Citing Elon Musk in this context is definitely not making the point you think it’s making.
He's quite involved with technical decisions. His social media behavior is irrelevant here -- this is about the ability to innovate outside of physics or economics, which is what he learned about in college.
Wait what? Despite the pandemic?
Why limit it to them? Without the Internet, there would have been no X.com, no PayPal, no billion dollar paycheck. If "funding" a large project is the equivalent of "being a scientific genius", I think we'll add a lot of geniuses to the books, and we should probably include every government official that makes decisions about funding large projects.
And really ... who deserves more credit for putting a man on the moon than Karl Marx? Without Marx no communism, without communism no Soviet Union, without SU no American fear of losing dominance, and without that no ambitious and well-funded space program.