We agree on the history but Elon also has a keen mind on technology. I have no doubt that he helped staff the company with brilliant engineers who did the heavy lifting. Musk's skill is recognizing what works, the engineering excellence, and then pouring in the resources to make it happen.
Well obviously Musk is a brilliant inventor and a very capable engineer; look at the way he educated and trained himself to be a highly capable rocket engineer for SpaceX!
But if you look at the history of Tesla, we see time and time again that Musk has over-reached in major ways, has demanded changes and put needlessly complex things into the cars; things which, in at least some cases, the cars would be better off without, or at least would sell better if there were more familiar options available to buyers. I'm not talking just about the front and rear power doors on the Model X. I'm not just talking about Elon getting this idea in to his head that he could completely eliminate human labor from Tesla's automotive assembly line, and speed up production to eye-blurring speed; a speed at which wind resistance would actually be a limiting factor!
No, I'm also talking about, for example, Musk demanding changes to the basic body design of the 2008 Roadster after the basic design was supposedly locked down; changes that gave Tesla cost overruns and forced Tesla to announce delays in the car going on sale no less than three times. Changes like lowering the door sills by two inches. (Not to say that Tesla shouldn't have done so; it's said that getting into and out of the Roadster is so restricted and tricky that you have to follow an exact procedure to do it without straining yourself. Lowering the door sills was definitely an improvement over the Elise. But of course, that change should have come early, when they were stretching the body shape/design of the Lotus Elise into the Roadster.)
And I don't think there is any doubt that those delays should be laid at Elon's door, and nobody else's. Martin Eberhard said in a blog post (and when I say "blog", I really mean blog and not forum or news site) that he would have been perfectly happy to use a fiberglass body for the 2008 Roadster, rather than develop the more complex and costly carbon fiber body, if that would have gotten it into production on time.
As I've said before, Musk is a great half of a brilliant invention and design team. But he needs a practical, pragmatic partner with his feet on the ground, to anchor the team and keep Musk from flying off to the castles in the sky he loves to build. Sadly, one of Elon's greatest flaws is his inability to share power and responsibility with others. So it looks to me like he's never going to get that partner that he really needs to anchor him in reality, a partner who would pay attention to costs and practical limitations and prevent Elon from repeatedly and seriously over-reaching.
