Honestly, I'll give Musk the credit for making electric vehicles cool. Not that he did the design or engineering, mind you, but that being stubborn about making electric vehicles "a thing" actually did move the industry towards electric vehicles proper, by throwing money at it and implementing a plan to make it more economically feasible. We all put a lot of faith in Tesla for being the ONLY company that seemed to be pushing forward with mass market EV adoption, when so many other companies were too scared to do it themselves. Now that there are more companies, and older established companies making EVs, and now that Elon has outed himself as kind of a twat, it's easier to dismiss him. But I will give credit where credit is due. I don't think we would see this boom in electric vehicles without him and Tesla kicking the car industry in the balls

Also Iron Man was a big movie at the time so people thought of him as the "real life Tony Stark." That whole myth that you could have a super genius that could build a fusion reactor from a box of scraps was a thing at the time and here's Elon Musk seemingly doing the same kind of thing.

Of course it's silly, you have to have teams of people solving thousands of problems (big and small) to be able to get new technology.

But yeah it's the most extreme version of the old saw "better to keep your mouth shut and have everyone assume you're a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt." In Musk's case, he could have kept his mouth shut and had everyone assume that he's a genius.