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Comment by davidbarker | Hacker News Reader

I’d be interested to hear your arguments about why you believe Musk is “possibly one of the greatest people to have ever lived“.

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Because he's almost single-handedly driven a fix to global warming and he will also vaunt our civilization on to other celestial bodies through the use of cheap space travel.

> a fix to global warming

We fixed global warming?

We're headed that way, as long as we don't somehow plateau on our improvement for some reason.

That's a serious [citation needed] claim; even if everyone switched to electric vehicles tomorrow, that only accounts for 10-20% of global emissions, and we've gotta cut a lot more than that.

Reducing the cost of batteries is one of the important things along that way. That allows many other things to be electrified.

you're confusing his scifi future state with the present. He made a successful electric vehicle company (those vehicles still consume electricity, often made from burning gas or goal) and a successful space company (with better, but not "cheap" transport to space). Both are great things, but they don't qualify him as the greatest person in history. You're just hero-worshipping and you picked a pretty bad hero.

Dude, TeamViewer and Zoom are doing more for global warming and it's not even a stated goal of the company.

Stop looking at the showmanship and look at the crude numbers.

Work from home is a temporary thing that's going to be largely ending soon so their long term effect will be minimal. Face to face interaction is important for human communication.

How are Teslas (which I remind you accounted for less than 1% of total vehicles sold globally in FY21) propelling a zero carbon face-to-face interaction?

It's not ending. Employees love work from home and talented workers in tech have real power.

> Work from home is a temporary thing that's going to be largely ending soon

Thanks in part to Elon Musk.

Pretty sure those technologies haven't stopped the flow of air travel recently. They just made business more efficient.

You honestly can't try and equate this with Elon almost single handedly bring the EV car market to the planet.

It either shows you are being disingenuous at best or ignorant in the subject matter at worse.

yes, combination of video and covid caused my company (in bay area) to stop flying large numbers of employees to the mothership (in basel). People used to go for a 2-day mini-conference (1 day to fly in, 2 on the ground, 1 to fly back) without even adjusting to local time zone. Entire business sections of planes reserved. Not anymore. Company is in top tier of profit margins.

I would like to see a source for your first claim, and I think the only source for the second claim is Musk himself (and I don’t trust much of what he says).

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