This is I think the case mostly for bad leaders. Good leaders share credit and take the blame. This is why your examples are good ones. Elon isn’t responsible for the site instability, that was the old management that allowed bad infrastructure (neverminding Elon firing 80% of the staff, only retaining those held hostage by their H1B, everyone with the slightest clue knowing that was inevitable, and that previous to Elon’s management twitter had been rock solid for 5-10 years.) It’s not Trump’s fault the economy crashed, unemployment went through the roof, supply chains fell apart, that was all COVID! Which of course had nothing to do with his complete and utter mismanagement of it in spite of having a playbook literally written for him. But he will take 100% credit for operation lightspeed, which he apparently came up with all by himself in between genius ideas like shoving a light bulb up your ass, drinking bleach, or just closing your eyes and putting your fingers in your ears and going “la la la” because the real problem was that we testing for COVID, not that COVID existed and was killing people.
It’s something I am honestly surprised that people don’t see through immediately. I have a massively, and I can’t overstate this enough, massively less important role, and this behavior wouldn’t be tolerated. If I went to my boss and said something like “I’m sorry we missed the numbers this quarter, Johnson really fucked me” I’d probably be fired right there. Good leaders have to own their decisions. If you empower someone who fucks up, it’s still your fuck up. If a toddler shoots someone, you don’t go “man that kid really should know gun safety” you say “wow which adult was entirely irresponsible/negligent?”
The only value high level leaders provide is in the decision making, and they own all of them. Like, no one on earth is or ever will be qualified to be president. You have to be an expert in fields it takes people entire lifetimes to be good at. Your job is to assemble a team of experts and smart people, and hopefully when they present you with different options you choose the best one. But you the leader still choose, and that’s the whole role. If you also want to abdicate responsibility, literally what is the point of CEOs? Especially ones paid a few bajillion dollars more than the rest of us?