Elon is problematic in many ways but none of the stuff in this meme is relevant.

He founded X.com that became PayPal in the merger with Confinity. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

His fame and his role is not as an inventor or designer. That’s a strawman.

He absolutely is an innovator. A lot of innovations would not have happened, at least as quickly as they did, were not for him personally.

He is a visionary who is impatient for the future and steps up to do something about it personally, in a way few others have. Almost none of the entrepreneurs I know, who are already extreme cases for risktaking and hubris, would have taken all of the money they made at a young age and plowed it into starting a rocket company and taking over an electric car company — down to every last penny to the point where they had to borrow money from friends to pay their mortgage.

You tell me ten currently living billionaires who had over $50 million in net worth from previous success and subsequently put themselves in a position where, had their next endeavor failed, they would’ve had zero. And I don’t mean people who bet the farm on something they’ve worked on for 10 years and it’s a significant operation and it’s a do or die moment. I mean people who take that risk at the very beginning of starting something too, especially when that new thing is regarded as such an absurd longshot by almost everyone else.

His skill is at building and running companies. That’s already an unusual combination; usually people are good at one and not the other.

His skill set is in capital allocation. He’s incontestably extraordinarily successful at this, and repeatedly so to a degree that the best expansion is competence.