Many smart people make things happen all the time. Regardless of whether there's some singular rich grifter in that specific that can latch onto them soon enough to claim credit or not.
And regardless I made no claim that any of those other things aren’t important, so feel free to knock down your own strawman.
That latching onto smart people and ousting them out of their own achievements and replacing with yourself in public imagination is something to admire.
Your own bias is showing.
You've provided zero evidence to back of your claims of "grifter" (whatever that is).
It's not hard. Businessmen run businesses. Musk runs many and in a very successful way. You're entitled to your own opinions, but that's what they are - nothing more than your opinions.
I do know we didn’t have self-landing rockets nor a massive reduced cost of space cargo until SpaceX.
Whether Musk hired the author of a Moon grant is irrelevant to that fact.
Same with Tesla. We had multiple, massively funded car companies try and fail to mass produce an electric car consumers wanted
Whether Musk overpromises FSD isn’t relevant to that accomplishment.