> have probably been positively impacted by him
Well, every time my Model 3's wipers go batshit insane, I get a little irritated with his decision to forego a known good solution that the rest of the world has been using for decades. Not feeling positively impacted at that moment ;-)
Developing reusable rockets was thought to be impossible and there was no hope for lowering the cost to orbit on the horizon _at all_ by anyone in the world, country or company. Rocket technology developed by governments is laughably bad compared to what SpaceX has built. Now, Starship promises to lower the cost to orbit to an incredibly low number and open up access to space to normal people. This is not a pie in the sky plan, the rocket is literally sitting on the pad in south Texas, waiting for bureaucratic rubber stamping so that it can launch.
I am not white knighting, I don't care about the personal foibles of the man running the thing, I am cheering on science, technology, and the progress of the human species.
To my knowledge, he has never lied about the present financial state of his companies. That gives him credibility in a way e.g. Yaccarino bullshitting about what fraction of Twitter’s advertisers have returned does not.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/03/cars/musk-tesla-tweet-lawsuit...
The end result is left out every time the "court finds" articles are linked. The jury found the opposite, which is what actually matters.
I've been reading about low-orbit satellite since at least the late 1990s when it must have been Slashdot articles then. There have been several plans, but the one whose name I remember was Iridium. I believe it became operational, but only ever managed to be used for voice telephony. It's been bankrupted and bought by other companies since then.
This is an absurdly difficult market to break into, and everyone has failed to one degree or another, with the degrees of failure all clustering around the really extreme end of that spectrum. This is ignoring any technological challenge (of which there are apparently more than a few).
He is claiming to have done a (business) thing that has been demonstrated to be nearly impossible. A thing which, if he hasn't done it and is merely lying about, we might not know for months or years.
It is perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of this, and no one owes him the benefit of doubt on this issue or any other. It is perfectly reasonable to remain skeptical even if you do not believe the man a liar. It is an extraordinary claim, and requires extraordinary evidence.
Capital Raise
4,281 days since Elon Musk said Tesla will never need to raise capital again. (2/12/2012)
"Tesla does not need to ever raise another funding round." Elon Musk, quoted by John Voelcker in Green Car Reports
4,052 days since Elon Musk raised $195.7M in common stock. (9/28/2012)
3,822 days since Elon Musk raised $313M in common stock. (5/16/2013) 3,822 days since Elon Musk raised $600M in convertible notes. (5/16/2013)
[...]
1,157 days since Elon Musk raised $5B in common stock. (9/1/2020)
1,059 days since Elon Musk raised $5B in common stock. (12/8/2020)
There are few such men, and arguably fewer who have the enthusiastic haters that Musk does.
I understand criticism. However, a (multiple) path of innovation is always going to be riddled with mistakes and failures. Within this context, the specific enthusiasm for hating Musk, by some, seems petty to others.
Edit: Lol, bring on the downvotes, it only serves to prove my point.
No, white knighting is accusing skeptics of being emotional haters who just don't appreciate all the good that Musk brings to the world. Accusing them of being short sellers, etc. Jumping to the defense of someone who is more than capable of defending himself.
The problem with bringing up those other tech CEOs vs. actually defending Musk is it starts looking like whataboutism.
I personally think there's enough hate for tech CEOs to go around and we don't need to ration it out.
He's not saying "look over at that other CEO".
Even still, it's not whataboutism to put things in perspective as you may see that you're blowing one thing out of proportion due to bias if those same values are being violated by another entity but you are okay with it because of the entity itself.
It's always a good exercise to check for contradictions in your values.
