One man stands head and shoulders above his competition.
Imagine being a 25-year-old, 6’5” guy who goes by the local park. There you see eight-year-old kids playing basketball. You ask if you can join, and they readily agree. Then you dominate. You score at will. You block any shot that they dare put up. In short, you are unstoppable.
It would seem that this analogy applies to Elon Musk. When he joined Tesla, it was common wisdom that nobody could set up a new car company. Some, like DeLorean, tried, but they all failed. There was Mercedes, Fiat, GM, Ford, etc., and that was it. You could try something, but it would either fail or be gobbled up by the big guys for pennies on the dollar. Then came Tesla. Tesla’s current market capitalization of nearly $1.5 trillion is more than 10 times that of the “Big Three” combined. And Musk was not the son of Lee Iacocca or some car engineer who wanted to prove others wrong. He showed up out of the blue, made and makes incredible cars, and is leading the world in driverless vehicles with Robotaxis poised to supplant the traditional cab and Uber business models.
And Musk seems to be like this in every field he enters. When our kids were young, I showed them the Tintin color cartoon videos. They were clean, they were high-quality, and most importantly, our kids learned English from them. In one of Hergé’s books and the subsequent movie, Tintin’s friend Calculus takes a rocket to the moon. In the video, the rocket lands very nicely upright on the moon. I said that was dumb and explained to the kids about disposable boosters, capsule, lunar lander, etc. I am not worth a trillion dollars. Maybe Musk saw the same thing as a kid and said, “That’s a great idea. Point noted.” He was the first to land rocket boosters upright, and he is still the only one to catch them in the air. He has run circles around NASA, Boeing, and others who seem to have never left the cocoon of Apollo success from the 1970s.
In every field and during every period, there have been individuals who have stood head and shoulders above their peers. In Madrid, there was a ball hung over 9 feet in the air to mimic the height of a ball that Ronaldo knocked in with a header. Michael Jordan won six championships, was MVP multiple times, and also was defensive player of the year. Thomas Edison is still the benchmark for patents and inventions in multiple key fields. There are simply people who are much better than those around them, and it oftentimes isn’t even close. When I was a kid, I was enamored with Vida Blue. At just 21 years of age, he accomplished the following:
39 Starts
24-8 record
312 innings pitched
301 strikeouts
24 complete games
AL MVP and Cy Young Winner
Just for a smidgen of comparison: in 2026, in the entire Major League Baseball, there were 21 complete games, while the strikeout leader had 252.
One of the many amazing aspects of Elon Musk is that he doesn’t use his towering superiority in his fields of endeavor in order to crush his competition. Just the opposite. He has mentioned on several occasions that his patents for Tesla are free for use by competitors. He wants better rockets and better self-driving cars, so he lets others use his company's advances. It has been reported that he slept on the floor in Washington during his DOGE work and did the same at some of his factories. He has a trailer where he apparently sleeps on site when he is at SpaceX. The anti-Musk would be living it big with a fleet of planes and a yacht that stretches from Boston to New York. He would be suing all of his competitors for patent infringement and looking for ways to knock them out of business. Musk is a rare bird, one that comes along once in every couple of generations. Sure, he is wealthy, but his wealth does not seem to have gotten to his head. He has business and humanity goals, and he seems totally focused on them. As “Mr. Wonderful” said, Elon Musk is 100 percent signal and 0 percent noise.
We should celebrate Musk’s great accomplishments. His cars have generated millions of miles of hands-free driving data. His engineers are making better algorithms for even greater success in self-driving. Like Steve Jobs wanting “only 1 percent” of the market with the original iPhone rollout, Musk is starting his Robotaxis in a few markets before he takes over the hired car business. His rockets will be taking off on daily or even hourly schedules. SpaceX will completely revolutionize human space activities, something not seen since NASA sent astronauts to the moon. The US government is streamlining its permitting in light of Musk’s plans, which in turn is allowing Musk to modify his rockets to make frequent launches more feasible. Watching Starlink satellites pop out of his most recent Starship launch is like living a hundred years forward.
One could easily and correctly make a similar argument about Donald Trump. At 80, he seems to need no sleep. He returns late to the White House from rallies or international trips and starts his formal day at 8 the next morning. He could have retired after 2020 and the Biden DOJ would have left him alone. He chose to run again, was shot at, arrested, had his house ransacked by the FBI, and was dragged through four different court cases. Yet, here he is once again as president, kicking the Chinese out of the Americas, pushing Iran to the brink of destruction, and directing America towards a new economic golden age. Biden was barely there, while Obama caved to America’s enemies and made its health system worse and more expensive. Donald Trump and his secretaries are pointing the US towards 250 years of success and international leadership. Look at Marco Rubio’s speech in Athens. That is the venue for the leader of the modern Western world.
Margaret Thatcher once gave a famous speech in Parliament in which she noted that as the rich got richer, everyone — including the poor — also went up in net worth. She accused her opposition of wanting the rich to be poorer via taxes and, in the process, the poor would also become poorer. Even if one does not own a Tesla or a Starlink receiver, he benefits from Elon Musk’s actions. Musk has set the standards for his fields of endeavor. Waymo looks 19th-century with its multiple Lidar systems. Musk took a bet and went with cameras and software. Right now, his Robotaxis are winning, and the millions of miles of FSD (Full Self-Driving) on Tesla cars are helping to improve algorithms and object identification in all light and weather conditions. How would you like to be a Boeing executive in front of Congress, describing how they were going to let a first rocket stage land in the ocean? “Why can’t you do like Musk and save us money?” When Starlink adds phone service to its WiFi service for access anywhere on the globe, I might become their next new customer.
Many people are jealous of Elon Musk, while others hate him for his politics/social views. I think that we should appreciate his accomplishments and vision. When some company says that it will have a new product by 2030, I add five years. When Musk says it, I circle the date on the calendar. Musk knows what he wants and can achieve, and then goes about getting the job done. How quickly did he get Grok up as the best AI (or SI) app? Good on Elon Musk.