He is hands down the greatest entrepreneur within our lifetime, and possibly the greatest in modern history.
PS - yes, I'm a fanboy - jesus christ how can you not be? and yes, it goes without saying he couldn't have done it without all the hard-working employees at both companies.
Given that these orders will take years to fulfill, we seem to be hearkening back to an older, simpler time.
But he's not even close to the most successful from a financial P&L standpoint yet. That honor would have to go to Larry Page.
edit: By problem, I mean the strong push for P&L over Making Shit Better.
What problem? Google is something that helps billions of people every day in substantial ways.
No, it isn't revolutionary and exciting, but things that make the greatest impact rarely are. You either want to help people or you want to do flashy things that grab peoples' attention.
Linus had a great TED about this today.
http://www.ted.com/talks/linus_torvalds_the_mind_behind_linu...
BTW, Linus has done more for humanity than Musk ever will. Teslas run on Linux and I would be surprised if his rocket didn't use it in some way as well.
But yes, we all love Elon Musk.
p&l is a silly goal when it comes to "Fuck yeah, progress!"
Is it though? We don't throw money at people for building useless shit. If you make a lot of money, it's because you helped a lot of people.
Why does making money have to be intrinsic to helping people? Ugh. Ugh, I say.
how about "most inspiring entrepreneur"? The two people that come closest in recent times, in my opinion, are Steve Jobs and Howard Hughes.
Manoj Bhargava for example is way more inspiring (to me) than Jobs ever was, the other two are Bill Gates and Elon Musk.
For example a state of the art desalination plant that can be mass manufactured.
The employees are incredibly skillful but Musk is the lynchpin.
Both companies' achievements are the result of thousands of people doing incredibly high-quality work, all overseen and directed and urged on by Elon.
The credit goes to him and to them, for both.
Maybe his company will become the biggest in the world like GE. A small posthumous revenge for Nikola Tesla.
Do you really want an answer for that?
It doesn't matter, HN is pretty much the church of Elon.
I am not a fanboy. (Perhaps it helps that I am not a boy.) But, whatevs. We all have our heroes. No need to justify yours, but also no need to make sweeping statements about what other people should be into.