Lots of 24 year olds are very ambitious and excited about changing their communities for the better. They come off as energetic, but naive.

With mentorship, experience, and a network of like minded people to collaborate alongside, they can channel that energy and temper it against the experience of their mentors to produce incredible accomplishments.

Unfortunately, 24 year old Musk got networked with a bunch of Stanford tech freaks and mentored by Wall Street ghouls. All his ambition was channeled into salesmanship, without concern for quality or consistency.

So now he's got a quarter trillion dollars at his disposal and all he knows how to do is make pitch desks for his investors. The next generation of 24 year olds forced to work with him (because he's squatting over a ton of capital and IP) get burned out quickly and turned off of the idea of contributing meaningfully to the future of US engineering.

So we've created a black hole of shit that sucked in one ambitious younger person, larded him up with cash, and pulled in two decades of subsequent ambitious young people to squander their time and talent on bullshit make work.