Elon Mask, because of controversies
the concern with Elon is just his confirmed 'greatness' re: his contributions in advancing civilization -- is he truly a genius and leader or moreso a PR man and lottery winner? he fits as GP especially since he's become the mascot for proponents of the 'great man theory', though when we get into that topic we quickly cross lines into religious thinking and messianism, and return to the question of what criteria
should we acknowledge as great? is public perceptions of the current ~decade and individual wealth enough? then he's in for sure...
the thought here is that he is not materially involved in the cutting edge engineering thats taking place -- and evaluating either of these on their commercial merits... well many of their ratios and metrics we would typically analyze by are not good, abysmal even, and hinged on future things that are expected to happen -- spacex has achieved the thinnest of margins and have much r&d yet to do, similar criticisms can be made with tesla.
Not even quite sure what he would be. Great Merchant? He isn't much of an engineer as far as I know. Or is he?
from my point of view the big win for elon thus far is paypal. But even there his success largely came from fortuitous stock positioning. I've worked for paypal its no engineering marvel lol for many years there was a lot manual excel work and accounting reconciliations taking place to make the 'automated' payments seem like they were actually automated
the engineers just built a fancy accounting ui that forever needed updating for new devices. But its certainly a great commercial success, thats undeniable
That one makes sense, although, I wouldn't be against including Bill Gates.
I would say bill gates is retired from the development or engineering phase of his career, and certainly did achieve something remarkable in his early days as a technical person. So in this sense he is not a present-day engineer, perhaps, but eligible for this category? I would leave him off the merchant list yet as he's still active in this sense to some degree.
it would probably help if the great person was dead in that regard. Not that I'm suggesting that we make it so.
lol great people never die, they live on forever as structures and yields. I prefer 'retired' to 'dead' as eligibility criteria, as it opens up at least some semi-topical and current names for discussion.
Having Tony Stark and Scrooge McDuck etc is funny in that regard. Is that a potential copyright issue? After all it's the Mouse. They don't seem to care for and like others touching their characters. Do I think they'll notice or care? Probably not. But you never know.
this is good point to consider perhaps for longevity of the main mod.. who knows what trends takeover in 10 years, maybe IP law goes crazy. Restricting to public domain characters, besides being safe, is maybe a good limiter on the potential silliness of leaving fictional names as possibility. Also an argument in favor of restricting names to dead people, maybe
As noted tho there are a some Great Leaders in the game that are by the standards of today mass-murdering-psychos
my take on this is we should add new category of "not so great people" lol maybe "infamous people" or even "great barbarians". Then the project would not be seen as endorsing these so much. At same time, any form of platforming may be seen as endorsement, and really what would it add to have every tyrant and oppressive maniac included? not much really. So there'd have to be some gameplay justification for such which rn doesn't really exist
once upon a time the civ franchise had unnamed 'barbarian leaders' that had to be captured/destroyed -- something for modmod perhaps
Might aswell have Great Engineer Tony Stark or Great Scientist Doctor Octopus. Civ6 have vampires, but I don't know if we'd like to go in that direction 
