[Klathmon]

Musk isn't a PR guy, and I think a lot of people respect and like him for that.

He makes crazy "moonshots", he has a vision and doesn't tone it down nearly as much as others do, and he's not afraid to be "wrong".

The SpaceX community has a running joke about "elon time" being set to mars time, because his predictions and goals are almost always late (and are often under delivering), but I honestly respect that. Him and his companies aren't taking the "easy way out" of making easily achievable goals and then making them again and again. They are shooting for unlikely and in some cases almost impossible goals, and getting 70-90% of the way there, and they aren't exactly ashamed of it. IIRC there was a reddit thread a while back that was "bashing" Elon and Tesla and SpaceX about only hitting something like 70% of the goals they set, but I read it differently. They set out to revolutionize 3 different industries (cars, space, and now "boring" and public transport), and even if they can only get to "70% revolutionized", it's still a massive win in my opinion!

He's not perfect, I hear lots of bad things from many employees about the work environment, but overall I really respect the man and the companies he has created, and I think he has and will continue to do a lot for humanity.

[jimbokun]

Musk is a genius at PR:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/945712432416137217

Saw this yesterday when someone threw together a quick article on all of the gushing responses from customers to this tweet.

How can you say someone nicknamed "the real world Iron Man" is bad at PR?

[kinkrtyavimoodh]

I think they meant PR-only guy. His PR genius is in using his fan following for free PR. Tesla or SpaceX hardly need to spend any marketing dollars.

No other tech leader is as charismatic (Steve Jobs came close, but Musk seems more genuine whereas Jobs felt like a salesman) and very few are as personally intelligent and accomplished.

[kumarvvr]

Steve Jobs used way more hyped up adjectives, almost as if talking to a cult following.

[TeMPOraL]

Steve Jobs was basically a salesman. A brilliant one. Nothing bad in that; I just wouldn't call him a "tech leader" - he was involved with technology only incidentally.

[staunch]

Steve Jobs was hacking on electronics in the 1970s and building the most advanced personal computing devices from then until his death.

He was not a programmer but he knew more about computers than most programmers do. There's absolutely no way to call him non-technical accurately. Bill Gates giving up programming did not make him non-technical.

Elon Musk wouldn't make this mistake. He's very openly trying to emulate Steve Jobs' entire skillset.

Maybe the cause of this confusion is that most people only saw Steve Jobs when he went up on stage for an hour every year. Try asking yourself what he was doing the rest of the time. Elon Musk did.

[TeMPOraL]

I might be mistaken, but I was under the impression that in the early days of Apple, it was Wozniak who was the tech guy and did most of the tech stuff.

[soperj]

If you read any of the stuff from Fokelore.org you'd realize how mistaken you were.

[gwicks56]

Read on twitter recently:

"Move far enough up in any career, and you are essentially doing sales".

Thought that was very true.

[27182818284]

He isn't a PR guy in the traditional sense at all.

He has been anointed as a neo-PR guy now because his style of doing things (like responding to requests on Twitter with "Done,") is breathtakingly refreshing compared to PR from actual trained PR agencies

[kumarvvr]

>He makes crazy "moonshots"

His back of hand calculations on the viability of self-landing rockets, while coming back from a trip to Russia after a failed attempt to purchase a launch vehicle certainly wasn't moonshot.

He is a technology man in and out and knows the capabilities and limits of technology. I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.

[TeMPOraL]

Indeed. Musk is a tech guy. The real tech guy, not the usual CEO of a tech company, who really does mostly marketing and management. He knows his physics and is involved in engineering decisions. For me personally, it's Musk who defines what does it mean to be a "tech CEO", and most companies we discuss here every day don't even qualify.

> I remember reading a book about Tesla and I always felt like he saw opportunities in the gaps existing between what is available and what is possible.

My view is that he focuses on what should be possible from first principles, ignoring whether or not our short-sighted markets find it desirable at the moment. It's a good strategy if you have a non-monetary goal in mind and resources to bankroll the efforts at forcing the markets into accepting your work.