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> Of course this is typical for engineers and Elon is an engineer.

He's not! This was discussed in the article comments and according to Wikipedia he have a BS in physics and another in economics. He started a PhD but quickly stopped.

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I know a lot of people in Silicon Valley who are called engineers and only have a physics background. They aren't certified professional engineers in the disciplines that have licensing, like civil engineers, but they're still engineers.

Used to be, a large segment of Silicon Valley 'engineers' were trained in music. Some weird overlap that worked early on, at least until the market got flooded with trained software types.

He is. He's been performing as an Engineer for a decade. Which makes him one. Regardless of his early certification/degree.

He manages engineers, and he would seem to be quite effective at it (a rarity!), but being a highly technical manager isn’t the same as performing engineering work. Do you have a specific example in mind?

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-elon-musk-schedules-a-typ...

That link doesn’t address my question. It says he works at SpaceX and he works at Tesla, not the nature of the work.

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