I think Elon Musk is what Steve Jobs wanted to be. Steve Jobs thought he was changing the world with the iPhone, and while it was new it wasn't world changing. What Elon Musk does is world changing.
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.