Interesting, my Tesla feels pretty real.
There are also claims of games being played with Tesla options at the direction of Elon, though that area is less clear to me.
Maybe it's just a case of what he is doing is a dramatically more difficult and challenging than what the majority of us can remotely understand. And that would mean things don't go the way he planned a significant amount of the time (perfectly normal). And that includes the whole spectrum of business operations -> investors, funding/finance, marketing, technology, distribution, supply chains etc.
I know from the comfort of our desk chair (with no risk taken, no relevant experience, no nothing really) and with perfect 20/20 hindsight we can make these criticisms but really they dont mean much.
Jobs and Bezos fell into this category, they just underpromised and overdelivered, not the opposite.
I'm going to assume you lack the background and expertise to make any meaningful assessment of these businesses in the general sense, let alone with regard to specific challenges they each faced.
And even if true, the opposite of under-promising and over-delivering is not "immense amounts of fraud".
Musk has barely signed off anything, he's constantly postponing the moment when he'll sign off quality of life, but he's getting paid right now.
Today has been a slow day and I used the various different flavors of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft so many times. They might not be a colony on Mars, but at least they are real.
He does credit for being such a charismatic charlatan and somehow managing to fool most of the world and being a social media and tech darling based on nothing but lies and empty promises. Tesla's valuation comes from a large part from Musks constant lies that FSD was a solved problem and was just around the corner, every ear since 2016. Every time he said that, he got more fanatics, and the stock surged.
SpaceX is almost fully funded by DoD and Musk has acknowledged the end goal is to use it for military purposes.
All his other ideas like Hyperloop/Boring company, the recently released private tweets with his billionaire friends, getting fired by his own board, clearly expose him as someone who doesn't really understand technology let alone be a 'genius'. More like an idiot.
He was born rich, got lucky and somehow people buy into his myth.
And yes, he is a fraud. He's been selling vaporware for close to a decade, charging for alpha code that kills people and lying about it. Its not the same level of fraud as Holmes but Musk was never honest about it either.