(THE RIVALRY THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN BUT NEVER WAS)
Much like most of the world out there, I am a huge Musk fan, and that might still be understating it. I have watched pretty much every press event, every speech, every conference, and every podcast that even made mention of Musk. But long before the rise of Tesla, SolarCity, The Boring Company, SpaceX, and Neuralink, I had a different idol.
I looked up to him as most people would look up to someone who has been their guide and mentor throughout their life. He was the designer and innovator the world had been sorely missing for centuries; he was Steve Jobs. Admittedly, though both had a completely different work ethic, they were similar in more ways than you might think.
Wozniak: You can’t write code, you’re not an engineer, you’re not a designer, you can’t put a hammer to a nail … So how come 10 times in a day, I read “Steve Jobs is a genius”. What do you do?
Jobs: The musicians play the instruments. I play the orchestra.
There was a different flair about each of them but they were similar in the fan-following they raised. One was a designer with attention to detail that no CEO has matched to date and the other, an engineer who just won’t stop building stuff. Both of them were capable of pushing their employees
to their breaking point until they achieved the goal of creating the perfect product and were equally passionate about what they do. But there is a tiny difference in the approach they took. You see, Musk is an engineer who knows pretty much everything there is to know about the project he takes on while Jobs was an artist who cared more about how the end product looked like than how it was done by his employees.
In the extremely famous biography by Ashley Vance about Elon Musk, he says how Musk was capable of, thanks to his voracious reading habit developed in his early childhood, replacing anyone in the job he hired them to do simply because he had the prerequisite knowledge for it. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, he makes mention of how, while Jobs provided the engineers with the calligraphic fonts to work with to put into the first Mac, he never told them how to do it, and set unreasonable deadlines for them to get it done. One might argue this helped push them beyond their limits, but considering Jobs might not even have had an idea about how long it would take to do something like that on average, it was unfair to the engineers working on it. But they were both creators.
Jobs created a product that became the beacon of innovation, a testimony to what was possible when man dared to dream. He inspired millions to “Think Different”. Musk, on the other hand, is the modern-day Bob-the-Builder. He finds a problem that needs fixing and then goes on to fix it. The difference between Musk and the average joe is the absence of the delay between ideation and implementation. A popular anecdote of this is the story of how he came up with the idea of the Hyperloop. On his flight from Russia to the US, after a failed SpaceX contract agreement, Elon came up with the idea of the Hyperloop. Most of us would have stopped about there. But most of us haven’t built 5 startups to roaring successes from the ground up. He immediately borrowed a paper and a pen from one of the two employees traveling with him and in under half an hour managed to check the plausibility and math of building something like that along with a rough sketch of the design. He even managed to make an estimate of how much the entire process of building it would cost. And this is not the only difference.
Steve Jobs was a businessman at heart. He was careful about the image Apple projected onto the public and did everything in his power to avoid saying or doing anything that would tarnish the said image. Some would say he learned his lesson the first time he did that when he called his daughter not his own. On the other hand, Musk’s infamous barrage of tweets and pranks on a daily basis is proof of the recklessness he is prone to. He is in a bid to prove himself to all those who didn’t believe in things he said he would do and he is pulling all the stops. But sometimes this habit of his goes overboard and ends up losing him valuable investors (recalling the April Fool’s joke in which he announced that Tesla was bankrupt, causing a lot of investors to lose money and ultimately putting him in a nasty mess). While Jobs spent an insane amount of time making sure everything from the shipping to the advertising was perfect, Musk banked on the die-hard fans screaming for him.
If one was to visualize it, think of the conductor of an elaborate orchestra- that’s Jobs. Now imagine a Metallica concert- the lead singer is Musk. Both would go to any extent to achieve what they wanted and thus became visionaries that would be unmatched for decades to come. As much as I would’ve liked to see a battle between these two giants, it is not possible sadly, thus making impossible a rivalry that should have been but never was.
