Elon's Y Combinator interview was pretty good. He seemed more in his element back amongst the hacker crowd (rather than dirty politics), and seemed to be doing hackery things at X, like renting generators and mobile cooling vans and just putting them the car park outside a warehouse to train Grok, since there were no data centres available and he was told it would take 2 years to set it all up properly.
I think he's just good at attracting good talent, and letting them focus on the right things to move fast initially, while cutting the supporting infra down to zero until it's needed.
It's hackery but also kind of sociopathic to dump a bunch of loud, dirty generators in the middle of a low-income community. Go set your data center up on Martha's Vineyard and see how long the residents put up with it.
Thinking more cynically: political corruption and connections I'm guessing? Just a couple months ago Musk was treating the US government like his personal playground.