"Because his wealth is entirely in overinflated Tesla stock, and because he’s already massively overleveraged from buying Twitter, coming up with that money means selling Tesla stock, and because the Tesla stock price is based on dreams and unicorn farts any amount he sells tends to sink the price.

And there’s no telling when the Tesla stock price will just collapse entirely as investors finally start valuing it like a car manufacturer, and not like kind of predestined savior of the human race (for context, Tesla in its entirety is currently valued at $800bn. Ford is currently valued at $40bn. And Ford sell a LOT more cars than Tesla)."

This is a quote from a comment above. What he’s “smart” about is being a conman. Which doesn’t really take intelligence. It just takes some trial and error and enough money starting out to make mistakes.