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(Not trying to rebut you in particular here. This is a rant I've had building up for a while, and you provided a lead-in.)
It's funny: I'm having trouble remembering when he proposed something that didn't strike lots of people as highly dubious. I'm most familiar with SpaceX among his companies, so I'll use examples from there. Some of his absurd ideas:
A private space company without lots of legacy engineering expertise, many billions of dollars of government money on cost-plus contracts, and so on. This was considered somewhere between unlikely and impossible -- Everybody Knows that space is the exclusive domain of governments and their closely-affiliated contractors. (I was online at the time, and I remember the ridicule!)
Lots of people were dunking on the idea of propulsively landing Falcon 9 lower stages -- on tiny barges in the ocean, of all things! -- and the jeering intensified when the early landing attempts kept turning into an entertaining procession of explosion videos. Then one day they stopped exploding, and kept on not exploding at least 9 times out of 10, with reliability improving over time.
A satellite internet constellation in low-earth orbit?! The dumber critics complained that it would have horrible ping times (because they got LEO confused with GEO), and the smarter critics thought that launching thousands of satellites that you have to replace every 5 years would be so ludicrously expensive that it would be a complete non-starter. Today there are more than 3000 mass-produced Starlink satellites in the sky; cost estimates look surprisingly good now, and are set to become much better with Starship launching. They're also trying to turn it into a military-contracting cash cow by offering the US DoD some capabilities that it badly wants, with their very-dramatically-named Starshield program.
Speaking of Starship, it has been ridiculed quite a bit, though the specific contents of that ridicule have been forced to change over the years. At first the problem was that they were trying to make a high-performance methalox engine of a type that had never successfully been made before -- but between some fancy new alloys and GPU-aided combustion chamber modeling, they managed to make the engine work. Then people were laughing at the idea of making the body out of steel plates welded together by guys whose previous job was water tower construction -- but it turned out to work really well in practice. Now people are scoffing at the idea that the $/kg to orbit could be anywhere near as low as SpaceX is predicting... and we'll see how that goes.
Over the years one starts to notice a pattern here. Musk has proposed a lot of things that ended up changing after being found unworkable or suboptimal, but in general, I'm wary of saying that any of them are obviously not going to work. If nothing else, he employs engineers who are capable of doing back-of-the-envelope calculations.
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