Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2014; Elon Musk’s age, his roles at SolarCity and Tesla Motors, Dolly Singh’s post at Oculus VR and the admiring tone and predictions about his legacy belong to that time. SolarCity merged into Tesla in 2016.
We don’t know whether we’ve found the new Apple, but we may well have found the new Steve Jobs.
Some describe Elon Musk as a far better visionary than Steve Jobs. Others are even more certain: Elon is Henry Ford, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs (all rolled into one), only an improved version, because part of his talent was acquired through intensive reading about history’s great visionaries. But who is Elon Musk?
Elon is a physicist and entrepreneur who, at 42, already has major projects behind him and will probably become the figure who changes the world completely. He co-founded PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla Motors, and he is also chairman of SolarCity.
Dolly Singh, currently head of talent at Oculus VR, the virtual reality company Facebook recently bought, worked with Elon Musk for 5 years at SpaceX and says it was one of the most rewarding experiences of her whole life and career.
On Quora, Dolly described Elon as the most brilliant, dynamic and charismatic person she has ever met. Proud to have helped Elon build one of the most impressive companies in the world, SpaceX, she is quite clear that there is no comparison between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, because, she says, Elon surpassed Steve Jobs a long time ago.
The reason the comparison wouldn’t be entirely fair is that they play in different leagues. Steve Jobs was a visionary who created products to put into the hands of millions of people, while some of the projects Elon has worked on are not known to consumers right now. Of course, PayPal is already used by millions of people. Jobs was interested in aesthetics, art and design, while Elon is interested in physics, astrophysics and electrical engineering. Elon’s greatest contribution may not come to be appreciated by our generation, but he will leave a legacy.
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Dolly says Elon learned to design and build rockets and spacecraft through many hours of reading and research. A shrewd and voracious reader, he has studied the steps of all of history’s great visionaries, including, in recent history, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.
Dolly describes him as an exceptional force of nature.
Elon Musk’s legacy
Although it is still too early to know what this visionary will leave us, many people think his goals and his vision for changing humanity are far more ambitious than those of Gates and Jobs. Elon saw the future of online payments long before any other entrepreneur, and the electric car technology of the future will probably be Tesla’s, not to mention how he could change space exploration and private space flight, a sector in which he competes with Virgin Galactic, the company owned by Richard Branson.
What’s more, Elon could turn out to be the inventor of the flying car, since he is working on it, and he is also trying to transform solar energy completely so that cities can be energy-sustainable.
Elon is also working on the idea of, and his wish for, a virtual currency and alternative fuels.
In an interview, the host asked Elon what he thought of Steve Jobs, and he replied that Jobs was one of the people he had admired most, although when he once tried to talk to him at a party, Jobs was very rude to him. And that, basically, is Elon Musk.
Further reading
Featured image: SpaceX, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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