There’s also essentially zero chance his organizations succeed in spite of him. This is just wishful ignorance.
But given the sheer number of projects at the companies he runs I don't find it hard to believe that he is largely not responsible for the technical successes. Again, I have no evidence for it, but it would not be hard to believe. Do you have anything other than faith for that statement?
We also have pretty detailed books on the history of SpaceX, written from employee interviews, which also indicate that Musk is fairly hands on. There's also this tweet from the designer of the Merlin rocket engine that is usually thrown around when these kinds of claims are made: https://old.reddit.com/r/SpaceXMasterrace/comments/15am9pl/t...
Isn't BYD a success?
Jeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000, after revolutionizing e-commerce with Amazon.
Two years later, Elon Musk launched SpaceX in 2002, which has since surged ahead of Blue Origin.
Is that enough evidence?
He's not doing the nitty gritty engineering day-to-day, but he understands enough to ask the right questions, give his teams permission to try ideas that seem crazy at first, and sometimes come up with those ideas himself (e.x. supposedly catching Starship with "chopsticks" was his idea).