For all you know he had some technical presentations given to him by his engineers and is just repeating the info within. I don't doubt he himself has enough engineering background to follow or contribute to the technical conversations at Tesla et al, but yeah.
At some point you just have to reason about how many companies he has and how much work he already has merely being CEO or chairman of these firms and how he could possibly be doing day-to-day engineering decision-making on top of that. And given the very public and embarassing exposes we've gotten from engineers at Twitter, I have deep, deep reservations that Elon is really a saavy engineer.
(Btw, software engineers are not really engineers.)
Broadly speaking, I wouldn't rush to consider anyone a doctor, an engineer, a pilot, so on and so forth simply because I watched a video of them speaking so well to a very specific problem that they just so happened to work so closely on. That's all I was getting at.
So those saying he's not an engineer at all are probably wrong, but those saying he's a good engineer probably aren't correct either.
I think it's also the case where his misses are more evident. If you said "We'll get to Mars in 10 years", people will likely have forgotten you said that after 5 years, much less 2 years after your boasted time frame expires. So people credit you for big ideas while not having to deliver on anything. Every year, we've been about a year away from fully autonomous self-driving cars.
Complaining about twitter and saying how you'd fix it is easy when you don't control twitter. But actually fixing it is a different story once you have all the control.
Promises are easy to make, harder to deliver.
I think you'll find there's a significant split in perception between, for example, the average American and the pseudo-elites who inhabit Bluesky and Hacker News. Or the latter and the average actual hacker, for that matter.
Is there direct evidence of Elon's personal engineering prowess? All I can find are his own boasting and second hand reports of folks impressed by his familiarity with jargon.
Yes: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...
But I was hoping to see some of his source code for Zip2, some CAD he'd done himself, or even a video of him solving some intractable problem in one of these rooms full of stumped geniuses.
Are we testing whether he knows anything at this point, or whether he's a literal Tony Stark? This thread started with discussion of whether he's any kind of engineer at all now we're looking for "rooms full of stumped geniuses" as if this was something every random engineer experienced.
Look I can go read Gates' code, so I have some direct evidence of whether his reputation as an engineer is worth the paper it's written on. The story for Musk is much less direct. Still, I'm open to studying the evidence of Musk's engineering chops.
The actual video it mentions is here: https://youtu.be/YAtLTLiqNwg?t=1100
But he has never understood people, politics, etc. Which is what twitter is all about.
So I don't know. Maybe he's a good engineer when he's not on camera. But as a public figure I think he's massively overexposed, largely by choice, and it's doing him no favours in terms of perception lately.