Brilliant and timely! I’m especially glad you called out Kurzweil.
He is an extremely dangerous lunatic—from what I can tell, he is largely responsible for Silicon Valley’s (and therefore the Federal bureaucracy’s) insanely unrealistic assumptions that it’s possible to generate enough renewable electricity—and transmit it across a stable national grid—to power AI, huge server farms, electric cars, air conditioning, and everything else—without the use of fossil fuels.
It simply will not happen. The laws of physics, unlike “climate science” are irrefutable.
Kurzweil is a cult priest and a reckless maniac—the national electricity grid will crash long before AI turns on us.
Even if it were possible, the craziest part is the idea that just since we could, we should! Imagine everything that energy could be used for, and instead, it's used to power worthless plagiaristic word salad machines that have inherently unsolvable hallucinations by way of functioning through next-token prediction. Without exception, everything they can do, a human somewhere can do better (if not necessarily faster), and they don't improve our lives.
They can't understand anything that isn't statistically likely in the data they've been trained on; e.g clocks can't be consistently and properly read unless at statistically probable times used most in advertising photos; see AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus' Substack. 'Understand' I use loosely for lack of a better word coming to mind, as obviously they understand nothing at all due to how they work.
Energy is not free. It comes at a great cost in terms of labour and resources, and there is only so much the Earth can ever produce due to physics, thermodynamics, waste heat and so on. Even if you had infinite clean energy, a bit more than a thousand years of 0.2%-or-so energy growth and the Earth will be a bright white star using galactic-scale energy due to exponents; the waste heat must go somewhere. Total madness it's being wasted on things like gen AI, energy and everything that goes into its production is taken for granted.
Kurzweil never got over his father's death. My girlfriend worked for his reading machine company. She got some virtual shares when Xerox bought them out. Her office mate later founded the igNoble awards, so she got a cynical running commentary. Kurzweil may have been a bit flakey back then, but it got a lot worse over the years.
The old cults of California have evolved into new ones. Jonestown, Manson, and Heaven’s Gate are back in modern forms under different names. Technology accelerates the spread of cult followings: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-become-a-cult-leader
I was disturbed to read the Guardian a few days ago and see they gave Ray Kurzweil coverage with his prediction that humans will merge with machines and it will be wonderful. I'm glad to see I'm not alone in being creeped out by his messianic tech proselytizing. Yes, this is like a tech rapture. But it's only come to this because tech generates big cash and our society unfortunately posits billionaires as the font of all wisdom. But as the proverb states, "Hubris begets nemesis."
Well said on hubris. Arguably, you could say we are merging already, if you consider things like smart phones and people's dependence on them as like another limb to be a sort of merger, which most of them like Kurzweil do. I don't know that I agree with that entirely since I think it misses nuance for the sake of argument, but I can also see the point that we have become very dependent and 'merged' with tech in one sense of the word.
Except, I don't know—have we?—since if so, how was the invention of the axe and our subsequent dependence on it not a merger with technology? But people like Kurzweil don't seem to be as impressed as I am with tech like the axe or wheel, or think of them as such. The funny part is that if we have already started merging with machines, it's the best argument against it, since look at how non-wonderful it is what phones, etc, have done to us and our minds!
The techies have realized, as Ted Gioia, has pointed out that addiction can be used as a tool to hook people to check their devices to see how many likes and views we get. Coke heads don't merge with coke. People get an endorphin rush from their phones. However, Kurzweil's predictions would have us merge with machines. Call me old fashioned, but I find that disturbing.
And let's not forget the biggest cult of all right now: the Republican party. These nuts now want a king with full immunity and the Supreme Court in his pocket. While I share Ted's opinion of tech and its boundless megalomania, I'm more concerned with the State of the Union.
By the way, I've owned a few Porsches (911s) myself, but never had the chance to get a classic 70s era 901. Maybe you could start a Substack about Porsches? It's a little off topic, but driving a 911 is definitely a form of "escape" too, so it still fits with the conversation!...
I think that you have crossed your own line about political comments. Either criticize the post or ignore the person. It's not necessary to stoop to villianizing a person because you disagree politically.
OK, that's clear. I'm just tired of all the nastyness that appears in comment sections and whenever I see someone seeming to be attacked it triggers my response. I have no arguement with you.
I just finished reading DARK AEON: TRANSHUMANISM AND THE WAR AGAINST HUMANITY. It gives a great summation of where these tech moguls want to take us, and how our blind inherence to materialism absent of spirtualism has led us to this point. It also leaves you with a hopeful blueprint of what you as an individual can choose to do to create a life as free from the dystopian technological prison as possible.
Great thought piece. As someone who lived in the SV for 10 years, and who actually went through "the circuit" I fully recognize this dystopia. The self-congratulatory, holier than thou, culture is all over the place without a hint of ethical questioning. I can 100% vouch for the HBO show Silicon Valley as an accurate representation of the dynamics, the companies, and the types of creatures that populate that egomaniacal ecosystem. SV leaders are more concerned with fighting death than enjoying their short lives. I highly recommend a new book by Yaris Varoufakis titled "Techno Feudalism." He makes a really thought provoking analogy between the oligarchs (aka billionaires) and the lords of old who allow you to use their land (cloud platforms) to grow your crops as long as you pay the rent and give them a portion of your harvest (sometimes a prima nocta was in play too).
Uncanny timing. I stumbled upon this "creepy cult" aspect for the first time yesterday, while getting involved on Twitter with the AI & copyright debates. Particularly RIAA v. Suno. There's a very strange hatred toward artists/creatives manifesting there. We're snobby/elitist, "the biggest money grubbers on the planet," etc. We're standing in the way of AI and progress. And all art should be "freeware." There are even some threats of shutting everything down, making us pay for resisting, stuff like that. It's all very weird. And unsettling.
This is what happens when you hire a small army of people to worship you and tell you how great you are every waking moment of every day. It’s called “believing your own press”. I doubt any of us could stay sane with people singing our praises day and night. It would take a person of rare humility to withstand it, and that does not describe our tech bosses at the moment. We can recall historical examples of this problem. It rarely turns out well.
Physical immortality is delusional. Going to Mars is simply applied engineering. There’s no reason at all there can’t be human settlements on other planets. In the meantime, the rocket business that Musk is developing is profitable and is making space so much more accessible that it’s conferring all kinds of benefits in terms of science and technology. So, sure, trying to physically live forever is delusional (probably). But don’t lump it in with space development and space exploration. They are really two different things.
An exaggeration of the possibilities of Musk's space business (e.g. economically viable human colonies on Mars) are lumped in with the immortality nonsense by the futurists and their fanboys via Extropianism and other similar isms. In other words, the aspects of space travel that Ted is complaining about aren't the same as the ones that you're defending. Satellites and the occasional scientist vs hordes of colonists.
Musk wants to put 1 million people on Mars. If you can get payloads up, cheaply enough, it is just a matter of arithmetic. It is not something we don’t know how to do, even theoretically, unlike radical life extension. The recent two videos of him, giving a tour of the SpaceX manufacturing facility and talking about their expansion plans, are very interesting, worth finding on the Internet. He is talking about having the main booster land right back on the launch platform and be refueled in a matter of hours. That’s just a refinement of capabilities they already have. Watching very large rockets with very large payloads of the space will become as regular as commercial aviation launches. there’s no reason this can’t happen. As a matter of fact, we should’ve been doing this decades ago.
This is one of the silliest articles I've read on substack. You ask your subscribers whether tech is bad, and the huge majority of them answer yes. Might this have something to do with the fact that you run a technophobic blog and are not attracting a random sample of opinion? Copilot tells people to bow down and worship it... when users put in a prompt telling copilot to act like an AI god. Even though there might be some nuggets of sense somewhere in here, your obvious bias discredits you.
His polls were asking if Google and other dominant web platforms are getting worse, and if views of Silicon Valley leaders are positive or negative. Hardly "whether tech is bad," which is not the point; believers in technocracy and cybernetic government as always appear to need to get off their phones, read some books, and improve their reading comprehension.
You have to be very out of touch indeed to think the answers do not represent a majority view among most people, or live in some gated, affluent community populated by mental cripples who think platforms are getting better, and what a shame it is that Altman couldn't get his trillions of dollars to improve generative AI and that Bankman has gone from effective altruist to prison fishmonger.
"Technophobia." What bullshit. Always, a perceived opposition to something—often really a criticism rather than an us-vs-them duality—is disregarded as some -phobia by its supporters who are unable to think past such terms. Technology is a tool, not a means to an end in itself; like history, its development is not an inevitable march forward from worse to better, and nor has it ever been that way. Your small mindedness discredits you.
The Luddites were completely sensible. They weren't against technology. They were against how the gains of technology were distributed. Living standards in England went down for decades. They didn't start to turn around until mid-century.
And that’s different how? Bezos just sold 5 billion in shares and we have homeless everywhere—how is it not similar, it’s so similar it’s ridiculous. History repeats, read some.
I misread your comment as saying it’s somehow different than the Luddites. The whole of it is a mess. Small groups like Ted and others are speaking out and of course there is a backlash as people are addicted to tech and it’s related attachment into our daily lives.
Speaking of Bill Hewlett, this is a good time to mention a book that I have absolutely no personal connection to: Michael Malone's "Bill and Dave."
I visited HP for three successive jobs. By then they were deep into the Lewis Platt / John Young periods of decline, but still: they were always decent people, great to work with, no big egos at all.
Then Carly Fiorina came in and ruined it, but that's another story.
Reasonable men may differ: I take exception to some of your assessments and conclusions.
Kurzweil was more right than wrong in his predictions for 2009. You don't have to believe in the Singularity—I do not—to be impressed by his prescience in 1989.
Cancer has proven to be substantially more complex than was appreciated 30 years ago. Pauling was right about Vitamin C boosting immune function, but more is clearly required.
Whatever the ultimate outcome of Musk's efforts to colonize Mars, SpaceX has dramatically reduced the cost of putting a payload in orbit, and he may reduce it again by an order of magnitude.
Bright, creative individuals are outliers who pursue ideas contrary to conventional wisdom. Sometimes they are correct and improve the quality of our lives, and sometimes they are (badly) mistaken. Expertise and accomplishment in one field do not necessarily translate well to other domains.
Musk is a financier. He can convince VC people to give him money possibly because his own personal flakiness aligns with the dominant flakiness popular in Silicon Valley. He bought an electric car company and got it a half billion dollar government loan. He bought a rocket company and got it a boodle of NASA and other government contracts. He has his winners and his losers. The Boring Company went nowhere. My guess is he couldn't get a big enough government loan or contract. His self-driving mode still doesn't work very well and may never. He took over Twitter and turned it into a Nazi bar, and let's not talk about that guy in a robot suit. Even Homer nods.
He's also a Nazi sympathizer and something of an asshole. In his defense, Henry Ford was one too. They had to give him a hit of thorazine to get Ford into war production during WW2.
Silicon Valley had a good run, but it has been downhill for the last decade, and a lot of it has to do with SV's divorce from the technological drive of that earlier era. There's a massive capital glut and an immense need for investment, but the SV cult members are off in cloud cuckoo land.
Reasonable men may differ but I would encourage you to take a closer look at what SpaceX has accomplished. Here is an independent analysis I found very enlightening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effFp6AnCWo
Don't misunderstand; I'm very impressed with SpaceX. Musk helped considerably in getting them venture capital and government money, but you'll notice that he has relatively little to do with the company. He didn't found it. He didn't develop any new technology. He doesn't run it. Shotwell runs it, but since she's a woman, she doesn't the CEO slot. (That's not on Musk. That's industry practice.)
You may have also noticed that Musk has greatly moderated what he says about SpaceX launches and operations ever since his "big kaboom" comment some years back. SpaceX is reliant on NASA and military contracts, so it was rather obvious that he was told to can it.
Some people make good impressarios. That is, they can recognize promise and understand how to develop and promote it. You get them in business, and you get them in the arts. Musk has a lot of talent as an impressario, and it's been amplified by his personal style which gibes with the Silicon Valley venture capital world view. A niece of mine worked in venture capital in Silicon Valley for some years, and it wasn't what she thought it was. She was not alone in her misunderstanding.
(Hmm, maybe the worm is turning. I just checked the Sequoia home page. It's still awfully cult-y, but it seems they've toned it down a notch since my last peek. Alternatively, I've gotten jaded.)
I don't think you have had a chance to watch that other video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effFp6AnCWo ) but at this point SpaceX is the low cost provider, they are cheaper than the Chinese and leverage Starlink launches to move down the learning curve faster than anyone else. They are doing business with firms all over the world and account for 80% of new payload in orbit, see for example https://spacenews.com/china-may-need-adjust-approach-toward-spacex/
"1. Identify a ludicrously powerful technology that kills people in unimaginably horrifying ways when it fails."
When you study the history of technology innovation you see many fit this rubric: natural gas explosions, train derailments, electrocution, automobile accidents, radium paint on watch dials, to name a few. Dynamite dramatically cut construction time for roads and railroads but was repurposed for warfare..
"3. Construct a barely-working prototype (that still may be killing lots of people even in its prototype stage) and take the company public."
Brilliant and timely! I’m especially glad you called out Kurzweil.
He is an extremely dangerous lunatic—from what I can tell, he is largely responsible for Silicon Valley’s (and therefore the Federal bureaucracy’s) insanely unrealistic assumptions that it’s possible to generate enough renewable electricity—and transmit it across a stable national grid—to power AI, huge server farms, electric cars, air conditioning, and everything else—without the use of fossil fuels.
It simply will not happen. The laws of physics, unlike “climate science” are irrefutable.
Kurzweil is a cult priest and a reckless maniac—the national electricity grid will crash long before AI turns on us.
Even if it were possible, the craziest part is the idea that just since we could, we should! Imagine everything that energy could be used for, and instead, it's used to power worthless plagiaristic word salad machines that have inherently unsolvable hallucinations by way of functioning through next-token prediction. Without exception, everything they can do, a human somewhere can do better (if not necessarily faster), and they don't improve our lives.
They can't understand anything that isn't statistically likely in the data they've been trained on; e.g clocks can't be consistently and properly read unless at statistically probable times used most in advertising photos; see AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus' Substack. 'Understand' I use loosely for lack of a better word coming to mind, as obviously they understand nothing at all due to how they work.
Energy is not free. It comes at a great cost in terms of labour and resources, and there is only so much the Earth can ever produce due to physics, thermodynamics, waste heat and so on. Even if you had infinite clean energy, a bit more than a thousand years of 0.2%-or-so energy growth and the Earth will be a bright white star using galactic-scale energy due to exponents; the waste heat must go somewhere. Total madness it's being wasted on things like gen AI, energy and everything that goes into its production is taken for granted.
Kurzweil never got over his father's death. My girlfriend worked for his reading machine company. She got some virtual shares when Xerox bought them out. Her office mate later founded the igNoble awards, so she got a cynical running commentary. Kurzweil may have been a bit flakey back then, but it got a lot worse over the years.
Yes, I saw it—totally agree
The old cults of California have evolved into new ones. Jonestown, Manson, and Heaven’s Gate are back in modern forms under different names. Technology accelerates the spread of cult followings: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-become-a-cult-leader
I was disturbed to read the Guardian a few days ago and see they gave Ray Kurzweil coverage with his prediction that humans will merge with machines and it will be wonderful. I'm glad to see I'm not alone in being creeped out by his messianic tech proselytizing. Yes, this is like a tech rapture. But it's only come to this because tech generates big cash and our society unfortunately posits billionaires as the font of all wisdom. But as the proverb states, "Hubris begets nemesis."
Well said on hubris. Arguably, you could say we are merging already, if you consider things like smart phones and people's dependence on them as like another limb to be a sort of merger, which most of them like Kurzweil do. I don't know that I agree with that entirely since I think it misses nuance for the sake of argument, but I can also see the point that we have become very dependent and 'merged' with tech in one sense of the word.
Except, I don't know—have we?—since if so, how was the invention of the axe and our subsequent dependence on it not a merger with technology? But people like Kurzweil don't seem to be as impressed as I am with tech like the axe or wheel, or think of them as such. The funny part is that if we have already started merging with machines, it's the best argument against it, since look at how non-wonderful it is what phones, etc, have done to us and our minds!
The techies have realized, as Ted Gioia, has pointed out that addiction can be used as a tool to hook people to check their devices to see how many likes and views we get. Coke heads don't merge with coke. People get an endorphin rush from their phones. However, Kurzweil's predictions would have us merge with machines. Call me old fashioned, but I find that disturbing.
Sorry, I meant to say people get a dopamine rush from checking their phones.
You can find versions of this merging on the internet. You can design your own "human" and have a "love" affair with her/him.
What will happen is some narcissists will take themselves out of the gene pool
And let's not forget the biggest cult of all right now: the Republican party. These nuts now want a king with full immunity and the Supreme Court in his pocket. While I share Ted's opinion of tech and its boundless megalomania, I'm more concerned with the State of the Union.
www.jim-frazee.com
J.Frazee - Say something off topic & controversial to promote your website.
The cockroaches of the comment section.
Thank you for proving my point.
I come here to escape politics.
Totally agree, I personally come here to escape that!
By the way, I've owned a few Porsches (911s) myself, but never had the chance to get a classic 70s era 901. Maybe you could start a Substack about Porsches? It's a little off topic, but driving a 911 is definitely a form of "escape" too, so it still fits with the conversation!...
(\____/)
( ͡ ͡° ͜ ʖ ͡ ͡°)
\╭☞ \╭☞ don't ban me Ted
I think that you have crossed your own line about political comments. Either criticize the post or ignore the person. It's not necessary to stoop to villianizing a person because you disagree politically.
OK, that's clear. I'm just tired of all the nastyness that appears in comment sections and whenever I see someone seeming to be attacked it triggers my response. I have no arguement with you.
I just finished reading DARK AEON: TRANSHUMANISM AND THE WAR AGAINST HUMANITY. It gives a great summation of where these tech moguls want to take us, and how our blind inherence to materialism absent of spirtualism has led us to this point. It also leaves you with a hopeful blueprint of what you as an individual can choose to do to create a life as free from the dystopian technological prison as possible.
This book looks really good. Thank you for the recommendation!
Great thought piece. As someone who lived in the SV for 10 years, and who actually went through "the circuit" I fully recognize this dystopia. The self-congratulatory, holier than thou, culture is all over the place without a hint of ethical questioning. I can 100% vouch for the HBO show Silicon Valley as an accurate representation of the dynamics, the companies, and the types of creatures that populate that egomaniacal ecosystem. SV leaders are more concerned with fighting death than enjoying their short lives. I highly recommend a new book by Yaris Varoufakis titled "Techno Feudalism." He makes a really thought provoking analogy between the oligarchs (aka billionaires) and the lords of old who allow you to use their land (cloud platforms) to grow your crops as long as you pay the rent and give them a portion of your harvest (sometimes a prima nocta was in play too).
What happened was that Silicon Valley became a dominant economic driver.
Uncanny timing. I stumbled upon this "creepy cult" aspect for the first time yesterday, while getting involved on Twitter with the AI & copyright debates. Particularly RIAA v. Suno. There's a very strange hatred toward artists/creatives manifesting there. We're snobby/elitist, "the biggest money grubbers on the planet," etc. We're standing in the way of AI and progress. And all art should be "freeware." There are even some threats of shutting everything down, making us pay for resisting, stuff like that. It's all very weird. And unsettling.
There is a pro-artist resistance effort culminating on Reddit's r/ArtistHate.
All text should be freeware.
All software should be freeware.
All music should be freeware.
Anything posted online should be freeware.
See how easy it is to say that? 😉
This is what happens when you hire a small army of people to worship you and tell you how great you are every waking moment of every day. It’s called “believing your own press”. I doubt any of us could stay sane with people singing our praises day and night. It would take a person of rare humility to withstand it, and that does not describe our tech bosses at the moment. We can recall historical examples of this problem. It rarely turns out well.
You can see today with the "leaders" of several countries.
A cult with the added Oligarchy (c) feature!
This should be a two part series. There’s so much to unpack with these billionaire cult figures building their dream utopia with your cash.
Physical immortality is delusional. Going to Mars is simply applied engineering. There’s no reason at all there can’t be human settlements on other planets. In the meantime, the rocket business that Musk is developing is profitable and is making space so much more accessible that it’s conferring all kinds of benefits in terms of science and technology. So, sure, trying to physically live forever is delusional (probably). But don’t lump it in with space development and space exploration. They are really two different things.
An exaggeration of the possibilities of Musk's space business (e.g. economically viable human colonies on Mars) are lumped in with the immortality nonsense by the futurists and their fanboys via Extropianism and other similar isms. In other words, the aspects of space travel that Ted is complaining about aren't the same as the ones that you're defending. Satellites and the occasional scientist vs hordes of colonists.
Musk wants to put 1 million people on Mars. If you can get payloads up, cheaply enough, it is just a matter of arithmetic. It is not something we don’t know how to do, even theoretically, unlike radical life extension. The recent two videos of him, giving a tour of the SpaceX manufacturing facility and talking about their expansion plans, are very interesting, worth finding on the Internet. He is talking about having the main booster land right back on the launch platform and be refueled in a matter of hours. That’s just a refinement of capabilities they already have. Watching very large rockets with very large payloads of the space will become as regular as commercial aviation launches. there’s no reason this can’t happen. As a matter of fact, we should’ve been doing this decades ago.
This is one of the silliest articles I've read on substack. You ask your subscribers whether tech is bad, and the huge majority of them answer yes. Might this have something to do with the fact that you run a technophobic blog and are not attracting a random sample of opinion? Copilot tells people to bow down and worship it... when users put in a prompt telling copilot to act like an AI god. Even though there might be some nuggets of sense somewhere in here, your obvious bias discredits you.
His polls were asking if Google and other dominant web platforms are getting worse, and if views of Silicon Valley leaders are positive or negative. Hardly "whether tech is bad," which is not the point; believers in technocracy and cybernetic government as always appear to need to get off their phones, read some books, and improve their reading comprehension.
You have to be very out of touch indeed to think the answers do not represent a majority view among most people, or live in some gated, affluent community populated by mental cripples who think platforms are getting better, and what a shame it is that Altman couldn't get his trillions of dollars to improve generative AI and that Bankman has gone from effective altruist to prison fishmonger.
"Technophobia." What bullshit. Always, a perceived opposition to something—often really a criticism rather than an us-vs-them duality—is disregarded as some -phobia by its supporters who are unable to think past such terms. Technology is a tool, not a means to an end in itself; like history, its development is not an inevitable march forward from worse to better, and nor has it ever been that way. Your small mindedness discredits you.
Technophobic, try Luddite. Or better yet, read a book on how tech has evolved in the past 20 years and it’s a gigantic trough of dissolutionment.
The Luddites were completely sensible. They weren't against technology. They were against how the gains of technology were distributed. Living standards in England went down for decades. They didn't start to turn around until mid-century.
And that’s different how? Bezos just sold 5 billion in shares and we have homeless everywhere—how is it not similar, it’s so similar it’s ridiculous. History repeats, read some.
Huh? Who said anything was different?
I misread your comment as saying it’s somehow different than the Luddites. The whole of it is a mess. Small groups like Ted and others are speaking out and of course there is a backlash as people are addicted to tech and it’s related attachment into our daily lives.
Absolutely brilliant. She crushed them.
Ted comes across as a really grumpy guy - at least in his Substack writing.
But I find him interesting anyway, especially with his appearances on Rick Beato's YouTube channel.
For whatever reasons, in spite of being a 76 year old recent widower, I am far more optimistic.
Is this a sensational article to chase clicks and views? Is Ted no different to the mass media that he rails against?
By your standards, your profile pic could discredit you as well.
Speaking of Bill Hewlett, this is a good time to mention a book that I have absolutely no personal connection to: Michael Malone's "Bill and Dave."
I visited HP for three successive jobs. By then they were deep into the Lewis Platt / John Young periods of decline, but still: they were always decent people, great to work with, no big egos at all.
Then Carly Fiorina came in and ruined it, but that's another story.
Thank you. I've been saying much of this to friends for over 15 years, after a deep immersion with those demonic kooks.
Reasonable men may differ: I take exception to some of your assessments and conclusions.
Kurzweil was more right than wrong in his predictions for 2009. You don't have to believe in the Singularity—I do not—to be impressed by his prescience in 1989.
Cancer has proven to be substantially more complex than was appreciated 30 years ago. Pauling was right about Vitamin C boosting immune function, but more is clearly required.
Whatever the ultimate outcome of Musk's efforts to colonize Mars, SpaceX has dramatically reduced the cost of putting a payload in orbit, and he may reduce it again by an order of magnitude.
Bright, creative individuals are outliers who pursue ideas contrary to conventional wisdom. Sometimes they are correct and improve the quality of our lives, and sometimes they are (badly) mistaken. Expertise and accomplishment in one field do not necessarily translate well to other domains.
Musk is a financier. He can convince VC people to give him money possibly because his own personal flakiness aligns with the dominant flakiness popular in Silicon Valley. He bought an electric car company and got it a half billion dollar government loan. He bought a rocket company and got it a boodle of NASA and other government contracts. He has his winners and his losers. The Boring Company went nowhere. My guess is he couldn't get a big enough government loan or contract. His self-driving mode still doesn't work very well and may never. He took over Twitter and turned it into a Nazi bar, and let's not talk about that guy in a robot suit. Even Homer nods.
He's also a Nazi sympathizer and something of an asshole. In his defense, Henry Ford was one too. They had to give him a hit of thorazine to get Ford into war production during WW2.
Silicon Valley had a good run, but it has been downhill for the last decade, and a lot of it has to do with SV's divorce from the technological drive of that earlier era. There's a massive capital glut and an immense need for investment, but the SV cult members are off in cloud cuckoo land.
Reasonable men may differ but I would encourage you to take a closer look at what SpaceX has accomplished. Here is an independent analysis I found very enlightening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effFp6AnCWo
Don't misunderstand; I'm very impressed with SpaceX. Musk helped considerably in getting them venture capital and government money, but you'll notice that he has relatively little to do with the company. He didn't found it. He didn't develop any new technology. He doesn't run it. Shotwell runs it, but since she's a woman, she doesn't the CEO slot. (That's not on Musk. That's industry practice.)
You may have also noticed that Musk has greatly moderated what he says about SpaceX launches and operations ever since his "big kaboom" comment some years back. SpaceX is reliant on NASA and military contracts, so it was rather obvious that he was told to can it.
Some people make good impressarios. That is, they can recognize promise and understand how to develop and promote it. You get them in business, and you get them in the arts. Musk has a lot of talent as an impressario, and it's been amplified by his personal style which gibes with the Silicon Valley venture capital world view. A niece of mine worked in venture capital in Silicon Valley for some years, and it wasn't what she thought it was. She was not alone in her misunderstanding.
(Hmm, maybe the worm is turning. I just checked the Sequoia home page. It's still awfully cult-y, but it seems they've toned it down a notch since my last peek. Alternatively, I've gotten jaded.)
Here is one story that offers a counter-example to your thesis on Musk:
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1798937746624631249 It's possible he is taking credit for other people's work but I think it unlikely.
I don't think you have had a chance to watch that other video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=effFp6AnCWo ) but at this point SpaceX is the low cost provider, they are cheaper than the Chinese and leverage Starlink launches to move down the learning curve faster than anyone else. They are doing business with firms all over the world and account for 80% of new payload in orbit, see for example https://spacenews.com/china-may-need-adjust-approach-toward-spacex/
"1. Identify a ludicrously powerful technology that kills people in unimaginably horrifying ways when it fails."
When you study the history of technology innovation you see many fit this rubric: natural gas explosions, train derailments, electrocution, automobile accidents, radium paint on watch dials, to name a few. Dynamite dramatically cut construction time for roads and railroads but was repurposed for warfare..
"3. Construct a barely-working prototype (that still may be killing lots of people even in its prototype stage) and take the company public."
Can you connect the dots for me on this. I was not aware of any astronaut or civilian casualties due to SpaceX testing or missions. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_accidents_and_incidents for a list of space related fatalities. Here is a list of automobile related fatalities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year Here is a list of air crash deaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_accidents_and_incidents
We accept these space, automobile, and airplane fatalities as part of the cost or tradeoff involved in taking advantage of the benefits. There are similar but harder o quantify tradeoffs for modern medical care (see https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking-health/medical-error-not-third-leading-cause-death ) and National Parks https://www.backpacker.com/survival/deaths-in-national-parks/