Say what you want about Elon Musk as a person, and if the stories are to be believed maybe he isn’t a very nice person, but you have to give him credit for having grand technological visions and making them come true.

Maybe his Tesla project will never make a significant profit, but even if the company went out of business today, Musk has already dramatically accelerated technology development for electric cars and forced traditional automakers to dramatically accelerate their own plans for engineering such cars and selling them at scale.

As far as space flight goes, everybody scoffed at the idea of landable, reusable rockets until Musk insisted his company could make it come true.