[xkjkls]

Is he? Musk has no engineering degree, he's never been the CTO of his companies, and most of his time seems to be spent on Twitter, dealing with media, and other PR things. I haven't seen any evidence that the engineering departments at either firm would be worse off without him.

[_Microft]

He's CTO at SpaceX.

[coldtea]

Which doesn't mean anything really. If you have founded the company and own it, you can be CTO and delegate all the real engineering / research work.

[marvin]

Even Tom Mueller, propulsion engineer & co-founder of SpaceX, publicly acknowledges that Musk is heavily involved in key engineering decisions. I get that Musk gets a large amount of hate these days, but at least find something material to criticize. "He's not even an engineer" isn't just an irrelevant argument, it's also wrong. (Except in the "certified engineer" sense, which I don't think anyone is claiming).

[xkjkls]

Yeah, but is Tom Mueller, whose boss is Elon Musk, really going to publicly state anything else?

[marvin]

I think he’s retired now, and only participates occasionally in an advisory role...?

[coldtea]

>publicly acknowledges that Musk is heavily involved in key engineering decisions

Is his salary in any way tied to touting Elon Musk?

[meowface]

You can, except he says he spends the vast majority of his time doing engineering. There are lots of videos of him with a hardhat on working in his factories. Not PR videos, either. He's the head of product development for the cars, not just the CEO.

Hate the guy for his personality all you want; I can certainly understand why. But there's no need to downplay his achievements or skills.

[ocdtrekkie]

Except the engineering work is usually not done with a hardhat on, "working" on the factory floor... that's production. I guarantee you if you see video of Elon Musk with a hard hat on doing anything other than touring the facility[1], it is marketing.

[1]Presumably, if he's down on the factory floor looking at things, he should be wearing a hard hat, so good for him. If he's bolting together cars himself, that's probably marketing.

[meowface]

He walks the factory floor every day wearing a hard hat, looking for process and tech improvements that could be made. He's not physically assembling the cars obviously. The engineering and design work is done in all of the meetings he's in every day, he says.

[coldtea]

>There are lots of videos of him with a hardhat on working in his factories

That settles it then. Is it a yellow hardhat?

[anewhnaccount2]

He has a physics degree.

[coldtea]

So like millions of others?

He just hit the fortune with PayPal. The other stuff (his "involvement" in engineering etc) is the classic media hagiography of powerful CEOs.

[lifekaizen]

I believe this underestimates his ability to see beyond what’s possible today and set game-changing goals and direction for those engineering teams.

[xkjkls]

Set game-changing goals like promising a self-driving car without LIDAR or other technology every year for the last three? I feel like every single Elon Musk "game-changing goal" is met with severe criticism by many of the engineers working in the field and setting their heads down to get things done.