Musk founded SpaceX. He hasn't been a chief engineer in anything but title for a long time. To the extent he deserves respect, it's in giving its team the insulation he's denied Twitter and the American people.
SpaceX employees online say he was heavily involved in engineering, as chief designer; but even imagining he did not, just allowing those crazy ideas to actually happen has incredible merit.
This will go down in history as the most shameful descent into madness of the 21st century. I sincerely hope he gets hospitalized for his drug addiction or whatever is going on, allowing others to take back command of these companies before they run into the ground.
His fate may not be all the different from Howard Hughes. A wealthy and influential figure from not so long ago who lost his mind towards the end.
One of my favorite insights applies:
Power doesn't corrupt; it reveals.
-- Robert CaroMerlin and Falcon 9, yes. Methane for Raptor, yes, but the integrated design and certainly Starship are not Musk. (Chopsticks, yes.)
Now, it's true enough that he didn't literally _build_ these things. He is the CEO. Steve Jobs didn't build the iPhone.
But these programs are very obviously shaped by Musk to a large degree.
What are you basing this on? It was carbon fibre or steel. SpaceX tried carbon. The bake was too inconsistent, so they went with steel. This was the stated and obvious design path since Falcon Heavy’s design trajectory plateaued.
The obvious choice that everyone uses is aluminum, or various alloys, like aluminum-lithium.
Certainly he's more useful to organizations when he goes in with the approach of listening to engineers' ideas to build stuff than when he goes in with the approach of gutting the organization in revenge for things he's taken exception to.
SpaceX also wasn't very big in the early years, and the CTOs and chief engineers of the space launch startups I know absolutely do involve themselves in the low level technical work. I don't imagine Elon did much of that even when he did make a point of interviewing every new hire and sitting in on meetings about low level purchasing decisions.
Musk was heavily involved in the engineering efforts at SpaceX. NASA struggled to keep up with his continual and extremely detailed stream of questions regarding engineering choices, with an obsessive and relentless focus on blueprints.
The list of engineering achievements and innovations (often unorthodox) is too long to list in a comment, but I highly recommend the book The Space Barons by Christian Davenport [0]. It's a fantastic read.