Slashdot Mirror
Survey Says: Elon Musk Is Most Admired Tech Leader, Topping Bezos and Zuckerberg (teslarati.com)
First Round Capital conducted a poll of 700 tech company founders and found Elon Musk to be the most admired leader in the technology industry. Elon Musk received 23 percent of the votes; 10 percent said Amazon's Jeff Bezos, 6 percent said Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and 5 percent wrote in Steve Jobs. First Round writes: "We launched State of Startups to capture what it means to be an entrepreneur. We asked the leaders of venture-backed companies about everything from the fundraising environment to their working relationships with their co-founders to their office's price per square foot. [...] Once again, we asked founders to write in which current tech leader they admire the most and we tallied 125 names. The Tesla and SpaceX leader held firm at the top spot (23%)..." Teslarati reports: While the survey did not ask respondents to explain their choice, it is safe to assume that Elon's propensity for setting lofty and visionary goals, and then being able to execute on them, is one trait admired most by tech founders. Most recently, Musk moved the scheduled start of production for the upcoming Model 3 midsize sedan forward by a full two years. Tesla also recently celebrated a record-setting third quarter and has been moving aggressively to close the second half of this year with 50,000 cars delivered. The company has announced a series of sweeteners to motivate people to order and take delivery of new vehicles before the end of the year. Unlimited Supercharger access for long distance travel and a, then, upcoming price hike on its entry level Model S 60, announced by the Palo Alto-based electric car maker and energy company, were incentives to stimulate sales. With plans to increase annual vehicle production by a factor of ten to twenty-fold by the end of the decade, send humans to mars and transform the energy sector, Musk's innovative solutions to rewrite humanity as we know it joins an elite rank held by few genius inventors and industrialists who have gone on to change the world.
and space travel (that isn't so clean)
Well, clean-er, at least (building space hardware is seriously expensive and therefore not clean at all, so reducing the need to build it every time increases the cleanliness - although Jevons' paradox may apply!)
Ezekiel 23:20
I don't despise Mark Zuckerberg like many do, but I hardly think he qualifies as a tech leader. Facebook succeeded through luck, timing, hard work and good engineering. That's all laudable, but there wasn't much leadership or vision involved. Bezos' initial idea, an online bookstore, was hardly visionary or leading but subsequent decisions, especially the decision to standardize internal system interfaces that led to the idea, and ability, to create AWS absolutely was visionary. Google should have done that, but didn't have the vision. There's no debating the vision of Elon "Mars or bust in my solar-powered electric car" Musk. Musk has so much vision we'd call him a crackpot, except that he has a tendency to succeed. Steve Jobs was clearly a leader and a visionary with a focus on making technology simple and beautiful.
And there are other leaders around who I'd say are much worthier than Zuckerberg. Larry Page, for example, whose goal for his new startup was to "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", an insanely ambitious mission which arguably is no longer ambitious enough to describe what Alphabet/Google is doing. Mark Shuttleworth, not so much for Thawte as for Canonical, where his vision hasn't really succeeded in displacing Windows but has gone much further than most of us considered possible. Though a bunch of CEOs probably wouldn't pick him, I'd put Richard Stallman high on the list, too. His vision of the importance of software freedom has been incredibly influential.
I could go on, but the point is... Zuckerberg? Really? For what? I suppose it was visionary to believe that you could build a billion-user interactive system with PHP.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Even space travel they have focused on trying to do it cleanly. A big part of why their next generation of engines, the Raptor, uses methane as a fuel is that in the long-run one can synthesize methane directly and a straightforward way https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction. This has both an advantage in terms of Mars (can make more fuel on Mars) and also in terms of eventually making clean fuel on Earth.