How many lines of code did Steve Jobs write? How many circuits boards did he design? Show me the work that wasn't done by his employees that he slapped his name on?
How many lines of code did Bill Gates write for Windows? For Excel? For Internet Explorer? He's clearly a technically incompetent fraudster stealing credit from his employees.
How many warehouses did Jeff Bezos design and build? What's his technical contribution to Kindle? How many packages did he personally deliver? Clearly he's technically incompetent fraudster stealing credit from his employees.
Musk conceived, funded and managed all his extremely successful companies. In case of Zip2 he was even the first (and only) coder. I really don't get this desire to bring him down by denying that his achievements are extremely impressive.
> Um, but isn't he chief rocket engineer at SpaceX for example? And are there not numerous stories and anecdotes of people working at SpaceX who say they are amazed at how good his brain is, how fast he calculates ridiculously complex equations in real time.
There's a difference between being a good business person (Elon is exceptional at marketing and execution) and a genius scientist / engineer. Elon has tried to market himself as the latter, and has a following online (mostly male and interested in tech) that believes it.
There hasn't been a groundbreaking paper, a patent or some other innovation that Elon personally contributed to that I'm aware of.
What about these?
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=pts&source=hp&ei=4iuVW4jkO...
https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Elon+Musk
While great, having worked in these environments before, we almost always put our bosses on the patent if they contributed to the discussion in any way[1]. Giving the benefit of the doubt, would those contributions be considered substantial?
1 - https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Jeffrey+Bezos https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Steve+Jobs https://patents.google.com/?inventor=William+H.+Gates https://patents.google.com/?inventor=Mark+Zuckerberg
If I had to guess: it's an inspirational story if you look, think and have a similar background to Elon and that demographic idolizes and sees Elon as a role model.
Why wouldn't we?
Gates was some kind of computer whiz kid in his early days, and who did write a lot of code. I noticed you picked certain later products, I guess he wasn't a involved in those? Jobs obviously wasn't the technical mind in his ventures. We can give these people credit for achievements as entrepreneurs without getting caught up in mis-attrtibuting credit for technical skill.
[0] https://www.cultofmac.com/122408/signed-by-steve-jobs-co-sig...
I'm not sure he told Atari he couldn't program:
>Jobs convinced Wozniak to work on the game during his day job at Hewlett-Packard, when he was meant to be designing calculators. At night the two would collaborate on building it at Atari: Wozniak as engineer, Jobs as breadboarder and tester.
>Allegedly, Jobs told Wozniak that he could have half of a $700 bounty if they were able to get the chip count under 50 (typical games of the day tended to require around 100 chips). After four sleepless days that gave both of them a case of mono (an artificial time limit, it turns out: Jobs had a plane to catch, Atari wasn't in that much of a rush), the brilliantly gifted Wozniak delivered a working board with just 46 chips.
>Jobs made good on his promise and gave Wozniak his promised $350. What he didn't tell him -- and what Wozniak didn't find out until several years later -- was that Jobs also pocketed a bonus somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000. Though it's often reported that this caused a rift in their friendship, Wozniak seems to have no hard feelings.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/127537/Steve_Jobs_Atari_...
> What he didn't tell him -- and what Wozniak didn't find out until several years later -- was that Jobs also pocketed a bonus somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000.
That part is crappy for sure.