The biggest tragedy of modern media is that they chose to cast Elon Musk as the real life Tony Stark instead of torvalds who created 2 pieces of truly revolutionary software (with the help of thousands of other engineers ofc)
Four things went for Musk:
- he was rich
- he had a passing resemblance to Robert Downey Jr.
- he
madewas closely associated with futuristic hardware (we don’t seem to value revolutionary software the same way as hardware) - he was rich
In all honesty, a lot of solo developers who are directly responsible for the internet as we know it should be getting far more credit than rich ass holes but here we are.
Edit: correct
Yeah Teslas were pretty leading edge at the beginning. Then they started doing weird stuff like removing stalks and making triangular trucks.
Falcon 9 and Starship are obviously futuristic too.
Also Subsurface, a scuba diving log program, but that one is not quite as well known.
Made me curious if Torvalds at least got some reward for his work besides gratitude from people who use his stuff. I’m not sure how credible internet estimates of net worth are but looking up “Linus Torvalds net worth” keeps showing me stuff from $50–$150 million so hey, at least he’s (probably) comfortable. Not exactly Tony Stark superhero territory but if he wasn’t rich enough to sit at home and sleep for the rest of his life if he wanted to I’d probably be upset on his behalf for a bit, before I moved onto the next outrage of the day. Glad to see he’s well-off.
