Musk has a very deep understanding of tech of his companies (at least for a CEO), so are most other American tech CEOs. As was pointed out, you can't siphon away tech like you can do with oil and other commodities without making things stop working.
Like with his white paper for the Hyperloop which was fundamentally wrong and couldn't have worked? Or with his idea of putting Hyperloop segments on.... Wheels? Or with his idea to make the whole rocket reusable, until SpaceX accepted reality and pivoted to at least partial reusability? Or to cite current examples: full self driving that doesn't actively kill drivers when...? And while I'd love to have one, his idea for that household robot is straight out impossible with current technology.
If anything, musk is an example of the parent, as all of his companies improved after they got over his original technical ideas.
I don't understand why people keep wanting to put celebrities on high pedestals with completely unrealistic expectations. He's a successful businessman and extremely talented influencer, he has enough achievements to his name without randomly adding more to it.
What do you dislike about this particular idea? It is not inherently wrong, it is "only" very technically challenging.
What SpaceX did was not a pivot, rather introduction of an intermediate step because full reusability proved too hard at that point. But they never gave up on the ultimate goal of full reusability and the Starship rocket that is now under development is intended to be fully reusable.
Also, huge corporations are themselves extremely centrally planned, and that is where much of their strengths lie. There's a reason why Apple was able to capitalize on the smartphone, and it wasn't some market of suppliers.
The problem with centralized planning is that it tends to ignore many local concerns, often with disastrous consequences, especially when leaders start to ignore any feedback from below in their central planning. This has caused the downfall of innumerable companies in various markets, but there is usually another company to take their place. When used by countries, it causes famines and other avoidable disasters, as happened in much of the USSR and China, especially under Mao's monstrous regime.
But when done right, as it was in China after the 90s and before the Pooh, it has also caused the single biggest reduction in poverty in world history, measured by number of people.
Brilliant scientists can be apolitical and so isolated from the rest of the society that they don't even realize what's going on. Notably, the Soviet Union produced a lot of excellent results in mathematics and physics.
But when it comes to designing and selling actual products based on the theoretical discoveries, the inefficiency, stupidity and mendacity inherent in the authoritarian systems really comes to the fore and can't be dodged.
This effectively restricts the talent pool - those who are smart are likely able to see thru any propaganda. And those that are smart are also more capable of emigrating overseas where you make more money anyway.
So it's not about stifling, but more about slowness. But with a large enough population, even a smaller % of talent is still a huge number.
This is rarely true. People can be, and often are, extremely smart in one field and idiots in others. The fact that they think otherwise is often part of the problem. Especially since propaganda is often layered - everyone knows something is propaganda, but that doesn't help you understand the truth, and there is often subtler propaganda that guides those who see the blatant propaganda to the "right truth".
