Wow, you think his ability is straight performance optimisation? A big part of his early fame was from doing research to find good algorithms to achieve his goals. He also had that stint in real time control systems... flying hovering rockets before spaceX even existed.

He's a problem solver with a strong ability to sift through possible solutions for what actually works, and quite capable of devising his own solutions when is research comes up empty.

But yeah, he can write assembler too.