Elon Musk is a tech and entrepreneurial genius, with his motivations in the right place...with some huge personal failings that cause big problems.
He's a hybrid of Tesla and Edison, picking up the best and worst of each. He has Tesla's genius, vision and concern for humanity, but also his instability, weirdness, and complete inability to deal with humans. He has Edison's ambition, drive and entrepreneurial skills, but also his ruthlessness and willingness to bend the rules.
His personal life is a series of disasters. His treatment of employees is shameful at best. Yet I claim that he may have done more to help humanity than any person born in the 20th century. And it all sort of fits together in a brilliant, horrifying and tragic way if you follow the streams.
Let's start with the genius bit. Yes, he started out with similar privileges and resources that Bill Gates had; 99% of comparable kids wouldn't have had the chances and connections. But he has the ability to spot opportunities for technical revolutions and the business cases to make them happen, followed by the maniacal drive to manifest the visions. Not infallible, but among the best we've ever seen.
And the motivation. Musk's philosophy is fundamentally libertarian - government should mostly get out of the way and let progress happen. And his core motivation, across most of his companies, is to change the world for the better in a huge way. If you believe that climate change is one of this century's biggest dangers, Musk has done more than anyone - Al Gore, Greta Thunberg included - to move us toward solutions.
Most of his endeavours have been focused on that end. Tesla cars, for more green transport, sooner...and the irony that it wouldn't have been possible without government intervention in the markets. Tesla self driving for a world of transportation as a service. (If you're not familiar with that, imagine a world where there are half as many cars as today, and almost nobody bothers to own one, with driverless hailing services providing 30 second response almost everywhere. Saves several thousands per year per household, eliminates traffic problems, parking, environmental issues and more.) Solar shingles to make solar roofs ubiquitous. Household battery banks to avoid the duck-shaped graph of electric demand. Massive battery banks and solar farms for utilities to provide 24/7 solar. All of these will have a huge impact on us reaching zero emissions many years sooner than we would have without him.
Detractors talk about his Mars ambitions as if he plans to leave a ruined earth and escape there, but that's ludicrously backwards. His motivation is to make humanity, for the first time ever, able to withstand a planet-scale extinction event, while he's working to save the earth at the same time. This doesn't benefit him personally, it's literally motivation for the good of mankind. SpaceX's Falcon 9 was an insane vision, and he very nearly failed. But it delivered an extremely reliable technology that made access to space roughly 10x cheaper, a key first step to making Mars a reality. (Starship will make it 5-10x cheaper still and far more green, a requirement if you're going to send 100k people/year to Mars.)
Starlink is his method to privately fund the Mars project. Four years ago, it was a ridiculous dream facing countless tech, financial and regulatory obstacles. Now, it's a tech marvel consisting of nearly half the satellites in earth orbit (in just 3 years!) delivering high-speed internet to places that didn't have it...and it's just getting started. (I've been using it exclusively for about 8 months now.)
He can also change course when needed. Faced with the reality that de-orbiting thousands of Starlink satellites per year would eventually kill somebody, he redesigned them to entirely burn up before hitting the ground. When stargazers complained about the brightness of the satellites, he again changed them to make them nearly invisible after the initial positioning phase.
Along the way his ruthless Edison streak and core libertarian philosophy has led to a contempt for labor, for safety regulations, and government in general. He works his employees beyond the point of burnout, and his lack of people skills makes it even worse. He's prone to feuds and rash decisions, in conflicts with California, NASA, and space and comms regulatory bodies.
All this sets the stage for the ultimate disaster at Twitter. Elon is a tech and business genius, and time and again he's learned that he's right when he has a vision and everyone says it's impossible. This, combined with his libertarian philosophy, runs the risk of epic scale Dunning-Kruger scenarios, when he steps outside his areas of core competency. The Thai rescue submarine and needless "pedo guy" distractions. And now, his most epic fail.
His Twitter acquisition was driven by his libertarian belief that free speech needs to be uncensored, and that there are tech solutions to allow and encourage exchange of ideas without becoming a cesspool. He comes in, as always, with the supreme confidence that his understanding of the problems and opportunities is superior. This isn't like SpaceX where he did tech dives to become one of the leading experts on rocket science. Add a contempt for regulation and rules, and there you have it.
Fire the management team because they're the old twitter. Fire much of the workforce because we're going to have tech solve the problems. Ignore the market dynamics of what brings content creators and consumers to a platform because he has the true vision.
Musk is an arrogant, abrasive, abusive genius trying to do things that he believes will make the world a better place. Not the god his fanboys see, not the devil his detractors see. The real person is neither of these, and far more interesting.