While that's true, I think it's more that rich people tend to insulate themselves from actually driving direct actions most of the time, so we see their stupid decisions after they've filtered from the Board, to the CEO, to the VPs, to the directors, to the managers, and finally, to the workers that actually do things. Really stupid things filter slowly back up as impossible, or as they hit snags over weeks and months, so it takes a couple rounds for them to really mess things up. Not to mention people softening the edges as it passes through the chain to make it more reasonable.

Elon being front and center, and actually ramming things through is what makes this so uniquely inept. Normally we wouldn't know that all of these terrible ideas are straight from him, and blame could be shifted around to scape goats.

Agreed.