While I like your whole post, I have to say +1,000 on your second sentence for explaining what happens on the internet (and elsewhere). I absolutely believe people do tend to attribute their own motives to others. In other words, person Y sees person X doing something, and Y would immediately think that X's actions were because of what Y's motivation would be to do the same thing. Whereas, in truth, we would have no clue what X's motivation was without actually talking to X.
From a Tesla perspective and generalizing scandalously, if you see someone writing that Elon is a con artist, what could be really going on is that the writer normally thinks like a con artist and is attributing what would motivate *THEM* on Elon. This won't be true in all cases, but I'd bet it's quite prevalent.
