He's the closest thing to a Hank Rearden in real life analogue that I've ever seen.
No, I don't have delusions that he is an Objectivist and/or a Libertarian. He leans moderately left-libertarian from what I've tracked of him, with an odd mutualist/socialist lump here or there. Such as his endorsement of UBI in the past. Doesn't care for unions though, at all.
Didn't get along with Trump at all, doesn't get along with Biden now. Gotta say, that's two positive checkmarks in his favor by my calculus.
He doesn't care what the industry insiders or government influence peddlers say can be done or should be done. He does what he thinks should be done, and finds a market for it. He respects both sides of the supply/demand equation. I love SpaceX personally, and I hate Tesla personally. But I can respect the fact that Musk believes in reducing carbon emissions, and as such looked at how to do so via the supply/demand curve. It isn't very common for a perfectly good power plant to be shut down, so for new power plants to be built (even green ones) you have to have a change in grid demand. If electric automobiles reduce demand for fossil fuels and increase demand for electricity, it's likely that a significant portion of that new grid supply will be green in some form. Of course this completely ignores the result of the massive increase in lithium demand, and the ecological/sociological/political liabilities of all that.
The whole cave diving submarine thing was weird. I didn't really follow it, there was something about Musk calling someone a pedophile, and promising to build a submarine. Ultimately they got the kids out of the cave by drugging them to sleep and putting full face masks over them and passively handing them through the cave system by expert SCUBA search and rescue crews. Whatever, I wasn't there.
Then there was the whole COVID respirator thing. SpaceX did end up partnering with someone (I want to say Leidos) to build a lot more ventilators, but to the immediate skeptic's perspective there isn't a single Musk/SpaceX ventilator that was made.
All told, the guy is inspirational to a lot of people. It's easy to get bogged down with how shitty government and regulations are. This is a guy that just slogs through it though and it's apparent that his ideas rapidly outpace what government is prepared to handle.
