Until a few months ago, I worked for the biggest battery making in the world (depending on the quarter), which also supplied Tesla. Current battery tech is a disaster. Mining Lithium and other rare earth minerals is bad enough. Almost all of the world's cobalt comes from a small region in Congo, with horrible working conditions. Every major company says they don't source material from places like Congo, but they are either lying or are willfully ignorant. There isn't enough CObalt produced in other areas of the world for any major battery producer to avoid it. It's pretty disgusting, really. Further, there just isn't enough rare earths to produce the battery energy storage needed to replace the extreme energy storage inherent in fossil fuels. WRT fires, let me say that I'll never willingly buy a current EV. The energy density in a chemical battery is scary. As the service manage of the computer division I worked for said after a battery safety recall..."No way in hell I'll ever drive a car with a 1000 laptop batteries between my legs."
There is tons of work being done on solid state batteries which could be a game changer. They have greater energy density so, in theory, they require less rare earths.
Regarding your last statement, I don't think there is any question on the impact of Musk on the world. I'm not convinced that electrification is the long term solution to anything, but if tech that makes it viable is developed, Musk will deserve credit for building the market for EVs that made the needed R&D viable.
Then, we look at SpaceX. In a very short time, Musk dropped the cost of rocket launches by something like 90% from what the Federal government had been doing for decades. The reusable rocket tech has major implications for all things space related, now and in the future. Then you add Paypal, which pioneered electronic payments and Starlink, amongst other less-successful ventures like the boring company/hyperloop which could be the precursor for future development, and his impact on the world is enormous. We won't even discuss the fascist monopoly that he broke with the Twitter buyout. Time will tell if it mattered in the end, but we could see where it was headed, if he hadn't.