There are multiple facets to his history to look at here; PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter/social media.
PayPal his coding was so bad they literally would replace his work all the time without letting him know.
Tesla he has a deal in place where the actual founders can’t call themselves the founders and only Elon can. His biggest claim is probably in this realm; he did get electric vehicles out the door before anyone else. I think this might be more a criticism of auto companies (particularly American ones) who continuously lag greatly behind others in safety, efficiency, and technology. Almost 90% of new cars sold in Norway in 2022 were electric. They were not all Tesla obviously.
SpaceX is probably technically the most impressive company of his, but everyone involved said Elon’s existence is essentially carefully managed by the real people in charge there. Whenever he comes by a literal group of employees gives him tours, tries to suggest that new things they want to implement were actually Elon’s ideas, try to keep him away from badgering the engineers too hard. It’s kind of like how there were handlers for Trump when he was president to try to limit the damage he could do.
Then twitter/social media. Obviously he is in way over his head with how to run twitter, but the most eye opening part to me of the last few years is how his entire twitter feed is full of economic predictions, and claims about history or science that are all incredibly, overwhelmingly false. He has an incredibly deep ineptitude about a variety of subjects.
That said, I’m a firm believer in intelligence both being obviously infinite (I guess I should say knowledge) and also deeply difficult to quantify. The world’s best plumber and the world’s best astrophysicist might have little in common in their special intelligence but both are deeply smart individuals within their fields.
Which is why it’s especially shocking that I think that Elon has displayed himself so badly over the decades (and this is ignoring the rampant racism and sexism at his workplaces) that he is, to answer the poll, a total fraud AND a deeply, deeply, truly stupid human. He has popped onto numerous live twitter spaces recently and hearing him talk with engineers and programmers live, without handlers and time to curate his response, it shows you the depths of how little he knows. I’ve listened to several and he has absolutely no clue what he is talking about, and you can literally hear him as he tries to conjure some bs story live (he is surprisingly bad at BSing too). Even his most sycophantic suck ups in those spaces have lost faith in him when he arrogantly lashes out at someone and calls people names repeatedly when it’s he himself who knows nothing.
I award Elon the score of 0/100.