Musk is kind of fascinating.
On one hand SpaceX and Starlink are businesses that it's practically embarrassing that seemingly nobody else even tried to build. You look into it and look at Bezos and Blue Origin and wonder if the markets can actually build new businesses anymore.
Then you set them aside and realize that he basically got away with visa fraud because he was wealthy to begin with and lucked into making tons of money off PayPal and didn't even found Tesla...
...and the lesson I take away isn't that there's anything special about Musk. It's that if you have billions of dollars almost anybody with some kind of preoccupation can build giant businesses related to it.
For example, I totally believe if some random geek obsessed with SeaQuest had been part of the PayPal Mafia they could have figured out a way to make a billion dollar business out of underwater habitats and submarines.
...at least if they were crazed in public enough about it, which seems to have turned into a key part of how Musk works at some point.
Kind of like if you have a lot of money and a few obsessions you now get ahead more by having Tom Cruise couch hopping moments than by being an actual Howard Hughes or Hearst.
Separately we obviously really shouldn't be letting companies with such concentrated ownership be publicly traded with these multi-class shares, but I guess that's where we are now: reinventing feudalism in market trappings.
"In this world some people born are like keys that move the world and exist having no connection to the social heirarchy established by man." - Kentaro Miura
I think that the average American discounts how important sociopaths are to the economy. The man chanting about developers, the guy who says you're holding it wrong, the human lawnmower who supports genocide, the CEO that introduced his wife to Epstein, the gay executive that launders bigoted politics, the other gay executive that wants to scan your eyeball and build AGI. The scheming Afrikaner now rides in to collect his due, astride two horses and a retinue of unsold EVs.
They all have rabid fanbases, but also the Mandate of Heaven. These sociopaths can exploit whatever they set their eyes on, and dominate it until their judgement fails them. It wouldn't be such a problem if Americans had a healthy skepticism for chronic liars, and didn't worship brand identity to their last breath. That tide is slowly changing, but not fast enough to stop where we're headed.
If you listen to Elon speak, and you don't have much technical knowledge, or even maybe have some mild technical knowledge, Elon really sounds like he knows what he is doing and has very high confidence he can execute it. He can very non-nonchalantly rattle off a plan to pull off the impossible like it's no big deal. And he does have some significant achievements under his belt, but quite a bit easier things than what he promises (and promised, often a decade ago) ahead.
I can totally see why retail shareholders are so enthralled with him. Nevermind Tesla largely was a self-fullfilling prophecy, despite the prophecy not even becoming true. But the share price did, and that's all that really matter to retail traders.
It's funny he's only able to do that because he has so little real technical understanding. A real engineer wouldn't be so flippant.
Your response is also a common trope. What has Elon actually invented? What code did Elon write on-par with Carmack?
We can judge him by technical merits very easily. But if you hold him to the standards of Carmack or Feynman, Elon's accomplishments are entirely benign.
The query in question is "Elon little real technical understanding", which is demonstrably false. Responding to that with the logical fallacy of Moving the Goalposts does not address it.
What I think is funny is that Steve Jobs also had very little technical knowledge and was just as much of an asshole, yet he's worshipped in the tech community. The only reason comments like yours are being made is because of Musk's politics. He was also loved in the Tech community, before supporting Trump.
Musk doesn't have to be a 'real engineer'. Most 'real engineers' would obsess over mundane details and rarely think about the bigger picture or making a profit.
> Elon really sounds like he knows what he is doing and has very high confidence he can execute it
In 2015, Elon Musk on Hyperloop: "it's no that hard", "it's like a tube with an air hockey table...", "I swear, it's not that hard" [1] Eventually, it was hard. You can literally go on and on with these examples.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQcfi8HK1i8
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It’s hard to imagine it all crashing down for him tbh. He has so many ways to conjure money and his mafia has immense resources. Why people love him so much I will never understand.
He revolutionized car and rocket industry , internet industry , military industry in a very dramatic obvious way. Now grab let’s say Amazon what did they revolutionize? Yeah they do deliver to you goods from China and help you to tend hardware with some decent soft on it .
You can twist it both ways. He has a bravery to take on super complex tasks. You might not like him personally but this is so much aspiring vs see on that list of richest people folks that sell shirts and pants or telco guy .
You can type in whatever sequence of keys you want, but Amazon preety much created and shaped that Cloud thing, if you ever heard of it. And that's just one of their side-projects.
There are better ways to stand for my man Elon.
>internet industry , military industry
This is the part people are missing. You are investing into the most important U.S government/military contractor (SpaceX + Twitter). And if you really look at how Tesla survived (i.e electric vehicle subsidies) you can make an argument Musk is the biggest state capitalist of the 21st century.
I've posted comments previously about how Musk & the Paypal mafia were the first to realise that the US government offers you the bigggest captive TAM in the world, but the SpaceX IPO just cements it.
> Now grab let’s say Amazon what did they revolutionize?
Self-report. Never heard of AWS-East-1 before?
The SpaceX IPO prospectus states that the company is targeting a TAM of $28.5T, equal to roughly a quarter of the world's gross economic output.
Patrick Boyle said it best. Roughly 1 billion people on the planet make more than $12k annually (folks with "discretionary" income). Divide that TAM of $28.5T by 1B and the every single person needs to give SpaceX ~$28.5K every year forever in order for that figure to make sense. It's more than 3x what the planet spends on food currently.
I know right! Except for the electrification of the auto industry, internet available from every place on the globe, and rocket launches so cheap they got 90% of the market, what has he ever done for us?
Don't underestimate the harm of being a hyper-rich asshole with government friends. It arguably outweighs all that even on pragmatic terms.
Also, the article explicitly answers your sarcasm.
Judging by his net worth he hasn’t done anything for us, he did it all for himself
The reason he has money is because he built products and services that people willingly exchanged their money for.
While true, his wealth is 99% speculative.
Elon has a closed box that he has successfully convinced a lot of people that there is a lot of money inside, and sold them small stakes in the contents, and promised year after year for 10+ years that this will be the year he opens it.
So the people who lament that he is a trillionaire have nothing to worry about then. It is just paper "wealth" that the market will pull back down to earth
Even if his 1T is speculative and undeserved he still has extreme power from that wealth. And there’s no indication that the bottom will fall out any time soon, so I think the lamenting is justified.
Such a boring statement.
Many people have built products used by far more people, that have generated far more utility, and accumulated far less personal wealth. These things aren't connected.
It's possible that the first sentence is true. Open source software comes to mind. However, that doesn't undermine the point that the reason he has money is because he built things other people wanted to buy. The fact that other people chose to forgo monetary rewards for their creations, or gave away their money, is not relevant to the question of whether he provided value to others.
The most dangerous oversimplification facing the human species.
How do you figure? Trying to understand and hoping you can walk through your logic
Not an native english speaker, but someone "doing something for me" is not (me buying products and services from that someone|selling products and services to me).
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
He has created the second most millionaires out of direct employees behind Microsoft. Many, though not all, of those new millionaires have been blue-collar workers (not office workers), unlike the case for Microsoft produced millionaires. So, from that PoV, he's done good for his employees.
> internet available from every place on the globe
I keep hearing this refrain that Starlink is going to connect everyone. LTE already covers 93% of the population globally [1]. There are obviously dead spots but I really don't see the economic case for Starlink coverage. I frequently travel with a mini and I appreciate the near certainty of connection but it seems like a luxury item. The vast majority of the time cell connection is fine. I suppose Starlink could eat all the telcos but it seems like they aren't too far behind and this connectivity will be commoditized.
[1] https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2025/10/15/ff25...
"There are obviously dead spots but I really don't see the economic case for Starlink coverage."
It's a good thing you don't run SpaceX (and whatever Bezo's copycat is called).
What have the Romans ever done for us?
TFA acknowledges this. Did you only read the title?
I think it wildly undersells/dismisses actual achievements delivered to form a narrative
This is conveniently forgetting that China used Tesla as a template on how to build out its electric car companies, as it is now using SpaceX as a template to get reusable rockets going...
Actually, there's good evidence that it's the other way around. According to Elon, designing a car factory is 1000X harder than designing a car. According to Elon, the initial model 3 production was a big mess that almost bankrupted the company.
How did they turn this around? By building a car factory in China using local knowledge, then building an duplicate of that factory in Germany, and then building a factory in Texas that incorporated knowledge learned.
sorry bud but you're misinformed and reaching for conclusions
model 3 was successful and profitable long before shanghai started churning out model Ys years later
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BYD sells fewer BEVs than Tesla globally. Their large numbers stem from hybrids. They also grew long after Tesla established EVs as a viable market. You're misinformed.
Nissan Leaf should get a lot of credit for establishing that market. Tesla launched first, but for 4 years only had an $100k car that only sold around 2500 units over its lifetime.
Nissan launched the Leaf 3 years after Tesla, but it was the first mass market EV, and in the first year sold around 9000 in the US and 20000 world wide.
Tesla didn't have a somewhat affordable car until the Model S in 2012, although it was still around twice the median price for a new car then.
It took until 2020 for Tesla cumulative sales to surpass Leaf cumulative sales.
Also, everything I'm finding says that in 2025 BYD sold 2.26 million BEVs in 2025 and 2.29 milling PHEVs, which is more BEVs than Tesla sold.
You're forgetting all the supervillain stuff.
> I know right! Except for […]
You mean like Krugman recognizes in this paragraph:
> Granted, Musk has had some real successes. Tesla was ahead of the EV curve, and Starlink is a critically important service as well as a viable business.
Krugman's hypothesis is in the very next paragraph:
> But these achievements weren’t enough to make Musk the world’s richest man. His wealth has, instead, historically rested mainly on self-fulfilling faith — investors believing in Musk’s genius have piled into stocks in Musk-controlled companies, and the rising value of these companies has enhanced his reputation for genius.
followed by:
> We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme.
> Furthermore, the SpaceX IPO now in progress makes it clearer than ever that Musk’s greatest skill isn’t developing futuristic products. It’s his mastery of financial shell games and his ability to leverage insider influence, especially his influence with the Trump administration.
> We have a term for enterprises that look successful because they keep drawing in new investors and keep drawing in new investors because they look successful. They’re called Ponzi schemes. And Elon Musk is basically a human Ponzi scheme.
Kind of a lame comparison. Nobody is sold on the dream at a "guaranteed" profit by in his companies, you know, like an actual Ponzi Scheme. It's literally the free market at work--it's really simple, if you don't believe in whatever he says, don't speculate!
You can make the same argument for literally any overhyped, or maybe properly hyped depending on who you ask, company. Doesn't mean they're all Ponzies. Unless your argument is ultimately that the stock market is a ponzi, which in that case is a different argument altogether.
Wish people would stop crying about this guy already. These hit pieces are so goddamn boring at this point.
> It's literally the free market at work--it's really simple, if you don't believe in whatever he says, don't speculate!
This, too, is actually addressed in the article - the whole point is that you're being forced to participate/speculate through this rapid inclusion in indices and mutual funds, because he's had the indices change the rules for him. So no, it's not that simple.
I've never understood how common the appeal to "simplicity" is. It's also very simple to just kill everybody you disagree with. There isn't a simpler idea, really. What is the point? Why even write a comment?
You have to take Krugman with a big grain of salt.
It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong. I think he sometimes leans on his nobel prize to give his opinions weight that people should discount given how often his opinions fall flat.
> It's been decades since he was in a policy position and these days he's more of a commentator, opinionator who is often wrong.
He was never in a policy position (perhaps one year under Feldstein in Reagan's CEA?).
In a 2011 paper examining talking head / pundit prediction accuracies, Krugman came out on as most accurate:
* https://www.hamilton.edu/documents/an-analysis-of-the-accura...
Krugman's brushing off genuine engineering wins here. SpaceX got space launch costs down to unheard of levels and built Starlink. Tesla built and scaled EVs at a time when no one else was willing to really try. Musk has a habit of overpromising, but there is real output that we can measure as well.
I expect SPCX might stay in squeeze territory until insider lockups expire, and yeah that's financial engineering, but the stock is not going to zero anytime soon the way an actual Ponzi would.
A wonderfully written article. I think Musk is simply a singular example of how the broligarchy has managed to overwhelmingly influence the very fabric of political and economic institutions: he's not the only one and certainly not the originator.
I wonder if the underlying principle of Ponzi schemes have been wielded in western democracies a lot more than most realise, amplifying (through greed rather than direct maliciousness) wealth disparities that have been growing since long before Musk started Paypal. The sad point isn't that this mentality exists, but that many who can ill afford such an atrocious investment don't have the opportunity to do much about it: how many people really can do much about where their low-grade investments are really placed?
It says more about the state of transparency in economies and politics in the 21st century than it does about the man himself. Symptom of the system is what I think Musk and Trump really are.
Kudos to the author, really thought provoking.
> But Musk proceeded to destroy X’s business model by turning it into an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool, prompting advertisers to flee.
This is where he lost me. There are still plenty of liberals and independents on Twitter. It is not "extreme-right" and anyone who thinks so is either being dishonest or has no idea what the left-right scale of politics in America looks like.
> It’s not hard to notice that Twitter has become extremely right-leaning.
This is very different from X is "an extreme-right, Nazi-friendly cesspool".
You think Musk's rhetoric is not extreme-right? Want some quotes?
According to the media and on Reddit, since Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads have collectively gained 70 bazillion users on seventeen different occasions, and have caused Twitter to collapse and disappear eleven times.
Meanwhile, in the real world, without Twitter, the video footage of the near beheading in Belfast would never have been seen by the world; yet another example of how it continues to make and drive the news.
Without the footage being available to all, the police and mainstream media would have continued to describe what happened as a mere "stabbing" or "assault" or "attack", as the media did for hours after it occurred. When was the last time anything, anything at all, happened after a Bluesky post?
Yes, some great things happened in Belfast in response to that post. Boy, isn't it great that the totally centrist Twitter is still relevant.
(History will judge you people appropriately -- as it did the people grinning at lynchings in 1950's America.)
I apologize on Twitter's behalf for it no longer obliging in hiding events that go against The Narrative(TM). But, as we've been discussing, Bluesky is always happy to censor as much as you want.
Enjoy having this content connected to your identity for the rest of time! You might be in for some unpleasant surprises later on.
he's being remarkably honest: to those on the left, free speech is an existential threat, and thus "extreme right"
You should probably read the snopes article, because nowhere in it does it say that it was a humorous take on the Information Superhighway hoopla.
You are spreading lies. Easily checked lies.
I used to respect Krugman, but as time has gone on he seems like yet another New York Times style leftist monkey just whining about people they have disagreements with. Pushing the frontiers of science and technology is an unknowable endeavor for which accurate predictions can never be made unless they are not really pushing the limits. It's attitudes like this which restrict us from actually doing real R&D, and instead focusing on quarterly profits and simple stories that nincompoops can understand. Has he not seen how Tesla transformed the global perspective on EVs? Has he not driven in one in FSD mode? Has he not seen the constant launches and innovation happening at SpaceX, or the XAI leap from nothing to having hyperscaler class datacenters and near frontier models. Sure, they haven't gotten to the lead yet, but jesus christ, what's Krugman bringing into the world from zero. The world would be a far better place with 1,000 brilliant kids taking their inspiration from Musk than from taking this pessimistic, whining NYT perspective on science and technology.
“Hey kids. Morality doesn't exist as long as you make enough people money.”
You people are nothing but whores. You can dress it up in some kind of utopian futurism but no one with a brain buys it.
> Considering that Climate Change is apparently the greatest challenge of our age, please point me to a single person who has done more to move the world economy to a Green economy than Musk?
The same guy burning portable gas generators at both Colossus data centers?
Yep. Also the guy moving countries to battery peaking power instead of gas turbines, the guy who started the revolution that has China moving to mostly battery powered cars. He could run those data centers for decades and not dent his net green credentials.