[KennyBlanken]

I think the billions in government loans, contracts, tax credits, and subsidies contributed significantly: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-list-government-su...

"He enabled the engineers at these companies to do what they did" is a weird way of saying he's an extremely abusive manager.

Work at enough companies and you'll see that a lot of them succeed despite their "founder"/owner, not because of them. They end up surrounded by people who insulate them enough, clean up their messes, and so on.

With a competent manager, it's likely Tesla would have long ago mastered things like "paint a car properly", not taken a decade to make a single-gear transmission that lasts more than 30,000 miles (and can be driven in heavy rain without risk of water ingestion) and "have body panels align the same on the left side of the car as on the right", as well as not faced the huge production problems they did because Musk was obsessed with switching to automated production.