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.

Comments

But who would know all of them?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is sort of why I don't like popularity contests on the internet. Because who would know all of them in order to make the best comparison, maybe noone. :)

Creeps

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of douchebags spend money to see how much their friend is liked is fucking creepy, what the fuck is wrong with them ?

Because it's not software

[Anonymous Coward]

Musk is popular because rather than making intangible items such as software he's advancing hard technologies like Rocketry and Cars. Physical engineering accomplishments are always going to outdo software for its ability to inspire. An example: K&R vs Steve Jobs, one made the software foundation for everything we use, the other made shiny physical products. Now when we look back 100 years from now Musk is going to be a visionary of the like of Henry Ford. The same is true of the person who invents working fusion, whether it's Polywell based, ITER, or something else. Once working fusion has been built it'll be hailed as a true landmark in science/technological progression. Warp drive is another advancement of this scale. These are the big advances which matter to the species and which are readily visible. It takes visionaries and money cold hard cash to make these projects happen and these guys might not be the only people smart enough to build these advances, but at the time they're the only ones putting their balls/livelihoods on the line to push us forward.

Re:Because it's not software

[swb]

I thought Henry Ford was a visionary because of his business model -- an assembly line that could mass produce cars for everyone -- not because he necessarily innovated the automobile concept itself.

Musk's advancement mostly seems in the electric drivetrain, less so in the business model. He wants to do direct sales, but while it runs against the grain of the existing car sales business, existing regulation and low production volume make it appear less than revolutionary, especially when many products are sold directly buy their maker.

Re:Because it's not software

[K. S. Kyosuke]

There's nothing wrong with software. Without software, the productivity of this world would drop like a brick. Numerical methods, advanced search algorithms, digital control systems etc. are all-important today for the things we do.

Having said that, when discussing such vital components of modern world, Facebook it ain't.

Re:Because it's not software

[Nemyst]

I disagree. The internet is equal parts hardware and software and has defined our current era. Self-driving cars and trucks might well cause a revolution in transportation methods and that's largely software based. A hypothetical sentient AI would probably be the greatest achievement of mankind and would be software.

No, the real reason Musk is seen as a much more inspiring figure is just that what he's working on is far more interesting and ambitious than just creating a site where you can share cat pictures and complain about politics or making a Walmart clone, but on the web. You could make amazing software, but the current trend is to make crappy websites.

Re:Because it's not software

[JaredOfEuropa]

Ford's innovation in business is that he saw the value of building an affordable car, one that his own employees could afford. But to achieve that he had to re-engineer the production process (rather than the business process). He did not reinvent the concept of a car, but he certainly had to redesign it so that it could be built efficiently on his production line.

You could say that Musk is following a similar path. He wants to get to Mars, needs to get launch costs down to make that feasible, so he (and his engineers) are trying to come up with a reusable rocket that allows them to drive down that cost. From vision to business model to engineering.

Yeeeah ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, whoop-di-doo.
Bezos gave us: improved logistics, more crap from China, and no way to tell what is genuine and what is not. And he treats his lowest employees like shit. Not, wait, he doesn't have any lowest level employees - he farms that out, so he never has to fire anyone ever and never has to pay workers comp. And the death of the small book shop.
The Zuck gave us a glorified international phone book, and five eyes' wet dream. We still don't know where he's going with this - apart from wanting to become a private-internet-with-ads, and neither, I suspect, does he.
Musk gave us PayPall (okay - booo), functioning, practical, and good-looking electric cars, cheap (in comparison) access to space (okay - orbit), solar cells you actually want to put on your roof, a believable concept for public transportation, a vertically landing rocket that actually does, enough political savvy to wrangle an okay to launch US military satellites (HTF did he pull that off?), and plenty of other stuff ... and I get the distinct feeling he ain't done yet.
I certainly know which one I want to be when I grow up &| get my shit together.

Zuckerberg created one thing, Bezos two

[NotInHere]

Zuckerberg has created one thing: Facebook
Bezos has created two things: Amazon and Amazon cloud.
Musk has created (or helped to create): Paypal, Tesla, Solarcity, SpaceX, ...

Facebook is just a ruthless market leader who is at #1 due to network effects, but Musk is driving real innovation.

Re:Zuckerberg created one thing, Bezos two

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Musk was there for the founding of Paypal. Paypal was a .boom winner. He's nothing more than a lottery winner who then invested ... and by invested I mean lobbied congress for subsidies for Tesla, SpaceX and SolarCity. He didn't create any of them, he funded people who knew what they were doing to create those companies using money he got by dumb luck.

What do you mean by this? At least SpaceX was born out of an economical analysis on the board of a plane bound from Russia to US. Of course, he started hiring specialists ASAP, but these very specialists contradict your claims that he "didn't know what he was doing".

Most admired

[Hognoxious]

Is that the same as "least despised"?

Re:Most admired

[Ol Olsoc]

Is that the same as "least despised"?

Tragedy of the commons. Especially bad in this internet age.

Anyone who is in a position of power or innovation gets a raftload of hate. Just human nature for some people to be angry at success. Or be angry at popularity. Or wealth. Take any positive thing, and there will be some people who freak out because it is positive.

I do some things, and it is pretty surprising the amount of crap one gets just for doing some things. Takes a lot of effort and time, and most of my people just love it.

Where the tragedy of the commons effect comes in is that the person who can't stand positives or success comes in has the same access to me as all the people who are positive, or when they do have criticisms, frame them in a way that I can use. Hard to improve things by dying in a fire or any of the other cute shit I get on occasion.

Oddly enough, the bashing tends to come in public, and kudos in private, which can make a competent person look silly bad.

And some people have trouble handling it. Some people quit and go back to being a lurker in life. Some people have their access tightly controlled to insulate them. Me? I absorb them all, and sometimes play the troll like a fish, or ignore them, depending on what appears to be what they want the least. Its like absorbing their energy.

But back to Musk, he'll reap a lot of hate, but only because he's doing stuff. New stuff. Cool stuff in my opinion. And he's largely succeeding.

And we've heard all of the whining of the folks that can't stand him because of his success, be it that electric cars will never be practical, or taking every accident as proof that they are (fill in the pejorative here) or that his rockets are subsidized, or that Hyperloop will never work because Musk, or that the Solar City roof sucks for some reason.

So as we adjust to the electronic tragedy of the commons, we have to realize that the slashdotter who believes that we'll be on oil energy forever and thinks Musk is a commie or something, is not remotely the equivalent of Musk and others who actually do things.

No surprise at all, just abuse vs hope

[Morgaine]

The survey ranking of the top 3 winning technology leaders is no surprise whatsoever. One of them is revolutionizing the EV, energy, space and transport sectors with a large number of leading technologies and hence gives people great hope for the future, while the other two are best known for their profiteering and abuse of the public. It's hardly a contest.

If you want to be known as a technology leader then you shouldn't be a leeching middleman as everyone will hate you, and rightly so. And if you do something technical then you should do it well, instead of doing it absolutely appallingly on purpose because that gives you greater profit --- I'm thinking of Amazon product search here, which is undoubtedly the worst search system that has ever been implemented in online shopping (advertising unrelated things in disguise). Prime Video has a similar purpose, mainly a vehicle for Amazon to put non-Prime content in front of you and make you pay for the privilege of their direct advertising. Oh and Bezos, you really shouldn't be abusing your employees either, it's bad karma.

Regarding Facebook, there's not a lot to say in terms of technology because all the company does is provide a website which monetizes and hence abuses people, so you have to scrape the barrel to find anything technical at all to say about them. One example of FB tech is that their techies release some fine open-source packages behind the scenes (only programmers hear about this though), but this is incidental to FB's primary product which offers no technical leadership at all. In fact they've given us technical regression since FB has closed off much public communication into a walled garden. Zuckerberg offers no hope at all.

So there we have it, not really a contest among those three. I'm sure there must have been other worthy companies in the surveyed 700, but among these three corporate leaders only Musk deserves to be called a technology leader. The other two should be filed under "Abuse for profit".

Re:No surprise at all, just abuse vs hope

[ShooterNeo]

Amazon product search is bad? To be fair I sometimes have trouble with it - especially if use the wrong search terms - and the sponsored products can be annoying - but it generally works. It lets you know what most people buy, what most people give good reviews to, and the review system is...better than nothing. When/if they fix the bribed review system it'll be pretty good. Also the "other products people bought" is good, so the "frequently bought together".

All in all it's better than newegg or ebay or going to the store in person. It's not bad.

Re:Survey brought to you by

[jellomizer]

Well out of the other leaders in the world he seems to be the only one betting a business model on overall cultural progress.

Zuckerberg - A platform where you can gossip and spy on your old high school crushes.
Bezos - A platform that can ship stuff you want to your door.

Musk - Focusing on clean energy, cleaner transportation, and space travel (that isn't so clean), but finding ways to make peoples lives better and push society to the future without it trying to wait for the other companies to change what they are doing only when they find out it is too late.

Re:Survey brought to you by

[K. S. Kyosuke]

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!)

Zuckerberg, really?

[swillden]

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.

Re:Survey brought to you by

[JoshuaZ]

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.

For two reasons.

[Lumpy]

Musk is the only man that is actually building shit to help society and further humanity while making a profit.

The other two are simply hiring others to make money off the masses for personal gain. Bozos and Zuck have done absolutely nothing for society, in fact many would say that have done the reverse.