I'm not sure about Elon's proficiency with software, but based on his comments on twitter I'd lean on him being out of touch there. He does seem to be knowledgeable on the AI/DL side though, see Andrej Karpathy's comment:
The amount of effort people take to try to convince themselves Elon is just a relatively average (or even moronic!) intellect who got successful via non virtuous means is absolutely impressive.
To attempt to be civil, I will also state I find the hero worshiping of Elon to be similarly deranged.
The stochastic parrot argument. It seems there’s no evidence that will change your opinion.
Also, have a look at recent unedited videos of Tesla’s self driving. It’s not everything that was promised and it’s much later than promised, but it sure is impressive. However I agree it is being oversold and that’s extremely scummy.
In my noob eyes, I think he just doesn't care much about software. He kinda have the same radical motto (delete, reduce, combine, forget the past, forget the mainstream.. basically what he says around min 20 in the video above. which is not far from move fast and break things) and he got a lot of success before with that so he just barged in twitter applying this brainlessly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. I don't care whether it's boo or yay, we just don't want shallow flamewars on this site.