I'm struggling to make out what your point is, other than to agree that electric cars definitely
weren't popular back then until Elon Musk and Tesla made them so through solving a lot of difficult engineering, regulatory and financial challenges.
However I can answer your first question: I've no idea what Elon Musk does, but obviously he has a lot of very very bright people working for him. Just as how Bill Gates wouldn't write specs but he would critique them in detail[0] to make sure that the right things were being built. Whether or not that's "sitting in meetings" or "handling design himself" who knows, because I don't know what "handling design" means, and why it wouldn't involve meetings.
[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...