\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nSome 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\u2019ve built up around science and technology.\u00a0 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\u2019s world and Musk is willing to step in to it so he can raise money.\u00a0\u00a0
\nWhich isn\u2019t all bad, Telsa makes some cool cars, Space X has some cool rockets.\u00a0 But there is an aspect of his persona that feels to me like it crosses the line into grift territory a bit too often.\u00a0\u00a0
\nOh, also, I think Tesla\u2019s autopilot tech is a bit unethical and reckless.\u00a0\u00a0
\nno single individual ever achieves much of consequence.
\nYou know what, I see this sentiment more and more and no, I\u2019m 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)
\nAnd the Jobs eras really were periods of visionary \u201cget out in front of the future\u201d 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
\nDon\u2019t 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.\u00a0 They lost most of the business market position they had built up with the apple II due to that string of Jobs managed failures.\u00a0\u00a0
\nScully kept the company alive by doing the boring business work of creating the education and other markets for Macintosh.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
\nEdit for clarity: I\u2019m not saying that the products weren\u2019t visionary, just that a company needs more than the vision to be successful.\u00a0 Without Woz, you\u2019d have never had the Apple II, without Scully the company might have died after the product flops.\u00a0 NeXT made awesome but ultimately niche products, when the engineers that left Apple for NeXT and their whole team were merged back into Apple\u2019s business structures, they became what they are now.\u00a0\u00a0
\nFurther edit: Also remember that the rest of the organization didn\u2019t 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.\u00a0
\nAnd yet another edit: And in the John Scully era, the Newton was a legit get-in-front-of-the-future attempt. It wasn\u2019t successful but it wasn\u2019t business as usual it invented the PDA as a product.\u00a0
\nAnd 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.\u00a0 There is a reason people know who Steve Jobs is but don\u2019t know Bud Tribble or Susan Kare.\u00a0
\ninspiring, organising, and ultimately taking credit for the work of others is what the Great Man of History theory is all about.
\nBut 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\u2019t, history is actually set on a different course, that\u2019s the whole point of the Great Person theory.. That Steve Jobs doesn\u2019t physically assemble each iPod himself does not change the fact that the iPods are due to him.
I mean when I say \u201cexceedingly high standards that accounts convincingly attribute to Steve\u201d 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\u2019s 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
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