Same for me, I was a big fan of his engineering mindset, but even though he probably still has that, the negative stuff he says and now does completely overwhelms everything.
I'm not being argumentative, but I've never really seen this sentiment before. What has he done to make you feel he's an engineering genius?
They actually want to heir somebody for the chief engineering position, but couldn't really find anybody suitable with the needed experience that wasn't already employed high up at the large defense primes. So really on the top level of the company it was the leadership team of Musk, Mueller, Shotwell, Königsman and Buzza.
And even if you want to claim that, finding the best talent, hiring them, giving them the best possible support while having the best possible business strategy to work towards is also quite impressive.
I guess one could argue that those things aren't 'chief engineer' tasks. I guess that would just be considered 'engineering management'. But again, management is what many chief engineers do a lot of the time.
What you absolutely can't compare him to is just a money man who is largely uninvolved. That is just ahistorical.
So at best one can argue that he is himself not a real engineer but a good manager of engineering teams, both small and very big.
A good recent example would be Musk getting caught paying someone to rank up his video game accounts while taking credit. That's very on point for Musk. Pay someone, take credit.
The Tesla naming is funny because musk is more of the "Evil Edison" than he is a Tesla.
I put Edison in quotes because Edison isn't nearly as bad as Tesla fanboys like to think.
The absolute shitton of failed car and rocket companies, including by people better financed then Musk, indicates this.
I guess you can say 'its just luck', but given that we are talking about two capital intensive industries that were widely considered almost impossible to break into, you would have to argue that he was lucky twice. I guess one can have that position, but I don't really think that's credible.
I guess one can say he isn't a great engineer but good CEO? Because he is the longest running CEO of the space and the car industry, and both companies over the last 20 years have been pretty successful.
Taking Bezos as a comparison, Bezos has been dropping like 1-2 billion per year into Blue Origin for almost 10 years and had a workforce comparable to SpaceX, who were the leader in rockets, sats and space transport of cargo and humans. SpaceX was started with less then 100 million $.
As some point just saying 'he had resources' just doesn't work. At some point you have to evolve your explication.