it's not clear to me at all how any of this shit is making any kind of breakthroughs for humanity that people attribute to him

If he used his billions to address the actual, critical problems the world is facing, I'd be first in line to praise him, but building electric luxury sports cars, rockets and streamlining online retail? That does about jack shit to make the world a better place.

Really? Paypal helped spur on ecommerce because it reduced the barriers of entry for online sales drastically compared to what options were available at the time which allowed for more every day people to make a living online instead of limiting it to larger companies. We see those benefits daily in the way the world works now. Would someone else have done it if not him? Sure, but the point is he did and to say there's been no benefit or shift from that is ridiculous.

SpaceX has proven that private space missions can be developed and launched with a fraction of the budget that we're used to, and uses that position to openly challenge the no-bid crony capitalist model of government contracts. That's a desperately needed if the military industrial complex is ever going to be dulled or if we want to be able to convince our legislators that space exploration needs to be prioritized again.

Tesla is not only producing luxury EVs, but the infrastructure to support them and other EVs via their Super Charging stations that refill at no cost through solar and push any excess power back onto the horribly fragile energy grid. Instead of just the train, they're also laying down all the railroads effectively. That can and will have huge ramifications for easing the adoption of EVs, something we desperately need if we're ever going to ween ourselves off oil. Their home battery is pushing a concept into the mainstream of using batteries for energy arbitrage to reduce grid dependancy for anyone who installs them, as well as once again adding stability to the grid by selling power back to it, and from there it makes adding a solar panel into the mix to become energy self-sufficient as simple as setting them up with some inverters and plugging them into the existing battery. Re: the luxury car point, they've said all along they plan on making consumer level cars but they've chosen to focus on the luxury level at first because it lets them get away with higher profit margins up front to sink into R&D to bring costs down. There's no way they could magically hit the ground running with a profitable consumer level EV because you need to be pushing huge numbers from day 1 to support that level of car and they've almost lost the farm a few times as it is. They've also open sourced the patents to their vehicles to help spur on the EV market.

He also spun up Solar City with a cousin to roll out residential solar installations that are more cost effective for home owners to get into and Solar City will soon be building battery factories in the US rather than relying on overseas sources. Between the combined needs and brains of Solar City, Tesla, and Space X who all stand to benefit from those battery factories I expect we'll see some battery tech breakthroughs coming from it, and likely be on the way to bringing the cost of Teslas down significantly at the same time. We really are a major battery tech breakthrough away from a significantly changed world since our battery tech is basically the same as it was 100 years ago but with different chemicals.

All that and the dude's only taken off two weeks worth of vacations in the last 12 years. He certainly wouldn't be firing rockets off into space without his team, but he's involved in a huge amount of what goes on at each of these companies (except PP obviously), and together they're the closest thing to a hope we have that we stand a chance at correcting some pretty major systemic deficiencies that will drag us down over the next few decades if we don't start addressing them. Don't deify him, but choosing to ignore the picture he's painting really is choosing to miss out on watching something interesting happen in our time for no real reason. We read about the 'titans of industry' from yesteryear, but through his teams Musk is laying down the groundwork for the next phase of our world and seems to genuinely want to do it for the betterment of society rather than purely power and prestige like a lot of the crooks we look back so fondly on.