I genuinely don't know how the mental model of such a person works where they look at Elon who got multiple world changing bets right but they focus on the ones that were wrong.

In general, people who focus on the many things he got wrong or lied about, will all at least admit that he got a few things right.

But the people who focus on his successes always seem to downplay, blame-shift and defend when it comes to his negative side. They'll never admit he was wrong about anything. It's the same worship / cult of personality that affects politics too.

I feel like a lot of the ideas are over-attributed to him. Tesla already existed, electric cars aren't really a revolutionary idea. He's a hype man and he does the hype stuff well. Cybertruck was a pretty unmitigated disaster. self-driving is not really working out as he promised. I still remember arguing with people in 2020 who thought you'd be able to sleep in your car in a few years. Seems like Waymo is beating them to robo-taxis. Hyperloop was a bad idea.

Starlink + reusable rockets... alright, not bad, but not exactly a "world changing bet". Seems far more hyped than anything. So he gets credit for just combining the idea of reusable rockets to send satellites into space? okay fine.

He had a lot of money and threw a lot at the wall to see what stuck. If I were a betting man, I'd bet against his "next big idea". He'll over-promise and under-deliver.