This should be the top comment on this thread. The entire presentation was a shambles. Elon Musk mumbling while trying to read stats off the screen behind him, attempting to answer hecklers and ending sentences that he'd forgotten to start. Then some tediously long demos of a man dropping a ball down a tube with amateur magician flourishes. That anyone could watch this and then conclude that he's a genius who did it on purpose is truly mine boggling.

That's what you get from buying the newest, shiniest ad without the customer caring about the product itself.

This approach has been glorified and happily adapted by everyone in the past decade just for the purpose of getting external validation on social networks.

We are just witnessing late stages of that.

That doesn't have to be the thinking behind it. I agree it could be a PR stunt. They're not clever - they're just abusing marketing edge cases hoping that more eyes is better than an irrelevant staged failure. (Possibly true given this post made it to the top of HN) It's still terrible, but I wouldn't say clever. Maybe sleazy.