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The Cult of Elon Musk Shines With Steve Jobs' Aura
HughPickens.com writes Alan Boyle writes that over the years, Elon Musk's showmanship, straight-ahead smarts and far-out ideas have earned him a following that spans the geek spectrum — to the point that some observers see glimmers of the aura that once surrounded Apple's Steve Jobs. "To me, it feels like he's the most obvious inheritor of Steve Jobs' mantle," says Ashlee Vance, who's writing a biography of Musk that at one time had the working title The Iron Man. "Obviously, Steve Jobs' products changed the world ... [But] if Elon's right about all these things that he's after, his products should ultimately be more meaningful than what Jobs came up with. He's the guy doing the most concrete stuff about global warming." So what is Musk's vision? What motivates Musk at the deepest level? "It's his Mars thing," says Vance. Inspired in part by the novels of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein, Musk has come around to the view that humanity's long-term future depends on extending its reach beyond Earth, starting with colonies on Mars. Other notables like physicist Stephen Hawking have laid out similar scenarios — but Musk is actually doing something to turn those interplanetary dreams into a reality. Vance thinks that Musk is on the verge of breaking out from geek guru status to a level of mass-market recognition that's truly on a par with the late Steve Jobs. Additions to the Tesla automotive line, plus the multibillion-dollar promise of Tesla's battery-producing "gigafactory" in Nevada, could push Musk over the edge. "Tesla, as a brand, really does seem to have captured the public's imagination. ... All of a sudden he's got a hip product that looks great, and it's creating jobs. The next level feels like it's got to be that third-generation, blockbuster mainstream product. The story is not done."
In OK with this, especially since the major difference between the two is that Musk is actually innovating, instead of just making great packaging and hype.
I'm all looking around for the cologne advertisement.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I think it's actually Obama who's done the most on climate change concretely. He signed into law new fuel economy standards that will double the fuel called me a new vehicles. Elon musk is selling a couple thousand cars a year, well Obama standards will affect millions of cars every year.
Face it, he's a little shit who covers his mistakes and his products weaknesses with astroturf and false PR.
Sounds like Steve Jobs
http://www.latimes.com/busines...
His 2010 cameo in Iron Man 2 didn't hurt either, and neither did the use of SpaceX for filming of some scenes.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ve...
It also helps that unlike Ellison his products are both physical and have direct practicality for most of the population so he is more easily associated with the inventor aspect of Tony Stark persona.
Signature red color of his space-age car is another bonus.
And so is the whole "rocket man" thing.
In comparison, Ellison is more like Tony Stark BEFORE Iron Man.
Yachting billionaire who collects cars, jets, islands and women and has a million dollar entertainment system which uses a swimming pool as a subwoofer, while his "charity" donations seem mostly to revolve around lawsuits.
As for comparison to Steve Jobs...
As the Iron Man 2 article above stated, Steve Jobs has "always been less Iron Man, more Willy Wonka".
Who, while espousing such lines as "Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?" ended up selling overpriced toys.
While Musk actually seems to be trying to actively fulfill the second part of that quote.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
It's Top Gear doing the misdirections and deceptions. They fudged the tests in order to make fun of the Tesla, and when Musk called them out on it and sued them for libel and defamation, Top Gear's defence was that they are "an entertainment program, not to be taken seriously". And that's exactly what it is.
I'm sure the man has an ego the size of Jupiter and a temper to match, but at least he has some reason to have those. He's getting things done in several difficult industries. The comparison to Apple and Jobs is apt in more ways that one: like Apple's flagship product, the Tesla has caught the attention of many, and every little flaw is put under a magnifying glass and blown out of proportion.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Oh so you can't be an innovator unless you completely invent every idea from scratch?
That's so novel, you should write a book!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The iPhone was a game changer in the market. You are right in that it wasn't a radical new design and more the result of a series of small improvements coupled with a drive for quality. Even so, all those improvements added up to the first smart phone that was actually easy to use. Back then, if you saw someone take out a smart phone at the bus stop, fiddle with it for a minute and then put it back, you could be sure it was an iPhone. Doing small tasks quickly simply wasn't practical on the other smart phones out there at the time.
I'm not sure to what extent Tesla innovated to create the cars they have, but certainly they made the first EV that people actually wanted to have for reasons other than it being an EV or hybrid. It was also one of the first mass market EVs that doesn't look like utter crap (the Honda Civic hybrid being the other one). Interestingly, some analysts suggested that Tesla should stick to supplying batteries and drive trains for other car makers... after having stood the EV market on its head. I for one hope that they'll continue to make cars, but the real test (and the tipping point) will be the moment they create a family EV in a mid-range price class.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Musk is more the Antithesis of Jobs
http://www.teslamotors.com/blo...
The NYT drove the car in circles in a parking lot to run down the battery, then lied about the range. Musk pulled the GPS data and PROVED they were lying.
http://www.teslamotors.com/blo...
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Fuel economy standards were fixed for 25 years, and the average fuel economy remained constant. Companies design to the standard.
Quite so. Companies don't compete on fuel economy and fuel economy is usually about 20th on the list of things car buyers actually care about. So unless the government forces their hand either directly through mandated standards or indirectly through gasoline taxes, car companies are going to meet the fuel economy standards and not much more. I fully expect our current fuel standards to not be updated for another 20-30 years regardless of what might be actually achievable.
It's important to know what companies can achieve so you don't make impossible goals, but standards drive change.
Nothing in even the most absurd proposal for CAFE standards was technologically impossible and it is unlikely that it was economically impossible either despite protests from certain groups. We have the technology TODAY to make cars that get well over 100mpg or the electric equivalent. They would be quite different from what we are accustomed to seeing on the road but that isn't necessarily a bad thing. (Tesla is a good example) Any automotive engineer (and I am one) who tells you doubling average fuel economy in passenger cars is impossible is either lying or badly misinformed. Modern engines are far more efficient than those from 30 years ago but we've increased the horsepower so much that the net result is (almost) no change in fuel economy.
Actually, musk has contributed a great deal Tesla.
The same is true of spacex.
While jobs would pick winners, musk has worked to make the winning products.
The iPhone was junk when it was released. There was nothing about the device itself that was really new, nothing that it could do which you couldn't do as well or better on another phone, it couldn't run any kind of non-Apple software (and still can't run anything which isn't expressly approved by Apple), and it cost six hundred dollars with contract.
What turned the iPhone into something important was not the revolutionary device, the device was not revolutionary, it was the widespread belief that this was something important. In other words, marketing. It was the belief that made sales and created the customer base, it was the belief that brought all those developers, and it was belief that made people put up with the idea of a completely closed ecosystem - the idea that it was okay to buy something which wouldn't really belong to you even after your purchase. Again, not a revolutionary idea, but something that Apple's extraordinary marketing power could make happen. That was the new thing, the game changer.
Wrong, *standards* don't matter, the actual fuel economy of U.S. vehicles has risen year after year in the last 30+ years.
Really? The facts say you are wrong. Average fuel economy barely budged between the early 1980s and 2007 when the new fuel economy standards were put in place. They started to creep up a bit in 2004 as fuel prices rose. After 2004 the average fuel economy has risen steadily due to a combination of higher fuel prices and increased mandated fuel standards. Now I'm no genius but I'm pretty sure that's a cause and effect relationship there. The fact that car companies are selling certain vehicles at a loss to ensure higher average fuel economy standards is proof positive that the standards are forcing the car companies to make more fuel efficient cars.
Obama's (actually Congress) new standards came from the auto industry, it is their roadmap.
The first increase in 2007 came under the Bush administration we've seen a steady increase in fuel economy since. In 2011 the Obama administration along with the major auto manufacturers came up with new CAFE standards that will take effect in 2017 and beyond.
Got any more unsupported "facts" you'd like to make up?
Steve Jobs revolutionized personal music players and smartphones. Elon Musk is revolutionizing energy production, battery technology, ground-based transportation, and space transportation. His goals are way more ambitious than any of the goals of Steve Jobs. And even though he has only achieved wide-scale success on one of those goals so far, producing a car that is safe, efficient, luxurious, and fast is much more difficult than doing the same for a phone. In that regard, Elon Musk has already surpassed Steve Jobs and he's only getting started.
The emphasis on typography that led to the Mac OS UI and to desktop publishing was an input of Jobs to the direction of the product.
Earlier than that, for all the slashdot hero worship of Woz, the Apple II wouldn't have been built had it not been for Jobs, and if it had it wouldn't have had a case, which means it wouldn't have been the breakthrough into offices that the Apple II was.
The idea that Jobs just picked products, rather than had a significant part in forming them is moronic.
Here is what _I_ consider to be an innovator.
Musk is just a salesmen.
Ok, I'll bite. What exactly did Holmes, or even the other folks as Theranos, invent? Microfluidic blood tests, DNA based tests instead of ELISAs, All that stuff was invented in the '80s and '90s.
Have a look at her list of patents. Which actually present new ideas instead of combinations of well established technologies?
http://patents.justia.com/inventor/elizabeth-holmes
Musk took existing technology, improved it and recombined it until it could support real business plans.
Holmes took existing technology, improved it and recombined it until it could support a real business plan.
Good on both of them.
The Chevy Volt is NOT all-electric; it's only slightly different than a plug-in Prius.
What Musk is doing is building the entire ECOsystem. Cars, batteries, high power charging stations. over the air updates, solar manufacturing & leasing.
All of those things are already available but no one company has done as much and Tesla is TINY compared to the competition.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Well, they're both innovators and promoters and visionaries.
They both innovated - Jobs by bringing GUIs to the masses and many other things by realizing what the masses want. (It's easy to bring something for a niche, but much more difficult to bring it to the masses). Musk brought innovative person-to-person payment system - send anyone money over the internet (he's a co-founder of Paypal, after all). Because until then, sending money meant you were basically a business, or were patient and did the whole money-order thing.
And they both had visions on how things should work. Jobs was about computing and making lives better through transparent computers (computers that you didn't see, but did things for you in the background). Musk is seeing how to improve our lives and future. You may not be able to afford a Tesla now, but you know, electric cars are actually very practical machines and you're now able within reason to even drive with an electric car to your destination.
Oh yeah, and both are salespeople because if you can't sell it, there's no point to even trying. Few things sell themselves, and most that assume they would, fail because of the hidden sales message.A few bad news articles and if you're not front and center managing the message, will easily spiral out of control. It's why Jobs made Microsoft invest $150M (message: If Microsoft invests in Apple, things aren't as bad as they seem). Or why Musk gets front and center when Tesla gets news, be it fires or negative reviews or whatever. Because if you're not dealing with the message, it's not going away.