Nobody is suggesting that he "simply" lucked out. But this part makes no sense: "I feel that boiling it down to luck is pretty insulting to all the work people have put into putting SpaceX a decade or two ahead of the rest of the world."
One, there's no conflict between believing that Musk was lucky and other people worked hard. Two, if the hard labor of "the best rocket engineers around" was what made SpaceX successful, then that helps prove the point that Musk's reputation as a genius technical innovator is perhaps overblown.
> I doubt that they have any concerns about their income.
That is spoken like somebody who has never been through a lawsuit. Or incurred the disfavor of somebody powerful. You can bet that every one of the people who has worked for Musk has signed agreements that would let him brutalize them in court for years. Lawsuits, even ones you are confident of winning, are incredibly stressful and draining. If Musk is happy to fire people just for criticizing him privately, there's no reason to think he wouldn't sue somebody for publicly making him look like an asshole. So as with Jobs, they tell the positive stories loudly and the negative ones quietly or not at all.
> Musk appears to at least be able to keep up with technical details enough to be able to discuss them with technically oriented YouTubers.
Oh dang, YouTubers? Well then.
As a person who has spent years doing anti-abuse work, including at Twitter, I can tell you that what he's been saying about Twitter's issues has a plausible gloss but is both ignorant and wrongheaded. Musk is happy to pretend to be an expert genius when he doesn't know shit. That gets lots of Twitter/YouTube likes, but that's not what matters when running a real business.
Or we could look at his attempts to automate the Tesla factories. Tesla almost went bankrupt because this nominal genius vastly overestimated what was possible, ignoring decades of manufacturing experience in favor of huffing his own... vapors. This was a multi-billion dollar error.
So is it possible that he was helpful technically at SpaceX? Sure. But it's also possible that the difference at SpaceX is that he had a stronger staff that kept him at bay while they did their "best rocket engineers" thing.