> His companies have made many monumental engineering achievements at his direction.

If you know anyone who has worked at one his companies, especially at a high level, you would know that they made those achievements despite his directions. The SpaceX team was ecstatic when he bought Twitter, because it meant he would be around a lot less.

The policy at SpaceX was basically avoid Elon, and if you had to talk to him, just agree to whatever he said and then not do it. He almost always forgot by the next time he talked to you, and if he didn't, you just said it was really hard.

Since he doesn't understand rocket engineering, it was pretty easy to get away with that.

And the people who worked with him at PayPal would tell you that he knows nothing about software engineering and they basically threw away everything he wrote, but they had to be nice because he had a lot of stock after his company was acquired by PayPal but called a merger.

Elon's main skill is marketing himself. He next best skill is marketing his companies' jobs to talented people and getting them to agree to work there.

That is certainly a critical skill for a CEO, but he is not a great engineer.

His companies making those achievements is not the same as he personally making those achievements. He does have some talent in being a CEO of a company and inspiring employees and investors.

But also don't oversell that: only Tesla and SpaceX have been successes, and he's had to have them bail out is other failed companies: SolarCity, Twitter, and xAI. The Boring Company also doesn't seem to be particularly successful either, and he never got around to building a company to build Hyperloop in the first place.