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Notes -
Musk surely isn't doing huge chunks of the engineering by himself. But he clearly is good at hiring the right people. You can only do that if you can tell whether someone knows what they're doing or not. He also seems to have a special talent at making those people work harder, motivating people. Based on the biography I read he has strong engineering skills and takes important high-level decisions about how the companies should move forward.
I suspect that Altman is similar. He may not be the greatest coder in the world but he's clearly a master schemer, outmaneuvering the OpenAI board and tapping Microsoft's nigh-limitless resources on generous terms.
I think a lot of it is getting middle management out of the way to allow the doers to do.
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