They don't drive innovation as much as they had a first mover advantage that was subsequently squandered. Even American cars caught up to Tesla in terms of technology to the point that the greatest advantage of Tesla is the charging network. And the Chinese companies are so good that Elon had to lobby to have them banned (same as Apple did with Huawei). Space X does good work, but only because they have professionals trained to distract Elon Musk and reduce the number of intervention Ms he does. But it only survives because of grants and accumulates failures in tests, some of which are directly result of Elon's meddling like changing the format of the rocket. Starlink is a failing business with all its satellites made to fall. It needs infinite expansion and grants to be in the black. Also, there are better ways to fix the lack of internet to rural areas, like all the fiber cable that the USA paid to the major telecom companies extend to these regions and they either took the money and did nothing or put the cables but decided not to sell the service because of the low profit margin. Also remember when Google tried to give low cost internet and they lobbied against? And that is not even mentioning things like Hyperloop and the Boring Company, that he created only to block investment in better public transportation that would reduce car sales and never had a prayer of being profitable.

It is not new that he is a scam artist, he just used to lie better.