He gets away with this because his preposterous ideas because his preposterous ideas sometimes go places. And I think he reminds us US Americans of all our favorite American heroes - the ones who tried the big ideas and gambled from time to time, but changed things. The Framers fought a war against the then-world superpower for independence. Jefferson doubled the size of the country with the stroke of a pen. Lincoln wagered his legacy on fighting to keep it together. Kennedy initiated the moonshot.

He also exemplifies the traits of the successful folks that we've grown to like (as investors and philanthropists) or respect (as giants of history). Though he's astoundingly good at making money, he's also dedicated to using it as a means to an end instead of hording it, and he inspires personal loyalty by being personally invested in so many of the projects as an engineer who can really get into the gritty details if necessary. He doesn't seem like the manager type who just knows money while being clueless about actual work.

Today there's a lot of "that's just the way the world is" sentiment. "Politicians will never change." "There's no will to go back to the moon or farther." "The oil and gas industry is too entrenched to make electric cars viable."

His attitude turns all of that on its head. "Yeah, but what if..." He hires some smart fuckers and tells them, "If I wanted to do this, how could I do it and how much would it cost?"

He seems to make his people follow the thought experiments all the way through and answer the hard questions. He doesn't want to know if it's plausible, he wants to know if it's possible. He knows that plausibility is only a question of money, willpower, and marketing. When he talks about something like this, though unlikely to happen and still wrought with enormous engineering and research hurdles, it serves to drive home the point that hey, if we really wanted this - like moonshot wanted it (or more) - we could totally do this.