alt Hacker NewsYour point 2 is interesting, but Musk isn’t any type of engineer really, just a money guy that uses engineer words. It seems more likely that he assumes a Hyperloop would be trivial not because it is a simple application of some lower framework that he’s got a deep understanding of, but because he hasn’t been given an itemized bill for one.
Musk used to be seen as an engineer. He co-founded a payments company that merged with PayPal (not sure if he did engineering, though). I believe he is widely seen as being a knowledgeable rocketry engineer. I also think that he contributed to engineering of early Teslas. Now he is completely over-committed, and seems to me like he is burnt-out but does not realize it, and is doing all sorts of crazy things which act to sort of paper that over. Twenty years ago he was seen as a high-level engineer (I've heard that Marvel's Tony Stark was based on Musk [I mean, obviously it was based on the comic book character, but hopefully you know what I mean]).