He started 3 billion $ companies and was involved in basically creating another one. All of these companies are doing pretty good things at least compared to the alternatives.

The space industry was terrible state and he disrupted it in many ways and is leading the charge on a new space industry totally chaining not just industry, but basically forcing change down governments throats including DoD, NASA and others.

Much the same could be argued about the car industry.

He simply thinks about problems differently. Listen to the interviews with the people that work with him, specially engineers.