> At times it seemed he trusted random feedback more than the people in the room who spent their lives dedicated to tackling the problem at hand. I never figured out why and remain puzzled by it.

I think this bit here drives the love-hate views on him. Most mature orgs are overly bureaucratic with small visions and strongly conservative views about what can be accomplished. Some play-act at having big visions for marketing and ego, but internally few line employees believe that they are achievable, and there is rarely a plan that could achieve the vision.

Musk seems to come in - similarly to Trump - and simply disbelieves the expertise of the managerial class, and comes with enough accumulated power to bulldoze them instead of playing political games. The managerial class is the connective tissue of all but the tiniest of orgs, so encountering them is a given.

The pitfall to me is that he extends that to all expertise - engineering, science, marketing. His opening belief seems to be that most professionals are bullshit artists who spend their whole day lying to justify their jobs. And while the professionals are often wrong about what organizations of people can achieve, they are much less often wrong about how engineering needs to work, and they are hardly every wrong about the core science.

So my general view is that he is pathologically convinced that everyone but him is a parasite. And in a world full of managerial parasites, that's a pretty effective strategy.

But he can't turn it off once he breaks through the connective tissue and gets to the actual expertise. It doesn't matter if you are an expert on cave diving, or scalable architecture, or the behaviors of your core customers. I think it says more about our organizations than it does about him that just spamming a strategy of saying "I think you're a parasite with no actual expertise" and only believing in someone in extremely rare cases can make you the richest man in the world.