I disagree with this. I think there's believable evidence from people who have worked with him that he's an effective technical administrator who focuses on learning his area of business[0], but also a bully and a braggart whose opinions on broader society are awful.
The main answer to the paradox of “how does he succeed while making so many bad decisions?” is that he’s the most focused person in the world. When he decides to do something, he comes up with an absurdly optimistic timeline for how quickly it can happen if everything goes as well as the laws of physics allow. He - I think the book provides ample evidence for this - genuinely believes this timeline, or at least half-believingly wills for it to be true. Then, when things go less quickly than that, it’s like red-hot knives stabbing his brain. He gets obsessed, screams at everyone involved, puts in twenty hour days for months on end trying to try to get the project “back on track”.
This is from a person who has failed to understand that most of what Elno says e.g. at those big Tesla day events is just baits for his followers and baits for investors. He's regularly promising the impossible. He's a confidence artist a.k.a. con man a.k.a. notorious liar, someone who lures people into giving him money in exchange for things he'll likely never deliver, and if and when he delivers, it's rather too late, too little. He's done that countless times with e.g. the Tesla semi, including his ~2017 assertion "this is something we can do now, right now". He could not do it then and he hasn't done it since. This is just one example. He feels entitled to say like anything he feels he can get away with and gets mad if his minions don't manage to get it done. This guy's a fraud in and out.
Yeah most of the specific engineering praise I see about him is by people paid to have such opinions. We know Musk fires anyone who pushes back, so we are left to assume employees have fallen in line. When you actually look at their praise critically it is faint, comparing him to a toddler as if that’s a virtue.
[0] E.g. the quotes from https://www.astralcodexten.com/i/136923606/is-musk-smart-doe...