[jandrese]

Maybe "poor emotional intelligence". Like you said, a person can plausibly get lucky on their first business and make it big once. But to do it repeatedly and to such a large degree takes skill. Say what you will about his politics, but his companies deliver. Even Hyperloop, which is basically just a bad subway, still has more buildout than pretty much any subway system in the US in the past decade. That might just be Elon willing to lose a ton of money on it to get it built though.

Might be interesting to compare and contrast the Las Vegas Hyperloop vs. the Las Vegas Monorail. Which is more of a boondoggle?

[BriggyDwiggs42]

I was with ya until the hyperloop example. Hyperloop was pushed for years as a vacuum tube train. Serious prototypes of this were developed. If it had worked out absolutely perfectly, it would still have lacked the throughput to be a good idea, but the prevalence of earthquakes in its target area, the inherent instability of a vacuum tube, the massive intended scale of the system, the economic feasibility of digging a huge tunnel, etc all made it an absolute shitfest of an idea. They then came up with a new idea, which was a one-lane tunnel without a safety walkway, which is utterly useless for passenger transport because it has, at best, the throughput of a two-lane highway. The hyperloop is probably elon’s most embarrassing failure after twitter.