Tesla is doing more innovation than the median tech company, and probably more than the 95th percentile. Plus, it's a consumer-understandable product, so you could "explain what you do at a dinner party" to someone outside of the domain.

"Engineer at Tesla" beats "engineer at IBM" but probably is socially inferior to "radiation oncologist".

Obviously status is to some extent subjective and culturally/individually determined, but there's broad agreement that certain jobs are higher status than others by various groups of people.