They're missing the critical component: intimacy and competence with the core craft. Elon Musk can contribute and hold his own in a room with the rocket engineers doing the heavy lifting. He can understand what they're talking about, perhaps lacking only the local context, on which he can be caught up reasonably quickly.

This is not to say that Musk has done all of the engineering directly or that he understands every single component of the product, but he knows the product with the intimacy necessary to realistically evaluate and engineer in detail. He knows what's possible, what's reasonable, and what to expect if you get the best people and put them in a place where they're able to do their best work.

That, IMO, is the biggest thing that separate the wannabes from the revolutionaries. It's extremely difficult to bullshit Musk because he knows what's going on and doesn't just have to trust "an excellent communicator" to dumb it down into digestable "non-technical" nuggets for him.

There is no need for a translation layer. No nervous middle-managers trying to "soften the blow" regarding some impractical contrived fantasy that the engineers laughed out of the room. SpaceX doesn't have to waste years of resources on said fantastical contrivances because the middle managers aren't willing to shut down the idea forcefully enough, or worse, because the C-suite is unwilling to accept the engineering evaluation.

Musk knows the reality of the situation in a real, visceral way, and the value of that cannot be overestimated. That is the true superpower. As smart as Bezos and Branson may be, as far as I know, they cannot claim the ability to understand what they're trying to make, and that is the core differentiator for SpaceX.

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To get industrial revolutionaries like Musk, you need to combine the financial independence (true financial independence, no VC babysitters), the vision, the tenacity and courage to blaze the trail, and the technical intimacy to know when you're running afield or when someone in the chain of command is pulling your leg. Getting all of these in one package is very rare and it's what makes people like Elon Musk stand out.

There are certainly many people with some mix of these components, but not many that have them all. If we want more Elon Musks, we need to ask how we can get the more fungible parts of this recipe to more people who are only lacking those elements.

At any point, Zip2 or PayPal could've taken a misstep that would've erased Musk from the history books (perhaps one such misstep would've been Elon taking role of CEO at Zip2, something his investors did not allow). He'd be a good engineer with a passionate interest in rocketry, like many other engineers before and after him.

How many sleeping Elon Musks are out there today, waiting for their own unlikely exits to materialize?

Follow-up for people who feel like typing more (because I don't): where else has this applied? Walt Disney knew animation, even if he wasn't the best animator. Thomas Edison knew electricity, even if he wasn't the best primordial electrical engineer. Sergei and Larry knew search. It seems that the earth-shaking successes are practically always spearheaded by people who know what they do at the fine-grained, detailed level.