Everything Musk does in the public sphere is a performance. He's putting on a show, and the show is always crafted according to whatever he thinks will sway the public in the direction he wants them to go.
This is a really tired take since it's not something that could possibly ever be known by you or anyone else not immediately close to Elon, and it's impossible for anyone else to refute it because they have the exact same lack of insight into whether Elon is putting on a performance every time he leaves the house.
Tesla was worth, at most, a few million dollars when Elon became their largest investor. They had no products. They had no sales. He turned a $2 million company into a $700 billion company, but he's not the founder because he wasn't in the paperwork for the first year of its existence in which very little happened? Ok.
Additionally, a settlement was reached to literally call himself a founder. At this point it's boring semantics of what "founder" means.
But go ahead and keep trying and failing to poke holes to push your unfounded narrative.
The same could be said of Ray Kroc and McDonald's, but it typically isn't because the McDonald brothers aren't the ones who made McDonald's ubiquitous on a global scale. Most of the time, Ray Kroc is considered the founder of McDonald's because he was the one to lead its global success.
Except in the case of Ray Kroc, he actually was the founder of the company that became McDonald’s. He didn’t pay the McDonald’s brothers for the rights to pretend he was the founder.
He bought the franchise for $2.7 million and paid the McDonald brothers a percentage of profits. I don't see a difference between Musk and Kroc in this regard. Without Musk, Tesla wouldn't be what it is today just like without Kroc the McDonald brothers' business would have remained regional and small.
The difference is precisely that Kroc is the founder of the company that is McDonalds while Musk is not the founder of Tesla.
It’s a fact that Musk turned Tesla into what it is today. It’s possible to get that point across without falsely claiming you’re the founder of the company. Words have meanings.
It's entirely valid to be allowed to judge other's behavior, and guess at their motives, especially the (former?) richest man in the world. Mental models of other people are a core part of being conscious.
There's a difference between an intelligent and meaningful observation of behavior to guess at motives and just outright calling someone a liar and manipulator without any real basis or evidence because you don't like them as a person.
I think Occam's razor applies here. In other words, it seems the more likely explanation is just that Musk is an egomaniacal rich guy. Imagining that Musk is playing 3D chess with the public psyche is overcomplicating things.
