content: He's also:   Envisioned bringing electric cars to the mainstream as a means of moving away from fossil fuels. At the time electric cars were glorified go karts for bay area hipsters to virtue signal each other with. Now pure electric vehicles are supercars - the Model S is literally the quickest production car made, on the planet.   Envisioned automated vehicles driving people around. At the time there was little more than some private tests from Google in the field. Now Teslas have driven hundreds of millions of miles in autopilot mode. And even though it's still a work in progress, the time in autopilot mode already has the vehicles with a substantially lower crash rate than when humans are driving.   Envisioned reusable rockets and bringing the cost of space launches way down to further pursuits in that domain. He succesfully created, launched, and recovered the first completely autonomous reusable orbital rocket - and then did it again, and again, and again, and again, and... The recovered rockets have already been tested and the first "flight proven" rocket launch has already been setup and will happen later this year, with a commercial orbital payload.   Envisioned bringing AI into the public domain ensuring such technologies can benefit everybody instead of just the huge corporations and governments that would have the resources to actively develop them themselves. The result of this is OpenAI which is a completely not-for-profit startup seeded with more than a billion dollars engaged in cutting edge AI research all in the public domain.   And much more...   Things he envisions have a way of going from sounding insane to becoming true. You'd really be fairly hard pressed to nail down any of his predictions or goals over the years that have not come to fruition in at least some way. I think the typical way people try to hate on him is to be upset that he hasn't refused the various preexisting tax benfefits for his companies - even though very little of it actually goes to his companies (most are consumer tax benefits) and his competitors in the same industries have, almost invariably, received exponentially more than he has at times in literal handouts as in the auto industry bailout.