8 ms·

Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs. He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract an

by mrkd 10y ago

Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs. He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract and keep talent at Apple with out a leader like Steve Jobs.

bitwize 10y ago
I see Musk as more of a Bushnell/Woz hybrid. He knows his shit technically, which is why good people want to work with him. Jobs knew how to delegate knowing his technical shit to others though.
- yardie 10y ago
  Jobs wrote the Atari game brick breaker. So like Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk he does have a technical background.
  - valleyer 10y ago
    As the story goes, Wozniak was actually the primary (or maybe even sole?) implementer on that project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...
  - yincrash 10y ago
    Not really. He was contracted to do it, but subbed all the actual engineering work to Wozniak then essentially lied to Wozniak about how much that work was worth.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...
    - yardie 10y ago
      My mistake. I was under the impression it was another game, asteroids.
  - tyingq 10y ago
    Pretty sure Woz wrote Breakout, with er ... "assistance" from Jobs.
- chc 10y ago
  Steve Jobs' contributions came from from his leadership and marketing chops, but he also had pretty good technical knowledge for a CEO. I mean, he got his start designing circuit boards at Atari.
  - simonh 10y ago
    Jobs was a true polymath. He knew enough about hardware design, software engineering, typography, music, pretty much any relevant subject that he could work well with experts in those fields and synthesise their efforts together into whole products.
  - jnbiche 10y ago
    Well, he got his start passing of Woz's circuit board designs as his own at Atari. Even he conceded that. I do think his technical knowledge was probably higher than most give him credit for, however.
- nikcub 10y ago
  A lot of his best insights required technical knowledge - adopting Ethernet, SCSI, Mach kernels, BSD userland, object oriented programming, Postscript, TrueType fonts, WebObjects (and Java server, while ditching it on the client), html5 (over Flash)
  - flukus 10y ago
    Were they his personally formed insights or did they come from talking to the right people?
    - geodel 10y ago
      Even then it would be 'known unknowns' to him as compared 'unknown unknowns'. It is big deal considering we just saw Marissa Meyer who was at center of creation of a web scale system proved out of depth at slightly different web scale system.
dmix 10y ago
It's also the stages of companies. Apple is in very much a "maintain the working business model" phase, especially with the current management. I'm not in a position to say they are wrong for doing so given they've continued to grow and now make as much money as ExxonMobil but with far better profit margins. While Tesla is still on the upward rocket phase while they are still figuring out their product/market. Much more exciting for the type of talent who are looking to make a big impact on the world. Steve Jobs brought that life back into Apple when he rejoined and maintained that environment through various product launches over many years. I'm not sure I'd want them to still pretend they are the same company or not, rather they should work on the talent they have. Just like how basketball teams rebuild after losing their star players, you rebuild around new talent instead of clinging on to past glory.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Exactly, Apple is to microcomputing what Tesla is to green power and vehicles. We'll see in 10 years after Musk is fired from Tesla by John Sculley.
  - sah2ed 10y ago
    > We'll see in 10 years after Musk is fired from Tesla by John Sculley. I know you are being facetious, but similar to Jobs, Musk got ousted as CEO from his first and second companies: Zip2 [1] and PayPal [2]. [1] Vance, Ashley (2015). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, p72. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal
    - agumonkey 10y ago
      Heh, I forgot that. But we all know these were really insignificant compared to his later ventures.
celticninja 10y ago
I think Elon Musk is what Steve Jobs wanted to be. Steve Jobs thought he was changing the world with the iPhone, and while it was new it wasn't world changing. What Elon Musk does is world changing.
- chx 10y ago
  If you think the iPhone didn't change the world, you need to take a second look.
- madeofpalk 10y ago
  iPhone wasnt world changing? I mean sure, you could make the argument that if it wasnt Apple with the iPhone it would have been someone else, but it's undeniably daft to think that the iPhone didn't lead to a complete change in not only consumer electronics (mobile phones), but also so many services around it. It's well documented that Android was going to be Blackberry-ish, then they pivoted to be iPhone-ish after the original iPhone announcement. Think the App Store and things like Uber, which exist primarily as mobile apps.
  - skeletonjelly 10y ago
    Interested to see your sources on this. I was under the impression Android started first but Apple beat them to the announcement
    - sosborn 10y ago
      http://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_prototype_revealed_during_google_oracle_trial.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_proto...
    - fossuser 10y ago
      I had read they had a "Dream" android phone prototype they were working on that was blackberry like [1]. There was also rumored to be a second one that was more iPhone like slated for down the line, but when the Apple demo happened Google immediately scrapped their blackberry like phone and the second one became the first. Interesting that Google recognized the importance and adapted quickly while Ballmer laughed it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U [1]: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-original-google-phone-presented-in-2006 http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-origi...
jksmith 10y ago
Funny you mention that. Apple will crash if they don't get a serious personality cult back in there. Even that probably won't save them. Plus Musk is not the same brilliant, simple communicator that Jobs was.
- afterdad 10y ago
  Why is it funny that he mentions that?
  - tawaycozstoned 10y ago
    Second that. I get the different opinions, but why is it funny (the downvoting implies that it was funny). I can for 100% assure that I only nitpick because I want to understand the logical reasoning for down-voting and are scared that I am too high to understand the meaning of the phrase "It's funny you mention that". I am not a native speaker, but I know all the words, heard it in English and there exists a translation into my language and the interpretation is the same for both, so long story short ... why is it funny?
    - pvg 10y ago
      http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/funny-ha-ha-or-funny-peculiar http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/funny-...
      - tawaycozstoned 10y ago
        So there are 2 meanings, and I read it "funny peculiar". But why is it "funny peculiar"? I think it is right to say Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs (as in "most popular tech/computer-stuff person for the public"), so working for Tesla has some kind of "coolness" factor and they have good marketing and might beat Google's self-driving endeavors simply via time-to-market (similar to IPhone). But why is that funny (haha) or funny (strange)? If they can build a self-driving car for the masses Elon Musk will be the uber-tech guy for a whole generation, and Tesla seen as one of the good guys with cool tech.
xenadu02 10y ago
Perhaps you're reading too much into things? Chris Lattner has been at Apple for over 11 years. He shepherded LLVM, Clang, lldb, and Swift. All while climbing the ranks to Director. A huge number of engineers would simply be ready to think about and do something different after that much time. You might say that Elon answers "Why Tesla?" but in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?". (I have no inside knowledge, I've just been in the industry long enough to have gone through this myself).
- CamperBob2 10y ago
  ... in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?". Seems obvious, doesn't it? Nothing interesting going on. Under Jobs, terms like "courage" and "innovation" used to mean something, like kicking sand in the face of the entire mobile phone industry and competing against their own bestselling product. Tim Cook's idea of "courage" involves selecting a headphone jack in a CAD tool and hitting the Delete key. And "innovation" means late nights at the office pushing the limits of dongle engineering.
  - 123jay7 10y ago
    > kicking sand in the face of the entire mobile phone industryt You know, it takes years if not decades to invent a product like the iPhone. You can't just say "Oh, Apple used to make iPhones, what has Tim Cook invented?". Like, give it some time, man.
  - webjprgm 10y ago
    My guess is that Apple was a vehicle to further his compiler and programming language plans. Now that he has done that, it becomes more mundane maintenance and incremental changes. So it is time to move on to a new challenge.
  - rimantas 10y ago
    Apple still has the best CPU on mobile. But that does not count for those who cannot see past a headphone jack.
- sulam 10y ago
Waterluvian 10y ago
But unlike Steve Jobs, he's an engineer. My favourite bosses were engineers first.
mtgx 10y ago
This is why I think Apple missed its chance to buy Tesla and make Elon Musk its CEO at the same time. I can't even imagine what Musk would do with Apple's $200 billion in cash. I think he would've been much more daring with that money than even Steve Jobs would've been. But I think Apple missed its shot, and the merger of Tesla and Solar City probably sealed that for good. Now Musk is probably already seeing a 10-20x larger combined Tesla/Solar City company in his head, 10 years from now, and a potential merger with a bigger Space X as well. So from his point of view, it probably won't be worth it anymore for him. He would probably have to take over a declining iPhone market and deal with that at the same time as dealing with explosive growth at Tesla and an imminent launch of SpaceX' big rocket to Mars. On the other hand there would be hundreds of billions of dollars he could get access to, so I wouldn't say it's impossible to happen anymore either. However, at least to me, this would only be interesting from the "let's give Musk unlimited money and see what he can do wit it" point of view. Otherwise, I would rather see Tesla/SpaceX be on their own, than join an Apple/Tesla/SpaceX megacorp.
- RivieraKid 10y ago
  That's a really good point, what would Musk do with $200 billions. It's questionable if he would be the profit-maximizing CEO choice for Apple though. Perhaps he wouldn't even want the job (if we ignore the cash), because the smartphone and computer industry is maturing, i.e. tougher competition, decreasing rate of innovation, maintenance mode ahead.
- Inconel 10y ago
  I'd be curious what that level of money would do to the culture at SpaceX. I work here as a tech and I get the impression from top to bottom that a big part of the overall culture centers around doing things as inexpensively as possible, largely out of necessity. People here genuinely get excited when we find ways to shave off even small amounts of waste. I'm not knowledgable enough about the psychological/sociological aspects of this but I wonder if it's possible to maintain that kind of culture when you have $200 billion sitting in the bank. It might lead to a kind of resource curse that some countries suffer from. I wonder if there have been studies done on this at the corporate level.
Steko 10y ago
> He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. This is a convenient narrative when Tesla makes a high profile hire but they've also lost a lot of talented engineers and I don't remember the convention wisdom being that it was because of Elon's shortcomings.
- yellowbeard 10y ago
  Who left and why?
pkaye 10y ago
How does Telsa compensation compare to Apple?
ksec 10y ago
Inspirational? People keep saying this but I cant see it. He has inspirational "ideas", but a person? At least not behind a screen and when he is doing demo. And for the iPhone Vs Electric Car comparison. Oh well may be i am old school, if BMW or other Car makers made a Electric Car ( assuming we have to choose a e-car ) i would choose them over Tesla any day. The interior quality of Tesla just dont compare well. The iPhone was truly a revolutionary product, in that many people tried smartphone before but they have ALL FAILED. This is speaking from someone who has used pretty much all smart phone prior to iPhone introduction. If anything i say the difference is Elon Musk lack of taste.

by mrkd 10y ago

bitwize 10y ago

I see Musk as more of a Bushnell/Woz hybrid. He knows his shit technically, which is why good people want to work with him. Jobs knew how to delegate knowing his technical shit to others though.

yardie 10y ago
Jobs wrote the Atari game brick breaker. So like Gates, Zuckerberg, and Musk he does have a technical background.
- valleyer 10y ago
  As the story goes, Wozniak was actually the primary (or maybe even sole?) implementer on that project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...
- yincrash 10y ago
  Not really. He was contracted to do it, but subbed all the actual engineering work to Wozniak then essentially lied to Wozniak about how much that work was worth.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_and_development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...
  - yardie 10y ago
    My mistake. I was under the impression it was another game, asteroids.
- tyingq 10y ago
  Pretty sure Woz wrote Breakout, with er ... "assistance" from Jobs.
chc 10y ago
Steve Jobs' contributions came from from his leadership and marketing chops, but he also had pretty good technical knowledge for a CEO. I mean, he got his start designing circuit boards at Atari.
- simonh 10y ago
  Jobs was a true polymath. He knew enough about hardware design, software engineering, typography, music, pretty much any relevant subject that he could work well with experts in those fields and synthesise their efforts together into whole products.
- jnbiche 10y ago
  Well, he got his start passing of Woz's circuit board designs as his own at Atari. Even he conceded that. I do think his technical knowledge was probably higher than most give him credit for, however.
nikcub 10y ago
A lot of his best insights required technical knowledge - adopting Ethernet, SCSI, Mach kernels, BSD userland, object oriented programming, Postscript, TrueType fonts, WebObjects (and Java server, while ditching it on the client), html5 (over Flash)
- flukus 10y ago
  Were they his personally formed insights or did they come from talking to the right people?
  - geodel 10y ago
    Even then it would be 'known unknowns' to him as compared 'unknown unknowns'. It is big deal considering we just saw Marissa Meyer who was at center of creation of a web scale system proved out of depth at slightly different web scale system.

dmix 10y ago

It's also the stages of companies. Apple is in very much a "maintain the working business model" phase, especially with the current management. I'm not in a position to say they are wrong for doing so given they've continued to grow and now make as much money as ExxonMobil but with far better profit margins. While Tesla is still on the upward rocket phase while they are still figuring out their product/market. Much more exciting for the type of talent who are looking to make a big impact on the world. Steve Jobs brought that life back into Apple when he rejoined and maintained that environment through various product launches over many years. I'm not sure I'd want them to still pretend they are the same company or not, rather they should work on the talent they have. Just like how basketball teams rebuild after losing their star players, you rebuild around new talent instead of clinging on to past glory.

agumonkey 10y ago
Exactly, Apple is to microcomputing what Tesla is to green power and vehicles. We'll see in 10 years after Musk is fired from Tesla by John Sculley.
- sah2ed 10y ago
  > We'll see in 10 years after Musk is fired from Tesla by John Sculley. I know you are being facetious, but similar to Jobs, Musk got ousted as CEO from his first and second companies: Zip2 [1] and PayPal [2]. [1] Vance, Ashley (2015). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, p72. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Heh, I forgot that. But we all know these were really insignificant compared to his later ventures.

celticninja 10y ago

I think Elon Musk is what Steve Jobs wanted to be. Steve Jobs thought he was changing the world with the iPhone, and while it was new it wasn't world changing. What Elon Musk does is world changing.

chx 10y ago
If you think the iPhone didn't change the world, you need to take a second look.
madeofpalk 10y ago
iPhone wasnt world changing? I mean sure, you could make the argument that if it wasnt Apple with the iPhone it would have been someone else, but it's undeniably daft to think that the iPhone didn't lead to a complete change in not only consumer electronics (mobile phones), but also so many services around it. It's well documented that Android was going to be Blackberry-ish, then they pivoted to be iPhone-ish after the original iPhone announcement. Think the App Store and things like Uber, which exist primarily as mobile apps.
- skeletonjelly 10y ago
  Interested to see your sources on this. I was under the impression Android started first but Apple beat them to the announcement
  - sosborn 10y ago
    http://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_prototype_revealed_during_google_oracle_trial.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_proto...
  - fossuser 10y ago
    I had read they had a "Dream" android phone prototype they were working on that was blackberry like [1]. There was also rumored to be a second one that was more iPhone like slated for down the line, but when the Apple demo happened Google immediately scrapped their blackberry like phone and the second one became the first. Interesting that Google recognized the importance and adapted quickly while Ballmer laughed it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U [1]: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-original-google-phone-presented-in-2006 http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-origi...

jksmith 10y ago

Funny you mention that. Apple will crash if they don't get a serious personality cult back in there. Even that probably won't save them. Plus Musk is not the same brilliant, simple communicator that Jobs was.

afterdad 10y ago
Why is it funny that he mentions that?
- tawaycozstoned 10y ago
  Second that. I get the different opinions, but why is it funny (the downvoting implies that it was funny). I can for 100% assure that I only nitpick because I want to understand the logical reasoning for down-voting and are scared that I am too high to understand the meaning of the phrase "It's funny you mention that". I am not a native speaker, but I know all the words, heard it in English and there exists a translation into my language and the interpretation is the same for both, so long story short ... why is it funny?
  - pvg 10y ago
    http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/funny-ha-ha-or-funny-peculiar http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/funny-...
    - tawaycozstoned 10y ago
      So there are 2 meanings, and I read it "funny peculiar". But why is it "funny peculiar"? I think it is right to say Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs (as in "most popular tech/computer-stuff person for the public"), so working for Tesla has some kind of "coolness" factor and they have good marketing and might beat Google's self-driving endeavors simply via time-to-market (similar to IPhone). But why is that funny (haha) or funny (strange)? If they can build a self-driving car for the masses Elon Musk will be the uber-tech guy for a whole generation, and Tesla seen as one of the good guys with cool tech.

xenadu02 10y ago

Perhaps you're reading too much into things? Chris Lattner has been at Apple for over 11 years. He shepherded LLVM, Clang, lldb, and Swift. All while climbing the ranks to Director. A huge number of engineers would simply be ready to think about and do something different after that much time. You might say that Elon answers "Why Tesla?" but in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?". (I have no inside knowledge, I've just been in the industry long enough to have gone through this myself).

CamperBob2 10y ago
... in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?". Seems obvious, doesn't it? Nothing interesting going on. Under Jobs, terms like "courage" and "innovation" used to mean something, like kicking sand in the face of the entire mobile phone industry and competing against their own bestselling product. Tim Cook's idea of "courage" involves selecting a headphone jack in a CAD tool and hitting the Delete key. And "innovation" means late nights at the office pushing the limits of dongle engineering.
- 123jay7 10y ago
  > kicking sand in the face of the entire mobile phone industryt You know, it takes years if not decades to invent a product like the iPhone. You can't just say "Oh, Apple used to make iPhones, what has Tim Cook invented?". Like, give it some time, man.
- webjprgm 10y ago
  My guess is that Apple was a vehicle to further his compiler and programming language plans. Now that he has done that, it becomes more mundane maintenance and incremental changes. So it is time to move on to a new challenge.
- rimantas 10y ago
  Apple still has the best CPU on mobile. But that does not count for those who cannot see past a headphone jack.
sulam 10y ago

Waterluvian 10y ago

But unlike Steve Jobs, he's an engineer. My favourite bosses were engineers first.

mtgx 10y ago

This is why I think Apple missed its chance to buy Tesla and make Elon Musk its CEO at the same time. I can't even imagine what Musk would do with Apple's $200 billion in cash. I think he would've been much more daring with that money than even Steve Jobs would've been. But I think Apple missed its shot, and the merger of Tesla and Solar City probably sealed that for good. Now Musk is probably already seeing a 10-20x larger combined Tesla/Solar City company in his head, 10 years from now, and a potential merger with a bigger Space X as well. So from his point of view, it probably won't be worth it anymore for him. He would probably have to take over a declining iPhone market and deal with that at the same time as dealing with explosive growth at Tesla and an imminent launch of SpaceX' big rocket to Mars. On the other hand there would be hundreds of billions of dollars he could get access to, so I wouldn't say it's impossible to happen anymore either. However, at least to me, this would only be interesting from the "let's give Musk unlimited money and see what he can do wit it" point of view. Otherwise, I would rather see Tesla/SpaceX be on their own, than join an Apple/Tesla/SpaceX megacorp.

RivieraKid 10y ago
That's a really good point, what would Musk do with $200 billions. It's questionable if he would be the profit-maximizing CEO choice for Apple though. Perhaps he wouldn't even want the job (if we ignore the cash), because the smartphone and computer industry is maturing, i.e. tougher competition, decreasing rate of innovation, maintenance mode ahead.
Inconel 10y ago
I'd be curious what that level of money would do to the culture at SpaceX. I work here as a tech and I get the impression from top to bottom that a big part of the overall culture centers around doing things as inexpensively as possible, largely out of necessity. People here genuinely get excited when we find ways to shave off even small amounts of waste. I'm not knowledgable enough about the psychological/sociological aspects of this but I wonder if it's possible to maintain that kind of culture when you have $200 billion sitting in the bank. It might lead to a kind of resource curse that some countries suffer from. I wonder if there have been studies done on this at the corporate level.

Steko 10y ago

> He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. This is a convenient narrative when Tesla makes a high profile hire but they've also lost a lot of talented engineers and I don't remember the convention wisdom being that it was because of Elon's shortcomings.

yellowbeard 10y ago
Who left and why?

pkaye 10y ago

How does Telsa compensation compare to Apple?

ksec 10y ago

Inspirational? People keep saying this but I cant see it. He has inspirational "ideas", but a person? At least not behind a screen and when he is doing demo. And for the iPhone Vs Electric Car comparison. Oh well may be i am old school, if BMW or other Car makers made a Electric Car ( assuming we have to choose a e-car ) i would choose them over Tesla any day. The interior quality of Tesla just dont compare well. The iPhone was truly a revolutionary product, in that many people tried smartphone before but they have ALL FAILED. This is speaking from someone who has used pretty much all smart phone prior to iPhone introduction. If anything i say the difference is Elon Musk lack of taste.