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Your point 2 is interesting, but Musk isn’t any type of engineer really, just a money guy that uses engineer words. It seems more likely that he assumes a Hyperloop would be trivial not because it is a simple application of some lower framework that he’s got a deep understanding of, but because he hasn’t been given an itemized bill for one.

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Musk used to be seen as an engineer. He co-founded a payments company that merged with PayPal (not sure if he did engineering, though). I believe he is widely seen as being a knowledgeable rocketry engineer. I also think that he contributed to engineering of early Teslas. Now he is completely over-committed, and seems to me like he is burnt-out but does not realize it, and is doing all sorts of crazy things which act to sort of paper that over. Twenty years ago he was seen as a high-level engineer (I've heard that Marvel's Tony Stark was based on Musk [I mean, obviously it was based on the comic book character, but hopefully you know what I mean]).

He co-founded a payments company - he certainly wasn't an engineer. He was fired and given a golden parachute from Paypal for his incompetent insistence that they stop all software development at PayPal for a year so that they could move off Linux and move to fully hosting on Windows NT servers (!). He was a manager and money guy from the start, he never was a software engineer or any kind of engineer.

I guess based on all the phrases like “used to” and “seen as,” you’d agree that these perceptions were never really all that realistic, right? He had better PR in the past for sure, but it was always just a PR thing. That makes his behavior a bad example of something engineers do.

We’ve got plenty of smug actual engineers, we don’t need to take blame for some cosplayer’s bad behavior.

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