SINGAPORE, June 25 -- Tech billionaire Elon Musk has hailed Singapore's founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew as a "genius", this time for his long-held belief that air conditioning was one of the most important inventions in modern history.

Musk made the remark on X yesterday, replying to a post by content creator Trung Phan that highlighted one of Lee's best-known observations about how air conditioning transformed Singapore's development.

"Lee Kuan Yew was a genius," Musk wrote.

The post resurfaced an excerpt from a 2009 interview Lee gave to New Perspectives Quarterly, in which he argued that air conditioning fundamentally changed what countries in the tropics could achieve.

"Air conditioning was a most important invention for us, ...