The December issue of Foreign Policy, the so-called Global Thinkers issue, has my commentary on Elon Musk and why he’s a bigger deal than Steve Jobs. You can read the story, “The Rocketeer,” at http://atfp.co/1bvOQIA.
Meanwhile, over at Fortune magazine, Chris Anderson has a story comparing Musk to Jobs, basically putting them in the same league.
Actually, Musk, still only in his early 40s, is already miles ahead of Jobs. You can argue that Jobs revolutionized three major industries: personal computing, music distribution, and cell phones, in that order. But these are all in the same category: consumer gadgets.
Musk, on the other hand, has upended the auto industry by making the best car on the road, bar none, an electric vehicle, as well as the space launch industry by launching satellites for a quarter of the cost of the competition. And he’s well on his way to making human spaceflight to orbit and beyond affordable enough to enable the settlement and development of space.
Jobs made gadgets, Musk is revolutionizing big-iron industries that have been stagnant for half a century. And I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that he’s also helping advance human evolution itself by developing the technologies that will finally get us off the planet in significant numbers. There’s no real comparison.
I think you are missing the impact of Steve Jobs on our society. We’ve come to take the world he built for granted. As just one example, the “personal computer” is not just a “consumer gadget” – it enables almost every modern activity today. I doubt SpaceX would be flying rockets today if they needed to use mainframes – they’d still be either coding or testing or out of money.
Here’s my own blog posts on the subject:
http://www.gdunge.com/2011/10/06/shock-and-awe
http://www.gdunge.com/2011/10/09/forgotten-apple-innovations
Musk is building the future, but Jobs built the present. I don’t think there’s any comparison in the number of lives directly affected by the two men.
Human evolution? How can you leave out the personal computer? That’s like leaving out the invention of running shoes from the history of track and field. Do you think we’ll leave computers behind when we move out into the solar system?
Thanks for the comment, Doug. Granted, Jobs had an enormous impact, and I’m a fan too. I’m typing this now on an iMac. I also have an iPhone and a MacBook Air, and I gladly pay the premium that these devices demand over competing devices. But I do think that humans leaving the home planet is on a vastly larger scale on the continuum of evolution—not just for humans, but for life on planet Earth itself—perhaps even more important than the colonization of land from the oceans 400 million years ago.
Hi Michael,
I’m a fan of both men. I find myself agreeing more with Chris Anderson (“Jobs and Musk are similar”) rather than with you (“Jobs makes gadgets, Musk saves the world”). I do see a similarity in the two of them, and with a couple of other famous monomaniacs – Howard Hughes and Robert Bigelow. All inspiring, hands-on leaders who have made a ton of money.
Jobs wasn’t particularly interested in space or the ultimate future of mankind, while you, me (I work for XCOR Aerospace), and Elon Musk are. That leads us towards being more impressed with Musk. However, Jobs’ story is over now, and we live in the world he had a big hand in creating. Musk is just getting started, and he and SpaceX could be forgotten in a few years, long before he and his companies have had a chance to change anything as thoroughly as Jobs did during his lifetime. History will be the judge, and history’s verdict is not yet in on Elon Musk.
But even if everything goes perfectly, and Musk saves Earth (with solar energy and electric cars) and humanity (by making us multi-planetary), I maintain that the idea that computers can and should be part of our daily lives – which is the central theme of Jobs’ work – will be as much a part of us then as it is now. Personal computers have become the ocean in which humanity swims, and Steve Jobs’ focus on improving the interface between us and the machines is what brought about this sea change in our lives. And if we leave Earth behind, like life left the oceans for the land and the air, then this time we’ll take Steve’s ocean with us, and swim effortlessly through it even as we walk on other worlds.
IMO, of course 🙂
While jobs was inarguably important, I don’t think he’s in Musk’s category – a category right now of One, in fact. I’d put a different metric on it: in changing Earth, who has garnered the most enemies? I would argue Musk has, from one status quo after another. Not only is the Old Guard of space – both corporate and government – trying to derail him; but a similar old-guard conspiracy in the automotive world of, for example, automobile dealerships colluding with state politicians trying to keep him from selling Teslas directly. There’s an old Cherokee saying or some such that goes like: You know by the enemies he makes that a man has led a life of worth.
Hi Dave,
I think that you, like Michael, are having a hard time seeing the enormous changes wrought in our daily lives by Steve Jobs’ work. Jobs has a big head start, and Musk is just getting started, so I think comparisons between the two of them are premature. But we can still argue hypothetically about it, thank goodness 🙂
Let me address the quality-of-your-enemies metric. Sure, Musk has powerful enemies — although I don’t see many enemies of SpaceX in government beyond the few Congresscritters who are trying to push SLS and worry that SpaceX makes their porkbarrel rocket look pathetic. NASA loves SpaceX for saving their bacon, and the DoD loves SpaceX for saving their budget, and the rest of the Federal Government really doesn’t seem to care. I agree that the automakers are pretty unhappy about Tesla, and ULA is pretty unhappy about SpaceX, and that those are pretty high-quality enemies.
Now, on to Steve Jobs’ enemies. Surprise! They’re all dead, or copying him.
Computer companies? All selling graphical user interfaces, or dead. (IBM gave up on PCs and sold that business to China. Microsoft Windows, released after Bill Gates got a look at a Macintosh.)
Phone companies? All selling iPhone copies, or dead. (Nokia. BlackBerry.)
Record companies? Digital, or dead.
Animated movie makers? Making CGI movies, or dead. (Even Disney quit making hand-animated movies after they bought Pixar.)
Tablets? Nobody could sell them until Apple made the iPad, and now the ones that didn’t give up and die before the iPad even came out are selling iPad clones.
He had some pretty big enemies before he out-innovated them, but nobody things they’re very scary now that Steve kicked their asses. Here’s a list of the Big Bads that I remember.
IBM and Microsoft I already mentioned.
BlackBerries (called CrackBerries by their users) were THE executive gotta-have-it before smartphones came out. Now the company is a joke.
Palm invented the first usable hand-held computer. Apple (while Jobs was gone) tried to compete with them (Newton) and got shellacked. Jobs came back to Apple, cancelled the Newton, and came out with the iPod, cleverly disguised as a music player.
The iTunes Store, along with the iPod, has made the record companies (and record stores) pretty irrelevant at this point. They’d be dead without digital distribution.
Nokia invented smartphones, or maybe Treo (an offshoot of Palm) did. Treo and Palm are dead, and Nokia’s on life support, since we got a look at the iPhone.
Samsung’s mostly “competing” with Apple by copying them, and it’s been a pretty epic battle. However, Samsung just lost a big court decision, and it looks like the tide may have turned. We’ll see.
So, how about the quality of those enemies? Sure, most of them are just companies and not what I’d consider “bad guys”. However, Microsoft, in my opinion and the opinion of many other people, including a large number of judges across the world, *was* evil. They’re not so bad, today. They’ve mostly stopped trying to exploit their monopoly, and they don’t lie, cheat, and steal like they used to since Bill Gates grew up and became a philanthropist. But back in the 90s? Evil.
I just thought of another recent Steve Jobs enemy, who is very much alive – Google, who released the Android OS as open source. I worry about Google – they seem to be forgetting their motto “Don’t be evil”, or else losing sight of what “evil” means. Google would make a pretty good candidate for a high-quality enemy. We’ll see.
So, to finally sum up, I’d say that Jobs’ enemies certainly outnumber Musk’s, if you count the dead ones. They’re pretty even on the quality, I’d say. I’d put SLS supporters and automotive and oil companies up against Microsoft at its worst. But, as a long-time Apple user, I am biased 🙂
I was recently a part of Hitachi Innovation Summit a great source for information on innovation technologies therefore stumpledupon the works of Musk, What an innovator, Businessman and leader of technology who is taking things to the next level.
Thumbs up to your work and hey i agree about his comparison to steve Jobs.
While jobs was inarguably important, I don’t think he’s in Musk’s category – a category right now of One, in fact. I’d put a different metric on it: in changing Earth, who has garnered the most enemies? I would argue Musk has, from one status quo after another. Not only is the Old Guard of space – both corporate and government – trying to derail him; but a similar old-guard conspiracy in the automotive world of, for example, automobile dealerships colluding with state politicians trying to keep him from selling Teslas directly. There’s an old Cherokee saying or some such that goes like: You know by the enemies he makes that a man has led a life of worth.
Nicely said. I agree.