Aside: I don't understand why they even mention what journalists think - only engineers opinions matter when judging engineering ability.
Or append &t=1h2m3s to the link to prevent writing long sentences on where to seek and save users from manual seeking :)
And possibly a genuine obsession with (rightwing-ish) meme/youth culture, which I think got him a lot of his initial followers on twitter/reddit/4chan/etc.
Smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is. Not good with anything interpersonal. Flair for the dramatic (and dad jokes) at the expense of those working with him.
Spoiler: He is not. But he is very good at faking it.
Anytime he tries to give a serious opinion on anything related to computers: It is laughably bad and out of touch (SQL, compilers, languages, performance, etc... ).
He definitively has a scientific background but definitively not "Tech" as far as computer are concerned.
To be honest, I’m actually interested in this hypothesis: is he legitimately skilled/knowledgeable, or is he indeed faking it? And for either side I would like to see evidence. This question is interesting to me because some of his companies have made substantial contributions to pushing the frontier of technology (reusable landing, high launch cadence, electric cars, energy).
If he is really faking it, that might even be good, because the success of his companies might be replicable and could continue without him. But what if he is not?
On a domain side to nerdery: video games. There is zero doubt he is faking it entirely.
The streams he publishes on game like PoE or Elden Ring, have been long commented on online boards
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1hwe0id/elo...
And honestly, I can understand it entirely.
He has a public image of "geek/need hero" that is honestly inspiring. And that benefits him a lot because it bring people to trust his decisions. He has all the interest of the world to maintain this image.
People he hired for these companies made contributions.
(Subtle things, like huge firetrucks parked straight across the road.)
The AI isn't good enough. I'm starting to suspect that current ML learning rates can't be good enough in reasonable wall-clock timeframes due to how long it takes between relevant examples for them to learn from.
It's fine to lean on other sensory modalities (including LIDAR, radar, ultrasound, whatever else you fancy) until the AI gets good enough.
I think it's fair to say he at least was a nerd. He was a dweeb getting beaten up in school, burying himself in books and computers at home. His skills are doubtlessly outdated now, but does that really mean much? Woz's skills (which to be perfectly clear, outclassed Musk's by miles) are doubtlessly out of date now too, but nobody would say Woz isn't a nerd.
I think the part where he grew into an unstable dirtbag might be influencing the way people see him now. Saying that is is, or at least was, a genuine nerd shouldn't be seen as any sort of excuse for his scamming, lying, etc.
I do believe he read a lot of sci-fi in his youth, if only because that would fit the pattern of a young boy who doesn't get along well with their peers and turns towards solitary pursuits like computer programming. He seems exactly the sort to have read lots of Heinlein.
The only real crimes are reading/writing someone's brain without permission (at which point others may call you names and stop inviting you to social events) or destroying a consciousness without backups (where you'll get permanent supervision to make sure you don't do it again). Most biological citizens have a full-brain computer interface for backups and general fun, called a "neural lace".
The AI Minds in charge of everything give themselves fanciful names, which Musk has used for his SpaceX drone ships.
For the reverse:
Almost every biological citizen is gender-fluid, can change physical gender by willing it, and there's a certain expectation that you try things both ways around so you know how to be a good lover. They dislike explosive population growth regardless of if it's organic or machine reproduction, and as everyone can get pregnant if they want to (because everyone can be a woman if they want to and it all works), it's considered quite scandalous to have more than one child.
It's sufficiently post-scarcity that money is considered a sign of poverty. They mostly avoid colonising planets, instead living on ships, or on habitats so large that if one was located at any Earth-Sun Lagrange point (including the one on the far side of the sun), we could see it.
Martin Eberhard was the technical co-founder of Tesla and Elon Musk is trying his best to erase his contributions to Tesla.
Eberhard wasn't that technical and was the CEO in the early years.
But that has nothing to do with the valley chips and computer nerdery
Just a savvy investor, and as far as I understand, hasn't really worked on any of it. His contributions were rants until he just took ketamine.
His work was making a yelp clone.
(Boring company...)
Edit: Oh, wow, mentioning this guy is surely controversial, sorry. However discussing whether he is a nerd, understands engineering on very deep level/gets his hands dirty OR he only manages people - there must be some psychological aspect related, a form of disagreement to discredit or have a hard time believing it can actually be true.
Here is a list of credible persons commenting on Musk whether he understands engineering or not. With all the sources: https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/eviden...