He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him. It appears it will be harder and harder to attract and keep talent at Apple with out a leader like Steve Jobs.
It's also the stages of companies. Apple is in very much a "maintain the working business model" phase, especially with the current management. I'm not in a position to say they are wrong for doing so given they've continued to grow and now make as much money as ExxonMobil but with far better profit margins.
While Tesla is still on the upward rocket phase while they are still figuring out their product/market. Much more exciting for the type of talent who are looking to make a big impact on the world.
Steve Jobs brought that life back into Apple when he rejoined and maintained that environment through various product launches over many years.
I'm not sure I'd want them to still pretend they are the same company or not, rather they should work on the talent they have. Just like how basketball teams rebuild after losing their star players, you rebuild around new talent instead of clinging on to past glory.
Chris Lattner has been at Apple for over 11 years. He shepherded LLVM, Clang, lldb, and Swift. All while climbing the ranks to Director. A huge number of engineers would simply be ready to think about and do something different after that much time.
You might say that Elon answers "Why Tesla?" but in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?".
(I have no inside knowledge, I've just been in the industry long enough to have gone through this myself).
Apple is famous for having some of the most tenured employees in the valley. 11 years is good, but not particularly long there. Google will be the next Apple in this regard, I predict.
... in no way can you claim an answer to "Why leave Apple?".
Seems obvious, doesn't it? Nothing interesting going on.
Under Jobs, terms like "courage" and "innovation" used to mean something, like kicking sand in the face of the entire mobile phone industry and competing against their own bestselling product. Tim Cook's idea of "courage" involves selecting a headphone jack in a CAD tool and hitting the Delete key. And "innovation" means late nights at the office pushing the limits of dongle engineering.
My guess is that Apple was a vehicle to further his compiler and programming language plans. Now that he has done that, it becomes more mundane maintenance and incremental changes. So it is time to move on to a new challenge.
I see Musk as more of a Bushnell/Woz hybrid. He knows his shit technically, which is why good people want to work with him. Jobs knew how to delegate knowing his technical shit to others though.
Steve Jobs' contributions came from from his leadership and marketing chops, but he also had pretty good technical knowledge for a CEO. I mean, he got his start designing circuit boards at Atari.
Jobs was a true polymath. He knew enough about hardware design, software engineering, typography, music, pretty much any relevant subject that he could work well with experts in those fields and synthesise their efforts together into whole products.
A lot of his best insights required technical knowledge - adopting Ethernet, SCSI, Mach kernels, BSD userland, object oriented programming, Postscript, TrueType fonts, WebObjects (and Java server, while ditching it on the client), html5 (over Flash)
Even then it would be 'known unknowns' to him as compared 'unknown unknowns'. It is big deal considering we just saw Marissa Meyer who was at center of creation of a web scale system proved out of depth at slightly different web scale system.
Not really. He was contracted to do it, but subbed all the actual engineering work to Wozniak then essentially lied to Wozniak about how much that work was worth.[1]
> He is an inspirational leader and talented people want to work with him.
This is a convenient narrative when Tesla makes a high profile hire but they've also lost a lot of talented engineers and I don't remember the convention wisdom being that it was because of Elon's shortcomings.
This is why I think Apple missed its chance to buy Tesla and make Elon Musk its CEO at the same time.
I can't even imagine what Musk would do with Apple's $200 billion in cash. I think he would've been much more daring with that money than even Steve Jobs would've been.
But I think Apple missed its shot, and the merger of Tesla and Solar City probably sealed that for good. Now Musk is probably already seeing a 10-20x larger combined Tesla/Solar City company in his head, 10 years from now, and a potential merger with a bigger Space X as well.
So from his point of view, it probably won't be worth it anymore for him. He would probably have to take over a declining iPhone market and deal with that at the same time as dealing with explosive growth at Tesla and an imminent launch of SpaceX' big rocket to Mars.
On the other hand there would be hundreds of billions of dollars he could get access to, so I wouldn't say it's impossible to happen anymore either. However, at least to me, this would only be interesting from the "let's give Musk unlimited money and see what he can do wit it" point of view. Otherwise, I would rather see Tesla/SpaceX be on their own, than join an Apple/Tesla/SpaceX megacorp.
I'd be curious what that level of money would do to the culture at SpaceX. I work here as a tech and I get the impression from top to bottom that a big part of the overall culture centers around doing things as inexpensively as possible, largely out of necessity. People here genuinely get excited when we find ways to shave off even small amounts of waste.
I'm not knowledgable enough about the psychological/sociological aspects of this but I wonder if it's possible to maintain that kind of culture when you have $200 billion sitting in the bank. It might lead to a kind of resource curse that some countries suffer from.
I wonder if there have been studies done on this at the corporate level.
That's a really good point, what would Musk do with $200 billions.
It's questionable if he would be the profit-maximizing CEO choice for Apple though.
Perhaps he wouldn't even want the job (if we ignore the cash), because the smartphone and computer industry is maturing, i.e. tougher competition, decreasing rate of innovation, maintenance mode ahead.
Inspirational? People keep saying this but I cant see it. He has inspirational "ideas", but a person? At least not behind a screen and when he is doing demo.
And for the iPhone Vs Electric Car comparison. Oh well may be i am old school, if BMW or other Car makers made a Electric Car ( assuming we have to choose a e-car ) i would choose them over Tesla any day. The interior quality of Tesla just dont compare well.
The iPhone was truly a revolutionary product, in that many people tried smartphone before but they have ALL FAILED. This is speaking from someone who has used pretty much all smart phone prior to iPhone introduction.
If anything i say the difference is Elon Musk lack of taste.
I think Elon Musk is what Steve Jobs wanted to be. Steve Jobs thought he was changing the world with the iPhone, and while it was new it wasn't world changing. What Elon Musk does is world changing.
iPhone wasnt world changing? I mean sure, you could make the argument that if it wasnt Apple with the iPhone it would have been someone else, but it's undeniably daft to think that the iPhone didn't lead to a complete change in not only consumer electronics (mobile phones), but also so many services around it.
It's well documented that Android was going to be Blackberry-ish, then they pivoted to be iPhone-ish after the original iPhone announcement. Think the App Store and things like Uber, which exist primarily as mobile apps.
The iPhone broke the carrier's backs. Before the iPhone the carrier was the customer, not you. They dictated features. They had final approval over the awful Java applets on phones. They also set the app prices and took a huge cut.
Very rarely is a new technology useful in abstract; the inventor of the steering wheel made a contribution but without the rest of the car it is meaningless.
Touch screens existed, sure. There were one or two largish screen phones, sure. Smartphones existed (all using keyboards and styluses). OS X and Safari existed. But no one had put it all together into a single device, nor had anyone created a sensible UI design language to take advantage of things like multitouch.
You're basically saying Dropbox is garbage because rsync/SMB/NFS/FTP existed. Or Uber/Lyft are garbage because Taxis existed. Yes there are some superficial similarities but it turns out the details make a massive world of difference and it is intellectually dishonest to be so dismissive.
I had read they had a "Dream" android phone prototype they were working on that was blackberry like [1]. There was also rumored to be a second one that was more iPhone like slated for down the line, but when the Apple demo happened Google immediately scrapped their blackberry like phone and the second one became the first.
If you walk through the new London Google office by kings cross, you can see the original android phone right by their restaurant. It looked just like a blackberry / Nokia E62..
Probably not a popular opinion, but I think Musk is overrated. The guy has a huge ego, just like Jobs had, and while he's putting it into a nice package, he's not the guy to come up with anything; electric cars, spacecraft etc.
Yes, he might change the world if/once he gets to Mars, but most of his stuff is a marketing tech demo.
Have you read Vance's biography of Musk? He's definitely a flawed individual in many ways, but I don't think he's fundamentally an egotist. Certainly not to the sociopathic degree many business leaders are.
And I think your categorisation of his work as a tech demo is unfair, and uninformed. SpaceX have built rockets that are delivering satellites into orbit and supplies to the international space station, and have achieved reusability. They have played a significant part in building a private sector space industry. These are not tech demos, they are real things. Can you boast any such achievement in your own life?
Likewise, Tesla have built and sold electric cars that people want. They've created a global re-charging network to supply them. And they've been the first company to deploy significant automation into the automobile market on a large scale. These are not tech demos, any more than the gigafactory rising out o the Nevada desert is.
The commenter claims Musk hasn't achieved anything at all, other than give some tech demos.
I'm perfectly entitled to ask what they've achieved themselves that puts them in a position to so casually demean what, by most people's standards, are quite considerable feats.
What OP has or has not achieved is irrelevant in my opinion. I think it's better form to just refute the criticism and leave OP out of it. But it's up to you of course.
I'm not sure that OP's accomplishments are relevant in this case. You don't have to be above someone to point out mistakes. That is not to say I agree with OP, only that I disagree with your statement.
For the egoist part, have a look at some of his quotes regarding nationalism, lobbying, competition, the rockets that currently get most of our cargo onto the ISS, simplistic comments on A.I, the way he treats lower-level engineers at SpaceX and Tesla etc. am on mobile, but it's easy to find more info for yourself.
Disclaimer: I work at SpaceX, albeit as a technician so I'm very far down the corporate ladder, but I feel that may be unduly harsh.
There can certainly be legitimate criticisms around Musk personally, and SpaceX/Tesla in regards to whether they are overhyped relative to competitors or whether they will succeed on delivering what they promise. With that being said, when a company delivers 70k+ cars in a year, even if this is just a tiny percentage of the overall new car market, or a company puts satellites into orbit, I think we've moved beyond "marketing tech demo" status.
I'll offer what might be an uncommon perspective on 70k cars. I used to have a 2nd gen Toyota MR2. Great car. Vibrant community, guys developing and selling alternator brackets to shave off a few pounds of weight, there were meet ups, etc. I eventually sold mine, miss it, and still see a few around. In the four years the 2nd gen was available in the U.S. (91-95), Toyota sold a grand total 20k. 70k may not be a lot compared to the overall market, but it's nothing to sneeze at.
Of course he doesn't come up personally with, say, rocket engine innovations. But what he does is orders of magnitude more valuable - motivating people, making good high-level decisions (because he's smart and knowledgable in multiple areas such as engineering, design, marketing), getting the right people work for him and being very hard-working.
Being a good CEO is just way more valuable than being a good individual contributor, because it multiplies the output and growth of the whole company.
And ego doesn't really matter that much in the big picture.
His "story" seemed to hint at a more engineering capable than Jobs. Jobs could do a bit of hacking it seems. Musk could do a bit of physics which is a tad harder IMO.
Jobs is complicated because he had technical knowledge and design taste.
Most engineers wouldn't have thought about having proportionally spaced fonts back in the 80's when personal computers only had 80 x 24 fixed withd character green phosphor displays.
When Jobs dropped out of regular college and dropped back in to take the classes he was truly interested in, he took calligraphy; years later that lead to the Mac being for first personal computer (the LISA had it too, but that was the $10,000 predecessor to the Mac) to have proportionally spaced, bitmap display.
That's not something Woz (or someone like him) would have prioritized for a brand new computing platform.
Funny you mention that. Apple will crash if they don't get a serious personality cult back in there. Even that probably won't save them. Plus Musk is not the same brilliant, simple communicator that Jobs was.
> If you think the job of a CEO is to increase sales, then Ballmer did a spectacular job. He tripled Microsoft’s sales to $78 billion and profits more than doubled from $9 billion to $22 billion. The launch of the Xbox and Kinect, and the acquisitions of Skype and Yammer happened on his shift. If the Microsoft board was managing for quarter to quarter or even year to year revenue growth, Ballmer was as good as it gets as a CEO. But if the purpose of the company is long-term survival, then one could make a much better argument that he was a failure as a CEO as he optimized short-term gains by squandering long-term opportunities.
Long term opportunities like Azure? Bear in mind 'Nadella' launches like Office for iOS came out so soon after he took over they must have started bell back into Ballmer's reign.
Yes, he blew it on Mobile and that's a huge deal. The hugest. He had his blind spots, but he was very far from incompetent.
Second that. I get the different opinions, but why is it funny (the downvoting implies that it was funny).
I can for 100% assure that I only nitpick because I want to understand the logical reasoning for down-voting and are scared that I am too high to understand the meaning of the phrase "It's funny you mention that". I am not a native speaker, but I know all the words, heard it in English and there exists a translation into my language and the interpretation is the same for both, so long story short ... why is it funny?
So there are 2 meanings, and I read it "funny peculiar". But why is it "funny peculiar"? I think it is right to say Elon Musk is the new Steve Jobs (as in "most popular tech/computer-stuff person for the public"), so working for Tesla has some kind of "coolness" factor and they have good marketing and might beat Google's self-driving endeavors simply via time-to-market (similar to IPhone).
But why is that funny (haha) or funny (strange)? If they can build a self-driving car for the masses Elon Musk will be the uber-tech guy for a whole generation, and Tesla seen as one of the good guys with cool tech.
I think you are over-thinking and misreading this. One person says something to the effect of "I think Musk is the new Jobs" another replies "I think Apple will die without a cultlike leader". The thing at the beginning of the reply is just a mostly content-free throwaway phrase not intended for the Talmudic analysis you're giving it.
You are right, I probably read too much into it. It's because I am high, and when I am high I get extremely interested in languages (both natural/real and computer languages) and as a non-native speaker but fluent reader I often wonder about phrases ... too long.
"Flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) have revolutionized storage with their high performance. Modern flash-based SSDs virtualize their physical resources with indirection to provide the traditional block interface and hide their internal operations and structures. When using a file system on top of a flash-based SSD, the device indirection layer becomes redundant. Moreover, such indirection comes with a cost both in memory space and in performance. Given that flash-based devices are likely to continue to grow in their sizes and in their markets, we are faced with a terrific challenge: How can we remove the excess indirection and its cost in flash-based SSDs?
We propose the technique of de-indirection to remove the indirection in flashbased SSDs. With de-indirection, the need for device address mappings is removed and physical addresses are stored directly in file system metadata. By doing so the need for large and costly indirect tables is removed, while the device still has its freedom to control block-allocation decisions, enabling it to execute critical tasks such as garbage collection and wear leveling.
In this dissertation, we first discuss our efforts to build an accurate SSD emulator. The emulator works as a Linux pseudo block device and can be used to run real system workloads. The major challenge we found in building the SSD emulator is to accurately model SSDs with parallel planes. We leveraged several techniques to reduce the computational overhead of the emulator. Our evaluation results show that the emulator can accurately model important metrics for common types of SSDs, which is sufficient for the evaluation of various designs in this dissertation and in SSD-related research.
Next, we present Nameless Writes, a new device interface that removes the need for indirection in flash-based SSDs. Nameless writes allow the device to choose the location of a write; only then is the client informed of the name (i.e., address) where the block now resides. We demonstrate the effectiveness of nameless writes by porting the Linux ext3 file system to use an emulated nameless-writing device and show that doing so both reduces space and time overheads, thus making for simpler, less costly, and higher-performance SSD-based storage.
We then describe our efforts to implement nameless writes on real hardware. Most research on flash-based SSDs including our initial evaluation of nameless writes rely on simulation or emulation. However, nameless writes require fundamental changes in the internal workings of the device, its interface to the host operating system, and the host OS. Without implementation in real devices, it can be difficult to judge the true benefit of the nameless writes design. Using the OpenSSD Jasmine board, we develop a prototype of the Nameless Write SSD. While the flash-translation layer changes were straightforward, we discovered unexpected complexities in implementing extensions to the storage interface.
Finally, we discuss a new solution to perform de-indirection, the File System De-Virtualizer (FSDV), which can dynamically remove the cost of indirection in flash-based SSDs. FSDV is a light-weight tool that de-virtualizes data by changing file system pointers to use device physical addresses. Our evaluation results show that FSDV can dynamically reduce indirection mapping table space with only small performance overhead. We also demonstrate that with our design of FSDV, the changes needed in file system, flash devices, and device interface are small."
