I put these ad hominin lying squarely on the media's unwillingness to engage accurate reporting.
His hyperloop concept is essentially a rail gun which is a linear motor and the cushion is electromagnetic force that maintains an airway (not wheels because of the electromagnetic force) which needs to be a near vacuum so as not to slow the effect of the electromagnetic force. Wheels have the same problem (wasting electrical energy on wheels) and fortunately with electromagnetic force in a tunnel you don't need those either. This is all perfectly feasible but there are lots of practical details.
His Boring company benefits but it also supports the use of electric cars (underground or in tubes) as he did in Las Vegas. He never created a hyperloop company because it was never an appropriate time.
If you had the actual presentation given by Tesla and Boring (and I did) on his concepts they included trains/buses as well as cars (and taxi like cars).
I am sure he realized he was competing with people who wanted to use oil and or/gas to move people and things. He will use oil/gas when the best practical engineering solution is that today and offer the proof in SpaceX which uses oil, but with reuseable vehicles, and his shift to all electric motion controls on his rockets when he can as well.
I am sure as well he knew that electricity can be generated in many much more environmentally ways than just oil/gas generators (look at gravity) , and electric motors, fundamentally, are not that expensive over their useful life and distance travelled. Last Sunday, for example, I brought out an electric typewriter that had not been touched in over 40 years, plugged it in, and it solenoid typed and motored the roller just fine. It was typing like it did when we stopped using it back in 1983. I just worry when the oil based ribbon runs out. (It is a 'typing wheel' Smith Corona used for over a decade starting in the 1970s). Lots of electromagnetic circus tricks in that too. And they work. If electro magnetics didn't work work well, there would be no atoms in the Universe and light would not exist and couldn't survive perfectly intact while travelling for billions of years through space without aging at no external energy cost for the travel.
All that said, Elon is a very good capitalist who knows you need to have things people actually do buy to have the money to move society forward in more efficiently and sustainably using the resources that God gave us.
I highly recommend Isaacson's Biography on Musk. This shows some of his Machiavellian tendencies, based on his clearly stated and reasoned goals. Unlike many capitalists who hide their motivations, he does not. But you have to respect the technical education you need to appreciate what he is saying and not listen to uneducated or just irresponsible media. Elon will say and do inconsistent things like any human who is driven by a future he cannot fully predict in detail. But he doesn't hide it unless you just make up what you think he is saying without understanding why he believes in the socially advantageous products he thinks he or someone else can build. Capitalism is a friendlier way than government orders in getting people aligned on the truth. As Steve Jobs said to me once, 'if I can make five times the amount of money selling something for $2,000, why isn't that better than making only one for the government for $10,000,000 and not have free money to invest in things I know could be built if I had the money (That was the situation before the personal computer). Steve was just as Machiavellian as Elon and was similarly clear, transparent, and yes, a hypocrite unless you looked more deeply at the transparent and clear motivation behind his lies.
https://medium.com/@rhtcmu/i-knew-steve-jobs-and-have-a-different-view-of-musk-bae389fc4164
