He also has a nose for identifying business ideas where there's an actual market, and for sniffing out talent that's already working on those problems effective

He also has a nose for identifying business ideas where there's an actual market, and for sniffing out talent that's already working on those problems effectively. Musk didn't found PayPal - he founded X.com, a competitor of Confinity (founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin), and then Peter Thiel convinced him to merge to reduce competition in the space. His "contributions" to PayPal post-merger were largely limited to trying to convince them to switch from Linux to Windows servers, and bad ideas about software architecture. You can read about this in Levchin's entry in "Founders at Work" [1] Musk didn't found Tesla. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning did. Musk came in as one of the first investors and then forced the founders out, then got his role rewritten into a "founder" title with a lawsuit. Musk did found SpaceX. However, his role was basically that of a talent scout. Early hires like Gwynne Shotwell and Tom Mueller were critical, and he basically poached them from Boeing & TRW. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/dp/B092RC56HW/ https://www.amazon.com/Founders-Work-Stories-Startups-Early/...