On the contrary. It's not that he's not bright, it's that is is a brilliant conman.

Re self-driving: Tesla's boom in the past ~1.5 years coincided with his laughable claims about self-driving and robo-taxis.

And re bitcoin: the guy literally tweeted two words "buy doge" and sparked a pump-and-dump bubble. Then he went on SNL, didn't plug doge enough, and it tanked instantly. Then a couple hours ago he tweeted more doge stuff and it started rallying again.

Crazy stuff.