He's always been incompetent. He was fired from PayPal for that very reason. He's used his parents emerald business money to fabricate a career. He's paid his way into being the engineer he clearly idolized but couldn't actually earn himself. He bought Tesla, he bought Twitter, the "HyperLoop" was a hundred year old idea called a vac-train. Even the biggest selling point for SpaceX, were just plans NASA had decades ago but the technology didn't exist at the time to pull it off. I mean the Boring Company... we've been successfully digging subway tunnels for a long time... the London Underground opened in 1863. New York had theirs in 1904. Elon in 2018 debuted a claustrophobic tunnel that was less than 2 miles long...

If it wasn't for daddy's money, he would have been a nobody. But he bought his way into some sort of 'relevance' and has conned a lot of people who don't understand science out of a lot of money. His greatest accomplishment is being a great conman.