I wonder where this notion started. Tesla was an existing company he bought and all the heavy lifting a SpaceX was done by other people. He made some good business calls, but I’d say a lot of his success stems from being at the right place, at the right time with the right wallet.
Tesla was basically a fully government funded entity for the first decade of Musk's ownership. His greatest skill with Tesla lay in promoting it (and doing an even better job of promoting the myth of Tesla being hand built by himself alone) and in securing government benefits.
There was the direct half a billion dollars in loans the government gave Tesla after the financial crisis without which it would have collapsed. But even more so, the only reason Tesla could survive financially during the 2010s was a combination of government subsidies and government green credits which essentially had the likes of GM and Ford paying Tesla to build cars (so they could offset their credits).
What I will never get over is GM/Ford being so short sighted that they were willing to pay a competitor hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than investing in coming up with an electric platform of their own.
> What I will never get over is GM/Ford being so short sighted that they were willing to pay a competitor hundreds of millions of dollars, rather than investing in coming up with an electric platform of their own.
They kind of did have electric platforms that never sold well. They were probably of the mindset that nobody really wanted these cars, too niche of a market for them to participate in other than the most basic of compliance cars.
A lot of the legacy US automakers barely survived the financial crisis. In this time period they're very risk adverse. They've made a few EV versions of their cars previously for compliance reasons, but they never really sell well and don't actually make the company any money. To them, it made sense to focus on producing the cars they know how to make with good margins to pay back the bailout money.
Looking back we can say they should have probably bothered to make actually decent EVs and market the hell out of them instead of half-assed retrofits of existing cars with half-baked electric powertrains. But I dunno, if I'm in that board room in 2008-2009 and someone says "lets bet the farm on products that lose money and nobody likes" vs "lets keep building trucks and SUVs that are shown to print money and maybe we'll actually make it out of this economic disaster", there's a good chance I'd have picked the "lets print money" option. Its only seeing the EV market today a decade+ later that we see there really is a market for decent EVs, but at the time that market definitely had not been proven.
Also, by the end of 2008 gas prices had fallen back down to ~$1.60/gal. Cheap gas was in, hybrids were out. Even the Prius began to struggle in sales compared to trucks and SUVs. Its easy to see the value of an EV with gas being >$4 on average, its harder when gasoline is cheap.
He's a classic visionary with the ability to manifest that vision in others with his words. His track record speaks for itself, likely because of his vision and willingness to risk. He likely has strong skills in seeing positive outcomes and cast them as truths into others. He will continue to succeed in business outcomes, until his vision falters.
I think you might both be right, but never agree with each other, due to the trickiness of language. That is to say, depending on your definition of "genius" (and depending on the still not fully understood nature of genius), you might on the one hand agree that he qualifies as being a "genius", but isn't "one of the most brilliant men alive."
Setting aside any purely semantic disagreements (for example the fact that "one of the most brilliant men alive" is highly dependent on the number of other brilliant men around), I think part of what OP is arguing against is the implication that most people attribute a specific kind of genius to him (and OP should definitely step in to disagree with me here if I am mistaken). For example, most people may agree that Warren Buffet is a genius, but it's clear (to me at least), that they mean genius in a very different way in that context than when applied to Musk. The implication seems to strongly be that Musk is not merely a savvy businessman, but a "brilliant scientist" or "brilliant engineer" or something as well, something I think no one would assign to Buffet. Buffet bought Duracell, but no one believes he is key to battery technology. For the record, I am not arguing about whether Musk is or is not this kind of genius, just that Musk is a unique case in that the conversation exists on this axis, arguably much more so than even with Steve Jobs (who most people at best attribute "design genius" to, but will readily admit is not an "engineering genius", and in fact may even attribute the ability to see "past that" as one of his strengths). So I think the frustration I detect in this argument is that Musk seems to often be imagined in the same ranks as the actual Nikola Tesla perhaps, which they feel is unearned, and then the defense given is more appropriate for an Edison or Ford-esque "businessy crossover genius", vs. a description of direct technical accomplishments. Again, I am not arguing either way as to where he should be placed, just pointing out that I see a lot of this sort of "talking past each other", since "genius" colloquially implies something that doesn't make "Steve Jobs" immediately come to mind, vs. Einstein.
Geniuses at self-promotion and manipulating others, certainly. A world full of Jobses would be an unlivable dystopia. A world full of Wozniaks, now that would be interesting.
While I don't disagree with you, there must be _some_ level of 'right place and time' involved with anyone who holds superlative accolades. Same can be said for the converse.
I wonder where this notion started. Tesla was an existing company he bought and all the heavy lifting a SpaceX was done by other people. He made some good business calls, but I’d say a lot of his success stems from being at the right place, at the right time with the right wallet.