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> My two cents is that Musk (being on the spectrum) is driven in a different way than Bezos (and therefore, being obsessive to a greater degree [1], making him

> My two cents is that Musk (being on the spectrum) is driven in a different way than Bezos (and therefore, being obsessive to a greater degree [1], making him more involved "on the ground", leading to SpaceX's success). My perspective, having watched multiple interviews of Elon and Bezos, is that Musk is just really passionate about tech. He's an engineer at heart, that's why he's directly involved in the development of the tech, which is central to all of his businesses. He's also a risk taker and a pioneer, he's not afraid of taking big risky bets on unproven technologies, he seems to actually enjoy doing that, and proving people wrong. Bezos, on the other hand, is passionate about business and making money. He would like to have the tech success that Musk has, but he doesn't have the vision and the interest in how exactly the tech works. Once he sees that something is going to be financially successful, he tries to copy it. Amazon is successful because it has good execution, economies of scale and competitive pricing, but it wasn't the first online retailer, or the first cloud provider, etc. I don't know if I would invest in Blue Origin. Personally, I think Rocket Lab is a much more interesting company (that is already trading on public markets). It's being led by someone who is genuinely passionate about space and has a proven orbital launch vehicle. I wish I could invest in SpaceX, but IMO Rocket Lab is the next best thing to invest in, a mini SpaceX.

deleted 5y ago
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CobrastanJorji 5y ago
> [Bezos] would like to have the tech success that Musk has, but he doesn't have the vision and the interest in how exactly the tech works. You can say a lot of bad things about Jeff Bezos, but confidently claiming that he lacks vision and interest in tech and blindly copies whatever works is...bold. Who was this "first cloud provider" if it wasn't Amazon?
- NOGDP 5y ago
  What kind of 'vision' and tech leadership did Bezos bring to AWS? Arguably none whatsoever.
  - bhupy 5y ago
    I recommend reading Steve Yegge's (in)famous "Platforms Rant". https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 The conventional understanding is that AWS was a top-down mandate by a prescient Bezos way ahead of its time, and that vision ultimately paid off.
    - foobarian 5y ago
      I never saw a corroborating, or adding more detail source for Yegge's post, and I wonder if this wasn't Bezos himself talking. I think someone put him up to it.
    - philwelch 5y ago
      The mandate Yegge alludes to in the “platforms rant” is to adopt a service-oriented architecture, not to build a cloud services provider.
    - NOGDP 5y ago
      This uncorroborated story is not 'conventional understanding'. It doesn't even demonstrate any link to AWS vision or architecture. Service oriented architectures existed years before this mythical memo and AWS didn't exist until years later. This memo reads like a Steve Jobs parody - just blatantly attributing all major tech and architectural decisions to Jeff's genius and foresight.
      - ra7 5y ago
        > just blatantly attributing all major tech and architectural decisions to Jeff's genius and foresight. In a thread that is attributing all of SpaceX and Tesla's technical achievements to Elon Musk's genius and foresight...
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    Bezos' API mandate declaration in 2002 shows remarkable vision and leadership. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
misiti3780 5y ago
This makes sense to me also, Bezos came out of finance to start Amazon, Musk always was an engineer.
neaanopri 5y ago
Yes Bezos is definitely passionate about business, and certainly as a business Amazon is 1 if not 2 orders of magnitude above Tesla or SpaceX. However, Bezos would not start a rocket company if he wasn't passionate about space. As the saying goes, the best way to make a million dollars in aerospace is to start with a billion.
- the-dude 5y ago
  Airline. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/richard_branson_452106 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/richard_branson_452106
deanCommie 5y ago
> or the first cloud provider, etc. This is just as uncharitable to Amazon as all those trashing Musk for his extracurricular Twitter activities are in dismissing his technical credibility. AWS was absolutely revolutionary with EC2 and S3 and Amazon was the first in every meaningful way here.
squeaky-clean 5y ago
Bezos has actually been preaching the same stuff about space as Musk since high school. Needing to get humanity off of earth and wanting to be the one to do it, etc etc. I only know this because he graduated from the same high school as me (20 years before me), and I did some googling one day. He was the class valedictorian, and while his entire speech isn't transcribed anywhere I know of, The Miami Herald quoted sentences from various high school valedictorian speeches as part of a graduation article, and Jeff Bezos has a few sentences in there. The Miami Herald archives for 1982 don't seem to be loading for me, but a CNBC article [0] has it quoted. > ″[Bezos] wants to build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting around the earth,” the Herald’s article says. > ″‘The whole idea is to preserve the earth,’” he said, according to the newspaper, which notes of Bezos that his “final objective is to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park.” It's interesting to me how he was saying this in 1982 but instead went down the path of banking and then eventually Amazon. Yeah Blue Origin was founded in 2000, but like everyone else here is quipping, what has it actually accomplished? I have no basis for this, but I feel like his goals were: 1) Become the richest person in the world. 2) Use my money to lead humanity to space. He doesn't seem to be as good at goal 2 as goal 1. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/amazon-jeff-bezos-proposed-colonizing-space-high-school-graduation-speech.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/amazon-jeff-bezos-proposed-c...

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CobrastanJorji 5y ago

> [Bezos] would like to have the tech success that Musk has, but he doesn't have the vision and the interest in how exactly the tech works. You can say a lot of bad things about Jeff Bezos, but confidently claiming that he lacks vision and interest in tech and blindly copies whatever works is...bold. Who was this "first cloud provider" if it wasn't Amazon?

NOGDP 5y ago
What kind of 'vision' and tech leadership did Bezos bring to AWS? Arguably none whatsoever.
- bhupy 5y ago
  I recommend reading Steve Yegge's (in)famous "Platforms Rant". https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 The conventional understanding is that AWS was a top-down mandate by a prescient Bezos way ahead of its time, and that vision ultimately paid off.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    I never saw a corroborating, or adding more detail source for Yegge's post, and I wonder if this wasn't Bezos himself talking. I think someone put him up to it.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    The mandate Yegge alludes to in the “platforms rant” is to adopt a service-oriented architecture, not to build a cloud services provider.
  - NOGDP 5y ago
    This uncorroborated story is not 'conventional understanding'. It doesn't even demonstrate any link to AWS vision or architecture. Service oriented architectures existed years before this mythical memo and AWS didn't exist until years later. This memo reads like a Steve Jobs parody - just blatantly attributing all major tech and architectural decisions to Jeff's genius and foresight.
    - ra7 5y ago
      > just blatantly attributing all major tech and architectural decisions to Jeff's genius and foresight. In a thread that is attributing all of SpaceX and Tesla's technical achievements to Elon Musk's genius and foresight...
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  Bezos' API mandate declaration in 2002 shows remarkable vision and leadership. https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611 https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611

misiti3780 5y ago

This makes sense to me also, Bezos came out of finance to start Amazon, Musk always was an engineer.

neaanopri 5y ago

Yes Bezos is definitely passionate about business, and certainly as a business Amazon is 1 if not 2 orders of magnitude above Tesla or SpaceX. However, Bezos would not start a rocket company if he wasn't passionate about space. As the saying goes, the best way to make a million dollars in aerospace is to start with a billion.

the-dude 5y ago
Airline. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/richard_branson_452106 https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/richard_branson_452106

deanCommie 5y ago

> or the first cloud provider, etc. This is just as uncharitable to Amazon as all those trashing Musk for his extracurricular Twitter activities are in dismissing his technical credibility. AWS was absolutely revolutionary with EC2 and S3 and Amazon was the first in every meaningful way here.

squeaky-clean 5y ago

Bezos has actually been preaching the same stuff about space as Musk since high school. Needing to get humanity off of earth and wanting to be the one to do it, etc etc. I only know this because he graduated from the same high school as me (20 years before me), and I did some googling one day. He was the class valedictorian, and while his entire speech isn't transcribed anywhere I know of, The Miami Herald quoted sentences from various high school valedictorian speeches as part of a graduation article, and Jeff Bezos has a few sentences in there. The Miami Herald archives for 1982 don't seem to be loading for me, but a CNBC article [0] has it quoted. > ″[Bezos] wants to build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts and colonies for two or three million people orbiting around the earth,” the Herald’s article says. > ″‘The whole idea is to preserve the earth,’” he said, according to the newspaper, which notes of Bezos that his “final objective is to get all people off the earth and see it turned into a huge national park.” It's interesting to me how he was saying this in 1982 but instead went down the path of banking and then eventually Amazon. Yeah Blue Origin was founded in 2000, but like everyone else here is quipping, what has it actually accomplished? I have no basis for this, but I feel like his goals were: 1) Become the richest person in the world. 2) Use my money to lead humanity to space. He doesn't seem to be as good at goal 2 as goal 1. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/amazon-jeff-bezos-proposed-colonizing-space-high-school-graduation-speech.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/31/amazon-jeff-bezos-proposed-c...