RL recently wrote:

Musk… is Tech-bro-toxic-masculinity-oblivious-stupidity personified – he may own 100 billion dollar companies, but he is an overwhelmingly negative value to humanity. I hope SpaceX succeeds… but I hope Musk dies in jail.

I get it. Musk used to be widely loved by the left when he kept out of politics. Most of us just assumed he was sane because of his highly successful EV company. But then he dove into MAGA face first.

Sure, he used DOGE to gut America’s science, but I have to lay that atrocity more on the man at the top. Musk couldn’t have begun that Devil’s work without Trump’s orders. And DOGE was generally a failure; he walked off that job in a very ugly way.

RL argues that Musk isn’t an engineering and technology genius, he’s simply made an almost unimaginable fortune on other people’s brainpower. That’s called capitalism. Sometimes it sucks ass, and sometimes it is a force for good. There are countless thousands of examples of both.

So what did Musk actually bring to the table? He brought his mega billions, but he also brought his dreams. His dream to explore space. His dream of cars that don’t run on fossil fuels. Even his dream of subterranean tunneling. Space X, Tesla, The Boring Co., all benefit the world in ways that all of us here care deeply about.

Having a person that will be someday soon be a trillionaire with the dream of settling Mars in the next decade is an almost unimaginable gift to space exploration enthusiasts. (The same could be said about Bezos.) Yeah it’s too bad he’s such an asshole. Yes it sucks he’s a rightwing POS. But in 50 years will people care about his forays into politics or will they be travelling to Port X on Mars?

My view is at this point he’s still giving a little more to the world than he’s taking away. He just needs to stay in his fucking lane.