I think Elon Musk's big advantage over his competitors is that he has a high enough level of engineering skill to identify talent. Elon himself isn't the best engineer ever born, but he's good enough to know when someone's ideas or designs or plans make plausible sense. Most CEO's of large corporations, even engineering companies, can't do this, and it shows. So they run the company on the basis of making numbers bigger, and making sure that they cut costs enough to turn a profit each quarter, which eventually runs the company into the ground. They don't pay attention to the ground reality of what the company is actually doing, and only govern on the basis of what the stock price is doing, because the ground level reality is inscrutable and meaningless to them.