Not really true. Tesla is at the forefront of applying machine learning in real-world settings. It's definitely not unrelated to science, in my opinion. If autonomous driving in 2020 is on the timetable, Karpathy (Head of AI) is probably confident that it is possible. Musk is very aggressive on timelines (but always wraps it in "it is probable that", which to him is cautious but to which translates to almost certainly in newspapers), but from what I know, he has delivered most promises (which he sees more as projection of previous trends), albeit a little late.
There's probably some real science happening behind the scenes, experimenting with ML algorithms (Karpathy is certainly up to it). But the challenge of getting it to work sufficiently well in the real world isn't science, it's engineering. Meeting schedules isn't science, it's management. And so on. "Believing in science" has nothing to do with believing musk will or will not succeed, and I think you would find the vast majority of people who think he will succeed (me included if you don't mind late) don't attribute it to "because science".
I don't see the line between science and engineering as clearly as you do, apparently. Is CERN a science or engineering project? Drug design? Genuinely curious what qualifies as science. Seeing some articles, it's not the quality. Applied vs. fundamental also seems like a difficult line to actually draw.
Edit: Especially in ML, a large part of the research is done in companies.
Science is about discovering things via experiments and observations about the world, engineering is about making things that work. There is a tiny bit of overlap.
CERN is a gigantic engineering project used to do a bit of science. Experimenting with different concrete mixes to find one with a set of qualities is science used to let you do some engineering. OpenAI's dota bots are the sort of thing that might fall in the overlap of both discovering things and making things that work.
Maybe more to the point, "believing in science" means "believing that those experiments and observations reveal true facts", which has nothing to do with whether or not we believe Musk will succeed at his self driving car ambitions.
