That's the job of an executive, to have the ideas and give your engineers goals to achieve. You do need sufficient knowledge of the business to do this, but it's fundamentally not "engineering." Elon is an executive, and an increasingly poor one at that.
All the "he's the first one up, last one to bed, in the weeds on everything" is just fake. It's just things people say for purposes of myth building. And easily contradicted by his social media usage patterns. Same thing happens with our current POTUS. It's just building a cult of believers.