I never followed or indeed follow Musk's career. My issue is, if he was as bad as the MSM are currently saying he is (current = since his acquisition of Twitter), logically he would have been terrible before. So, my question would be, why was he propped up/celebrated before his Twitter acquisition by the media? Why wasn't this supposed ineloquent buffoon outed much earlier?
A lot of luck and that he has the ability to make money for himself because he has money. He used to be very good at selling himself, by painting himself as a visionary, founder, and great businessman. He is very good playing the hype game and courting investors, but he is actually bad at business.
He bases his persona on two facts: having been CEO and founder of Pay Pal, and being CEO and founder of Tesla. But a lot of it is half-truths and smoke and mirrors. And all of it comes down to he being a trust fund kid who learned to use money to shield himself from the bad consequences of his actions.
His first company was a success, by virtue of being actually run by the board -of which is Father was part of- (he wasn't CEO of it). And PayPal was a success, but it was all despite of him. You see, he didn't found PayPal, and he isn't properly part of the PayPal mafia. He got into PayPal through a merger between PayPal and Xcom (his company which was a competitor). The merger happened because neither company could stand to survive while in competition with the other. PayPal was a recognizable brand with a lot of users and good business fundamentals. Xcom had deeper pockets (because Musk is a trust fund baby). The merger had Musk placed as CEO of the combined companies -because he brought more money to the table-. His tenure, however, was a disaster and he was ousted by a literal coup started by key people at PayPal -the actual PayPal mafia-. Without him at the helm, PayPal managed to grow. He however, remained the greatest investor an received a lot of money when Ebay bought PayPal.
He then used the money he got from the PayPal sale to invest into Tesla, and through legal shenanigans managed to gain the legal right to call himself founder of Tesla. Then "Revenge of the Electric Car" happened, which was in a way an almost auto-hagiography, where he sold himself as the mind behind PayPal's success and a visionary. He used this good publicity to then found SpaceX, and since space travel is inherently cool, he gained a lot of brownie points as a genius.
Yes, Tesla is a good company that makes money, but it also makes a lot of dumb business decisions that it can afford because its core product is a hot product -at least until this year when it has started to slow down-. On the other hand, SpaceX which is all Elon hemorrages money, and only keeps growing in value because of the Sillicon Valley investment model which is very degenerate.
Only now most people are seeing Musk as a less than stellar businessman, thanks to his disastrous managing of Tweeter and his forays into Crypto bump and dump. He is starting to come as more of a conman with deep pockets than a true genious.
