‘Lidar is lame’: why Elon Musk’s vision for a self-driving Tesla taxi faltered
(www.theguardian.com)
It's entirely possible he was responsible for some of PayPal, but since, his MO has been, as you said, buying up promising companies. And there's nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when he rewrites history to be the founder instead of simply an investor in these firms and claims credit for shit he simply didn't do.
I fell for it myself for a while. Early days of Tesla, early days of SpaceX ... dude knows how to sell and arguably accelerated BEVs, but it appears he doesn't know how to actually carve tunnels or rewrite mass transit with functionally unlimited money. Not to mention, Starship is having a really bad time these days, which stands in stark contrast to how banal Falcon launches have become.