Yet he has charisma for a certain demographic.

You pulled out the main point here - the idea of him, particularly the early idea of him. Back before he started speaking publicly, and I'm not even taking about the past 5-10 years when he's been vocal on Twitter, being political, or spreading his personal beliefs (pro-natalism, anti-trans, etc)

I mean the early early days post-paypal but when he just got involved with SpaceX and Tesla and he hadn't been paraded around the interview circuit yet. No one really knew anything about him, but because he had used his money and bullied his way into being named founder of companies, when people heard of him through these and looked him up, they assumed he was this brilliant man who must have founded these groundbreaking companies and invented incredible things. He was just going around doing his thing and these companies kept doing things that seemed great and people could create any story in their head. They were fanboy-ing about an idea they had created for themselves, about an image that has been curated and created. Investments came in, his stock went up, all he had to do was keep quiet and it would have stayed the same.

But he didn't - he started doing interviews, during which he couldn't answer simple questions that somebody how claimed to design the rocket should be able to answer. He got on Twitter and started lashing out at people. He started claiming he had amazing ideas for designs for projects that would save all sorts of things and became furious when the flaws were pointed out (eg, the soccer team stuck in the cave and the mini submarine). Then he went all in and letting the world see all of him.

A lot of us that liked the idea of Tesla (an EV for a relatively lower cost so everyone could get it, but still look super sleek, and then have tons of upgrades for the ones that could afford it) actually looked into it when we could finally see it and realized it was just junk-it was made with the cheapest parts in the cheapest way possible with an unbelievable number of flaws, there was no way someone brilliant oversaw the production of these. With SpaceX we were already horrified at the idea of putting something as important as a service to our country and people into the hands of a single CEO that could decide to simply change his mind and decide to cancel the launch of a resupply mission. Sure, even in the 60s there were contractors working for NASA, but it was contractors that NASA hired to work on a NASA led project, this is not a project we should be outsourcing.

I think too many people stuck with him beyond that though and were in a sunk-cost fallacy thinking that they've put so much time into being a fan and singing his praises that they better stick with it. I feel like they have to claim it was his charisma because what else could it have been? When really it was just their idea of him.

I would argue that the charisma is what allows him to fool people and put up that smoke screen, and you can't argue that many have not been fooled.