I'd say its fairly ubiquitous that startups have bad code that get rewritten upon scaling demands.
Why does one need a $150k certificate to be an engineer. I went to a top engineering school, everything could be learned by reading engineering textbooks. Based on experience, Elon is an engineer.
Hiring smart engineers, does not mean Elon Musk is an engineer. Unless, Elon himself did actual engineering work. He did some software dev at Zip2 but then it has been mostly investments. I think it is fair to say he is a businessman instead of an engineer.