It's not all ideas, but an ideas guy is a necessary but insufficient condition for the ultra talented "do-ers" to do their amazing things. Elon could have bought a big chunk of Google or apple if he wanted to with all his wealth and just generated nice returns, but t we probably wouldn't have boosters that return to land and can be reused if he did.
Musk essentially was the A series, which led to him becoming the chairman and majority owner of the 7 month old company, which at that point just had a handful of guys. He ended up dismissing the original founders of the company before production began on their first product.
Their impact on the Roadster is debatable. Their impact on Tesla, as a whole, is effectively zero.
You can still do that. Just "electric battery car" was not a novel idea in 2003.
Jobs was viewed as the idea guy when he went back to apple, and it wouldn't have been really different if that was his first time there instead of returning.
