ujm,
He nearly ran Paypal into the ground and was forced out by the other owners. And he later on admitted that Tesla almost went bankrupt during the Model 3 rollout in 2018, most of which was due to him meddling in the manufacturing process. Tesla did survive that by the skin of its teeth but it was mostly due to some masterful financial manuevering by then CFO Deepak Ahuja. And the less that is said about Boring Company or Neuralink the better – Boring company is pretty much a bust and Neuralink is about 10 years behind the actual leaders in the field.
On the other hand Tesla is finally profitable and SpaceX has done same amazing things, though as best as anyone can tell it is probably not profitable yet.
But don’t confuse stock price with business genius. Tesla is overvalued by at least 5X and probably closer the 10X. Its meteoric rise in 2020-2021 was mostly due to hardcore fanboys of the stock plus a strong tech bull market and a lack of serious competition outside of China. The tech bull market is over, competition finally arrived outside of China and BYD is eating Tesla’s lunch in China. And it seems to me from looking at Tesla stock message boards that many of the fanboy stockholders are both heavily leveraged and were also heavily invested in crypto, and may have to sell off some of their Tesla stock soon. Because of the hardcore fanboy investor base I avoided trading in Tesla one way or the other until late 2021 when its rise halted, but since then I have made decent amount on put options.
I am not as negative on Elon as some of his biggest detractors, but he is a mixed bag who has a tendency to make overconfident snap decisions with inconsistent results.