I don't want to defend musk in any way but I think you are making a mistake there using him as an example because what boosted him quite a lot is that he actually delivered what he claimed. Always late but still earlier than anybody was guesstimating. And now he is completely spiraling but its a lot harder to lose a billion than to gain one so he persists and even gets richer. Plus his "fanatical" followers are poor. It just doesn't match the situation.
Sounds a lot like "I'm not racist but". There's a website dedicated to all of his bs https://elonmusk.today
He is the definition of a cult. Collects money from fanatical followers who will praise every word he says, never delivers, "oh next year guys, for sure, wanna buy a not a flamethrower, while you are at it?". Not to mention what once were laughable conspiracy theories about him turned out to be true(such that even I laughed when I heard them). Torvalds is right with his statement about musk: "incompetent" and "too stupid to work at a tech company".
How is any of that different from AI evangelists, be it regular hype kids or CEOs? "All code will be written by AI by the end of {current_year+1}". "We know how to build AGI by the end of {current_year+1}". "AI will discover new sciences". A quick search will draw a billion claims from everyone involved. Much like on here, where I'm constantly told that LLMs are a silver bullet and the only reason why they aren't working for me is because my prompts are not explicit enough or I'm not paying for a subscription. All while watching people submit garbage LLM code and breaking their computers by copy-pasting idiotic suggestions from chatgpt into their terminals. It is depressing how close we are to the Idiocracy world without anyone noticing. And it did not take 500 years but just 3. Everyone involved - altman, zukerberg, musk, pichai, nadella, huang, etc. are well aware they are building a bullshit economy on top of bullshit claims and false promises.
