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• Musk and Jobs are both seen as visionaries
• Jobs biographer recognizes parallels between the entrepreneurs
• Different approach
Apple founder Steve Jobs has had a decisive influence on the electronics market. Under his leadership, Apple heralded the triumph of the iPhone, and the iPod and iPad were also developed under his leadership and became successful products.
Also Elon Muskthe boss of the electric car pioneer Tesla, has caused major upheavals in his industry: With him at the helm, Tesla has risen to become the largest electric car manufacturer, and he is also pursuing ambitious goals in space travel and tunnel construction, among other things.
Jobs biographer sees parallels with Musk
Walter Isaacson, the author of the authorized biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs, believes there are similarities between the two managerial personalities. In an interview with “Influencers with Andy Serwer” at Yahoo Finance, the former CNN CEO explained why Elon Musk is in some ways “the Steve Jobs of our time”.
“He’s crazy enough to think he can change the world, so he could be one of the people changing the world,” Isaacson told the portal. However, he sees a final assessment as premature: “I think [
] we are still in medias res, i.e. in the middle of history”. Although the business of both the space company SpaceX and Tesla’s Model S seems to be going well, Elon Musk – like Steve Jobs at the time – is moving on the cliff and also “Steve was sawed off at some point,” warned the expert, referring to the fact that Jobs had lost his job at the top of Apple in the meantime.
At the moment he doesn’t seem to be worried about Musk, “I love the fact that he’s a man with passion and obsession,” Isaacson said.
Influential entrepreneurial personalities
In fact, it’s not just the passion with which both entrepreneurs approached their projects, there are other parallels that make a similarity between Jobs and Musk clear from an entrepreneurial perspective.
Both are influential entrepreneurs of their time and their fortunes are closely linked to those of their companies. When Steve Jobs was booted out of Apple in the mid-80s, there was even a bankruptcy in the room. The iPhone manufacturer struggled more badly through the following years, only when Steve Jobs returned to the top of the group 12 years later did Apple initiate a triumph that has continued to this day and has made the company the most valuable company in the world. The fate of Steve Jobs is closely linked to that of Apple. Steve Jobs embodied Apple’s spirit of innovation and passion for new products like no other personality. With his charisma, he led Apple to the top of a segment previously occupied by industry giants such as Nokia and BlackBerry.
And Elon Musk also turned the automotive market inside out and helped the idea of electrically powered vehicles to achieve a breakthrough. Like Steve Jobs at the time, Musk pushed ruthlessly into an industry in which traditional companies such as Ford, General Motors & Co. had been successful for years. Both Jobs and Musk have revolutionized their respective industries, both have turned their companies into success stories, they were and are both leaders and identification figures.
Millions become millions more
The starting position was similar for both of them: An innovative product – for Jobs it was the invention of the Apple computer, for Musk the founding of the payment service PayPal – made both entrepreneurs financially independent at a young age. Both use this capital for further investments: Steve Jobs was, among other things, a large shareholder in Pixar and founded the computer company NeXT Software after being kicked out of Apple, Musk also invested in Tesla and the space company SpaceX and also participated in the Hyperloop project. He also invested in his tunneling company, The Boring Company, and also has a foothold in neurotechnology with Neuralink.
Why Musk isn’t a Jobs clone
But despite all the similarities between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, there are also differences between the two radiants in the entrepreneurial sky. Elon Musk is a doer who would like to implement new ideas immediately. He started his tunneling company, The Boring Company, after getting frustrated at being stuck in a traffic jam on the highway with his Tesla. His employees should also try to implement Musk’s ideas promptly, because in the past he often spontaneously announced possible features for Tesla vehicles. Musk often gave the expected dates for the presentation of new models at an early stage, but in many cases the implementation of the schedule could not be adhered to.
Steve Jobs, on the other hand, hardly left anything to chance when it came to marketing. While Musk mostly discussed new ideas directly in public, Jobs established a confidentiality policy at Apple that still has an impact today. For example, speculation about the supposedly new product range has always run rampant before events announced by the iPhone manufacturer, but Apple itself does not comment on the products or the possible equipment of these in the run-up to an event.
Microsoft founder Bill Gateswho knew or knows both entrepreneurs personally, summed up the differences between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk in an interview with “Bloomberg”: “If you know people personally, this kind of simplification doesn’t seem appropriate. Elon is more of a hands-on engineer and technician. Steve was a design genius and a genius at choosing people and marketing. If they sat in the same room together, they wouldn’t be confused.”
Would Jobs and Musk be friends?
In retrospect, one can only speculate as to whether the two visionaries would have gotten along privately. “The one time I met Steve Jobs, he was kind of an ass. And everyone I know who met him…” Musk began a tirade against the Apple boss in an interview with “GQ” before interrupting himself . Bill Gates, meanwhile, called Jobs a “magician when it came to motivating people…I could see him casting the spells and then I would look at people and see them intrigued,” Gates once said on a podcast Dax Shepherd.
This, in turn, can also be applied to Elon Musk, because his way of doing things has helped him to develop a large following of fans who also feel motivated by him, albeit in a different way. The Tesla boss has done so in the past caused massive price movements for Dogecoin, Bitcoin or Etsy on the stock exchange – just through messages on his favorite platform Twitter.
In the end, Jobs and Musk share a passion for their companies and their status as visionaries. Both are surrounded by a personality and inventor cult, both are said to be or have been rather difficult characters. Despite all the parallels between the two alpha animals, it should be noted that they are both completely different personalities, unique – each in their own way.
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Image Credits: Larry Busacca/Getty Images for The New York Times, Steven Ferdman/Getty Images