This "explanation" doesn't pass the smell test, because the chronology of cause-and-effect is inconsistent.

Elon's companies get successful, which makes him famous... which explains how his companies were successful before he got famous?

His work at Zip2 was incredibly consistent with his pattern: a person with visionary ideas, an effective prototyper, an incredible ability to sell with smoke and mirrors... but only successful in business to the extent his companies are protected from him:

> ...in early 1996 the firm Mohr Davidow Ventures invested $3 million into the company, on the condition that Musk hand over most of his shares and cede operational control to a seasoned tech executive named Rich Sorkin. Musk was demoted to Chief Technology Officer, and not surprisingly, he hated to see someone else run his own business. But he needed the money to take Zip2 to the next level, so he took the deal.

> The new programmers found that they needed to rewrite most of the software, to make it more efficient. Musk’s DIY approach to coding didn’t include chunking, so he inadvertently created a “hairball”: a tangled mess of code that’s nearly impossible to unravel if anything goes wrong.

> Often he would re-write his programmers’ code after they left work at the end of the day, without telling them of the changes. He was also prone to micro-managing and rudely criticizing his team. Needless to say, they found him difficult to work with.

But Zip2 became vital to the online transition for traditional newspapers and other media. Right place, right time, Musk being actively managed from the very beginning. But he's incapable of recognizing now that he needs that support system.

Musk didn't found PayPal - he founded X.com, a competitor of Confinity (founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin), and then Peter Thiel convinced him to merge to reduce competition in the space. His "contributions" to PayPal post-merger were largely limited to trying to convince them to switch from Linux to Windows servers, and bad ideas about software architecture. You can read about this in Levchin's entry in "Founders at Work" [1]

Musk didn't found Tesla. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning did. Musk came in as one of the first investors and then forced the founders out, then got his role rewritten into a "founder" title with a lawsuit.

Musk did found SpaceX. However, his role was basically that of a talent scout. Early hires like Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller were critical, and he basically poached them from Boeing & TRW.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...

Your smell test also fits a random walk, where hundreds of other tech nerds simply walked into the wrong deals, hallways, etc.

So while I agree there's likely not a walking Elon cleanup crew, the popularity of Elon matches a random momentum that coalesces in American capitalism.

I'll be sure to remind people of this (and cite this comment) whenever anyone criticizes Elon Musk for something Tesla/SpaceX does. ;)

Just semantics but I am curious: what business titles do you consider "head" titles?

>also fits a random walk, where hundreds of other tech nerds simply walked into the wrong deals, hallways, etc.

Not really. To explain multiple enormous successes merely by random chance (and what's worse, claiming his odds are lower than average, ie "in spite of him") so vanishingly unlikely that it's a statistical impossibility.

Elon founded SpaceX. That fact is totally uncontroversial, even among critics.

So it's always going to be given that this fact is true, then that story is more likely to be true. Or given that this one thing is more likely to be true, then that story is more likely to be true.

Saying something is true/false based on news stories is really silly since you can almost never verify the truth of that story. Always going to be more/less likely given this/that.