Elon musk?
Elon musk?
For me, we're still under Jobs' reality distortion field. I mean, which companies did he build? NeXT which did interesting technology but basically died in the market. Pixar where there's significant dispute about his level of involvement and he may have been more an angel investor.
And Apple. Huge, sure. But he was kicked out the first time round for focusing exclusively on a product that was losing money hand over fist, was both more expensive and less capable than rival products, and which was never more than a minor niche player (albeit stably so), squandering the Apple II's early work. When he returned it was some years before they regained serious success, and that was largely with iOS. Which, by the time of his death, was already losing market position in both phones and tablets, a trend which is showing no sign of abating and every likelihood of levelling out in much the same position the Mac ultimately did, for similar reasons - one manufacturer and a few devices simply can't innovate as fast as a whole army of rivals cooperating. He built great products, but a great company to live for a lifetime?
Now, don't get me wrong. I'd love to have even 0.1% of Steve Jobs' success. He was a visionary, a brilliant marketer and an excellent communicator. But I'd suggest his personal single-minded obsession interfered with his ability to hear the market reaction to his products, and the consequence of that was not companies that last a lifetime.
I'm a Musk fan, but Jobs had a huge body of work in fantastic products/movies that his enterprises created under his leadership.
a trend which is showing no sign of abating and every likelihood of levelling out in much the same position the Mac ultimately did
There's your problem right there. You're somehow equating number of clone devices out there to Jobs's visionary ability to create entirely new markets with products and services that were then copied endlessly.
Number of cheap clone devices out there produced by third party manufactures was never Jobs' goal. How is IBM doing with that whole computer clone business, by the way?