Some Musk discourse crossed my dash, and I always think the thing about Musk is that he (like Steve Jobs before him) leans into...
Some Musk discourse crossed my dash, and I always think the thing about Musk is that he (like Steve Jobs before him) leans into the lone genius mythology that we’ve built up around science and technology. Movies, TV, fictional science/tech portrayals have created a Tony Stark/Q from James Bond/Doc Brown from Back to the Future shaped hole in people’s world and Musk is willing to step in to it so he can raise money.
Which isn’t all bad, Telsa makes some cool cars, Space X has some cool rockets. But there is an aspect of his persona that feels to me like it crosses the line into grift territory a bit too often.
Oh, also, I think Tesla’s autopilot tech is a bit unethical and reckless.
no single individual ever achieves much of consequence.
You know what, I see this sentiment more and more and no, I’m gonna push back in favor of Great Man significance. I remember Apple under Steve Jobs, and then under Gil Amelio, and then again under Jobs, and now Tim Cook, with the chief role changing hands while the rest of the organization stood pat (or rather drifted at the same rate as within administrations)
And the Jobs eras really were periods of visionary “get out in front of the future” moves and exceedingly high standards that accounts convincingly arrribute to Steve, and the others really have been uninspired corporate conventional wisdom and running down the stock of goodwill and reputation Jobs built up
Don’t forget that Jobs was originally pushed out of Apple for the failures of the Apple III,the LISA, and at the time the looked to be failing Macintosh. They lost most of the business market position they had built up with the apple II due to that string of Jobs managed failures.
Scully kept the company alive by doing the boring business work of creating the education and other markets for Macintosh.
Edit for clarity: I’m not saying that the products weren’t visionary, just that a company needs more than the vision to be successful. Without Woz, you’d have never had the Apple II, without Scully the company might have died after the product flops. NeXT made awesome but ultimately niche products, when the engineers that left Apple for NeXT and their whole team were merged back into Apple’s business structures, they became what they are now.
Further edit: Also remember that the rest of the organization didn’t stand pat when the leadership changed. When Jobs left he took many key players with him to start NeXT, and when Jobs came back he brought them back.
And yet another edit: And in the John Scully era, the Newton was a legit get-in-front-of-the-future attempt. It wasn’t successful but it wasn’t business as usual it invented the PDA as a product.
And final edit: My original point was that Jobs has an oversized role in the public imagination because he was the most willing to take the credit and step into that lone genius/great man role. There is a reason people know who Steve Jobs is but don’t know Bud Tribble or Susan Kare.
inspiring, organising, and ultimately taking credit for the work of others is what the Great Man of History theory is all about.
But inspiring and organizing actually makes a physical difference! If you have a Great Person to inspire and organize, things happen differently than if you don’t, history is actually set on a different course, that’s the whole point of the Great Person theory.. That Steve Jobs doesn’t physically assemble each iPod himself does not change the fact that the iPods are due to him.
I mean when I say “exceedingly high standards that accounts convincingly attribute to Steve” I mean that he would hire the best of the best in every field and when they delivered their best he would abusively belittle them, with the perfect combination of rage at his imperfect inferiors, genius vulnerability-seeking manipulativeness, and personal legacy of perfectionist artisan triumph to back it up
And he would convince them that they were miserable failures, that this thing they thought was the masterpiece apex of their creative life-career was in fact evidence of their fraudulent undeservingness
And in response they would consistently cancel everything else in their lives to make this masterpiece more perfect in hopes of winning Jobs-sempai’s forgiveness, and this was basically how all Apple products were made up until iTunes went brushed aluminum and got the store, before it went to shit