He hasn't been involved in an engineer project in 20+ years. He did some SWE at paypal and then lead some of the first teams at spacex. That was the last time he was even 2 steps removed from a tech team.

Everything since then has been filtered through multiple layers of middle management and executive staff. It would be way more reasonable to respect him as a businessman or maybe a visionary than an engineer. (not that I'm advocating for the existence of that respect in the first place).