Maybe he's a brand. The skill is that investors will put money into a company that has his name on it, and companies with money succeed.

No, it's clearly much more than that. He was able to get Grok to a frontier-level LLM while Apple and Microsoft, with far more money to throw at the problem, and more existentially threatened by not succeeding, have not.

Have Microsoft and Apple even tried? I haven’t seen any evidence that it’s their goal.

Microsoft didn’t but Apple did.

So did Meta.

Is there any secret sauce behind LLM other than big money? I'm under the impression that its a known recipe at its core and for many of the enhancements around it.

If there wasn't, Apple would have been able to buy one.

Maybe, but there is also the potential for survivorship bias being a factor here too. The chance that a specific person with no football skills can throw a football 50 yards into a trash can is pretty low. But if you gather a stadium full of unskilled random people, chances are good that one of them will be able to do so, even multiple times. But you'd be wasting your time trying to discern what special football skill that person has.

I'm not saying this means successful CEOs don't have any relevant skills contributing to their success, but it's worth considering that for the most part we're only seeing the successful ones. It's hard to say how many would-be billionaire CEOs are out there with similar skills to someone like Elon Musk who just happened to get unlucky.