The other side of the coin of praising him personally for success like that, is blaming him personally for everything that goes wrong, like Cybertruck being simultaneously late and far more expensive than announced and far worse than announced and that even the announcement itself wasn't well done, or the majority of this Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
With Tesla, Musk invested in a neat startup, where the original founders didn't have the right skills to make
it work and/or it was too soon for the tech, Musk managed to get the right talent in to turn the loss-maker and laughing stock into a decent middling output car company. That's fantastic! But it also isn't what Tesla is seen as by those who idolise Musk: he didn't make everything out of it; and even with all the talent, he found he got lucky that battery tech advanced as fast as it did and made EVs viable when they did.
Musk's accomplishment was absolutely astonishing in betting on a completely immature market and bringing a tiny startup to the giant that is today. Then stuff like the cybertruck for me mark the moment when he completely lost it.
I don't think so, I think it's an important point, and he thinks it's an important point because he tried to pretend he did found Tesla by claiming that title officially when he bought it, which I find duplicitous and underhand, something of a pattern with Elon Musk in his business dealings.
He did a great job building that company up, but is now ruining it with a series of really bad decisions and appears to operate more on hype than tangible progress nowadays.
I really don't see the difference between buying a garage startup without a single product and a few months after its creation (total paid: $6.5 million, peanuts that show that it was basically an empty box) and actually founding it yourself. In any case, absolutely everything Tesla has been in the past 20 years is due to Elon Musk and not to the supposed "founders".
Musk wants to be called founder and he's absolutely right, as he got in when there was still nothing. Not that I care, but if you want to criticise Musk there plenty of real stuff to do it. This one is at the level of "he inherited his money".
With Tesla, Musk invested in a neat startup, where the original founders didn't have the right skills to make it work and/or it was too soon for the tech, Musk managed to get the right talent in to turn the loss-maker and laughing stock into a decent middling output car company. That's fantastic! But it also isn't what Tesla is seen as by those who idolise Musk: he didn't make everything out of it; and even with all the talent, he found he got lucky that battery tech advanced as fast as it did and made EVs viable when they did.