An important thing about Elon Musk that’s widely known in tech circles but perhaps not in the wider world: he’s an ignoramus.

His technical knowledge is shallow and careless, full of parroting and fantasizing.

People who’ve worked on the small amount of code he actually wrote long ago describe his work as an unskilled mess.

At every company he runs, there are teams of people devoted to keeping him away from the engineers, who largely succeed to the extent that he forgets they exist.

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