Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs.
He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract and keep talent at Apple with out a leader like Steve Jobs.
He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract and keep talent at Apple with out a leader like Steve Jobs.
While Tesla is still on the upward rocket phase while they are still figuring out their product/market. Much more exciting for the type of talent who are looking to make a big impact on the world.
Steve Jobs brought that life back into Apple when he rejoined and maintained that environment through various product launches over many years.
I'm not sure I'd want them to still pretend they are the same company or not, rather they should work on the talent they have. Just like how basketball teams rebuild after losing their star players, you rebuild around new talent instead of clinging on to past glory.
I know you are being facetious, but similar to Jobs, Musk got ousted as CEO from his first and second companies: Zip2 [1] and PayPal [2].
[1] Vance, Ashley (2015). Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, p72.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#X.com_and_PayPal
Chris Lattner has been at Apple for over 11 years. He shepherded LLVM, Clang, lldb, and Swift. All while climbing the ranks to Director. A huge number of engineers would simply be ready to think about and do something different after that much time.
You might say that Elon answers "Why Tesla?" but in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?".
(I have no inside knowledge, I've just been in the industry long enough to have gone through this myself).
Seems obvious, doesn't it? Nothing interesting going on.
Under Jobs, terms like "courage" and "innovation" used to mean something, like kicking sand in the face of the entire mobile phone industry and competing against their own bestselling product. Tim Cook's idea of "courage" involves selecting a headphone jack in a CAD tool and hitting the Delete key. And "innovation" means late nights at the office pushing the limits of dongle engineering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game)#History_...
I do think his technical knowledge was probably higher than most give him credit for, however.
This is a convenient narrative when Tesla makes a high profile hire but they've also lost a lot of talented engineers and I don't remember the convention wisdom being that it was because of Elon's shortcomings.
I can't even imagine what Musk would do with Apple's $200 billion in cash. I think he would've been much more daring with that money than even Steve Jobs would've been.
But I think Apple missed its shot, and the merger of Tesla and Solar City probably sealed that for good. Now Musk is probably already seeing a 10-20x larger combined Tesla/Solar City company in his head, 10 years from now, and a potential merger with a bigger Space X as well.
So from his point of view, it probably won't be worth it anymore for him. He would probably have to take over a declining iPhone market and deal with that at the same time as dealing with explosive growth at Tesla and an imminent launch of SpaceX' big rocket to Mars.
On the other hand there would be hundreds of billions of dollars he could get access to, so I wouldn't say it's impossible to happen anymore either. However, at least to me, this would only be interesting from the "let's give Musk unlimited money and see what he can do wit it" point of view. Otherwise, I would rather see Tesla/SpaceX be on their own, than join an Apple/Tesla/SpaceX megacorp.
It's questionable if he would be the profit-maximizing CEO choice for Apple though.
Perhaps he wouldn't even want the job (if we ignore the cash), because the smartphone and computer industry is maturing, i.e. tougher competition, decreasing rate of innovation, maintenance mode ahead.
I'm not knowledgable enough about the psychological/sociological aspects of this but I wonder if it's possible to maintain that kind of culture when you have $200 billion sitting in the bank. It might lead to a kind of resource curse that some countries suffer from.
I wonder if there have been studies done on this at the corporate level.
My favourite bosses were engineers first.
And for the iPhone Vs Electric Car comparison. Oh well may be i am old school, if BMW or other Car makers made a Electric Car ( assuming we have to choose a e-car ) i would choose them over Tesla any day. The interior quality of Tesla just dont compare well. The iPhone was truly a revolutionary product, in that many people tried smartphone before but they have ALL FAILED. This is speaking from someone who has used pretty much all smart phone prior to iPhone introduction.
If anything i say the difference is Elon Musk lack of taste.
It's well documented that Android was going to be Blackberry-ish, then they pivoted to be iPhone-ish after the original iPhone announcement. Think the App Store and things like Uber, which exist primarily as mobile apps.
Interesting that Google recognized the importance and adapted quickly while Ballmer laughed it off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U
[1]: http://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-origi...
Very rarely is a new technology useful in abstract; the inventor of the steering wheel made a contribution but without the rest of the car it is meaningless.
Touch screens existed, sure. There were one or two largish screen phones, sure. Smartphones existed (all using keyboards and styluses). OS X and Safari existed. But no one had put it all together into a single device, nor had anyone created a sensible UI design language to take advantage of things like multitouch.
You're basically saying Dropbox is garbage because rsync/SMB/NFS/FTP existed. Or Uber/Lyft are garbage because Taxis existed. Yes there are some superficial similarities but it turns out the details make a massive world of difference and it is intellectually dishonest to be so dismissive.
Yes, he might change the world if/once he gets to Mars, but most of his stuff is a marketing tech demo.
Bell Labs changed the world. Tesla did not.
And I think your categorisation of his work as a tech demo is unfair, and uninformed. SpaceX have built rockets that are delivering satellites into orbit and supplies to the international space station, and have achieved reusability. They have played a significant part in building a private sector space industry. These are not tech demos, they are real things. Can you boast any such achievement in your own life?
Likewise, Tesla have built and sold electric cars that people want. They've created a global re-charging network to supply them. And they've been the first company to deploy significant automation into the automobile market on a large scale. These are not tech demos, any more than the gigafactory rising out o the Nevada desert is.
That was an unnecessary remark; the commenter never claimed that he/she has achieved more than Musk.
I'm perfectly entitled to ask what they've achieved themselves that puts them in a position to so casually demean what, by most people's standards, are quite considerable feats.
Being a good CEO is just way more valuable than being a good individual contributor, because it multiplies the output and growth of the whole company.
And ego doesn't really matter that much in the big picture.
Disclaimer: I work at SpaceX, albeit as a technician so I'm very far down the corporate ladder, but I feel that may be unduly harsh.
There can certainly be legitimate criticisms around Musk personally, and SpaceX/Tesla in regards to whether they are overhyped relative to competitors or whether they will succeed on delivering what they promise. With that being said, when a company delivers 70k+ cars in a year, even if this is just a tiny percentage of the overall new car market, or a company puts satellites into orbit, I think we've moved beyond "marketing tech demo" status.
Most engineers wouldn't have thought about having proportionally spaced fonts back in the 80's when personal computers only had 80 x 24 fixed withd character green phosphor displays.
When Jobs dropped out of regular college and dropped back in to take the classes he was truly interested in, he took calligraphy; years later that lead to the Mac being for first personal computer (the LISA had it too, but that was the $10,000 predecessor to the Mac) to have proportionally spaced, bitmap display.
That's not something Woz (or someone like him) would have prioritized for a brand new computing platform.
I can for 100% assure that I only nitpick because I want to understand the logical reasoning for down-voting and are scared that I am too high to understand the meaning of the phrase "It's funny you mention that". I am not a native speaker, but I know all the words, heard it in English and there exists a translation into my language and the interpretation is the same for both, so long story short ... why is it funny?
But why is that funny (haha) or funny (strange)? If they can build a self-driving car for the masses Elon Musk will be the uber-tech guy for a whole generation, and Tesla seen as one of the good guys with cool tech.
https://steveblank.com/2016/10/24/why-tim-cook-is-steve-ball...
> If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job. He tripled Microsoft’s sales to $78 billion and profits more than doubled from $9 billion to $22 billion. The launch of the Xbox and Kinect, and the acquisitions of Skype and Yammer happened on his shift. If the Microsoft board was managing for quarter to quarter or even year to year revenue growth, Ballmer was as good as it gets as a CEO. But if the purpose of the company is long-term survival, then one could make a much better argument that he was a failure as a CEO as he optimized short-term gains by squandering long-term opportunities.
Yes, he blew it on Mobile and that's a huge deal. The hugest. He had his blind spots, but he was very far from incompetent.