We all (even me) get things wrong, but a reasonable take on the last few decades would be to see it as an era of elites being suckered by scammers over and over again, from Enron to Saddam-had-WMDs to mortgage derivatives to Theranos to Elon-Is-Tony-Stark to NFTs to various obvious fake things about Gaza/Israel to AI...
I'm sure I am leaving many things out.
It wasn't that people made mistakes, it was that the people-with-microphones shouted down anyone who disagreed, almost in unison, and then quickly moved on to embrace the next scam.
Sure some people were the cons, not the marks, but I think that often they are the same people simultaneously. Elon himself is both con and mark most of the time, in that he often does believe his own bullshit.