I guess they did well despite him. People who can send rockets to space probably also know how to deal with rich idiots.

I think somebody at SpaceX said they do better when Musk isn't around

Having followed SpaceX for a very long time, I think that Elon kinda figured early on how to get engineers excited for a lofty goal and give them sufficient room to fail and innovate, whilst squeezing every drop of work out of them.

So he was a good hype man for things he broadly understood and he was willing to put loads of money into making it successful.

But following a long tradition of people who are actually excellent in a narrow field, he convinced himself that he can translate this into imposing weird and frankly really stupid philosophy onto the world. The Bloombergs and the Carsons of the world have already failed at this, happily it looks like he will too. Not that he'll learn anything from it, just hope he goes away and stops trying.

Money