[whoknew1122]

I'm not an engineer, so I can't really comment on whether someone is a good engineer or not. But he's not engineering here. He's leading 5 companies.

In corporate culture there's this thought that being good at something makes you good at managing people who do that thing. But that's not true. Being an engineer and a manager of engineers requires different skill sets. And being a CEO is many levels divorced from a manager of engineers.

Elon as an engineer or coder stopped being relevant after Paypal. Now it's about Elon the executive. Which, as an outside observer, seems more to be about Elon's brand than any actual managerial genius.

[cameldrv]

The flip side to this is that there's a thought that you can be a good manager without being at least adequate at the task that is being managed. I've found this to be untrue, and overwhelmingly the best managers are also good at the job they're managing.

The problem for managers that don't have the domain knowledge is that they're completely reliant on others for technical judgement. If they don't have the ability to see whether what someone is proposing is reasonable technically, they also don't really have the ability to independently determine whether they should trust someone's technical judgment. This can lead to an excessive reliance on credentials, and a highly political workplace, since that becomes the main way to influence the manager's decisions from below.