I kinda put him in the same box as Steve Jobs. They are very crappy in some ways, but you cannot argue with what they have achieved.
Would we have a 'space race' like we have now, if it wasn't for Musk? Even Bezos cannot keep up.
How long would the EV 'evolution' have taken if Musk didn't make it a priority?
There are loads of faults here, and I am not blind to them. However, I think its short-sighted to paint his goals as "lies".
1. You don't have to believe him. 2. We still get some impossible results in the end which leads to a more interesting future.
If we have self-landing rockets you could argue all day about truth and integrity but we'll still have self-landing rockets.
Making impossible claims in investor calls, in corporate communications, to be clear, to the point where the company has later had to asterisk said claims as "visionary, not targets".
Cybertruck is entering mass production soon. Yes, it's late, but it's coming.
Same for self driving. It is clearly getting better all the time, and it's coming.
Again, he is often late delivering on very difficult and ambitious things. Have a look how the competition are doing with re-usable rockets, mass producing electric vehicles, self driving, etc.
None of these things are easy, and they take time.
I mean, electric cars were a thing. Not a big thing. But nonetheless. And FSD is to me a lot less impressive than implied. And on FSD, he has repeatedly well, failed to deliver - "this year, coast to coast, no interventions" is something he's said each and every year since 2016. And it still runs in to the back of stationary emergency lighted vehicles. Until last year it could barely handle roundabouts. It saw level crossings as a weird intersection with a light that was red, and then not, and then red again, with a collection of trucks crossing it.
I'd agree that he's failed to deliver on the FSD so far, but I mean, it'll be such a shift (when either Tesla or some other group nail it which like I said I think is the most likely) that when we look back on it in 100 years we're not going to care how far their time estimates were out by.