@interfluidity In my experience, most businesses have some degree of infrastructure in place to keep the big boss out of the minutiae. In most cases, that's because the Type-A big-picture people who found, expand, and run big companies aren't actually useful to solving specific problems; that's why they employ smart people under them.
When I was an executive, we'd specifically keep the boss out of the loop for small-but-alarming-sounding problems we knew how to solve so we could just present it to him as an already solved problem afterwards, preventing him from getting involved and mucking up the works during the crisis. And he was actually quite competent in his job; his ego just caused him to sometimes insert himself into situations where he wasn't helpful.

So, it wouldn't surprise me if this happens to a degree in every company at every level. Musk is just an egregious example representing the far end of the scale for incompetence and ego.

So, the context between him and his firms' accomplishments is that they accomplished those things *despite* him, not because of him. The only value he added was daddy's money and viral marketing doomed to eventually backfire.