At the heart of Elon Musk's public persona is his image as an engineering and managerial genius.
How else could he build Tesla into the world's leading electric vehicle company, creating a profitable market for an entirely new technology? Or strip down the costs of space flight to turn SpaceX into the low-cost bid-winner for government rocket launching?
Musk's image has won him a legion of adoring fans, many of whom see him as a savior of a globally warming Earth or, alternatively, the savior of humanity through his plan to transport civilization to an unpolluted Mars.
