I have not seen a single indication of genius by Musk. I see a spoiled trust fund man-child in the right place at the right time and who frequently pays other people to come up for ideas for him. I can literally think of dozens of people I've known over the years who are far more intelligent and would do much more with his starter funds from daddy.
I've been in meetings with him when he was still active at SpaceX and before he truly dove off the deep end. I had direct conversations with him telling him his engineers were wrong about something. He was quite intelligent and knew his shit. He was arrogant and a dick, but it was obvious he knew a LOT about the rockets he was building. He wasn't doing the engineering, but he definitely understood the work going on.
Now, though, the dude is a fucking lunatic. I don't know if he just started taking too many drugs or if the billions of dollars made something break in his mind or what, but he was not like this back then.
No, he didn’t. He has no knowledge of rockets outside of Wikipedia. He has no knowledge of engineering outside of some shit science show.
I have worked with engineers who worked with him at Tesla and they say he is a functional idiot, borderline mentally defective. He will go into meeting and act like he understand magnetism and everyone has to sit there awkwardly listening for an hour about him rambling on like a moronic 6th grader until he leaves.
I am sure I am not the only one who thinks a large amount of his success stems from Peter Thiel wanting to fuck him. And possibly actually fucking him.
Musk came in as "the money guy" to PayPal before Theil was rich. It's why he was CEO for 6 months, but everyone hated him as a leader so much they fired him.
They all got really, really rich together, and the Elon risked it all on Tesla and survived via government handouts for a decade.
Easy to take big risks when you know you can pop back to dads emerald mine for a fill up at any point.