https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/945712432416137217
Saw this yesterday when someone threw together a quick article on all of the gushing responses from customers to this tweet.
How can you say someone nicknamed "the real world Iron Man" is bad at PR?
No other tech leader is as charismatic (Steve Jobs came close, but Musk seems more genuine whereas Jobs felt like a salesman) and very few are as personally intelligent and accomplished.
He was not a programmer but he knew more about computers than most programmers do. There's absolutely no way to call him non-technical accurately. Bill Gates giving up programming did not make him non-technical.
Elon Musk wouldn't make this mistake. He's very openly trying to emulate Steve Jobs' entire skillset.
Maybe the cause of this confusion is that most people only saw Steve Jobs when he went up on stage for an hour every year. Try asking yourself what he was doing the rest of the time. Elon Musk did.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/127537/Steve_Jobs_Atari_...
> "At night the two would collaborate on building it at Atari: Wozniak as engineer, Jobs as breadboarder and tester...."
But this is a very biased way of describing two people working on a technical project. To call one an "engineer" and the other a "breadboarder" as if he sat quietly contributing nothing.
Just because one person is playing second fiddle to a truly gifted technical genius doesn't magically make them non-technical.
If you want to argue Steve Jobs isn't technical, you'll have to set the bar lower than "as good as Woz" or almost none of us will make the cut!
You cannot create the company or products that Steve Jobs did without being technical. That doesn't mean you have to write the firmware on the wifi chip. It does mean you have to understand thousands of deeply technical concepts about computers.
"Move far enough up in any career, and you are essentially doing sales".
Thought that was very true.
He has been anointed as a neo-PR guy now because his style of doing things (like responding to requests on Twitter with "Done,") is breathtakingly refreshing compared to PR from actual trained PR agencies
His back of hand calculations on the viability of self-landing rockets, while coming back from a trip to Russia after a failed attempt to purchase a launch vehicle certainly wasn't moonshot.
He is a technology man in and out and knows the capabilities and limits of technology. I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
> I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.
My view is that he focuses on what should be possible from first principles, ignoring whether or not our short-sighted markets find it desirable at the moment. It's a good strategy if you have a non-monetary goal in mind and resources to bankroll the efforts at forcing the markets into accepting your work.
He makes crazy "moonshots", he has a vision and doesn't tone it down nearly as much as others do, and he's not afraid to be "wrong".
The SpaceX community has a running joke about "elon time" being set to mars time, because his predictions and goals are almost always late (and are often under delivering), but I honestly respect that. Him and his companies aren't taking the "easy way out" of making easily achievable goals and then making them again and again. They are shooting for unlikely and in some cases almost impossible goals, and getting 70-90% of the way there, and they aren't exactly ashamed of it. IIRC there was a reddit thread a while back that was "bashing" Elon and Tesla and SpaceX about only hitting something like 70% of the goals they set, but I read it differently. They set out to revolutionize 3 different industries (cars, space, and now "boring" and public transport), and even if they can only get to "70% revolutionized", it's still a massive win in my opinion!
He's not perfect, I hear lots of bad things from many employees about the work environment, but overall I really respect the man and the companies he has created, and I think he has and will continue to do a lot for humanity.