Musk has a lot of negatives and comes off as arrogant sometimes, but I never heard a story about him forcing the SpaceX engineers to keep some design flaw there because it was his precious idea and thus can't be wrong.
IDK about Tesla, I am not that interested in cars.
Munro Assoc's teardowns and analysis suggest that Tesla both innovates and increments at an astonishing clip. Tesla makes plenty of mistakes, for sure. Often existential. Like attempting fully automated manufacturing. But somehow they manage to pivot.
One notable exception, that I'm aware of, is Telsa's full self driving car effort, especially without LIDAR. That one baffles me. So stubborn. While it might have been about cost at some point, expense and risk hasn't deterred Tesla's other audacious moon shots. Like investing in the gigapress to make huge castings. Total game changer.
Tesla's AI team was recently sacked. I'd love to know the inside baseball. Does it signal a change in strategy? Were they pushing back too hard, like maybe insisting on adopting LIDAR? Maybe Musk just wanted a fresh team for fresh start?
I think the reason would be very revealing.
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Like you, I also have little interest in cars. But I'm junkie for all the process, improvement, Peter Drucker, Edward Deming type stuff. And right now that means trying to figure out what TMSC, Apple, Haier, Tesla, and SpaceX are doing.
I don't care if Musk is a genius, poseur, whatever. If I did care, regardless of his past actions, I'd worry about his escalating self-destructive behavior sabotaging Tesla and SpaceX going forward.
Musk very obviously has to live right on the edge of chaos, always has to double down.
Musk's compulsion sorta reminds me of cyclist Graeme Obree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Obree The way I heard it; part of Obree's internal drive, beyond all ration limits, was he truly believed he'd die if he didn't succeed. Literally racing for his life.
From a very far away, I wonder if Musk's mania is like Obree's in some ways.
Whether that actually happened or not isn't that important but the fact that people thought it was a good thing always struck me as odd. It's really bad if the boss of a multinational company focuses on such minute details and hints at major management failures.
All signs point to him being a very talented businessman and organizer who manages to get a lot of people producing innovative and popular products. It seems like people underestimate just how much of a challenge that is and feel the need to "give" him some more tangible skills.
He has good understanding of the broad strokes of their technology and carries the vision forward but an Engineer-CEO he isn't and shouldn't be.
Outside his own domains of expertise he certainly comes across that way, but he does also say "yeah I reckon there's only like a 60% chance of our latest rocket not exploding".
