This comparison is flat out ridiculous. Jobs returned to Apple 10 years before the iPhone and launched a series of successful and profitable products: iMac, iP

This comparison is flat out ridiculous. Jobs returned to Apple 10 years before the iPhone and launched a series of successful and profitable products: iMac, iPod, and iTunes leveraging an existing rabid fanbase, and putting them in prime position to design and launch a category changer like the iPhone. I'm not particularly impressed with Musk or Tesla, but you can't compare bootstrapping an automobile company to leveraging a decades-old vertically integrated consumer electronics behemoth to disrupt UX in a $1000 hand-held device. The financial crisis was probably the optimal time to launch such a product.