the investment and technology communities need someone like musk to think of outlandish ideas, get them financed and convert them from science fiction to reality. the electric car was dead pre-musk. solar power was boring pre-musk. musk drums up excitement from consumers which makes financing his ideas easier.
please don’t compare musk to jobs. musk has done so much more for his companies than jobs has. jobs helped market something that was unique-ish (it was inevitable and really only an iteration of things already in existence) and required very little effort to sell. our world would be little different if apple’s products never existed as the natural progression of the industry would’ve moved in that direction with 100% certainty. musk took something nobody wanted and made it attractive, single handedly. musk will change the way we live markedly, and single handedly. jobs was apart of an industry that was evolving together. he did not drive the industry anywhere. the industry drove him.
i’m unsure whether i’d buy TSLA at this point, mostly due to the capex requirements over the next three years, but TSLA stock will do just fine so long as it can continue to access cheap capital.
PA thinks Steve Jobs was a miracle man instead of a good salesman, thats really all you need to know about this topic. Thats said I wouldnt touch Tesla long or short with a 10 foot pole. Why go into such a volatile name when the range of outcomes is so wide and hard to handicap?
A friend of mine does high end body work and paint. He recently did a new Tesla, which he said was one of the first in the nation to get a paint job from someone who isn’t affiliated. He mentioned that there were a lot of minor defects that I’d never notice, but made it a huge pain to do a quality job. Sounds like their assembly line is low quality based on his experience
Simply no comparison between the fit and finish of any other high end car and a Tesla. Tesla is way behind. Hell, drive a Buick Regal followed by a Tesla. The acceleration of Tesla will wow, but once you get over that your senses will surprise you.
By putting touch screens in the hands of billions of humans, Steve Jobs did more than Elon Musk has ever done. Yes, Jobs was a great salesman, but he also had the vision and dictatorial grip over the company to keep pushing them to invest in risky new products.
Musk’s primary contribution is Tesla, which is a great story, but doesn’t really change the EV landscape in the long run. They might have forced other car companies to accelerate their development of EV cars, but the ultimate product and technology will be comparable. Tesla is a success (so far), but nowhere near the scale of iPhone.
all i know is that if steve jobs is great, mike lazaridis is the greatest ever. if jobs pushing for mass adoption of a touch screen phone is so highly revered (although a touch screen phone already existed), shouldn’t we revere mike lazaridis for basically creating the smartphone AND pushing for mass adoption out of constant pure innovation and trial and error? the blackberry was so novel that no other phone could replicate it for years. the iphone is entirely replicated and was simply taking the blackberry screen, upsizing it, and booting the keyboard. jobs helped push an shift in the smartphone market. lazaridis created the smartphone market.
fyi, i don’t worship lazaridis, it’s just that jobs is incredibly overrated.
musk has already done far more than jobs and he is 16 years younger. you may not comprehend this yet, but musk is basically enabling the self-driving car revolution all himself. self-driving cars require electric cars so musk single handedly making electric cars feasible, he is in turn enabling the greatest productivity boost mankind has ever seen and will be personally responsible for saving millions of lives every year.
Musk is at least a real engineer who can design. All Jobs can do is say if he likes how something looks, they are really not comparable at all. Obviously at the levels Tesla/SpaceX are operating I cant imagine Musk being that involved in design anymore but he is capable. Steve Wozniack is more important to tech people than Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs is clearly one of the great marketing minds of the passed century. The only real comparison would be a conversation about who was the bigger POS in their personal life, apparently Jobs & Musk are/were both a complete mess and treated their families pretty poorly.
I have noticed America tends to love these stories of these leaders who willed their way through to make what they dreamed happen. In reality it doesnt work like that, touch screen phones existed before Apple, one would have popped up at some point in the late 2000’s by a competitor either way. Its not like Apple invented the tech, they just stylized it (which isnt to diminish what they did) but much like with science/technology most discoveries and products stand on the backs of others before them. Who knows what would have happened with Einstein if there werent centuries of scientific discovery before him leading him to his conclusions.
Why does it matter if Steve Jobs himself engineered Apple devices? Any number of Indians could put together the device. However, no one did until Steve Jobs told them to. Leaders in society are the ones that push people in a specific direction. It is very possible that we would be using Blackberry type phones today without Steve Jobs. Even if touchscreen technology existed, someone had to popularize it. It doesn’t matter how good Napolean was at shooting guns. What mattered is how he directed people to serve his vision.
Do yourselves a favor and read “The Rational Optimist” by Ridley. Yeah, I’ve pumped the book before, but one day I’m going to see a post, “Shit, I should have read that sooner.” Innovation is exploding. The pace that information is being shared is mind boggling. Odds are that we will continue to innovate ourselves out of any global “problems” that we may have. The lone genius has been and will continue to be relatively irrelevant. Richard Whitcomb saw trans-sonic flow before it could be modeled, but if he had died young, we still would have supersonic airplanes today. No doubt.
Yes, but the fact remains that someone had to effect that change, and that person still deserves recognition. If Obama was not born, someone else would be President, but we still memorialize Obama’s work, because he was the actual guy. Influence is measured by what a person has actually done, not by what a hypothetical person might have done in a different reality.
The fact of the matter is, even if Jobs was not the only person to envision an iPhone world, he was the primary figure in realizing this vision. He created the most valuable company in the world, and the whole technology world has been molded according to his legacy. To deny that Jobs was one of the most influential figures in this generation is to be blind to reality. Certainly, what he did exceeds what Musk has done (that is the original question).
so jobs pushing for a ubiquitous touchscreen phone a couple of years early is more influential than musk pushing for electric and self-driving cars several years if not decades early? a touch screen phone will be more influential in history than self-driving cars? are you actually being serious right now? musk’s actions will literally save tens of millions of lives cumulatively on top of adding trillions in economic benefit and efficiencies. musk’s actions will likely lead to a 10%+ improvement in average income and a monster boost to average wealth. musk’s actions are also tilting economic influence back to north america and away from asia. jobs’s actions had the opposite effect.
I don’t think Musk is that overrated. I think he deserves credit for seeing the potential in electric cars and how they could be better than conventional ICE powered automobiles and making that a reality. Nobody else did that. (Something we sorely need to move away from fossil fuels). His SpaceX stuff is not exceptional, he’s basically doing what Lockheed used to do (when America was great).
Now Elizabeth Holmes on the other hand…she should be in prison.
