While I agree that treating Elon Musk as some sort of flawless messiah is a mistake, I fail to understand why people pretend that Tesla and SpaceX have done nothing at all interesting or innovative. In both areas, they’ve accelerated some areas of human progress by perhaps two decades.

But this sentence from here is just great.

We now live in an era where raising a billion dollars of other suckers’ money and developing a new “app” to take selfies or find imaginary creatures in a porta-potty is considered the apex of human civilization but investing your entire fortune in a quest to build a self-driving electric car is treated like dangerous, egomaniacal adventurism.

Anyone who builds anything that interfaces with the real world does seem to take on withering criticism these days. Perhaps it’s because we live so much of our lives behind screens that anything with moving parts is seen as disreputable and too disorderly to dignify with any concession to its usefulness.

I don’t know.

But would the world be better of if Tesla and SpaceX didn’t exist? I can’t find even a scrap of a good argument for that. Because it’s goddamn stupid, mainly.