My alternative viewpoint is based on incentives. Money causes physical work to be done. It influences probability distributions. F = ma. A certain amount of

My alternative viewpoint is based on incentives. Money causes physical work to be done. It influences probability distributions. F = ma. A certain amount of money can only cause so much dirt to be hauled up a hill with a certain probability. You can't have an economy valued at $2000 that does 2000kwH of work and then go try to use $10 to do 500kwH of work, at least not in the long run. The only way to do it in the short run is if you're eating another economy and digesting their energy. "Probably, but it might have taken longer, or they might have been invented in another country" Both of those are speculation, and are also highly unlikely. It might have also happened more quickly. The US had a handful of ecommerce companies in the .com boom which were right on Amazon's tail. The limiting factor was demand which is ultimately a form of incentive. The limiting factor is not "great men" who are competent enough to get the job done, it's having a large enough pool of resources in the hands of someone or some institution which can decide to invest it in that thing. Competence doesn't have much to do with it. A severely incompetent person with a will and a large enough pool of resources can still get it done with a little luck. Musk had a will and a large enough pool of resources. He was one of the first people whose life's wealth had almost no coupling to the pre-silicon valley US economy and who became rich after the internet had proliferated. He's not particularly competent, but he was able to dream a little bigger than previous generations of filthy rich people. His wealth wasn't tied to oil or the automobile industry, so he was able to see the value of moving off of it. I think another factor that confuses people is that IMO society has a speed of information. Government policy tends to take a couple years to filter through, and then on top of that, there are statistical limits on the rate at which an individual or company can react to that, and re-channel money to appropriately take advantage of the new conditions. People seem to think that as soon as a government policy takes effect, things should start changing, but think of the mass of our society... the people, the buildings, the equipment... that all has inertia. Things don't happen in the real world at the speed they do on the internet.