Musk appears to be a fantastically competent salesman and decent rocket scientist, but we shouldn’t expect him to have the Midas touch on other fields of competence.

And while Musk ought to employ people to warn him about all the issues he now cites as why he changed policy, remember that he did start The Boring Company in response to getting stuck in a traffic jam, and got in trouble with the SEC for repeatedly tweeting stuff that CEOs are not supposed to tweet, and tried to name his kid X Æ A-12 — I assume he has sycophants telling him his every idea is fantastic no matter what he does, just as he has anti-sycophants (sychokrupho? My Greek is terrible) yelling as loudly as possible that he’s evil for failing to spend his money on their pet project.