I think part of it is the fact that he was the front runner of an entirely new industry and managed to make it work. Even though he had insane amount of privlege - nd government support - a lot of people are quick to brush those facts about him and argue that "after years of failing and making breakthroughts, he created an entirely new industry." To them, Musk's success story is painted as a sort of tragedy as every time he was successful, something bad happened to him and he was able to bounce back. All in all, people think he's immediately a genius because he created the industry, even though he had an overwhelming amount of support at the end to make that all happen.

Also with regards to Twitter, the users statistics in America are pretty surprising. I was watching The Young Turks and one thing that stood out to me was that in one of the reports they shared said "97% of tweers from America came from 23% of the users". I might've messed up the percentages but they are around that amount. Regardless, a lot of the tweets made on Twitter in America on a regular basis are from a very small portion of people. Also note that there aren't alot of Americans using Twitter either. Not even half of American Millennials are on Twitter and about a quarter of baby boomers in America are on there.