This would be a valid interpretation if Elon were uniformly secure. However, his total lack of a logical triage method for evaluating ideas/suggestions indicates that he isn't being uniformly logical in his approach to leading even his companies, let alone the world.
He has a penchant for using an ad hoc method of evaluating things, which is precisely like everyone else. The main difference is that he is overly convinced of his ability to do that.
He believes, in some sense, that his 'natural aptitude' for following signals and an unapologetic devotion to the first principles of physics somehow implies that logic need not apply in the sense of evaluating information.
This method is automatically doomed to be less efficient than applying ethical principles to the contributions he provably fields in great diversity and quantity from others around him.
He is essentially performing an unremittent perpetual evaluation of information based on the "what I can see I can decide on thereafter to act or to not" method, which is not much different than arbitrarily choosing a bracket of the March Madness field and deciding that among those teams the best team is necessarily found.
It doesn't represent meritocracy. What it represents is progress of luck and convenience.
He has, absolutely, achieved an excellent degree of success with the time he's been alive. However, it is inarguably the case that the success he has achieved is not distributed in a fashion from which the highest degree of support and success within the context of what people in general think is best for the world can be summoned.
After all, that argument states only that he could lead more effectively if he chose to evaluate information more effectively in line with the still somewhat vague mission statement of his companies.
And you will want to argue that utter fact if you're like 'most people.' Even the more likely if you're an "Elon Musk" fan.
Because, among other things, you don't define success very carefully. Certainly not even as carefully as he does.
You would choose to say "Elon Musk is the very definition of success" or some such garbage as that.
And if you were right about that (which you clearly are not) he would not be striving constantly to do better as it is so plainly obvious that he is.
How does one "do better"? Is it not by listening to others to the extent that you can see the grain of truth in what they are saying, or is your old and getting more tired by the minute approach of reading with confirmation bias in full effect the approach which you still find very sensible?
That is, do you look for the fleck of dirt in a tub full of bathwater to make sure you can throw out the baby which you're deliberately avoiding evaluating carefully, or do you understand that when someone is clearly speaking (or writing) sincerely you ought well to consider thoroughly what they are saying, versus the default choice of figuring out how to reject the whole argument they're making?
More often than not because it takes more work to understand than you feel like doing, and since the default is always "well, I have better things to do" the opportunity cost calculation associated with thinking you might be wrong is a calculation you're never willing to do in the case or cases you most need to do it.
And this, right here, is the same EXACT thing that Elon does. He learned some measure of economic principles, but he's apparently failed to appreciate the full implications of opportunity cost.
The opportunity cost associated with a perceptibly 'ad hoc' method of evaluating information is that a person or company (or even an entire species) which uses such a system will never evolve toward a true meritocracy unless or until it adopts a meritocratic system for evaluating information.
This of course concomitantly means that the best inventions and ideas by definition remain further out of our reach than they would be once we define what good ideas and inventions necessarily (i.e., by a system other than popular vote or 'the squeaky wheel gets the oil') are.
