CMV: Elon musk is definitely not the "future billionaire" he claims to be

First off, what exactly makes Elon musk the "future billionaire" so to speak. What did he actually do to be the richest man alive, or what does he continue to do? For all intents and purposes, he's nothing more than your average businessman who drops hypebombs about space travel on social media and Twitter. Rocketry was already being discussed in the 1900s. Masking his real identity as nothing more than your average 1% businessman isn't going to get this far and much longer. You want to know how we are going to be in the "future" (aka space travel) by 2050? If we get the average DoD budget for 2024 of around $875 billion multiplied by 30 years. That's around $26 trillion, and that's already enough to send an entire fleet of ships and people to mars. So we already have the funding and the resources, all that needs to happen is that the budget isn't cut. So much that i should now expect to see the change in the way that things are run like for example, when the Soviet Union went from the peasant state that it was to the nuclear power that it became over the span of only 30 years. If that was the case, we would have already been on Mars by now with the amount of wealth this country and the world already has to spend on the "future". Musk doesn't have the ability to do anything that the government can't already so why are we still idolizing him instead of the guys and gals that are already working for NASA. Why are we still on the hype of a man and his company's ability to send civilians into space when we've already done that for decades? You want to travel into space? It costs roughly $300 million to send a civilian to the ISS, and much more to send anyone to the moon. Why would you wait on the whims of a billionaire to do this when it already seems to be an expensive endeavor that we can already go through? I could already expect to hear people say "but if the government is doing this, they will only send astronauts", which is already a valid concern. But the way things are going, much like i said on the first point. Change in the way things are run. If there are already civilians on space, who's to say that there will be much of a difference who's running the show. As for point 3, self-driving vehicles. These vehicles have an accuracy rate of 92.5%, much less than your average human driver. For anyone who drops the comment that "70% of car accidents are due to human error", much like i said on that last point, what exactly makes Musk's company so special when he isn't doing anything that the government run DoD can't do? Here's something to make that point even clearer: When the hype for self-driving vehicles was being discussed, it was already being discussed by the government only seeing how viable DoD assets would be with them, as well as how they could be used to bring much more accurate and precise vehicles in warzones or other hazardous areas. But the fact of the matter is is that these vehicles can't even reach the accuracy of the average human driver. We're already on the verge of war with China, why are we still relying on Musk's company to do something that the government is already capable of doing? (Side note: It's kind of crazy how the average person can't even be trusted to investigate the credentials of the people that they are idolizing don't you think?)<br><br>&#x200B;