That's actually part of why their are so many Musk haters: he rewrites history to make himself appear successful, taking credit from those who actually did the

That's actually part of why their are so many Musk haters: he rewrites history to make himself appear successful, taking credit from those who actually did the work. Paypal was based on Thiel's startup, not Musk's. In fact, after Paypal merged with Musk's X.com, X.com shut down all of its pre-merger activities and focused exclusively on scaling Thiel's Paypal. Musk forced his original CEO out and took over the merged company, but was fired by the board months later for gross incompetence, and is a member of the Paypal Mafia solely because of the golden parachute his lawyers negotiated for him. (Note that Thiel and the other members of the Mafia absolutely hate Musk; go through media interviews of these guys and you'll notice how much they avoid talking about him.) Electric cars were a thing before Musk; hell they actually pre-date ICE vehicles. The issue was that batteries were very expensive; Tesla simply happened to come along when batteries started getting cheap enough to put into cars and artificially low interest rates made it feasible to invest billions in high-risk startups. Vertical landing rockets were invented by NASA in the 1970s, but they never had the budget to develop those into viable alternatives to the Space Shuttle program, because politicians had a vested interest in the Space Shuttle program and not in reusable rockets. The development of SpaceX's reusable rockets was entirely funded by NASA and the DoD. Affordable global satellite internet already exists. Iridium is actually cheaper than Starlink, and is close to profitability. Starlink currently runs at a massive deficit and by SpaceX's own admission will not be profitable if Starlink does not receive government internet access funding. Musk's life's work was not to innovate anything. It was to find innovative things being done by other people and to take all the credit for himself.