Please. Elon's track record to take tesla from concept car stage to current mass production levels and building SpaceX from scratch is hardly comparable to Altman's track record.
I feel like Steve Jobs also fits this category if we are going to talk about people who aren't really worthy of genius title and used other people's accomplishments to reach their goals.
We all know it as the engineers who made iPhone possible.
Someone far more deserving of the title, Dennis Ritchie, died a week after Jobs' stupidity caught up with him. So much attention to Jobs who didn't really deserve it, and so little to Dennis Ritchie who made such a profound impact on the tech world and society in general.
I think Ritchie's influence while significant is overblown and not entirely positive. I am not a fan of Steve Jobs, who had many reprehensible traits, but I find it ridiculous to dismiss his genius. Frankly, I find Jobs's ability to manipulate people more impressive than Ritchie's ability to manipulate machines.
The main reason C and Unix became widespread IMHO is not because they were better than the alternatives, but rather because AT&T distributed them with source code at no cost, and their motivation for doing that was not altruistic, but rather the need to obey a judicial decree or an agreement made at the end of an anti-trust court case under which IBM and AT&T were ordered not to enter each other's markets. I.e., AT&T was prohibited from selling computer hardware and software, so when they accidentally found themselves to be owners of some software that some universities and research labs wanted to use, they gave it away.
C and Unix weren't and aren't bad, but they are overestimated in comments on this site a lot. They weren't masterpieces. The Mac was a masterpiece IMHO. Credit for the Mac goes to Xerox PARC and to Engelbart's lab at Stanford Research Institute, but also to Jobs for recognizing the value of the work and leading the first implementation of it available to a large fraction of the population.
More like ppl on this site know and respect Jobs for his talent as a revolutionary product manager-style CEO that brought us IPhone and subsequent mobile Era of computing.
Altman is riding a new tech wave, and his team has a couple of years' head start. Musk's reusable rockets were conceptualized a long time ago (Tintin's Destination Moon dates back to 1953) and could have become a reality several decades ago.
You seriously trying to take his credit away for reusable rocket with "nu uh, it was in scifi first?" Wow.
"A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not ... of superiority but of weakness.”
>NASA had taken on the project grudgingly after having been "shamed" by its very public success under the direction of the SDIO.[citation needed] Its continued success was cause for considerable political in-fighting within NASA due to it competing with their "home grown" Lockheed Martin X-33/VentureStar project. Pete Conrad priced a new DC-X at $50 million, cheap by NASA standards, but NASA decided not to rebuild the craft in light of budget constraints
"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit." - Oscar Wilde
But he is a manager, not an engineer although he sells himself off as such. He keeps smart capable folks around, abuses most of them pretty horribly, and when he intervenes with products its hit and miss. For example latest Tesla Model 3 changes must have been pretty major fuckup and there is no way he didn't ack it all.
Plus all self-driving lies and more lies well within fraud territory at this point. Not even going into his sociopathic personality, massive childish ego and apparent 'daddy issues' which in men manifest exactly like him. He is not in day-to-day SpaceX control and it shows.
"A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not ... of superiority but of weakness.”
