As someone in the tech industry, I think what's caused this epidemic of scammers, con men, and grifters like Musk among tech is that everyone's been trained by science fiction to think we should be running around with flying cars and sentient robot assistants by now but we clearly aren't. Whenever science fiction has technological advancements, it doesn't show it like it actually happens in slow collective research by many people but instead has it as a single guy just hammering out gigantic leaps in a night. Combine this with stories of guys who bought Apple stock when it was $1 and you've got a ton of eager people looking for a Tony Stark to be their golden ticket and plenty of con men ready to fill that role and take their money.
All of these guys focus on how their gadget is "new" and "disruptive" even when the underlying tech is decades old. Natural Language processing AI, for example, is presented as this new thing when those programs are over 50 years old! The idea that it's all just come about in the last couple years allows the Musks to misrepresent advancements as happening over months instead of decades and dismiss problems as minor glitches of an experimental technology that'll be fixed any day now instead of deeper flaws in the concept itself that have persisted for decades with much slower or even no progress at solving them.
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