Even points that you wouldn't think would be controversial, like "Tesla disrupted the EV industry that was previously only interested in building compliance cars for rich crunchy-granola city weirdos", are almost instantly shot down. Anything that isn't just outright hatred for Elon gets slammed to hell. It's almost impossible to have a balanced discussion about him or his companies.
I also don't think he's as dumb as people think. He has an eye for industries that are ripe for disruption and has actually managed to deliver at least twice so far. There is no question at all that SpaceX is the premier launch provider in the world today (I know I'm getting downvoted for saying this). Tesla sells about half of the EVs sold in the US and basically didn't exist 10 years ago. The jury is still out on the Boring company. Neuralink and Optimus are still too new to tell. Even Paypal is a good example of seeing a market gap and exploiting it. Twitter/X was the real stinker. Elon is exactly the wrong guy to be running a social media company, and worse he thinks he is winning by out-foxing Fox News. He's got that engagement algorithm brain that results when you chase bigger numbers. It is the biggest right wing black hole you could imagine and Elon himself has fallen right down the center. You couldn't ask for a more perfect radicalization system than he has built with the "pay for voice" scheme with basically no bot protection.
Most of your last paragraph about Twitter is what has caused me to think he's dumb, in spite of having a few early successes which may be attributable to survivor bias (you have millions of people taking random risks, some of them are going to pan out randomly, and after the first one you have money so it's easy to make more money). Calling the rescuer guy a "pedo guy" during the crisis in Thailand and just myriad other inane utterances have tanked his valuation in my eyes.
But I think I might agree with you that "dumb" is the wrong word. Perhaps "unwise" is what I'm feeling. He may have skills and intelligence to apply those skills to start businesses or make money or whatever. But he doesn't apply that intelligence to the end that we might call wisdom, and I think that's what I as well as a lot of other people are trying to articulate when they say he's dumb. Agree with you though, people aren't black and white.
Might be interesting to compare and contrast the Las Vegas Hyperloop vs. the Las Vegas Monorail. Which is more of a boondoggle?
