That's what Elon Musk has done since the start of his career and it has worked pretty well for him. For that you need to be a really good hype man because it's objectively true that great work that nobody knows about is pure waste. You need to be rich because in the US it's assumed that this means something awesome about you personally. You need to be the one who always announce the news on Twitter, you don't even have to lie, your strongest fan will assume you did all the work. Like they believe he is the founder of Tesla. Like they believe he is the real life Tony Stark. Like they believe that he, not the actual rocket scientists working at Tesla, design all those rockets. Like they believe that he invented the hyperloop when he renamed the vactrain concept from hundred years ago and then couldn't build it because it's bullshit. Like they believe he will save humanity by helping us anytime soon to escape Earth that people like him are destroying.
I don't really care about Elon Musk. The guy is a mix between a Tech Robber Baron and an emotionally immature 14 years old who has read too much science fiction. And remember more the fiction than the science.
OTOH his fan club is a fascinating experiment on how a cult of personality develops in public and in real time.
I don't disagree with your read on his lack of maturity, or that he takes credit for work he hasn't done, or that his fans believe he is singularly responsible for the accomplishments of his teams. However, it's odd that Musk is so obsessively hated. I believe his passionate detractors are under a similar polarizing spell as his passionate fans, only in the opposite direction of "hero worship".
I'm talking about his fans and their perceptions of Musk. They hear "he is the real life Tony Stark" and they think "WOW" instead of Tony Stark is a character of fiction that can't possibly exist in reality".
Absurdity is fascinating to me.
Could you expand that more? Like what meaningful work did your acquaintances say Musk did for SpaceX and what valuable engineering work did they think he was capable of doing?
Maybe Musk socially engineered a kind of nerd reputational ant mill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_mill where everyone who works in the aerospace industry knows several current and former senior engineers at SpaceX, none of whom agree with the assessment that Musk has done no meaningful work for SpaceX, or is a poor engineer incapable of valuable work.
I know he had pocket emeralds when he was a teenager and he bought twitter and made a lot of stupid tweets, but those things don't take much time, maybe in his other time he did amazing things.
