They also made a whole lot of progress on those big problems before Musk's public face-heel turn.

IMO Tesla -- we owe them a bit, for revitalizing electric cars. Now that the big brands have come around, I'm not sure Tesla has such a huge draw (?). Like if you are an engineer, you could work on the same problems at Ford, but with fewer CEO antics, your designs will probably be implemented with better build quality, and I bet your employment would be more stable.

SpaceX is still pretty impressive though.

Everyone is starting from square one with EV, Tesla has mineral rights locked up and are ahead by a few years at least.

From the software engineering side, it's still an opportunity to work on one of the highest traffic web sites on the internet. There's not a massive number of opportunities to do that.