Musk has spent and continues to spend an inordinate amount of effort cultivating a particular image/brand of himself, one which has gained him a large following.
Not having a PR team in front of him and being off the cuff is exactly how he cultivates his brand and has a large cult following.
Well he could've fooled me. He might troll every once in a while, but the rest of his public discourse is standing on a soap box telling us all we're wrong.
Musk reminds me of the guy who came up with the idea of scamming people by dividing them recursively into two groups, each of whose members receives an opposing prediction about some future event with a binary resolution.
By the time he works down from 65536 potential marks to 4 or 8 or so, they think he's a god, a time traveler, or a time-traveling god. They'll give him their life savings without a second thought.
Following his retirement, Frank Avruch, the first nationally-syndicated Bozo the Clown, launched his own website -- bostonman.com -- which, like the “Man About Town” segments he did for WCVB-TV news, provided information on special events, hotels, restaurants, museums, and theaters in Boston.
- Possibly misremembered couplet from childhood, that also applies nicely at Tesla
I think the actual dynamic here is that a personality who is good at inspiring passionate following of a small group of people [0] is not really a good personality for endearing himself to most people. So driving startupesque innovative companies working on hard engineering was in his wheelhouse. Whereas being on the political stage, and running a company whose chief asset is its hundreds of millions of users, is not.
With his ability to create that type of following, Musk would have been much better starting his own social network. Having found himself owning Twitter, he should have put the company into stasis mode, viewed the debt interest payments as a sunk cost of a bad financial investment, and brought in professional management to run the company and slowly cut costs. Alas, he was overconfident based on his previous successes.
[0] including yourself, referring to reasoned criticism as "haters"