Elon Musk is also spread rather thin and seems to make things work somehow. Eliezer's accomplishments are not on the same level but the one he's been working on for more than ten years is rather more ambitious. Even just founding a non profit research institute is an awful lot more than most people ever do with their lives.

And even if the chance of any of the things he mentions happening are very small any one of them would be awesome. Seriously, half of them could be the life's work of a very talented, intelligent person. If he gets more than one of the very ambitious ones up and running and then either does the Musk superhuman thing or hands it off to someone else I'll be very impressed.

I think the point is that Eliezer's main strength - at least as I expect he would espouse himself - is his rationality or metacognition. This is what he would bring to those endeavours.

In the same way that a clever computer science can be useful to many industries purely through the application of computing, he is hoping that his thought processes can be useful to many different industries, quite separate from actual in-depth knowledge of that particular industry.

I don't think this is a far-fetched idea.

Whether Eliezer is actually good enough to do it is another question, to which I don't know the answer.