Why do people fall for that? He didn't start from 0, he literally had financial backing from his family.
Now is is carpetbagging the US government.
I think it's because the amount he got from his family was tiny in relation to his level of success, and the success being from providing real things people bought/used, and from the real things being things that had never been done before.
He was in the US illegally, didn’t have the qualifications he claimed to (no degree and he was never in a Stanford PHD program, never matriculated there and simply has a letter from a professor he claims is proof he was accepted as a candidate - which it absolutely is not). He failed out of 4 universities. He stole the idea for zip2. He likely sold gems illegally in both Canada and the US - there are huge gaps in his story.
All of this is fairly easy to check up on and people have done the work. https://sethabramson.substack.com/p/the-truth-about-musk-fro...
He has cheated and failed up to an unprecedented degree. Fueled by a venture capital industry who realized that backing a conman selling dreams and lying is more reliable than backing an honest entrepreneur who could fail on merit.
He move to politics is the final act. The wheels have come off his cons, Tesla is failing and has no future evidenced by the total lack of a roadmap of new vehicles.
He intends to exit by making his illegal actions legal thanks to Trump.
It’s shameful how instrumental this community has been in propping up a man who history will remember as one of the greatest conmen of all time.
We’re way past that.
But he is a terrible person, unstable, has many mental issues, pretty terrible father (which goes directly to terrible husband). Petty, childish, vengeful, has no issue lying to whole world with straight face.
At the end it doesn't matter what pros one have even up to this level, such set of cons overwhelms overall rating of given person very firmly into POS territory for me. Happy to see it unfolding now, and not decades after his death once cult of his worshippers slowly dissipates.
But I think he can still redeem himself, he has tremendous potential for good, maybe more than any other human being right now. I don't mean some Mars pipe dream, that feels rather like a great endeavor for 22nd century, but plenty of crap here back on Earth that needs some stronger push into better direction.