It really depends on your use case. My Titan's MediaTek is enough for me as I don't do super intensive tasks on it. In a pinch it does the job. If I'm away and need to quickly SSH into my servers, I can do that, no problem. I can make calls and text people and it has a huge battery. Right now it's as de-googled as it can get with the stock ROM.
The drawback is that due to the wonky 1:1 aspect ratio display, a lot of apps either have bugs or bad usability, because they were created for taller scrrens. To me, it doesn't matter, as I cut down on smartphone usage and just have a handful of apps.
It has always been despite him. There are some brilliant people at SpaceX which made eveything from Falcon Heavy to Starlink to Dragon possible.
They needed to keep Musk distracted so he didn't interfere with operations too much.