Lol, Musk lost a power struggle, yes. But why does Musk have to personally build something in order to count as a successful CEO? That is a standard applied to no one else. Yes, the earliest form of Paypal was developed by Confinity, but it looked very little like the Paypal after the acquisition. It was initially only for Palm Pilots! X.com had the ability to send payments using email addresses first.

And the decision to buy them (which X.com did) was made because Musk and others (not others in opposition to Musk) recognized the potential in the early Paypal product. Acquiring a promising product that goes on to be huge is the kind of thing a successful CEO does much more often actually coding a new product him/herself.

Zip2 and X.com/Paypal. Those were the initial startups that provided the money for SpaceX and Tesla.

Imagine forgetting his role in shepherding four companies from nothing to major success. And Twitter isn't done, yet. Remindme! 6 months.

>I think what he brings to the table is Marketing and not really engineering

How could you know this? Engineers who have worked for him and spoken publicly generally say he is for real and does contribute to engineering. But more generally, a CEO's role is to be the one who decides on overall direction and strategy. It was Musk who decided to go all-in on rocket reusability and direct the resources of the company to that, despite the fact that others who had tried failed. He did it because he knew enough engineering to see a path to success. That's how he matters. He knows enough science to call bullshit on people who are stuck in their ways and say things can't be done. Others still have to do 99% of the detailed engineering work, but he is far from just a hype man.

This is also relevant to a statement Musk has made several times that I think people miss the importance of. He insists that people who oversee coders also need to be good coders themselves. NOT because they are going to be doing the brunt of the coding work, but because they will be able to better direct and assess the work of the people who are doing that work. They will have an intuitive sense of what approaches are possible and impossible, or efficient and inefficient, and guide the team to execute, and trouble-shoot with them when problems arise. To the extent Musk is an "engineer" that is what he is doing: helping teams think through problems.

And I totally hate the edgy teen persona too. It's embarrassing a lot of the time. I used to interpret as him needing to blow off steam because of all the stress from his day job. Now, I don't know what the fuck it is. Real immaturity, I guess.

I find these to be strange arguments. For example, the charge that he hasn't lived up to promises. What promises? The only really big fail that I'm aware of (and I've been watching the EV world and Musk since 2016) is his claims of self-driving. Everything else has not been a promise, but a goal. Sometimes people fail to reach goals on time, especially when they are the kinds of things that have never been done before. What "promise" has he made that hurt you or anyone else?

You have an entirely unrealistic set of expectations on the transition to electric vehicles. If you look at various projections from major organizations studying clean energy before Model 3 came out, they estimated less than 10% transition to clean vehicles by 2030 for new car sales. Then when Model 3 became a hit, they started bumping it up to around 25%. Now that every other manufacturer (except the Japanese) realized they need to go all-in on EVs in order to survive, the projections are around 50-60% EVs by 2030. That is a huge change, and it requires hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in new technologies and factories and supply chains across the world from dozens of companies. This is lightning speed for the largest manufacturing industry in the world!

SpaceX has transformed the space launch industry and is transforming telecommunications. Ukraine would have been right fucked if they weren't able to rely on secure high speed internet in the field from Starlink. Similar LEO constellations had been talked about for years, but because of the high cost of orbital launch before SpaceX, and general lack of urgency prior to Musk, it had never been done. Everyone else is still years behind, even after Musk lit a fire under them. We would be decades away from high speed LEO internet without SpaceX. It may not matter to you, but it matters to places without high speed cable around the world.

Is he an asshole who strangely wants to advertise that fact rather than hide it like every other CEO? Yes. Is he making a big difference. Obviously, emphatically, yes.