A person doesn’t become not smart no matter how much he flirts with neo nazism. They might be an immoral piece of shit but pretending he isn’t also smart can be extremely dangerous, lest people think we can now just let him wreck his brand and become irrelevant.

To be fair there are plenty of ruthless greedy people with zero morals out there but Musk is far more successful than any of them so something has to differentiate him. He might not be intelligent enough to recognise what a crigerworthy loser he is but let’s not pretend he isn’t smart.