Well that is just a vast misrepresentation and distortion of the facts. The idea of landing boosters came about from spacex wanting to pursue reusable orbital vehicles from the beginning. Now spacex never wanted to acquire Russian engines. Where this russian connection comes from is before Elon started spacex, he wished to buy a few Russian ICBMS to launch a small greenhouse project to mars. The idea was to spur interest and investment into a mars program. This was back in the early 2000s and the russians basically laughed him out the door.

From this, Elon founded spacex thinking he will build the rockets himself. A founding tenet of spacex was to decrease the cost of access to space. To achieve this, they set about trying to reuse rockets in the very the beginning. Their first rocket, the falcon 1, had parachutes on board to test first stage reusability. Later, on the first 2 launches of their falcon 9 rocket they again tried using parachutes. It became apparent that using parachutes wasn’t working and so, in 2011, they began the grasshopper program to practice their rockets propulsively. Within 4 years from the start of the program, spacex was successful and had landed a first stage from a rocket launching a payload

To suggest it wasn’t part of the original inception of spacex or it was just an off the cuff response is blatant exaggeration. Listen, Elon has quite a few problems and in my opinion he should not be in charge of the day to day management of his companies. He should be the ideas man, pushing the companies vision and letting others get bogged down in implementing his ideas.

Musk’s talent is the ability to raise capital for ridiculous sci-fi projects. This skill at least partially requires the subject to believe that Musk will be at the helm to navigate the cannonball run endeavor.

If Musk isn’t actually pushing the buttons at Tesla then the magic is gone.