Musk is willing to take large risks with no promise of payback until a long time in the future, which very few investors are gutsy enough to do. This approach requires enormous vision and self-confidence and has paid off spectacularly for Musk.

But once you move much beyond that, Musk doesn't impress me as particularly intelligent. The stock shorting comment is but one example. Shorting a stock is not hostile to the company. It is not hypocritical to have an opinion on the stock valuation and also wish to help humanity. That is an illogical conclusion on Musk's part.

In order for Mars to be a lifeboat for humanity, at least of portion of Mars would need to get modified to be nearly identical to Earth. Same gravity, solar wavelengths, same micro-organisms, atmospheric composition, etc. Not only that, all the plants and animals that we need to live need to have their environments closely replicated too. And bringing the things we need with us will cost about $1 million/pound. You don't have to think about this very long or very hard to realize it is infinitely easier and cheaper to simply not screw up Earth in the first place.

Similarly, I'm not very impressed with his flirtations with cryptocurrency, especially Dogecoin which was created to illustrate the absurdity of cryptocurrency. Musk also has a penchant for making predictions that never come true: Full self driving in 2014, millions of robotaxis by 2020, manned missions to Mars by 2024, the Tesla human robot, all kinds of hyperloops and tunnels coming soon, etc. I think he believes those predictions when he makes them. But it seems like the reason his predictions are so consistently wrong is that he's simply not thinking through the problem and therefore not understanding how hard these really problems are.

The jury is still out on the Twitter experiment, but it doesn't seem to be going well for the same reasons. We'll see.

So I wouldn't say "genius" is the right adjective. "Visionary" is probably a better fit.