I’m frequently amused by the surprise shown in many quarters concerning Musk’s capabilities, project choices, eccentricities, origin and wealth.

As an Elon Musk-type wannabe (with no billion dollar war chest), I’m actually surprised it’s taken this long to get Elon Musk.

Really? Yes! Because, my argument is that, without taking anything away from Elon Musk, he was inevitable. Not an alien, not crazy. Just inevitable.

I can assure you that there are tens of thousands of physicists and probably hundreds of physicist entrepreneurs that have seriously dreamt of electric cars, solar energy and reusable rockets. How do I know this? Because I’m one of them, but without the means. Ask my family and they’ll tell you.

But dreaming seriously and doing and having the means and the right ideas? That’s the difference between tens of thousands and having 2 or 3.

My point is now that we have thousands of poly-billionaires, it makes sense that some of them will be physicist dreamers. The fact that 4 or 5 of the top poly-billionaires are space nuts and/or physicists is not an accident. Physics is not easy. Space is not easy. Programming is not easy.

Musk, Bezos, Gates and Paul Allen’s brains enabled them to become amongst the richest men in the world. It’s no accident 3 out of 4 of them are interested in space and new energies. They are all scientists of a type.

So Elon Musk is not an alien. He’s just the truly geeky entrepreneur that was inevitable statistically speaking.

For years I wondered, when will we get a billionaire who wants to spend his money on cool stuff. Like Musk, I watched NASA failing to lower the costs to space. I dreamt of solar energy. And wondered about electric cars. A lot of us did.

I was stunned that rich entrepreneurs were happy to sit around pools with cocktails or invest only in incremental technologies when they could be doing exciting, world-beating and altruistic Musk-ish things.

Musk came on the anything-is-possible scene in 2002 after PayPal and $200 million with a bookish can do attitude and . . did what tens of thousands of us physicist, coder and geek dreamers wanted to try to do.

Voila! Tesla. SpaceX. Solar City. Open AI. Boring Co. Neuralink.

Not many of us would have done as good a job as Musk.

But probably more than you might think.

Reusable rockets, internet satellite constellations and electric cars were tough problems but the laws of physics were not against them. All they needed was connecting of a few already solved dots.

I believe there are more breakthroughs to come purely because smart people will try what scares everyone else.

And making his first $200 million was a great filter!

Thanks Elon for being you!