He is definitively a risk taker. The thing with a risk is that is easy to take if you have money, and if you have a lot of money you can fail many times.

He was born to rich family and had that luxury.

Here's summery of his evandors:

1995 - Founded Zip2 with his brother, got ousted from CEO position in 1996, the company was sold to Compaq in 1999
1999 - he launched his X.com with three founders
2000 - X.com merged with Confinity resulting in PayPal, Musk again was ousted as a CEO on the same year, in 2002 they sold it to eBay (he no longer was in the company but still had stocks)
2002 - He used his money from PayPal to fund SpaceX
2004 - Tesla. This one is interesting, because he is recognized by a lot of people as founder, but he was investor, but they let him to paint himself as Founder
2006 - SolarCity - it didn't do well and was purchased by Tesla in 2016
2015 - co-funded OpenAI, he resigned in 2018 due to conflicts with Tesla AI
2016 - co-funded Neuralink
2016 - The Boring Company - supposed to be working on creating hyperloop, but that idea turned out to be failure, and now any mention of hyperloop was scraped from the company website. He apparently admitted that hyperloop was successful attack to stop California from building high speed rail.
2022 - Twitter

So it looks like largely his biggest successes were Zip2, X.com/PayPal and SpaceX and investment in Tesla. In Zip2 and X.com he was ousted before companies got successful.

SpaceX and Tesla are where he actually succeeded the rest after that he was just throwing money in investments. Technically that's also what happened with Tesla.