I think they meant PR-only guy. His PR genius is in using his fan following for free PR. Tesla or SpaceX hardly need to spend any marketing dollars.
No other tech leader is as charismatic (Steve Jobs came close, but Musk seems more genuine whereas Jobs felt like a salesman) and very few are as personally intelligent and accomplished.
Steve Jobs was basically a salesman. A brilliant one. Nothing bad in that; I just wouldn't call him a "tech leader" - he was involved with technology only incidentally.
Steve Jobs was hacking on electronics in the 1970s and building the most advanced personal computing devices from then until his death.
He was not a programmer but he knew more about computers than most programmers do. There's absolutely no way to call him non-technical accurately. Bill Gates giving up programming did not make him non-technical.
Elon Musk wouldn't make this mistake. He's very openly trying to emulate Steve Jobs' entire skillset.
Maybe the cause of this confusion is that most people only saw Steve Jobs when he went up on stage for an hour every year. Try asking yourself what he was doing the rest of the time. Elon Musk did.
I might be mistaken, but I was under the impression that in the early days of Apple, it was Wozniak who was the tech guy and did most of the tech stuff.
As far as I know, you're right: "Jobs never did a lick of engineering in his life. He had me snowed," Alcorn later recalled. "It took years before I figured out that he was getting Woz to 'come in the back door' and do all the work while he got the credit."
They created the Apple II together. Woz did most of the hard engineering but it was Jobs that shaped it into a product for regular people through a thousand technical decisions.
You cannot create the company or products that Steve Jobs did without being technical. That doesn't mean you have to write the firmware on the wifi chip. It does mean you have to understand thousands of deeply technical concepts about computers.
He isn't a PR guy in the traditional sense at all.
He has been anointed as a neo-PR guy now because his style of doing things (like responding to requests on Twitter with "Done,") is breathtakingly refreshing compared to PR from actual trained PR agencies
No other tech leader is as charismatic (Steve Jobs came close, but Musk seems more genuine whereas Jobs felt like a salesman) and very few are as personally intelligent and accomplished.