Is that actually true? Because if I were Elon Musk that is the image I would want people to think of me - I'm sure he is ideologically motivated in where be builds his businesses but it seems to be popular to ascribe considerable virtue to someone who can be rather unvirtuous when pushed.

What makes "I want to launch rockets and am obsessed with doing it" a particularly virtuous assessment?

Because no hackernews thread about an Elon company is complete with either straight up religious worship of Elon or brushing away potentially legitimate concerns about his businesses - and this isn't even including the inevitable "Tesla isn't a car company" in any thread where Tesla is compared to any other company that sells cars

As far as reality distortion fields go, I don't think it's that bad, but with these kinds of things I am firmly in the "don't trust; verify twice" camp.

And no Hacker News comment about a Musk company is not filled with wild accusation accusing Musk of playing 4D Chess in 3D dimension, lying about literally everything and generally being a Bond villain.

The guy literally invested huge amount of his money into a scientific mission to mars and when he realized it wouldn't work he dedicated the next 20 years trying to build a company that could do it.

And he did all of this so he could have a good 'image' a small part of the population? That is just beyond stupid.

Just because Bezos didn’t tweet publicly doesn’t mean that he too is not a man with a mission.

Everything he has achieved with Amazon very much seems to imply otherwise.

Bezos has a very large amount of unallocated capital, which means that if he had a mission, he could move a lot faster on it. Musk has none, in fact, has heavily bet the farm more than once in pursuit of his stated mission. If Bezos has a mission I can not find what it is based on his actions. If I didn't know what Musk's mission was I could make a pretty good stab at it based on his actions so far.