The article and book it’s sourced from make a pretty compelling claim that he does actually know the technical details of the things he’s working on, and that jives with other things I’ve read. I think a lot of what he’s doing is the kind of first-principles argument that can drive seasoned engineers nuts (“factor X is the root problem, so what if we just changed factor X?” “Yeah gee golly nobody’s ever thought of that”), but it turns out if you’ve got enough money, patience, and latitude, there’s a lot of meat on that bone.

Agree though that the echo chamber around him really does feed into his worst instincts - I feel like it’s similar to George Lucas, who, with constraints, made the first Star Wars trilogy, and without constraints made the second.

And, yeah, he’s got a strong engineering affinity and what looks like a strong anti-affinity for anything involving people.

I don’t mean any of this to gas up Musk. I don’t particularly like him, I don’t think he’s a good person, and I think the fact that he’s as influential as he is is an indictment of our society broadly. I do think he’s had some outlier successes, and with both Tesla and SpaceX he’s shifted the world in what I’d consider a positive direction, so I think it’s worth taking a dispassionate look at how he’s done it, both the positives and negatives.