Steve Jobs was the Elon Musk of his time, he just died too soon for everyone to see him for the villain he was.
Steve Jobs did at least actually do things. Musk just buys things and claims he did them.
Nah Jobs didn't do anything himself. From Wozniaks first computer up to the multitouch display for the iPhone, all of these things were just bought/stolen/copied. Jobs just knew how to put these technologies into something that would sell.
So elon but a good businessman
Salesman
without the good, or the (hu)man(ity)
There's no version of this reality where Jobs isn't a good businessman. You might not like the company or their products, but they've somehow managed to build a huge and successful business selling those overpriced toys to tons of people. They managed to create a cult around expensive consumer electronics. That is a massive success no matter how you slice it. And you can't deny that Jobs played a big part in that.
The weird thing is that Apple without Jobs was a failure, but also Jobs without Apple was also a failure.
it was just a gag for comic effect. it wasn't the breadth and depth of my thoughts and feelings of the digital and manufacturing epochs since the 1980s.
But also, it was kind of begging the question of "is there such thing as a good business man?"
There's good for /their/ business. But is that- in general - good?
Does the current head of Larian Studios count as a businessman? If so, that's one I would consider good for the company AND the consumers
Also you can tie it directly to Jobs, because when he was gone for a bit, apple fuckin tanked, and then he came back and they came out with the iPod.
That's not an accident.
Yeah, Steve Jobs was definitely an asshole, and he didn't personally design any of his products, but he did know what direction to move things in and what consumers wanted in a phone. He was the first to put a truly usable portable touchscreen computer into our pockets with a phone in it, and every phone nowadays is basically just a reimagined, upgraded version of the first iPhone. The way we communicate is forever changed because of the iPhone.
But yeah iPhone's are kind of the pinnacle of "how much can we fuck you over before you notice" now. All because of the little Apple on the back of the phone.
There is a story that the concept of touchscreen phones was stolen from a Nokia engineer who tried to get nokia to produce them but the feature was dismissed as a 'gimmick'.
I could believe that too tbh
He didn't know what customers wanted in a phone.
He knew what customers would want in a phone when they were taught about its existence.
The customers had no idea they would want it before he showed it to them.
Jesus I'm no Elon fan but how many companies do you have to take from a couple million to hundreds of billions before you're good at your job?
What is it with modern society and the need to reduce everything about a person just because they're a POS? He might be evil but he's clearly pretty good at being a businessman or you wouldn't even know his name.
But… he literally isn't. Like just look at twitter, he has ruined it from day one with bad decisions day after day whose impacts haven't shown directly, but now appear more and more with embarrassing effects (The verification badge which is now worthless and has been used to impersonate people and cooperations, the two factor authentification which stopped working, the self-DDOSing, the maximum amounts of tweets one could view per day, the old tweets that got deleted due to a glitch, etc.)
And in other companies it's mostly other people managing the stuff and cleaning up the mess he leaves; especially SpaceX is currently just glad that he isn't too busy with his X playtoy to bother them.
The only thing you may call him somewhat successful in is making out companies that have a potential so he could get into them early and claim their success.
Elon is (maybe was) very much good at what he does. Twitter is a bad example because that whole shit show was a dick measuring content from the get-go.
Fact is, SpaceX wouldn't be SpaceX and Tesla sure as fuck would not be Tesla without his leadership.
He's a piece of shit as a person, and I'd never want to work for him, because his work ethic is unhealthy to say the least (and I personally have a pretty extreme work ethic), but it's schoolyard nonsense to claim he's somehow bad at business. Leading a business may be the one thing he is good at. It's tossing shit just to toss shit.
You can not like him and acknowledge he is good at things.
Tesla sure as fuck would not be Tesla without his leadership.
You're right, it wouldn't; it would almost certainly be a better company.
Musk got Tesla where it is financially entirely through blatant fraud. "Earning" the company's absurd valuation based almost entirely on dishonest promises of releasing a technology that is entirely unachievable, undesirable, and dangerous is an unsustainable business model, and it's already showing cracks.
The fact that you seem to think that being highly profitable through constant ethical violations in every aspect of the company is to viewed as a succsess is honestly pretty gross.
I live in the real world, in which the Tesla turnaround happened before the self driving shit
It's a completely different business vertical. Running a government rocketship contract or vehicle manufacturer isnt the same as software development or social media. Plus he's made so many decisions that are laughably stupid to the layman that it almost seems like he's tanking it purposefully.
Businesses aren't all the same and the same type of person can't run all of them. It's like asking your heart doctor to give you a urologists opinion.
Tesla started with almost nothing, SpaceX was his from the ground up. I'm not certain how much of Paypal was his but something tells me he was in management there too.
No one's claiming he developed the Tesla Model 3, or engineered the landing system of the Dragon boosters himself. He has been in charge of the people who have though, and he seems to be doing well enough of a job to keep those companies going.
So he's not good at managing a social media platform specifically, if he's actually trying and this isn't just a long con to destroy the site for some other end goal.
Being a succsessful businessman does not make one a good businessman. Half of the equation is ethics, because it fucking matters.
A successful businessman with bad ethics and an unsuccsessful one with good ethics are both bad businessmen.
The only good businessman is one who both succeeds and has good ethics.
While he has had some success, he's also demonstrably been a glory hog benefiting from crazy good luck.
He had an Internet company during the first dot com boom. He got a bunch of cash from Compaq for effectively nothing, because businesses had to snap up anything vaguely Internet. Right place at right time, basically won a lottery.
So then he founded an Internet bank. But want allowed to lead it, no matter, either way it was overshadowed by PayPal, which was a runaway success. Somehow he managed a merger with him being put in charge of the joint company. Then he almost tanked it and was put aside to salvage the company. However, he managed to be popularly thought of as "the PayPal guy"
He founded SpaceX. Off the top of my head, that one seems fair enough.
Then you have Tesla, which existed prior to him Knowing about it, yet he still insisted on being called a founder. It's possible that without him, Tesla wouldn't have gone far, but either way, he's been a glory hog about it to the point of again getting himself framed as "the" Tesla guy.
Also in the case of Tesla, it was a company entering a market with virtually zero competition. Compare the available fully electric cars of 2013-4 and take a wild guess as to which consumers were drooling over: the one that looks like an actual car or ones that screams "eco-friendly toy" (Mitsubishi i, Nissan Leaf)?
Just like how Elon did not design his rockets, SpaceX engineers did, Steve did not design the iPhone, Apple engineers did.
Also everyone seems to conveniently forget about the factory workers actually building them.
Jobs insisted on removing the keypad from a smartphone. He didn't make the multitouch display, but he did force app developers to take it seriously.
The iPhone didn't originally have apps other than basic ones that shipped with the phone, like Safari, YouTube, calculator, etc...
People hacked the first gen to run things like an NES emulator. Apple promptly shut that down and introduced the app store.
I don't hate Jobs for that, but I despise almost every other fucking company panicking in order to copy that shit. Blackberry keyboards were great stuff in the early 2010s.
I feel like he had a part in the first apple. Wozniac did the work but Jobs sold it. Selling and marketing are not easy and a different skill set. I'd be curious what Wozniac has to say about it though.
Not only Jobs managed to sell, he managed to sell way above cost. Apple became synonymous with premium features, even when it was clearly lagging behind the competition in terms of raw power (late 80's) or offering sub par experiences.
He was a visionary who was able to see the applicability of new technology, and was able to force his will for better than the standard upon people who would otherwise have thought the improvements impossible. The guy was a fucking jerk, that's true, but he also completely changed the world with his vision. To say he was nothing more than a Musk, or a thief, is to be disingenuous.
but he also completely changed the world with his vision
Which is a fucking shame, because his vision sucked for the most part. "Less power to the consumers, let them grovel for our products; You can only use our products the way we demand you to; Fuck repairability, buy new; Fuck keyboards"
Gonna have to learn how to necromance if you wanna keep sucking that dick.
What things did he do?
He invented the rounded rectangle, all hail
There's also the flat mouse
Jobs insisted on selling a touchscreen-only smartphone. Turns out, he was right on that one.
But like, he didn't design or build it himself. His company did.
So by that logic he's still the same as Musk, who insisted on a mass-market EV car or reusable rockets.
His company did.
It wasn't even his company, they stole the concept from another company. The home button also wasn't an apple original. The "sum of the parts" was the "original" thing
He was also right about not supporting Flash on the iPhone. People wanted to crucify him for that, but better video and web standards came about because of it, and we're all better off living in a world without Flash.
He was a world-class jump-ropesman, for one
This sells Musk short. He is making smart entrepreneurial decisions for the most part. I hate the monkey testing controversy though.
Tru
Didn't Musk start SpaceX? That's, at least, one thing. Too bad he can't stick to it.
No, he bought it from others and made them sign a contract letting him claim he's the original founder.
Start? Nope.
Woah; that's just so wildly inaccurate; I have no idea what to even say.
Are you really saying Jobs was a transphobic right-wing extremist whose father got super rich and helped him to just buy into uprising companies without really doing anything by himself?
He did father a child he denied to the day he died, intentionally screwed Woz out of his fair share of the apple fortune, killed himself by treating cancer with quackery. Jobs is probably more self made, but that's about it.
Jobs is probably more self made, but that’s about it.
I just gave you some pretty major differences. To me, most things that defines Musk as the horrible person he is aren't true for Jobs. Again: The extremist position, transphobia, the fact that he bought into his companies and didn't actually invent these things and made these breakthroughs by himself (which is just not true for Jobs, even if you have reasons to not like him), that he just got his money by his father's mine and hasn't made such successes by himself, etc. All of that doesn't apply to Jobs.
Those things you mention are just… cases of him doing awful stuff; most of them not even related to Musk in any way. But if "he did awful stuff" is enough to set him on the same layer as Musk, then he is also "the same person" as a good share of all people living.
He did not deny her until the day he died. She even lived with him during highschool, and he named a computer after her, even though he made up a bogus acronym to pretend that wasn't his motivation.
Woz was worth $500m at one point and is worth $100m today. It's not like he was cut out of the game, he just wasn't interested in money or success the way Jobs was. Without Jobs drive for success, Woz would never have shared his inventions with anyone, it was just a private hobby to him.
Steve was definitely an asshole, but there are plenty of valid criticisms to levy at him, you don't need to misrepresent anything.
’s not like he was cut out of the game, he just wasn’t interested in money or success the way Jobs was.
You really buy that? That's some bullshit someone says when they got fucked over and know they'll lose and come out worse if they try to get what's rightfully theirs.
Woz himself has said as much. The guy has more money than he'll ever be able to spend. He's fine.
Woz himself has said as much.
That's why I said:
That’s some bullshit someone says when...
Don't get me wrong, I don't give a shit about the contentedness of any of these treasure hoarding shitdragons, but there never has been and never will be a person who is fine with getting ass fucked out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Even Muskrat is throwing an endless tantrum and fucking up people's lives over a bad deal, even though he did it to himself on purpose.
there never has been and never will be a person who is fine with getting ass fucked out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Hi, you don't know me... but for a single hundred million dollars, you can ass fuck me out of as many hundreds more as you want.
Sounds like a deal.
Not to stand up for jobs, but from what I've seen of woz, I can totally believe he wouldn't see more money as worth the bother.
From what I've seen:
If you're making 36k a year, your are obsessed with opportunities to get more, no matter who you are. Your life is financially difficult and any chance to overcome that is worth it.
If you are making 200k a year, you start seeing different sorts of folk.
Some will not stop until that number is as big as it can be. Their lives will be consumed by that as a "high score"
Some care less about money and more about titles and conspicuous status symbols, like a coveted office.
Some are happy to just do their work the way they like without having to worry about the money anymore, or to work on hobbies and afford to walk away from working.
I know folks that are 200k as "bird in the hand" money and chasing bigger numbers is worth considering, but they are more concerned about risk to their perceived status or working conditions than pay.
Take one of those last sort of folk, get them to tens of millions of wealth and they are likely happy to just stop thinking about the money, even if it means they are sonetimes the chump as a result.
That's true, he was not nearly as bad as Musk. I was mainly talking about how he's a general asshole who steals from others and is revered by techbros. I was maybe being a bit hyperbolic in my comparison.
I don't necessarily agree with that, but I get this point (in contrast to how you phrased it before), so fair I guess.
But just one thing:
is revered by techbros
I actually don't know any people who revere Musk. I know this is dependent on the bubble, but at least with Jobs being generally seen pretty favourable and Musk seen extremely unfavourable by most people, I think there's a big difference.
did he ever reconcile with his kid? hard to imagine just ignoring your own child like that...
Who, Elon or Steve? /s
he just died too soon for everyone to see him for the villain he was
Steve Jobs was the Elon Musk of his time, he just died too soon for everyone to see him for the villain he was.
Steve Jobs did at least actually do things. Musk just buys things and claims he did them.
Nah Jobs didn't do anything himself. From Wozniaks first computer up to the multitouch display for the iPhone, all of these things were just bought/stolen/copied. Jobs just knew how to put these technologies into something that would sell.
So elon but a good businessman
Salesman
without the good, or the (hu)man(ity)
There's no version of this reality where Jobs isn't a good businessman. You might not like the company or their products, but they've somehow managed to build a huge and successful business selling those overpriced toys to tons of people. They managed to create a cult around expensive consumer electronics. That is a massive success no matter how you slice it. And you can't deny that Jobs played a big part in that.
The weird thing is that Apple without Jobs was a failure, but also Jobs without Apple was also a failure.
it was just a gag for comic effect. it wasn't the breadth and depth of my thoughts and feelings of the digital and manufacturing epochs since the 1980s.
But also, it was kind of begging the question of "is there such thing as a good business man?"
There's good for /their/ business. But is that- in general - good?
Does the current head of Larian Studios count as a businessman? If so, that's one I would consider good for the company AND the consumers
Also you can tie it directly to Jobs, because when he was gone for a bit, apple fuckin tanked, and then he came back and they came out with the iPod.
That's not an accident.
Yeah, Steve Jobs was definitely an asshole, and he didn't personally design any of his products, but he did know what direction to move things in and what consumers wanted in a phone. He was the first to put a truly usable portable touchscreen computer into our pockets with a phone in it, and every phone nowadays is basically just a reimagined, upgraded version of the first iPhone. The way we communicate is forever changed because of the iPhone.
But yeah iPhone's are kind of the pinnacle of "how much can we fuck you over before you notice" now. All because of the little Apple on the back of the phone.
There is a story that the concept of touchscreen phones was stolen from a Nokia engineer who tried to get nokia to produce them but the feature was dismissed as a 'gimmick'.
I could believe that too tbh
He didn't know what customers wanted in a phone.
He knew what customers would want in a phone when they were taught about its existence.
The customers had no idea they would want it before he showed it to them.
Jesus I'm no Elon fan but how many companies do you have to take from a couple million to hundreds of billions before you're good at your job?
What is it with modern society and the need to reduce everything about a person just because they're a POS? He might be evil but he's clearly pretty good at being a businessman or you wouldn't even know his name.
But… he literally isn't. Like just look at twitter, he has ruined it from day one with bad decisions day after day whose impacts haven't shown directly, but now appear more and more with embarrassing effects (The verification badge which is now worthless and has been used to impersonate people and cooperations, the two factor authentification which stopped working, the self-DDOSing, the maximum amounts of tweets one could view per day, the old tweets that got deleted due to a glitch, etc.)
And in other companies it's mostly other people managing the stuff and cleaning up the mess he leaves; especially SpaceX is currently just glad that he isn't too busy with his X playtoy to bother them.
The only thing you may call him somewhat successful in is making out companies that have a potential so he could get into them early and claim their success.
Elon is (maybe was) very much good at what he does. Twitter is a bad example because that whole shit show was a dick measuring content from the get-go.
Fact is, SpaceX wouldn't be SpaceX and Tesla sure as fuck would not be Tesla without his leadership.
He's a piece of shit as a person, and I'd never want to work for him, because his work ethic is unhealthy to say the least (and I personally have a pretty extreme work ethic), but it's schoolyard nonsense to claim he's somehow bad at business. Leading a business may be the one thing he is good at. It's tossing shit just to toss shit.
You can not like him and acknowledge he is good at things.
You're right, it wouldn't; it would almost certainly be a better company.
Musk got Tesla where it is financially entirely through blatant fraud. "Earning" the company's absurd valuation based almost entirely on dishonest promises of releasing a technology that is entirely unachievable, undesirable, and dangerous is an unsustainable business model, and it's already showing cracks.
The fact that you seem to think that being highly profitable through constant ethical violations in every aspect of the company is to viewed as a succsess is honestly pretty gross.
I live in the real world, in which the Tesla turnaround happened before the self driving shit
It's a completely different business vertical. Running a government rocketship contract or vehicle manufacturer isnt the same as software development or social media. Plus he's made so many decisions that are laughably stupid to the layman that it almost seems like he's tanking it purposefully.
Businesses aren't all the same and the same type of person can't run all of them. It's like asking your heart doctor to give you a urologists opinion.
Tesla started with almost nothing, SpaceX was his from the ground up. I'm not certain how much of Paypal was his but something tells me he was in management there too.
No one's claiming he developed the Tesla Model 3, or engineered the landing system of the Dragon boosters himself. He has been in charge of the people who have though, and he seems to be doing well enough of a job to keep those companies going.
So he's not good at managing a social media platform specifically, if he's actually trying and this isn't just a long con to destroy the site for some other end goal.
Being a succsessful businessman does not make one a good businessman. Half of the equation is ethics, because it fucking matters.
A successful businessman with bad ethics and an unsuccsessful one with good ethics are both bad businessmen.
The only good businessman is one who both succeeds and has good ethics.
While he has had some success, he's also demonstrably been a glory hog benefiting from crazy good luck.
He had an Internet company during the first dot com boom. He got a bunch of cash from Compaq for effectively nothing, because businesses had to snap up anything vaguely Internet. Right place at right time, basically won a lottery.
So then he founded an Internet bank. But want allowed to lead it, no matter, either way it was overshadowed by PayPal, which was a runaway success. Somehow he managed a merger with him being put in charge of the joint company. Then he almost tanked it and was put aside to salvage the company. However, he managed to be popularly thought of as "the PayPal guy"
He founded SpaceX. Off the top of my head, that one seems fair enough.
Then you have Tesla, which existed prior to him Knowing about it, yet he still insisted on being called a founder. It's possible that without him, Tesla wouldn't have gone far, but either way, he's been a glory hog about it to the point of again getting himself framed as "the" Tesla guy.
Also in the case of Tesla, it was a company entering a market with virtually zero competition. Compare the available fully electric cars of 2013-4 and take a wild guess as to which consumers were drooling over: the one that looks like an actual car or ones that screams "eco-friendly toy" (Mitsubishi i, Nissan Leaf)?
Just like how Elon did not design his rockets, SpaceX engineers did, Steve did not design the iPhone, Apple engineers did.
Also everyone seems to conveniently forget about the factory workers actually building them.
Jobs insisted on removing the keypad from a smartphone. He didn't make the multitouch display, but he did force app developers to take it seriously.
The iPhone didn't originally have apps other than basic ones that shipped with the phone, like Safari, YouTube, calculator, etc...
People hacked the first gen to run things like an NES emulator. Apple promptly shut that down and introduced the app store.
I don't hate Jobs for that, but I despise almost every other fucking company panicking in order to copy that shit. Blackberry keyboards were great stuff in the early 2010s.
I feel like he had a part in the first apple. Wozniac did the work but Jobs sold it. Selling and marketing are not easy and a different skill set. I'd be curious what Wozniac has to say about it though.
Not only Jobs managed to sell, he managed to sell way above cost. Apple became synonymous with premium features, even when it was clearly lagging behind the competition in terms of raw power (late 80's) or offering sub par experiences.
He was a visionary who was able to see the applicability of new technology, and was able to force his will for better than the standard upon people who would otherwise have thought the improvements impossible. The guy was a fucking jerk, that's true, but he also completely changed the world with his vision. To say he was nothing more than a Musk, or a thief, is to be disingenuous.
Which is a fucking shame, because his vision sucked for the most part. "Less power to the consumers, let them grovel for our products; You can only use our products the way we demand you to; Fuck repairability, buy new; Fuck keyboards"
Gonna have to learn how to necromance if you wanna keep sucking that dick.
What things did he do?
He invented the rounded rectangle, all hail
There's also the flat mouse
Jobs insisted on selling a touchscreen-only smartphone. Turns out, he was right on that one.
But like, he didn't design or build it himself. His company did.
So by that logic he's still the same as Musk, who insisted on a mass-market EV car or reusable rockets.
It wasn't even his company, they stole the concept from another company. The home button also wasn't an apple original. The "sum of the parts" was the "original" thing
He was also right about not supporting Flash on the iPhone. People wanted to crucify him for that, but better video and web standards came about because of it, and we're all better off living in a world without Flash.
He was a world-class jump-ropesman, for one
This sells Musk short. He is making smart entrepreneurial decisions for the most part. I hate the monkey testing controversy though.
Tru
Didn't Musk start SpaceX? That's, at least, one thing. Too bad he can't stick to it.
No, he bought it from others and made them sign a contract letting him claim he's the original founder.
Start? Nope.
Woah; that's just so wildly inaccurate; I have no idea what to even say.
Are you really saying Jobs was a transphobic right-wing extremist whose father got super rich and helped him to just buy into uprising companies without really doing anything by himself?
He did father a child he denied to the day he died, intentionally screwed Woz out of his fair share of the apple fortune, killed himself by treating cancer with quackery. Jobs is probably more self made, but that's about it.
I just gave you some pretty major differences. To me, most things that defines Musk as the horrible person he is aren't true for Jobs. Again: The extremist position, transphobia, the fact that he bought into his companies and didn't actually invent these things and made these breakthroughs by himself (which is just not true for Jobs, even if you have reasons to not like him), that he just got his money by his father's mine and hasn't made such successes by himself, etc. All of that doesn't apply to Jobs.
Those things you mention are just… cases of him doing awful stuff; most of them not even related to Musk in any way. But if "he did awful stuff" is enough to set him on the same layer as Musk, then he is also "the same person" as a good share of all people living.
He did not deny her until the day he died. She even lived with him during highschool, and he named a computer after her, even though he made up a bogus acronym to pretend that wasn't his motivation.
Woz was worth $500m at one point and is worth $100m today. It's not like he was cut out of the game, he just wasn't interested in money or success the way Jobs was. Without Jobs drive for success, Woz would never have shared his inventions with anyone, it was just a private hobby to him.
Steve was definitely an asshole, but there are plenty of valid criticisms to levy at him, you don't need to misrepresent anything.
You really buy that? That's some bullshit someone says when they got fucked over and know they'll lose and come out worse if they try to get what's rightfully theirs.
Woz himself has said as much. The guy has more money than he'll ever be able to spend. He's fine.
That's why I said:
Don't get me wrong, I don't give a shit about the contentedness of any of these treasure hoarding shitdragons, but there never has been and never will be a person who is fine with getting ass fucked out of hundreds of millions of dollars. Even Muskrat is throwing an endless tantrum and fucking up people's lives over a bad deal, even though he did it to himself on purpose.
Hi, you don't know me... but for a single hundred million dollars, you can ass fuck me out of as many hundreds more as you want.
Sounds like a deal.
Not to stand up for jobs, but from what I've seen of woz, I can totally believe he wouldn't see more money as worth the bother. From what I've seen: If you're making 36k a year, your are obsessed with opportunities to get more, no matter who you are. Your life is financially difficult and any chance to overcome that is worth it.
If you are making 200k a year, you start seeing different sorts of folk.
Some will not stop until that number is as big as it can be. Their lives will be consumed by that as a "high score"
Some care less about money and more about titles and conspicuous status symbols, like a coveted office.
Some are happy to just do their work the way they like without having to worry about the money anymore, or to work on hobbies and afford to walk away from working.
I know folks that are 200k as "bird in the hand" money and chasing bigger numbers is worth considering, but they are more concerned about risk to their perceived status or working conditions than pay.
Take one of those last sort of folk, get them to tens of millions of wealth and they are likely happy to just stop thinking about the money, even if it means they are sonetimes the chump as a result.
That's true, he was not nearly as bad as Musk. I was mainly talking about how he's a general asshole who steals from others and is revered by techbros. I was maybe being a bit hyperbolic in my comparison.
I don't necessarily agree with that, but I get this point (in contrast to how you phrased it before), so fair I guess.
But just one thing:
did he ever reconcile with his kid? hard to imagine just ignoring your own child like that...
Who, Elon or Steve? /s
Oh he died soon enough.