I'd say he's somewhere between Steven Jobs and Elizabeth Holmes. Like Trump, much of his image is cultivated. He didn't start PayPal or Tesla, he parachuted into them with a lot of money and won court cases which gave him the claim to being the "inventor" of each.
I wrote an article about him, trying to be fair. Other engineers are mad at him about lying re: tunneling tech (in truth, he lowballed a project while not having any superior tech). Neurolink and others have largely been failures. I was in the Electric Auto Assoc beginning in '88, and we financed the first hybrid at Stanford, '91 (which led to the Prius). Many think Musk "invented" electric cars, but they are really rich people's toys, not mass-market. I will give him credit for mass producing lithium batteries. Space X is another of his notable successes (NASA is reliant on him for satellite tech), but do people realize the enormous cost/vague purpose of colonizing Mars? (Much, much cheaper to colonize the bottom of our ocean, but then that's not as "cool").
The big question is, are we at a point where we give self-proclaimed "geniuses" (Trump, Musk) carte-blanche? I believe in Capitalism, but I say we need to be wary. The repentant Capitalists (Bill Gates, Andrew Carnegie) has kept an eye on relevance and service in their philanthropy. Stewardship of capitalists (Henry Kaiser, etc) by FDR helped win WW II. I hope Musk can improve government spending/defense, but will we be slaves to his whims? Musk seems to have little interest in anything other than his ego. He, Trump, Eliz Holmes are teaching a giant class in "fake it until you make it".
