tbf though, when the promises you make are so huge, any one W would be enough for most people to build an entire career off of.

But you have to take Elon for what he is: It's a complicated mess of things, good and bad and all over the place. He's a capitalist, but he's only the world's richest man because he's a crony capitalist. He was a darling of the left for creating the useless EV industry, but he's a darling of the right for taking over Twitter and making some boomer tier tweets. He helped Trump get elected, but he's still a neoliberal who wants to import unlimited cheap labor. He lies a lot about his projects, but some of his projects have been knock it out of the park successes.

And you can just go "Oh, well those projects weren't from him", but I've seen how you can have a lot of technologies that never get off the ground despite being ready to go for decades, and it seems like a surprising number of techs do actually get to market under Elon, so while he might not be what people treat him like, he's obviously got the right stuff in his head to get things done when they're actually possible.

So friend or foe? He's more like an unpredictable 800 pound gorilla.