This Email From Elon Musk to Tesla Employees Describes What Great Communication Looks Like

What Mr. Musk says is correct and that should be the policy in most of the companies. However, it may work for Tesla because they actually recruit smart and bright candidates as against 'mass' recruitment done by most of the companies that I've seen. When you've a lot of fresh graduates working for you, the key people in the company are going to be 'wasting' majority of their time in 'answering' stupidest of the questions.

PS: I've seen this happening. I think some things are better left for companies that must recruit smartest of the engineers. Just my opinion though.

I agree.
I see in today's express there is an item about closure of 800 engineering colleges in India. There was also some opinions expressed about what should be done. It was suggested that students should do internships in the last two years with full vigor so that they could get absorbed into those industries instead of through the mass campus recruitment route.
There is an unsavory story I heard through a senior person in one of the institutes. He told me that some of the big companies doing campus interviews avoid his institute since it did not pay the bribe asked for by the HR lot responsible for recruitment of these companies. They were picking up very average students from those institutes that paid the maximum.
That granted, it is also true that many of the established (mostly family owned) companies do have a highly hierarchical system of communication.

Bribing is commonplace. The placement agencies bribe the HR managers so that their candidates are preferred. The placement agencies charge insane amount to the candidates and that's how even the stupidest of the guys get placed. The only loser in the game is the company; that relies on the HRs to recruit candidates.

When it comes to Tesla, I'm assuming they still are a relatively smaller company and the hierarchy is flat. It's therefore possible for them to have engineers talk to the most relevant person to get the problem solved or make the idea heard.

Not sure if the bigger IT companies can even think of it. The CEO would end up getting complaints all the about managers and HRs for bad appraisals. 😀