Perhaps. It's common that history over-simplifies things

Huge engineering projects have thousands of engineers that often are remembered as a single face but having a good lead engineer is crucial because you can have the best workers in the world when lead by an idiot your work will be just a wasted time and money.

You said they weren't in the vehicle business.

You are responding to a different person and by that point Tesla was not in business it had no revenues and no product at best they were a r&d shop but they had no workers nor capital behind it.

It's not nothing, but it's not done alone

Reminds me when few years back a bonus payout for Musk was voted and goals were deemed to be absurd yet now they are in like 60-70% of all revenue market cap and have already exceeded net profit goal.

Turns out management is critical just look at msft during Ballmer to see the case of a horrible CEO