But it took him four months deeply embedded with the Republican party to come to this conclusion?
It's been blindingly obvious to anyone remotely paying attention to US politics for the last decade (or two, or more, but blindingly so, more recently).
It's always difficult to get a true read on what people believe, and that goes double for very powerful or wealthy people, who have professionals devoted to their image management.
Which, not coincidentally, is also where the idea of Musk as an "amazing, brilliantly intelligent man" comes from. After all, he doesn't have any sort of history of published work or intellectual breakthroughs to support that.
He seems to be good at investment, and at a certain kind of hype-based marketing, including of himself (up to a point.)