A growing number of people are calling bullshit on Elon Musk. Bullshit on the value of his electric-car company, Tesla, which he says will be worth a trillion dollars within a decade. Bullshit on SpaceX and his plans to relocate humanity to Mars. Bullshit on his motives, which often seem more self-serving than selfless. And bullshit on the very idea of Elon Musk, the billionaire engineer who will save us from ourselves. The swell of bad feelings seemed to crystallize this week when Musk, in characteristic fashion, inserted himself into the roiling media drama surrounding a team of teenage soccer players who had become trapped by rising waters in a cave in Thailand. For more than two weeks, hundreds of divers, doctors, Thai Navy SEALs, and volunteers of all walks of life had been frantically attempting to rescue the boys, 12 in all, plus their coach, as their oxygen levels depleted.

As the world watched, Musk had the brilliant idea to build a little submarine that could be used to transport the children out of the cave. He started tweeting about the mini-sub. Tweeting e-mail exchanges with the rescuers. Tweeting videos of his team testing the mini-sub prototype in a swimming pool in Los Angeles. It was as if Tony Stark had walked right out of a movie theater and was going to save a bunch of teenagers and their soccer coach from a cave. And on the surface, it seemed like an altruistic use of Musk’s time and money. But that, of course, depends who you ask. “The Elon Musk sub stuff was a cynical P.R. stunt,” remarked one journalist, after the Thai Navy SEALs had rescued the last of the boys. “The real heroes were the divers and local support teams, not detached Silicon Valley Jesus.”

It devolved from there. Another aggrieved person said, “The unsung heroes here are the security personnel tasked with keeping Elon Musk from fucking up the rescue.” And then there was this zinger: “Elon Musk is making a big show of reaching for his wallet after the bill has been paid.”

Did Musk really deserve this vitriol? For every person who bashed him on Twitter for making the Thai rescue operation about himself, 10 times as many fans rushed to his defense. Musk, after all, spent days racing to build a working submersible—constructed from a SpaceX rocket parts—with the help of his top engineers. He did reach for his wallet. He did pay the bill for the work done. He even lugged it to the cave in Chiang Rai Province, deep in the jungle, and seemed to respond graciously when he was told it wasn’t needed—at least until a BBC News story about the snub set him off, which inevitably invited his dissenters to pile on.

Musk, in some ways, has become not only a Rorschach test for how people feel about Silicon Valley, but also how they feel about the extraordinary, and in many cases insidious, effects the technology industry is unleashing upon society—one that has allowed a rarified group of billionaires to use their prowess and intellect to attempt to shape the universe to their liking. We are living in an age when people who have become spectacularly rich in one limited field now feel empowered to take over global problems. Michael Bloomberg used his perch as a data-services genius to exert his influence over everything from sugary drinks to the Second Amendment. Tom Steyer, a hedge-fund manager, has used his wealth to fund a crusade against environmental malpractice and Donald Trump.