But c'mon. You're really just playing dumb. We all know what SpaceX/Tesla and Apple have done, and (I think) we all know the role Musk and Jobs played in their success. And the reason we all know these things is precisely because of how important what they've done is. It's self-evident.
So, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that you're not acting in good faith. And that's why I answered indirectly.
But, okay, what "proof" would you find convincing?
The claim was that Musk's companies haven't "built" anything. Versions of Starship have clearly been built and launched, even if the project is still in development. It's a very real project and anyone can watch its developmental progress live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg
I doubt you or anyone else would bet significant money that Starship won't reach orbit. If so, I'd be happy to accept.
For the record, I don't think you can point to any project even remotely equivalent in terms of capability or progress from Boeing, Lockheed, or ULA. I'd be happy if they were doing nearly as well as SpaceX.
My other examples: Starlink, Tesla, and Dragon have clearly been "built" and shipped. Starlink is the hands of consumers, is actively helping Ukraine for military and humanitarian purposes, Tesla has shipped millions of vehicles, and Dragon Crew had another successful rendezvous with ISS days ago.
I could spend a lot more time providing examples but consider these to be more than sufficient to disprove the claim that Elon Musk's companies haven't "actually built anything he announces" in "years".
> OK I challenge you to try to engage and bring constructive evidence then
What kind of evidence would convince you? Wikipedia has summaries. Of course, they necessarily lack the context required to deeply understand the topic.
> Apple has an almost negligible ratio in that regard. Musk has achieved even less.
I challenge you to give evidence for these assertions. I would be convinced if you explained how you came to this conclusion and explained how you calculated the terms of this ratio.
> "There are people who evaluate these people's contributions differently than I do"
That would presume we're talking about people with approximately equivalent knowledge that simply come to different, but reasonable, conclusions.
But this is not the case. What I see in this meme is people betraying their ignorance and motivated reasoning at every turn. There's nothing knowledgeable or reasonable about their assertions. It's always highly vitriolic and dismissive toxicity. It's not that they're simply mistaken about certain facts, and can be corrected, it's that they're transparently ignorant and/or acting in bad faith.
For example, it's extremely uncommon, maybe even unheard of, for someone with a deep knowledge of technology history to agree with these kinds of dismissals of Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I've never seen someone able to discuss the topic at a high level that won't readily acknowledge their contributions, even if they can be very critical of them in certain ways. As one example among many: historian and professor Walter Isaacson wrote well respected books about Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. He is currently writing one about Elon Musk.
There's a popular and cynical meme that people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk are just marketing bullshitters that don't actually do anything useful. It's laughably false and easily disproved. And yet it seems to comfort cynical/pessimistic/unhappy/ignorant people, of which many exist, and so it prevails.
It's not merely "gushing" to be excited about new technology breakthroughs. And Musk, through his companies, is actively delivering today on Starlink, Tesla, Dragon, and Starship to name a few big ones. This meme that he's "all talk" is easily disproved for any honest observer.
I still think Triplebyte gave me the best interview I've experienced, and I've done ~100 over the years at all kinds of companies. I've also interviewed people ~1000 times myself.
It was even more impressive because the person doing the interview wasn't super competent and yet they still managed to do a fairly comprehensive technical evaluation in ~2 hours.
One section was a debugging session where you had to get tests to pass. The code and tests were quite decent, which made it quite easy to show off. Every company should do this.
Too bad the Triplebyte promise (not having to do phone screens) was a joke and their business model wasn't good, but that part of Triplebyte had major promise.
"Historical evidence" does not exist! There are new decentralized protocols being launched every ~day now. This is how decentralization really works, it's crazy and wild, and not at all planned by anyone.
Even just an evolved version of this, a ten thousand centralized internet currency marketplace, would constitute a decentralized internet currency system. And this is probably the weakest system that could result.
A comparison to oil monopolies confirms that he's entirely confused. There is absolutely no historical analog to Google or Facebook.
Everything about the internet and computer technology is uncharted territory. The most technical human on earth can't predict what will happen even 5 years in the future.
It is safe to predict that Google and Facebook are going to be obsoleted by newer, cheaper, better technology.
Google/Facebook operate highly inefficient businesses and that's the weakness that will wipe them both out. No government intervention will be necessary.
Hint: #decentralization
The big internet risk is the last mile, controlled by Comcast/AT&T. We need a campaign to move the whole country to fiber conduit powered by local internet providers.
> Henry David Thoreau wrote that "[i]t is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself."
> Some abolitionists in the United States regarded the analogy as spurious. They believed that wage workers were "neither wronged nor oppressed". Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans argued that the condition of wage workers was different from slavery, as laborers were likely to have the opportunity to work for themselves in the future, achieving self-employment. The abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass initially declared, "now I am my own master", upon taking a paying job. But later in life, he concluded to the contrary, "experience demonstrates that there may be a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other". Douglass went on to speak about these conditions as arising from the unequal bargaining power between the ownership/capitalist class and the non-ownership/laborer class within a compulsory monetary market. "No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty, while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and the shopkeeper.".
Requiring police verification to buy a used car doesn't seem crazy. If that's the only other way of getting a car, it seems like an easy loophole to close.
Car rentals seem like a weak point for terrorists. The options for obtaining a private vehicle are very limited. Stealing a car is a good way to get busted. So it hijacking a car.
If the "Do Not Fly" list is a good idea, it probably makes sense to apply it to car rentals if they don't already.
But c'mon. You're really just playing dumb. We all know what SpaceX/Tesla and Apple have done, and (I think) we all know the role Musk and Jobs played in their success. And the reason we all know these things is precisely because of how important what they've done is. It's self-evident.
So, it seems pretty reasonable to assume that you're not acting in good faith. And that's why I answered indirectly.
But, okay, what "proof" would you find convincing?