Can anyone clarify this to me?
The accident of the whom and where he was born did play into it, but I will echo another commenter that he is an amazing capitalist - and I do mean that as an insult to Elon. He has done an amazing job of playing the game in a system that rewards shrewdness, cutthroat action, and manipulation. He managed to get enough clout to be able to lie about just about anything and pay for the echo chamber that makes it real enough.
Overrated? In most aspects yes. In being everything that is wrong with capitalism he’s right on point.
... If you ignore Starship. SpaceX is operating on a $20 billion bridge loan which, if the IPO struggles at all, adds to the risk. Starlink depends on becoming a telco scale mass market ISP, but it's operating in a shrinking TAM, squeezed by increasingly cheap terrestrial wireless infrastructure, and the fact that high income customers are a minority in areas rural enough for terrestrial wireless to be an uneconomical.
Tesla is spending more than the market cap of Rivian to become the Allbirds of the car industry. They're gonna blow their capex on robots and AI without refreshing the car line.
Another commenter remarked that Elon's fame is a failure of skepticism. I've been a skeptic for a few years now, starting with skepticism about agile rocket development, which sounded like bullshit to me.
There is no reason to say that its development is slow. Falcon 9 took 8 years from concept to first flight and another 8 years to high cadence, reliable reusable flights. Starship is now only 10 years in development and already went through several iterations.
But also, this feels like exactly the kind of thing he’d post pseudo-anonymously.
Elon Musk is a truly proficient capitalist. Great at creating capital. So, in that sense, no he is not overrated. There is nothing really subjective about capital — you either have it or you don't. And despite all the warning signals, people still heavily invest in his ventures.
But is he overrated as a leader, as a visionary, as a genius — the subjective measures. I'd argue, yes. Doesn't take a genius to create capital. As he's done nothing artistic or altruistic for us to debate the merits of his life, I can't imagine what other criteria he can be evaluated upon.
