Why not? It doesn't matter if he's... Elon Musk. What he's accomplished in fields he wasn't trained in is significant. I think that makes OPs point just fine.
He seems to have a rare skill for building large successful innovative companies with revolutionary products. Not sure if that’s below or above the level of accomplishment of the reference group.
Because Elon Musk has made a series of incorrect, misleading, and ignorant statements about the Coronavirus crisis in order to benefit himself personally.
Name one aeronautical engineer phD who deserves more credit for giving America the ability to put humans in space next month than Musk.
He's quite involved with technical decisions. His social media behavior is irrelevant here -- this is about the ability to innovate outside of physics or economics, which is what he learned about in college.
> Name one aeronautical engineer phD who deserves more credit for giving America the ability to put humans in space next month than Musk.
Why limit it to them? Without the Internet, there would have been no X.com, no PayPal, no billion dollar paycheck. If "funding" a large project is the equivalent of "being a scientific genius", I think we'll add a lot of geniuses to the books, and we should probably include every government official that makes decisions about funding large projects.
And really ... who deserves more credit for putting a man on the moon than Karl Marx? Without Marx no communism, without communism no Soviet Union, without SU no American fear of losing dominance, and without that no ambitious and well-funded space program.
