This is a bit of a spoiler, but the guy who mentions Musk is actually from the evil mirror universe. So the second guy from the mainline universe is confused as to why Musk is on that list. He was probably a bigger figure in the mirror universe.
SpaceX pretty much kept US Spaceflight alive between the time of the Space Shuttle, and… whatever comes out next. Tesla corporation has proven to the rest of the car manufacturers, and other startups, that the way of the future is not via burning fossil fuels.
Elon showed the world what a shitheel he was after that.
So, I’m pretty sure that this dialogue was written before Elon became the obvious shitheel that he is now. And, as many point out, mirror universe Elon Musk might’ve been even more instrumental to their world, than ours.
It was really disappointing and cringy. I thought the show came out after the Thailand cave incident where he said people who were helping rescue trapped children were only in the country because they were pedophiles, but I just looked up the dates and the first season of Discovery came out a year before that incident. I waited a while to get Paramount+ because I didn't want yet another streaming service on top of Netflix and Hulu.
The Musk references aged very quickly. It's not great to name off living people as future historic figures when they are still alive and able to wreck their legacies.
The cave thing was worse than you remember: he got in an argument on twitter with a guy telling him how dumb the submarine idea was, so the smart reply was to call the guy a sex tourist… and it was obviously the cave expert called in to supervise the entire rescue.
Nevermind how that was an ad hominem to begin with lol.
From a Star Trek universe perspective it hit way too many lows, though. This is just my opinion, of course. I found it hard to sit through some episodes. The actors are generally great, but there is too much cheap dialogue (listen to some of the Season 2 and 3 “Picard” dialogue in comparison!), underdeveloped characters, statements like the above that were written without even considering how they might age… well, this was discussed ad nauseam in many places, so I’ll stop the rant before it starts.
Thank you Discovery for showing us what doesn’t work. Other shows learned from you.
