And if you think he is smart, think again. He tried to "smartly" get off the deal but the other party was smarter. He is clearly not the smartest man in the room.
Boring Company / Hyperloop existed mainly to stop California from building their own high speed rail, and The Tesla Truck existed mainly to rebuild hype around the Tesla brand at the time, and it's probably never going to go into production. Both were "built to fail".
Once he realized that he couldn't get out of buying Twitter, I believe he's trying to apply the same script to make sure the loss is way smaller than 44 billion dollars.
Regardless of whether "truck" here refers to the Cybertruck (https://www.tesla.com/cybertruck, for which you can place an order) or the Semi (https://www.tesla.com/semi), are you really suggesting it is just fake and there's nobody working on these vehicles?
I will throw in the new Roadster (https://www.tesla.com/roadster) for good measure too.
Also, I wouldn't call it fake outright. Something more along the lines of the Lamborghini Huracán Sterrato[1] or the Porsche 911 Dakar[2] - which are like... yep, they're real cars, but it's more of a limited run branding exercise than an actual vehicles range.
[1]https://www.lamborghini.com/it-en/modelli/huracan/huracan-st...
[2]https://www.porsche.com/international/models/911/911-dakar/9...
Well, the other party sold their company to Elon Musk to run into the ground, so smarter isn't quite the word I'd use for them, either.
Yeah, I get that, but in doing so destroyed a thing that lots of people found value in. So yeah, they made more money than the thing was worth, great business decision, but I'm not willing to award "this nice thing is worth more as scrap than it is on its own right now" as being called "smart".