I lightly disagree, maybe he doesn't do the calculations or write the tests, but he's almost certainly grilling people all the way down to ensure alignment on engineering. His passion being engineering, he's probably not asking 'program management 101' questions, but doing a smell-test on your technical work and your competence level just as a fellow-level senior engineer would.

A while back I saw an interview with a NASA engineer they loaned to SpaceX for six months. He described a meeting in which two engineering proposals were being debated, and at the end Musk said "ok we'll do it this way" and that was the end of it. The guy was kinda blown away, and said at NASA they'd have had a dozen more meetings first.

Given that SpaceX lives or dies by how well their rockets work, I don't think there's really anything more important for Musk to be doing.

You are talking about Dan Rasky. Link to this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxIiiwD9C0E

He's one of the richest people in the world, with a massive interest in space & rockets, and owns the most exciting piece of space technology being built today. Where else would you spend your time in this situation?

I would probably spend my time focussed on growing and sustaining my companies and hiring very skilled people to do that engineering work for me, I'd be very interested in the engineering work, but I wouldn't be doing that work myself. Similarly I don't expect Mark Zuckerberg writes much code at facebook these days, there's just too much other stuff to do

If you're goal is literally just a successful company, then sure that makes sense. But if you actually have a passion for what you do (and I'm not arguing that Zuckerberg doesn't have a passion for spying on people), and the company is already a huge success, why wouldn't you spend your time doing something that you think is really really cool and hire very skilled people to do the other stuff?

Exactly this.

If your goal is to get rich and play golf and relax, that is one thing. The fact that Elon is one of the wealthiest people in the world and also as passionate as someone working in their garage seems kind of like a crazy situation.

I wonder if there is similar historical precedence in terms of an ultra wealthy person being interested and involved like he is.

For Elon Musk, Jim Keller or even Steve Jobs, their value isn't in manually doing the CAD / VHDL / Code, rather, it is being the Eye of Mordor on the critical path and understanding the solution top to bottom. No excuses, only problem solving.

I feel the key insight behind both SpaceX and Tesla is that both the napkin engineering from first principle and then having the force of will to personally see it through /are/ the most important thing. Both qualify as engineering.

Happy to have my fairy tale hero's journey view of success corrected.

Anyone inclined to argue against this could maybe sink 1,000 hours into Factorio. The game is simple enough to require 1-person-engineer, but complex enough that the player must both solve low-level problems AND be The Eye of Mordor. If you don’t relentlessly pursue both, you get stuck in the tarpit and progress stalls.