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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.
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.
Well, whoop-di-doo. ... and I get the distinct feeling he ain't done yet.
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
I certainly know which one I want to be when I grow up &| get my shit together.
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.
Is that the same as "least despised"?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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".
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.