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This comes up quite regularly on HN and gets debunked every time. A not very complete list of sources saying they have worked with him on engineering problems

• ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
  His job is literally CEO, not Engineer, and he doesn't practice engineering for his day job. There are more cases of him shitposting on twitter than there are attestations of his engineering chops from fans in that article. This isn't an indictment on him, or his ability to learn: if you do anything only a few times a week or a few times a month, instead of 8 hours per day, you likely won't learn that thing very quickly. Especially if, when you do it, it resembles more of a pointy-haired boss swooping in on a meeting, telling someone to change something when you have no idea what the implications or history are, and then going back to twitter shitposting.
  • indoordin0saur 3y ago
    Your job is what you do, not what your title is. He definitely makes engineering decisions, whether you like those engineering decisions or not.
    • FireBeyond 3y ago
      > He definitely makes engineering decisions, whether you like those engineering decisions or not. That's the crux of one of the big complaints at Boeing at the moment. Accountants / beancounters making engineering decisions. Engineering presents options 1 and 2, with cost and effort breakdowns. Accountant executives select option 1. That doesn't make them engineers, because they've made an engineering decision.
    • ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      I'm trying to imagine the CEOs I've worked under, randomly swooping into an Engineering meeting once or twice a month, "making a decision" that doesn't respect the chain of command, with no knowledge of the subject matter or history, and never checking back or caring about the results. Then calling themselves an "engineer" because "they make engineering decisions". That would be really disempowering. Engineers "make engineering decisions" for their primary day job, not just on the occasional weird drug-fueled power-trip through the engineering department in between shitposting on twitter and being interviewed on the Joe Rogan podcast, and their job depends on the decisions being good, too.
      • dzhiurgis 3y ago
        Never worked in small flat org eh?
  • avgDev 3y ago
    "At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on earth." -Elon Musk I don't know anyone who makes statements this dumb and I have been developing software for manufacturers for a decade.
• cujo 3y ago
  This is honestly some rather bizarre proof of him being an engineer. It reads like fan letter that uses tweets as the sole evidence. This quote is gold: > One of the core takeaways I got from him about himself was that he was an engineer more than anything else (career wise), and I agree with that. I don't really care if he's a "real" engineer or not, but this actually makes me think he likely isn't if that's as good as it gets.
• rurp 3y ago
  Someone publicly praising an incredibly powerful person who is well known to be vain and petty is not good proof of anything.
• ActorNightly 3y ago
  >As an engineer, I’m sure he’s still top notch. That’s in large part what made him the richest man/human on Earth. People need to be more critical of themselves when reading or writing statements like this, and stop and question if the statement actually has a logical reason to be true, or is it based on one's own biased priors about the world (which this statement is certainly is). Firstly, when talking about people like Musk or Bezos or any other extremely wealthy individual with businesses behind them, their wealth isn't determined by the value that they bring, its determined by anyone who makes direct decisions to buy stock, which isn't 100% correlated to engineering value (i.e profiting of perceived movements of the price based on sentiment). Musk main talent is same one Trump has to become president and still enjoy a shitload of support - both can sell stories extremely well. Thats not to say he does't have ANY technical talent, as his companies are successful with actual products, but most of the reason that they are is because he was able to bring the money to push through the hardships, because no matter how hard he personally works, he still needs a lot of people with various talents to do other roles, which requires salaries, which requires selling stories.
• reducesuffering 3y ago
  It's kind of crazy how conspiratorial much of HN is about Elon. Many people simply aren't capable of not letting their valid political differences crossover into their evaluation of his aptitude. You'll have many people around Elon all vouching that he's a smart, technical engineer, but hordes of people on HN who have never met him, let alone spent an hour in a meeting discussing a technical topic, all very sure of themselves that Elon is a midwit who simply orders people around. From Karpathy: "he understood how it works about as quickly as you'd expect a PhD student to. The fact that he can do this across many technical disciplines is impressive and borderline superhuman. I don't think people understand or would believe how low-level and technical typical meetings with him are." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703617 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33703617