Musk is a lot more involved in day to day operations at SpaceX than a lot of people seem to understand. Shotwell on division of labor with Musk:
> The way Elon and I share the load, he focuses on development. He's still very highly engaged in the day-to-day operations, but his focus is on development. He was the lead on Starlink, and I started shifting my focus to Starlink around late spring, early summer of last year. Elon’s focus in that time was moving to Starship, that is his primary focus at SpaceX. It doesn't mean he's not thinking about the company on a day-to-day basis, but his emphasis is to get the Starship program to orbit.
Even if SpaceX was his only company, he still is just one person. I'm not talking about Musk specifically, but CEOs generally. In almost no circumstance does it make sense to assign engineering success to a CEO in the way it was done above. CEOs are responsible for hiring executives and setting and enforcing vision and values. That's important but it isn't the whole story.
What I understand is that Musk is very skilled at taking highly technical decisions, that have huge risks and financial implications.
Take the example of the decision to re use rocket engines. Its a highly technical decision that has huge financial repurcussions and essentially the whole basis for the low cost business model of SpaceX.
It would not be surprising if there were similar stories from Ramesh Balwani about the division of labor with Elizabeth Holmes at Theranos. SpaceX is no Theranos, but you shouldn't reach that conclusion from stories from the C-suite.
Elon Musk has repeatedly over and over made "bet the company" product decisions at all his companies. You aren't that lucky that many times without being able to skillfully grok technical things.
> The way Elon and I share the load, he focuses on development. He's still very highly engaged in the day-to-day operations, but his focus is on development. He was the lead on Starlink, and I started shifting my focus to Starlink around late spring, early summer of last year. Elon’s focus in that time was moving to Starship, that is his primary focus at SpaceX. It doesn't mean he's not thinking about the company on a day-to-day basis, but his emphasis is to get the Starship program to orbit.