Same for me, I was a big fan of his engineering mindset, but even though he probably still has that, the negative stuff he says and now does completely overwhelms everything.
So I know he's the CEO at SpaceX, but doesn't that just mean he pays people to do the engineering? In my view this makes someone about as much a genius engineer as hiring a plumber makes me a master plumber.
I suggest you read some books about SpaceX. Musk was deeply involved from the beginning, when the team was only a few people and was the chief engineer. Now you can argue, as 'chief engineer' he just happen to heir 4-5 of the most brilliant team leaders and they did everything themselves. But in the middle there was always Musk who made man decisions, and there was nobody else who can really be considered the chief engineer, as all of the team leaders were quite busy running their teams. You can say a lot about Musk, but that he wasn't involved enough in SpaceX is just not one of them.
They actually want to heir somebody for the chief engineering position, but couldn't really find anybody suitable with the needed experience that wasn't already employed high up at the large defense primes. So really on the top level of the company it was the leadership team of Musk, Mueller, Shotwell, Königsman and Buzza.
And even if you want to claim that, finding the best talent, hiring them, giving them the best possible support while having the best possible business strategy to work towards is also quite impressive.
I guess one could argue that those things aren't 'chief engineer' tasks. I guess that would just be considered 'engineering management'. But again, management is what many chief engineers do a lot of the time.
What you absolutely can't compare him to is just a money man who is largely uninvolved. That is just ahistorical.
So at best one can argue that he is himself not a real engineer but a good manager of engineering teams, both small and very big.
He said himself that probably knows more about manufacturing than anyone else. I don't take that as a true statement, but at the time he slept at the Tesla factory floor, I am sure he learned a lot and solved many manufacturing problems. He is not just a manager that signs paychecks
I may be out of the loop, but how much engineering has he done? Seems like he's surrounded himself with talented engineers, and they've been the source of his various companies' impressive engineering feats.
Musk isn't a good engineer. Lol. He's never really invented anything, just given money/resources to smarter people. Musk is good at sounding smart. He isn't a talented engineer.
A good recent example would be Musk getting caught paying someone to rank up his video game accounts while taking credit. That's very on point for Musk. Pay someone, take credit.
The Tesla naming is funny because musk is more of the "Evil Edison" than he is a Tesla.
I put Edison in quotes because Edison isn't nearly as bad as Tesla fanboys like to think.
The problem with that position is that plenty of people who also had money tried to just pay smart people, and most weren't nearly as successful.
The absolute shitton of failed car and rocket companies, including by people better financed then Musk, indicates this.
I guess you can say 'its just luck', but given that we are talking about two capital intensive industries that were widely considered almost impossible to break into, you would have to argue that he was lucky twice. I guess one can have that position, but I don't really think that's credible.
I guess one can say he isn't a great engineer but good CEO? Because he is the longest running CEO of the space and the car industry, and both companies over the last 20 years have been pretty successful.
Taking Bezos as a comparison, Bezos has been dropping like 1-2 billion per year into Blue Origin for almost 10 years and had a workforce comparable to SpaceX, who were the leader in rockets, sats and space transport of cargo and humans. SpaceX was started with less then 100 million $.
As some point just saying 'he had resources' just doesn't work. At some point you have to evolve your explication.
I'm not being argumentative, but I've never really seen this sentiment before. What has he done to make you feel he's an engineering genius?