A not very complete list of sources saying they have worked with him on engineering problems https://cleantechnica.com/2022/11/16/incorrect-claims-about-...
What definition of 'engineer' is Elon Musk not?
People need to be more critical of themselves when reading or writing statements like this, and stop and question if the statement actually has a logical reason to be true, or is it based on one's own biased priors about the world (which this statement is certainly is).
Firstly, when talking about people like Musk or Bezos or any other extremely wealthy individual with businesses behind them, their wealth isn't determined by the value that they bring, its determined by anyone who makes direct decisions to buy stock, which isn't 100% correlated to engineering value (i.e profiting of perceived movements of the price based on sentiment).
Musk main talent is same one Trump has to become president and still enjoy a shitload of support - both can sell stories extremely well. Thats not to say he does't have ANY technical talent, as his companies are successful with actual products, but most of the reason that they are is because he was able to bring the money to push through the hardships, because no matter how hard he personally works, he still needs a lot of people with various talents to do other roles, which requires salaries, which requires selling stories.
> One of the core takeaways I got from him about himself was that he was an engineer more than anything else (career wise), and I agree with that.
I don't really care if he's a "real" engineer or not, but this actually makes me think he likely isn't if that's as good as it gets.
From Karpathy: "he understood how it works about as quickly as you'd expect a PhD student to. The fact that he can do this across many technical disciplines is impressive and borderline superhuman. I don't think people understand or would believe how low-level and technical typical meetings with him are."
This isn't an indictment on him, or his ability to learn: if you do anything only a few times a week or a few times a month, instead of 8 hours per day, you likely won't learn that thing very quickly.
Especially if, when you do it, it resembles more of a pointy-haired boss swooping in on a meeting, telling someone to change something when you have no idea what the implications or history are, and then going back to twitter shitposting.
That's the crux of one of the big complaints at Boeing at the moment. Accountants / beancounters making engineering decisions. Engineering presents options 1 and 2, with cost and effort breakdowns. Accountant executives select option 1.
That doesn't make them engineers, because they've made an engineering decision.
I don't know anyone who makes statements this dumb and I have been developing software for manufacturers for a decade.