Elon is a serial fraudster. Went to school on Daddy's money from an emerald mine, bought his own frathouse with it and also used it to fund Zip2. Elon denies the emerald mine today after initially bragging about it, but we know he had the emerald mine because--besides his past statements on the matter-- he even bragged about it to his girlfriend's, who still have the emeralds Elon would give them:
"‘When we went to visit Elon’s mother in Toronto during the Christmas break of 1994, Elon gave me both the small ‘love, love, love’ note and the necklace. His mom had a number of these necklaces in a case in her bedroom and Elon told me they were from his father’s emerald mine in South Africa—he pulled one from the case. And because I had not gotten him anything as a Christmas gift (and I felt very guilty about that), he said we would consider the necklace an early birthday present for me. I wore the necklace for a number of years on and off, but it’s mostly been in my jewelry box for the last 10 years (always reminding me of Elon, of course).’"
https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/346384406430090-elon-musk-14k-gold-necklace-presented-to-his-college-girlfriend-with-original-photograph-1995/
Zip2 was Elon's first extreme success thanks to the dot com bubble. He defrauded investors by bringing him to his setup and showing them a fake super computer he claimed the website was hosted on. The investors got conned and later the new IT people they hired realized Elon's website was a pile of crap and had to be rebuilt from scratch.
http://www.bhpanel.org/failing-upwards-the-story-of-elon-musk/
Elon has gone through the rest of his career just scamming investors for more and more cash to fund his failures.
Make no mistake: Tesla is a failure. His cars are rated the most dangerous of any on the road. Most of Elon's cash comes from Carbon Credits. His sales are pathetic and dropping every year. The Cybertruck, another epic fraud promoted with fake ads like the Cybertruck vs Porsche race, was said to have "2 million reservations!" but today the trucks are piling up in parking lots across the country, unsold and forgotten.
The Tesla-Semi, hyped as having nuclear proof glass and AI that will know when the driver has a stroke or something, only delivered about 30 of them and are now no longer sold on the website. The internet is filled with broken down Tesla-Semis on the ground. And Elon never revealed how much the Tesla-Semi could even carry.
The Robotaxi is already a failure. Elon promised customers 100% investment returns in just one year if they bought Teslas NOW, RIGHT NOW, as all Teslas would have the hardware to transform into taxies and just make you money driving around on their own.
FSD is still killing people and now Elon has a new stand alone "Taxi" and isn't talking any longer about your 100% investment return on the piles of shit you bought in 2017 or 2018 that was supposed to be a full fleged Robotaxi already by then.
It's easy to start a bunch of companies and hire a bunch of engineers to build stuff for you when you aren't using your own money, and have a limitless number of goobers willing to give you money based on false promises of Tesla Robotaxies every single year, or trips to the Moon by 2018 with rockets that can carry 350 tons of payload, except it's 2024 and now it's 50 tons.
SpaceX's Starship is going to fail too since Elon has already blown through several billion dollars blowing up Starship with no end in sight, and still hasn't met any of his milestones he promised to Nasa. Starship was supposed to be doing moon landings 2nd quarter of 2024. Elon still hasn't proven the thing can carry cargo.
SpaceX employees say they had a art of getting Elmo out of the way so they could do real work, but Starship was Elon's baby, which is why it's trash.