His modus operandi is taking quick decisions and backtracking if he is wrong.
Actually it's not only his modus operandi, SpaceX according to NASA evaluation is also working that way.
It's basically depth first search vs. breath first search.
Dr. Daniel Rasky, a NASA Senior scientist
https://youtu.be/MxIiiwD9C0E?t=1464 :
> I think there are some things and kind of going back to in some ways back to the Apollo days if you take a look at kind of the environment that NASA had in Apollo it was kind of what Elon has with his young engineers. you had you know people trying things and in what works and what doesn't work I think over the years we've gotten into a very risk-averse profile and we're I call it full matrix engineering that okay that all concerns that anyone can raise have to be chased down a hundred percent before you can make any decision. Okay, so yeah like a full matrix of all the things that may be pertinent to a certain decision and you have to fill that entire array before you can make a decision to go forward and there's times when that makes sense but it doesn't make sense for everything we do. SpaceX uses a sparse matrix okay 51% okay when do when we get to 51% okay enough we're gonna make a decision and then we're going to try it and move on.