Elon Musk doesn't seem like the easiest person to work with, but I'm having a hard time thinking of a more accomplished human.
I mean, I guess some people here subscribe to the notion that space travel is imperative for human survival. In that case, you might argue that each step towards it is more valuable than anything else that does not immediately push towards human space travel. Human space travel will save humanity, your piddly vaccine only saves a couple of hundred million people. But that seems a bizarre argument to make (and maybe that's why one really makes it).
Edit: -3 in one hour? Wow. For what it's worth, I made this comment in good faith.
Are you really trying to gauge whether Musk is an accomplished person? Paypal, Tesla, and SpaceX are each the most successful companies to date in their respective markets.
Everyone on this thread would think a vaccine that saves hundreds of millions of people is a good thing. Be reasonable
SpaceX is also the most successful company in it's market. However, it's a tiny market with only a few companies, and receive government contracts and funding as well. I understand that the funding is orders of magnitude less than the Shuttle, that government funding is almost essential in new ventures like this, but the company would not be as successful without this additional money.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that yes, Musk is extremely accomplished. He has incredibly successful companies. However, the market for small electric sports car as well as ISS delivery system are both very small with few competitors, and would not exist without government funding.
The global launch market is well into the billions of dollars . SpaceX has booked over $4billion in revenue for the next 5 years. The majority of that money is __commercial__. They have the cheapest, sturdiest, most advanced technology in that sector. Furthermore, if they manage to lower the price point even further, they will open up a vast market. What happens when it is economically mine an asteroid or immigrate to Mars. They would make Pacific Union look like a tinker toy set.
There is no question Tesla has the best electric cars on the market. Tesla is set to turn a profit next year. This is an market filled with incumbents and where no car company has been IPOed for many decades. They have a 30% margin product which sells out. If their government loan vanished overnight, they would __still__ be able to execute since they have money from licensing their technology to other car companies.
Musk speaks of nothing less than pushing humanity forward toward. That kind of ambition will inevitably intersect with some portion of the public sphere.
The point I was trying to make was that gauging persons in this way is very strange to me. Accomplishment as a concept isn't something that can easily be compared. That is both because it is very abstract and fundamentally relative to another concept[1].
That's why the grandparent saying that Elon Musk is the most accomplished person (that he can come up with) struck me as odd; having a most implies having more/less. I tried to apply these general more/less as best as I could, but I explicitly said I felt bizarre writing it (I guess I should have rewritten it a sixth time).
[1] I.e. you are accomplished at something. Like efficiency: you can't be efficient, you can only be efficient in terms of a certain input and output. Both concepts are relative to other concepts. People often refer to efficiency and accomplishment without overtly stating the other concepts, but they are still there. Sometimes they are clearly defined by the context ("efficient car") sometimes less so ("efficient economy").