I completely agree with you. I'm not defending Elon here, but I want to expand on your conclusion.

Electric car companies from the last 20ish years:

Polestar Fiskar Faraday Karma Rivian Tesla Canoo

Only Tesla is profitable. The others are defunct, funded by private equity and operating at a loss, owned or partly owned by a different company, or are basically stillborn (not dead, but not doing much of anything). Even if his only contribution is throwing money at Tesla, that seemed to be enough to keep them going until they could stand on their own. Keep in mind, all these other companies had money thrown at them too.

I think the same goes for space x. I'll give the bastard credit where it's due: he didn't stop throwing money at Tesla and SpaceX even after all logic and reason said he should stop, and now they're successful. Maybe he had vision, maybe he got deep into a K-hole and had a vision, I don't know. I don't think anyone else would have kept them afloat by any means possible. If anything, legacy auto, Boeing, etc were waiting for Tesla and Space X to fail so they could buy them cheap and absorb their talent and tech.

So no, he didn't found these companies, and I don't believe a single word of his claims that he contributed in any meaningful way to their engineering or tech, but I don't think they'd exist in their current successful state without his money.

To put this another way, he deserves recognition for his stubborn insistence that these companies should continue to exist.

Along the same line of thinking, Twitter's current state is 100% his doing. He was very public about exactly what he was doing after he was forced to carry through on his lies and buy it. He very publicly killed that company, and is using his money to fuel the necromancy keeping it going.

I can only hope that SpaceX and Tesla eventually find themselves out from under his influence.