He was definitely not always like that, at least loudly in public.
just look at his consistent and extreme lack of comprehension of fairly basic engineering. The man is a talentless hack, who paid his way into fame and the appearance of success. His contribution to paypal was his money. When paypal and x (at the time elons online bank) merged, paypal's code etc. Weren't really infleunced by elon or even x. X was crazy unsafe and unreliable, and so merging really only brought together intelligent havenots with a decent product with an unintelligent nepobabies wealth.
he didnt invent tesla either. He just bought into the company and bought the right to call himself a founder and marketed that angle aggresivley.
elon is an idiot, and always has been. Idiots need symbols though, so other idiots idolize him, propping him up.
And even if Tesla evaporated today, he’d still be one of the richest people on the planet.
Even being rich != smart
he is certainly rich by most peoples standards but his networth is enormously inflated and represents unrealised capital which he gas succesfully leveraged for things like buying political influence.
That being said, most of those we would call intelligent in this kind of discussion are not good woth money, they're good woth more practical and interesting things. Things that aren't total figments of our collective imagination. Being good with money is like being good in theology.
As far as intelligence goes, there are certainly ways to become rich without it. But Musk didn't do it any of those ways as far as I can tell.
I totally get why people would say he misleads people and his stated wealth is inflated as a result. He has enormously overpromised and underdelivered, no doubt about that.
But I can't understand saying that is the only element of his success. Forget about his blather for a second. Tesla has sold millions of cars. SpaceX has done hundreds of successful orbital launches. You can't fake that.
Is he entirely responsible for those successes? Of course not. Could Tesla and SpaceX have achieved those things if the only thing Musk brought to the table was a relatively paltry amount of money? I really don't see how. You're telling me that this guy founded rocket company with $90 million that two decades later accounts for more than half of all orbital launches on the planet, and he's a talentless hack and only succeeds because he's willing to lie and his fans are too stupid? That doesn't add up.
Grifting people takes a form of intelligence, i agree, but it is not what we usually mean when we say intelligence in this context.
Let's be clear that the PayPal days consisted of his company merging with a company that was doing something his was failing at, spending 4 months as the CEO arguing that the entire thing that Comenity had built (which was "PayPal", that they'd already built a working version of, trademarked, etc., before the merger) be thrown away and rewritten in ASP, because he didn't understand Java.
So horrific was his tenure at PayPal that, in a world where CEOs "pursue opportunities", "spend time with family", etc., Musk was openly fired. In absentia. The morning he left for his honeymoon. How badly do you have to fuck up as CEO for the Board to do that to you?
Musk's "contribution" to PayPal is mostly just "cashing dividend checks".
There's a model Y with The Sticker on it in my street, introduced years after he showed his colors like that. No, dear neighbor, when you bought that car, you knew.