Like at any company, the people at the top aren't the ones who do the work. They need to have a broad understanding of the problem space, business opportunities

Like at any company, the people at the top aren't the ones who do the work. They need to have a broad understanding of the problem space, business opportunities, challenges and risk. They need to be able to understand what work is being done and understand the message that comes up to them. With that they can make high level decisions. From what I have seen, Musk deeply understands the problem space and can suggest engineers do low level stuff. I bet he suggests lots of stuff that the engineers go "erm no that is not possible". Those suggestions will never be seen by us. We will see the suggestions that happen like a rocket ship nose being changed by Musk.