That's a pretty absurd slur. If you're going to claim Musk isn't an engineer then you're defining the term so narrowly it stops being interesting. Biographies

That's a pretty absurd slur. If you're going to claim Musk isn't an engineer then you're defining the term so narrowly it stops being interesting. Biographies of him are quite clear that when he decided to make SpaceX he spent a very long period of time indeed doing nothing but reading rocket science textbooks; it was the knowledge of rocketry he gained by doing that which allowed him to realise which problems needed to be solved, that they could be solved, who could do the work to solve them and most importantly to gain the confidence of other rocket engine designers and convince them to join him. He pretty routinely engages in technical discussion about rockets, what happened, what went wrong etc. That's on top of his experience as a software developer. So if you're going to claim Musk isn't an engineer then really neither was Bill Gates, Larry Page, or other people who did some initial work and had some expertise in what their company did but rapidly became a professional executive.