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What exactly is the instantiation of value that you think Elon Musk and Warren Buffet “produce”? Scrimshaw?
I am, I suppose, an Elon fanboy in the sense that to get to Mars I would ride with Satan himself, but he doesn’t produce anything; he is at best a Schelling point around which (as @SubstantialFrivolity describes below) an engineering Old Boy’s Network rotates, but if it wasn’t Elon it would have been somebody (anybody) else, to no material detriment to the Mars project.
In fairness to the "Elon is unique" theory, he does seem to be a locus of "I don't care what problems you encountered, we're doing sci-fi shit, so shut the fuck up and figure it out" energy. This doesn't always work out, but it appears to be a load-bearing reason for why SpaceX is SpaceX instead of "failed aerospace subsidy farm #28".
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With most now-rich founder tech CEOs I could buy that. With CPUs, GPUs, OSs, social networks, whatever, there was a stable of plausible looking competitors and one caught a lead and rolled up into a progressively fatter cat that no other could compete with, network effects and all that, and maybe any one of them could have done just as well. ('anybody' seems a stretch, say, I'd most likely screw it up if asked to be a team lead of a team of any size. I might manage to manage a kitten but wouldn't bet on it. Very happy that tech companies have an IC track. And probably it takes a more select type to be a startup founder that doesn't fizzle out than, say, a Starbucks franchise boss or line manager wherever)
But SpaceX? Why would you expect some socioeconomic factors to turn up the same thing if there wasn't a idiosyncratic space maniac Elon driving it? There have been any numbers of attempts at space startups with comparatively incredibly lame results. Probably the most serious one has been Blue Origin where (if we believe the AI slop Google gives me for the search prompt) Bezos has likely poured in 100x as much of his own money as Elon did, and managed one (1) orbital flight so far, and some tens of 'hey we edged just over 100km so we can claim our tourists visited space' which tends to be peak space startup achievement. Is there any reason to think that swapping out Elon some random other boss wouldn't end up with at most a Virgin Galactic, instead of the wildly implausible looking outcome of first catching up with the established fat cat aerospace companies that had been doing this for decades at scale and made a giant government-funded grift of it, and then undercutting them on launch cost by 20x?
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