There was bribery before there was money and it would go right on if money went away.As long as money continues to exist, so will bribery.
It would be easy to undersell him, but maybe even easier to oversell him. His success has been getting in and doing it where it is time for "it", He got a mentor to teach him about the banking system and he was one of several people his age that saw what the internet was going to do before the older people did. He knew how to code and he built a website that could do banking PayPal was trying to do the same thing and they decided it would be better not to compete so they merged. He failed as a front man for it and got pushed out, but remained a large scale owner and when eBay bought it he was rich. I don't know how much of his actual code got into that version of PayPal, but at the very least he had the idea and had enough of a product that he'd be in PayPal's way. If he hadn't been pushed out, maybe he'd still be running PayPal, like Zuckerberg at Facebook. And he wouldn't be as rich as Zuckerberg. But he did get forced out and he immediately threw that money into Tesla and I don't know how much he may have improved anything there, but at the very least he was invested in something that it was time for. When NASA was getting out of the business, he was ready to get in and became the deFacto NASA and the government used their NASA money to help him out. And SpaceX he built from scratch. He didn't invent the rockets, but he made the investment and got the people together who did. There were several times that he could've retired as a rich man, but he keeps throwing money he makes into something else which could have broken him several times, but he has made it through. It's just another arena where he has outclassed Trump.Yea, I've felt for awhile now that his companies succeeded in spite of him, not because of him. He wasn't even an original member of the Tesla team, so there was already some momentum and culture in place when he bought his way in and he used to listen to the engineers and managers at SpaceX.
I see some people say yes and some people say no concerning x.com, but I forgot about zip2 in the lineup.From my understanding he didn't really write the code for x.com(his banking startup, not the site formerly known as twitter). He did write some code for the preceding company, zip2, but that was a glorified yellow pages, but on the internet.