The statistical problem is small sample size, not survivorship bias, as I got to see things before failure. These two examples are merely illustrative of things I've seen.
I think both are at play here and I don’t know about Musk’s programming skills. But it seems that they had other very good programmers (including levchin). So maybe business success can buy good engineers to clean the messed up code. I’m not sure how it goes with AI now though.