Those rockets, the ones that went into space, are those BS? Starlink works. Tesla’s were the most desirable electric car until politics came into it. And PayPal? Literally changed the internet.
I do wish that the Paypal statement would be a bit more nuanced though. Yes, Musk made a lot of money on the dot-com hype by way of Paypal. And he seems to have built strong friendships from that, weirdly with the same people that fired him. But his involvement in Paypal was that he let it buy the startup he was in and demanded to be CEO. He then only showed interest in throwing out the FreeBSD it was built on and replace it with NT (which was the hottest fad at the time) and to rename the company to "X". Neither happened, and he was quickly let go before the company risked bankruptcy. It's rather far fetched to go from that to "changing the Internet". Paypal won and X didn't.
Yeah he made the electric car popular, but it can be argued that in order to make his company economically viable he basically lied to his investors and customers about self driving cars for almost a decade, when he had nothing real in his hands. Thanks to those promises he got the money to keep the company afloat until it had the manufacturing capability to actually deliver the cars they sold; and someone may argue he would have failed if he had been honest from the beginning, and that maybe people wouldn't have invested the money they did if he hadn't set unachievable goals to begin with
And this is a pattern you can see in all of his companies; he promises the world Mars, gets a lot of funding and then instead of delivering on the "dream" target, he uses the money to deliver a valid but definitely less "romantic" product he can actually sell. One time is ok, but it's basically a modus operandi now. And this gives me a strong suspicion that the product was the real goal all along, and he knew he had to lie about the "dream" in order to get the capital at all
Elon sells a 2-3 phase project, and then delivers phase 1. Thats the entire man.
Tesla: Was meant to revolutionise car making and green the planet. He delivered a pretty ok set of electric cars and got completely outflanked by traditional car makers. He also used it to rescue his brothers failing business.
Starlink: Its billed as an uninterruptible censorship ignoring super internet in space where government cant get it. But what he delivered is just landline fiber extended by 1 - 2 satellite hops. Its great for rural areas but the business complies with all legal censorship requirements where it operates. My back of the napkin math tells me its ultimate goals are completely unachievable, and MEO internet providers IMHO are catching up.
SpaceX: SpaceX is really good, they have brought in everyone from JPL and other places and absolutely nailed low cost orbital payload. In fact I read speculation they will take boeings contracts for Artemis prep. However what he sold is the relocation of humanity to mars which is no closer to being achieved, and as far as I can tell, he has literally no one but concept artists working on.
Hyperloop etc: Basically kickstarted the boring company which IIRC is one of his better long term prospects. He wont be creating super fast mass transit systems but he can shave months off of boring projects.
Xitter: Billed as an uncensored town square, the place has just engaged in the other teams censorship and is generally a cess pit.
Neuralink: Apparently almost as good as stuff displayed on Beyond 2000 25+ years ago.
tl;dr guy is a salesman. The fact that he can sell you a dream and then pretend like he delivered it without delivering it is a testament to his business strengths. But dont drink the koolaid.