Yes. In addition, even when highly analytic people (including Nobel Prize winners) do carefully model the probability of outcomes they often then ignore the boundary conditions of their models, fomenting disaster in a very sophisticated way. Prime example Long Term Asset Management
Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM)
Elon has made this error several times, including the PayPal case. Unlike those others, when Elon realizes his error he quickly corrects himself and admits the error. Despite the justified criticism of his impulsiveness, he learns from his own mistakes. That is very rare, and perhaps is crucial to his continuing astonishing success.
The downside: it takes a very strong and well-prepared person to argue Elon out of a bad impulse. Ms. Shotwell has spoken to that issue. In some areas Elon seems to have largely avoided big errors. IMHO these have had strong, confident and competent people to prove the cases. Pretty clearly these include JB and Jerome.
There have not been equal qualities in evidence in customer service, parts distribution, sales and, probably, legal. Of course several of the most critical components needing improvement are those traditionally least susceptible to highly analytic proofs.
“Traditionally” is the crucial point. Predictive analytics in behavioral science and ‘the transportation problem’ have been advancing even more quickly than has been widely perceived. Frankly, these logistics and behavioral issues are vastly less sexy than are vehicle autonomy, interplanetary navigation and a few other topics. Tesla has had great difficulty applying these techniques to seemingly mundane customer service, production and distribution problems.
Were Elon capable of playing nicely with Jeff Bezos he might find out how to solve these problems. Amazon is case study number one fir how to make the most boring topics both exciting and soluble. Frankly, I think a strong dose of Amazon-think would rapidly cure the vast majority of serious Tesla problems. Then Elon could concentrate on the areas in which he is so wildly successful; solving seemingly-impossible problems. Amazon-think would let him escape the prison of mundane problems, the ones he cannot ‘outsmart’.
