From what I understand, after reading through Musk's biography, he is not a typical 'research' oriented person. A typical researcher is focused on refining a bo

From what I understand, after reading through Musk's biography, he is not a typical 'research' oriented person. A typical researcher is focused on refining a body of work that is already at the precipice of cutting edge. This research first mindset is about pushing the boundaries of research and the most efficient way to do that is by publishing papers etc. Musk, on the other hand is a problem first person and uses research to solve those problems. It's very different from a researchers mindset. For ex, Tesla's self driving car unit is full of researchers but they are not doing the traditional research, i.e pushing the boundaries of machine learning/computer vision. They are not there to win a research competition - ones that gave rise to Resnet etc. They are very focused on using deep learning to solve the problems of self driving. The end goal for Musk is a product and research is a means of getting there, the end goal for a researcher is .. well research.