He never built anything. He is a CEO who buys other people’s companies and tweets.

Zip2 and X.com were startups he co-founded. SpaceX was started from a clean sheet in 2002 — Merlin, Falcon, Dragon, and Raptor are in-house vehicles, not acquisitions. Neuralink, The Boring Company, and xAI were founded, not bought. Tesla is the exception: he joined as lead investor and chairman in 2004 and became CEO in 2008.

The useful correction is narrower: he does not personally weld the cars or write every line of flight software. He is a demanding chief engineer in design reviews, which is documented to the point of cliché. That is not the same as “never built anything,” and it is not the same as “lone genius inventor of the lithium-ion cell.”