He's a good businessman.

His market analysis around zip2, PayPal, tesla, and spaceX were spot on.

Twitter, not so much.

I don't think he intended Twitter to be a good financial investment. It seems like he bought it for its power in the public discourse. Whether or not that investment paid off is an exercise for the reader.

Born into money and making obvious investments that plenty of people with similar opportunity would make isn't particularly impressive.

It's not outright bad like failing to make money from a casino, but it's not particularly good either.

The failures of other electric car companies; Fisker Arrival, Dyson EV, Nikola, Faraday Future, would seem to indicate that being merely competent is a higher compliment than it feels like it would be.

What role did Musk do other than invest? You could even say he just got lucky with a gamble.

His biographies go into far more detail than fit here, but even if you only believe half of those stories, he is still way more involved that most investors. At one point he slept in his office at the Fremont plant to get the Model 3 launched. There's more to him than being able to sign a check.

well he managed to turn the twitter blunder into literal political capital with trump. so it all worked out in the end.