This is such a tired take. Strong leaders are able to marshal engineers to build things like the iPhone, electric cars, reusable rockets. Both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk excelled at this, and just because they're not doing the low level engineering work doesn't mean they don't get any credit.
And by all accounts Steve Jobs was extremely involved in the UX design of the original iPhone, and Elon Musk is often involved in engineering decisions at his companies.
That's not to say they both don't have flaws, but it's intellectually dishonest to deny their accomplishments because you don't like them.
It's much better that commenting is open, so that people thinking these things can express themselves, and be exposed to different viewpoints, resulting in more thinking and shared knowledge.
Without that, an opinion can fester in someone's mind, becoming worse since there's no way to release it and no visible counterarguments.
In my younger Slashdot days, I would read these polarized discussions, and it taught me about many perspectives on even the simplest thing.
> In my younger Slashdot days, I would read these polarized discussions, and it taught me about many perspectives on even the simplest thing.
I know precisely what you mean, but I'd argue that you were in a position to consider multiple perspectives in the first place. A lot of people are not. They have determined their position ahead of time, and regardless of new information, they will not change it.
This. Long forum flame wars taught me a lot about the subjects bur also about discourse as such. These days the top comments are quickly moderated, like they have been here, and the only thing you are left with is headless conversations about how shallow takes are bad - without having an opportunity to react with said supposed shallow takes for youself.
> Strong leaders are able to marshal engineers to build things like the iPhone, electric cars, reusable rockets
talking about tired takes...
The real refreshing take would be acknowledging that these things would exist even without them and that the cult of personalities is such an antiquate way to explain the success (or the demise) of companies (looks like Americans have learned nothing from the fall of Stalin).
Anyway: Steve Jobs did not give us smartphones and for sure Musk did not invent electric cars or reusable rockets.
They are (were?) good at marketing what other people made and other people still built.
In the case of Steve Jobs he died before turning full Elon Musk, whose contribution to the companies he's been part of has been mostly bad PR and egomaniac stunts.
Not that it hasn't worked more than a couple of times, but that doesn't mean it's good.
Psychologically wise, they are both visionary tyrants, emphasis on the second trait, which is the prevalent, the most evident and the one other people had to deal with.
As Psychology Today has put it "Steve Jobs success sends the wrong message to aspiring leaders" because "while Jobs was a successful leader, entrepreneur, and visionary, he fell considerably short of the qualities possessed by the very best leaders"
In tech everything is still muddy and it's hard for people outside of the field to differentiate between the genius and the impostor, so to put it in terms that are easier to understand for the general public, Musk and Jobs are Kanye West, the people who actually designed the things you mentioned and then built them and made them work, are Frank Zappa.
edit: to prove the point.
Who can name, off the top of their head, the strong leader who gave us the Nokia 1100 and the Nokia 1110 that are as of today the two best selling mobile phones ever in human history (250 million units each)?
Or the strong leader responsible for Mario franchising, almost 800 million copies sold, or Pokémon, 450 million copies sold?
Countless inventions were inevitable, like the automobile or powered flight. The most obvious sign for this are inventions that happened independently in quick succession, or where there's debate who was first.
You could also reasonably claim that the iPhone wasn't so much a "product invention", other phones with similar functionality existed, the genius was making a great version and targeting it at consumers instead of business people. But that's still an invention of sorts.
Tesla is a bit like that, but Musks real achievement is SpaceX, which came into a stagnant space where each rocket was some upgrade of an upgrade of an ICBM, and showed that a startup can compete in the space, and even disrupt it. And now two decades later the space launch provider market is full of startups with fresh ideas. Without musk this won't have happened
Musk real achievements has been convincing people that he is better than he actually is.
> and even disrupt it
disruption should lead to jail time in modern democracies.
it is an euphemism for "break every possible rule until they catch us"
> Without musk this won't have happened
Without the nazis Wernher Von Braun won't have happened and consequentially the v-2 rocket engines and the "now working for the Americans" Lunar landing.
Without Musk we would not have Musk, which is a net benefit per se, if you ask me.
- Nov 21, 2022 - The Twitter boss laid off the workers late Sunday, further trimming a staff that has lost almost 5000 workers since Musk took over
- 07 Nov 2022 - Elon Musk Fires More Than 90% Of Twitter India Staff: Report
- Nov 17, 2022 - SpaceX fired 9 employees who organized an open letter describing Elon Musk's tweeting as a 'distraction and embarrassment,' report says
- May 20, 2022 - A SpaceX flight attendant said Elon Musk exposed himself and propositioned her for sex, documents show. The company paid $250,000 for her silence.
- In December, former SpaceX engineer Ashley Kosak published an essay meticulously detailing alleged sexual harassment at the company
- in June by a group of SpaceX employees releasing a statement saying Musk’s frattish behavior was “a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment” and asking Musk to stop being, well, a creep
- ‘How Many Women Were Abused to Make That Tesla?’
Seven women are suing the Elon Musk-led company, alleging sexual harassment
the last one is particularly interesting as a story, the billionaire frat boy pretending people to love the company, love him, never openly criticize what he does and says, like he's an Egyptian Pharaoh (actually they were more tolerant towards their people)
And wear the S3XY Tesla pants, because Tesla is S3XY I guess... (－‸ლ)
How much more should we endure from someone who's clearly a sociopath before something really bad (O.J. 's style) happens?
of course he's saying that it's only a political campaign against him.
I'm not honestly convinced.
I will never understand the tendency to idolize bad people just because they had enough money to pull together something of dubious usefulness at best for the general public.
I often read heavy criticism against China here, but China is actually solving problems by manufacturing their affordable EVs, without having to rely on a billionaire deus ex machina to sell to the people as a savior.
it's not about infinite monkeys and sheer law of the large numbers, it's simply about progress.
Japan had smartphones in 1999.
Nokia had already made a few mildly successful attempts, they were very good on the tech side, they lacked the marketing strategy.
There's not much to re-discover, we all know how things went.
Nokia had 50% of the global market, but only 10% in the whole North America.
Americans have always preferred homemade products and iPhone is an US product.
Before that they preferred BlackBerry, which was North American.
Sometimes for Americans if something does not exists there, it does not exist period.
I, personally, was doing a-ok with non-smart phones and a different device to do the computing stuff and I strongly believe computing in general is in a worse place than in 2007.
Besides, people are still working for Elon Musk at Twitter, who is clearly a very bad boss, and the ones who are not anymore, are complaining for being fired and very few left on their own, literally no more than a dozen, which shows that people mostly do their job because they are paid to do it, not because they like the people paying them. They care about the salary, which is not worng.
I don't believe many people love Zuckerberg, yet Facebook/Meta has more than 80,000 employees working there and making the things Meta does possible.
Not because of strong leaders but because it's their job and they are paid (often times well, sometimes very well, sometimes awesomely well) to do it. Full stop. There's no need to romanticize the worker/employee relationship.
It's actually pretty bad for worker when people start believing that the you need leaders and the need to be strong (which usually means arrogant pricks, not emotionally and psychologically mature).
We are going to work, not to war.
The iPhone idea in Jobs mind was an iPod that could make phone calls, to sell more music to people. Then after many iterations with people who actually know what they are doing, it became the money machine it is, by incorporating the app store and the ads/apps selling business, which is the only true technical innovation iPhone brought to the table.
The consequences of those choices were easily imaginable, but were discarded because: making money over everything else.
So we now have kids depressed by the constant external pressure of having to fit in a model that is completely made up by rich people pretending that an infinity pool from the rooftop of a 5 star hotel in Singapore is the normal way to live and that promote beauty standards that are unnatural and unreachable.
If I had the power to chose, I would have chosen the infinite monkeys over Jobs and Musk every day of my life.
Please bear in mind that it's not just Jobs and Musk, it's not personal, the same is true for every so called strong leader a definition that their PR office attached to them and made it stick. A façade thoroughly crafted by people expert in rebranding other people. For money of course, not because they actually like their clients. On the contrary, they probably hate them. When these people are free to roam they act like Bezos going to space with a cowboy hat, while forcing Amazon's employees to pee in bottles, because that's who they really are.
Have you noticed the new likable, nerdy do-gooder Bill Gates public image?
And why is Bill Gates bad and Steve Jobs good? They did the same amount of unspeakable things, they broke the same laws, they evaded the same corporate taxes, they killed competition the same way, they sued individuals just because they could and had an infinite amount of money at their disposal.
At least Bill Gates is trying to defeat malaria, isn't he?
It's not a statement on how much he has to do with the achievements. It's a just one example of how the man lies almost constantly, and nothing he says can be trusted or relied upon.
Another great example would be the "$35k" Tesla, which existed only on paper for years, then was very difficult to order, then was pulled.
