Tesla seems like a company where people would place a premium on being a direct employee, vs. another organization. I'd certainly feel more 'pride' in saying "I work for Tesla" than "I work for X" for almost all non-SpaceX or tiny-startup values of X, and that's probably generally held by people who would contract for Tesla.
Tesla is doing more innovation than the median tech company, and probably more than the 95th percentile. Plus, it's a consumer-understandable product, so you could "explain what you do at a dinner party" to someone outside of the domain.
"Engineer at Tesla" beats "engineer at IBM" but probably is socially inferior to "radiation oncologist".
Obviously status is to some extent subjective and culturally/individually determined, but there's broad agreement that certain jobs are higher status than others by various groups of people.
