Often, when people talk of Jobs' reality distortion field, they refer to how he made you feel when you were in the same room as him, and he was talking to you.

Often, when people talk of Jobs' reality distortion field, they refer to how he made you feel when you were in the same room as him, and he was talking to you. About how even if what he was asking seemed impossible from a technical point of view, as an engineer or designer or manager you couldn't say no to him, and in the end ended up being swayed by his arguments. Or how no matter what your intentions were, he'd be able to change your mind (e.g. http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Are_You_Gonna_Do_It.txt http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Are_You_Gonna_Do_...). The media has then completely changed the meaning of "reality distortion field" to turn it into a self fulfilling prophecy of sorts - "Steve said it and we're convinced because he has the reality distortion field". But in that case, we're just watching a video of a keynote - there is no "reality distortion field, and thus he has a reality distortion field". As humans, we like being convinced and believing in fantastic, out-of-this-workld things - the latter form of the RDF is solely in the eye of the beholder. I've never worked with Elon Musk nor do I know anyone who has, so who knows if he does have a proper RDF the way Steve did. But he definitely has a form of the latter - subconsciously, we want to see heroes conquering space just by the might of their hard work, smarts, and determination, and Elon is the perfect person to project that on to. Hence why journalists write glorious introductions like the one above without anyone having to ask them to.