While Musk has an unparalleled ability to con cash out of naive venture capitalists and attract gullible followers who've watched far too many sci-fi movies & TV shows (and have failed to grasp the essential difference between trash entertainments and reality), he's merely today's version of P.T. Barnum. As such, he's able to capitalize on generic human ignorance and folly - he simply does so at huge scale. The major problem underlying all of Musk's so-called "visionary" companies is that there's actually no vision at all. Musk simply takes a problem that can easily be solved in far better ways, inflates its importance to absurd levels, and then claims to have a magical solution. Clever people aren't duped by Musk - but that means 86% of the population are easily fooled.