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RcouF1uZ4gsC

People keep on conflating "great" with "good human being".

Genghis Khan was a "great" man.

However, he was also very cruel.

Alexander the Great was a "great" man.

Yet, he could launch a siege of Tyre because he felt insulted.

Elon Musk is great, because he has revolutionized both cars and space launches.

He made electric cars cool!

This will have massive impact on how cars are made in the future and on how we fight global warming.

He revolutionized how the US launches rockets. SpaceX has driven the price of launches down.

He may not be a "good" man. He may in fact be a horrible human being.

But, I think he is as "great" a man as any in our generation.

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Yeah. "Great person" is appropriate to describe Musk when it comes to "great stature" or "great influence". It seemingly does not apply when we use it to refer to "great character".

The problem is that "Great man" as a term is now too vague and we must now make the effort to distinguish between people's achievements and their personal character. Else people will pick the interpretation of "great" that suits their worldview.

> he has revolutionised

His engineers have.

For this specific subdiscussion, I wouldn't underestimate Elon's own knowledge and capabilities in the technical sides of Tesla and SpaceX, and similarly his continued work on, generally, making his engineers (in addition to his own) effort to bear fruit.

So, "his engineers have" sounds too dismissive.

I give him credit for putting gobs of money and patience into some long shot and longer payoff tech R&D which virtually no one else was willing to do on the same scale and patient time frame. He may have not been the genius engineer behind the tech, but the genius engineers that built those things would have not had the same opportunity to do so without him. There is simply no doubt that he accelerated that tech.

Is he a shit human being? Of course. Does he make himself out to be smarter than he is? Of course. Would we have private space flight and viable consumer EVs without him? Of course, but not for a long time.

Uhhh, the US government gave gobs of money, as did investors. He didn't. He held paper shares and took out loans off the backs of others to pivot into buying a social media company lol

So do you think it’s easy to convince people and governments to tie up capital waiting on a 20 year ROI on tech that doesn’t exist yet?

Minimize it all you want, but that nutcase has some big successes in advancing technology due to believing in a vision, expressing the patience necessary to get there, and yes, convincing others to do the same. I know I wouldn’t be able to do that and I suspect you can’t either.

> His engineers have.

Okay, so Boeing, ULA, and Ford also could have done this?

So Elon Musk invented Panasonic, LG and CATL?

You don't hear Hitler described as great too often do you? Those that do tend to have troubling tattoos. Was 9/11 a great event? Sounds like a party we should all attend.

An unadorned "great" is a compliment with connotations of admiration. To scrub this from your meaning, you have to be more specific e.g. "great evil", "great nuisance", "great disaster" etc.

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