It's funny he's only able to do that because he has so little real technical understanding. A real engineer wouldn't be so flippant.
This is a common trope, it's been dismantled many times previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33555870
We can judge him by technical merits very easily. But if you hold him to the standards of Carmack or Feynman, Elon's accomplishments are entirely benign.
For one, I can counter those with anecdotes from people I do know and trust. Like, I know directly from at least one very senior ex-Twitter engineer, who I worked directly with and whose technical chops I can vouch for (and who left before Elon took over, so you know, less chances of prejudice) that everything Elon said about Twitter engineering after he took over was absolute BS.
For another, I can point to boneheaded moves directly traceable to Elon, like eschewing LIDAR for Tesla FSD, that have endangered my own life on multiple occasions. Like, phantom braking is STILL a problem for in 2026, something that LIDAR would largely eliminate.
Just because he's built some very successful technical businesses does not mean he's technically strong. It is useful to know that cults of personality are cultivated. And especially for one like Elon (cf video game cheating scandal) when in doubt, it is probably a good idea to err towards "cultivated."
You can pick any video and see this for yourself.
You can watch the playlist linked above to verify this for yourself. Tim Dodd asks Elon deeply technical questions about Starship and Elon explains the design rationale and tradeoffs behind each of them.
In one of the videos Elon walks around Super Heavy booster with Joe Petrzelka, Head of Booster Engineering at SpaceX, and they take turns explaining the technical details of how the ship works.
Musk doesn't have to be a 'real engineer'. Most 'real engineers' would obsess over mundane details and rarely think about the bigger picture or making a profit.
Maybe for those who are younger and who mostly know of Jobs posthumously but Jobs was a highly polarising figure through the 80s, 90s and 2000s and there were many ppl who would never buy any Apple product because of the Jobs personality behind it (including when Jobs wasn't actually in charge; it was still a company built in his "Walled Garden + Salesman Hype" image)
Elon would have gotten there with his inability to deliver on promises but he found his political cash cow first.
What turned me off to Elon was "it's a tube with an air hockey table in it, it's not that hard."