When it comes to automated driving though you're really requiring solving entirely novel never-before-solved problems. If there is a spectrum between "found a company on doing some existing engineering twice as good" and "found a company on solving the Goldbach conjecture" then driverless cars are a bit more towards the latter than hoverslamming rockets is.
NASA didn't stop innovating per se. In the 1980s and 1990s they worked out their own version of vertical take-off and landing and actually test flew it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o
Linear aerospike engines are pretty neat too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcW9kUUTfxY
Problem is absolutely none of this stuff ever got close to operational. It kept getting cancelled in the prototype stage.
If the DC-X had been developed into a fully reusable first stage, we'd have had something like Falcon 9 by the year 2000 and might be on Mars by now.
The difference between SpaceX and NASA is mainly that SpaceX cares about cost.
Or we can say that NASA has incentives to absurdly increase cost, like any bureaucracy.
There is no way the DC-X could have been developed without increasing enormously the budget (and taxes from Americans). That was the reason it was not done.
And innovation when you have many, many billions is one thing, if you have to operate in a commercial market but still find a way to innovate at that level its quite amazing.
I have issues with how Musk communicates, but fundamentally I think Tesla is innovating as much as SpaceX. Many here and me have lots of issues in how Self-Driving is developed, but fundamentally its the right concept.
What Tesla is doing with batteries is quite amazing. I have over the last 2 years spent a lot of time understanding the battery industry and what Tesla is doing is actually incredibly impressive. People mostly don't understand that because battery and battery production is far more obscure as topic.
However whatever else you can say about Elon, he is committed to the projects that he is committed too.
SpaceX will not give up on Starship, or at most replace it with a changed design that tries to solve the same problem. Tesla will not stop trying to push down the price of battery, they are comited to it and are willing to go all the way to vertically integrate mining if that what it takes. Tesla will not stop developing Self-Driving, they will push forward and invest as much as they need to invest.
I do wish the Communication around the Self-Driving technology would change. They should have just called it 'Co-Pilot' and sold a 'Advanced Co-Pilot' and say they are working on 'Self-Driving' but it not a product (yet). Stop promising it will come so soon, and I not sure about how I feel about letting Beta testers put up videos.
In which way did he lead the program technically?
Problems that are conceptually simple can still be very complex once all of the details are added. Theoretically landing a rocket is a simple matter of turning it into a giant model aircraft and doing the math on how much fuel you need to reserve. Re-lighting an engine is conceptually easy too. In practice we know this is a huge accomplishment.
Self driving is a problem that starts out hard. Think about how you get a computer to recognize other objects, especially other cars, based on it's fairly limited set of sensor inputs. Once you add in the details, like dealing with unexpected road conditions, detecting vehicles that are partially invisible to your sensors, etc... and it's hard to see a future where the technology is viable, at least in the near term. All computer vision stuff currently has a sizeable false positive/negative error rate that you just have to accept. But on the road a false negative or false positive can be fatal.
It does seem like his is heavily involved in the engineering, and he does say he's the chief engineer of SpaceX.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
The issue isn't the predictions. It's the time frames he makes the predictions about. We will have everything he's said one day, but in the mean time we need to call him out for what he's done: lying, and why he's done it: to get money.
It's an unfortunate flipside to their willingness to work so hard-- they almost need to believe in the impossible to keep up the pace. Ideally there is someone between them and the public face of the company, but all too often they can't help spouting off stuff they should be keeping under wraps in front of TV cameras or in tweets.
It's like there is this enormous gulf that most others can see, but to Elon it's invisible.
So don't let anyone tell you that philosophy and theology don't matter. We are witnesses a multi-billion dollar bet being made on the basis of some extreme views about the nature of man, and because this appears to be a core belief of Elon, I doubt he will ever update his priors to make more effective investment decisions based on feedback from real-world tests. He will always view this as a project that is almost-ready with just a few technical glitches to overcome.
The reason why he's so motivated is because his compensation package is so ridiculous.
If he is so uninterested by money he can of course show that by giving it to charity.
18 hour days are the "walking barefoot in the snow for three days" of our time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa
Amazing how neither sleep deprivation psychosis nor frost bite are a thing if you're rich enough and talking about how virtuous you are.
That assumes the same objectives would have been pursued without Musk, which I find unlikely, given the skepticism and criticism Musk had to endure, and dispel, in order to keep his companies on-target, without a scale-back of ambitions, all those years.
I do wonder if some of these same things could, or would have been accomplished in the absence of Musk, but with the same amount of capital and under the leadership of Gwynne Shotwell. I think they would have. Musk has a big dream, and is great at hyping stuff, but it's not like he's personally engineering the Falcon 9 and its recovery system. Shotwell hired the right people to implement the grand vision.
What I'm concerned about is the people who think that Tesla can do no wrong, and it's the most amazing thing ever. When the reality between the sales/marketing pitch, as you've documented above, and what actually exists in the real world on a certain date is so divergent.