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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

You really have to have a terrible case of tunnel vision to write this post. One Elon Musk? Sure, I only see one guy named Elon Musk on the list of billionaires.

What is the requirement here?

A space company? There are several of those.. Jeff Bezos (worth 23b) has Blue Orgin.

He says "cool sci-fi shit"...

What about self-driving cars? Those aren't sci-fi enough for you? How is Tesla's battery powered car MORE sci-fi-ish than a self-driving car?!

Look, I wish the best for Musk... but the author needs to take a look around at what other people are doing.

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So I guess you didn't read the full article before blasting off...he specifically pointed out self-driving cars, as well as numerous other non-Musk sci-fi initiatives.

His point is less about a dearth of cool sci-fi shit than a lack of extremely wealthy individuals wielding their fortunes to aggressively push these things.

Edit: And not just "a space company." A space company, an electric car company, a renewable energy company, and the crazy passion to make these things work. What results has BlueOrigin produced? SpaceX is actually Getting Shit Done.

Yes, he does mention self-driving cars, conveniently leaving out that it's Google, a company controlled by 2 billionaires.

Like Richard Branson?

Yeah, ok, I get that the article did say there is "only one" Elon Musk, but pointing out the small handful of individuals in a similar space doesn't seem like a very solid refutation of the points made.

And with the possible exception of Branson, none of them are close to doing as big of things, with as much success, and as much inspirational flair and passion, as Musk.

The author is the one who narrowed the field, and unnecessarily so, to make a point.

He starts the criteria with "billionaires".. 0.000000215% of the worlds population.

Then to narrow it down farther he says they must be working on 'cool sci-fi shit'. Ie: they can't just be doing innovative things, they must be sci-fi things, and even if they are sci-fi, they must be 'cool'.

Of course there are only a few people who meet that criteria.

Its not very sci-fi but I find what Bill Gates, Warren Buffet are doing with the Giving Pledge to be every bit as important and inspirational as what Musk is doing with Tesla and Space X.

There's a lot of ways to contribute to society, to each their own.

http://givingpledge.org/

I would definitely add Bezos to this list. However, Musk is very good at getting one thing going and turning to the next, while people like Bezos, Gates, Jobs have a narrower vision and pursue it without straying aside (actually jobs did with Pixar). Or perhaps it only looks that way because IT is such a broad field (and the iphone is as close to apple tv as tesla cars are to spacex rockets?).

OTOH, do you really need to be a billionaire to do "cool sci-fi shit"? Arguably, Musk didn't get rich with amazingly cool stuff, he just got a bit luckier than most people with the valuation of Zip2 and early PayPal.

> A space company? There are several of those.. Jeff Bezos (worth 23b) has Blue Orgin

I think most people would agree that Bezos is a runner up, but how many is several? I can think of him and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic). And neither of them seems to have made it their mission in life rather than just a billionaire's hobby.

  SpaceX
  Blue Orgin
  Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic
  Armadillo Aerospace
  Bigelow Aerospace
  Stratolaunch Systems

I think that counts as "several"

Thanks very much for the info. Bigelow Aerospace and Stratolaunch Systems are excellent examples. Bigelow is especially interesting because from what I've googled he doesn't seem to have any sort of technical background.

On the other hand, I don't believe John Carmack is a billionaire, and in any case Armadillo Aerospace has only had a few million invested in it. (Whether or not these guys are billionaires is very important. The question is about rarity, and the pool of people under discussion gets much bigger if we consider people with merely 100 million and who are consequently restricted to more modest goals.)

In any case, I think the point may still stand that these people devote much less of their emotional and temporal capital than Musk. I'd love to hear alternative evidence.

EDIT (in reply to jlgreco since I can't do it in the normal way): Yep, according to the side bar on Wikipedia his net worth is 2.3 billion as of March.

Was Musk actually a billionaire? My impression is that he got a few hundred million from Paypal but never corrects anybody when they overestimate how much he got. He nearly bankrupt himself with SpaceX and Tesla apparently.

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