[cbozeman]

Musk is easily on the level of Jobs and arguably beyond him, not just financially, but on the scale of what they've done for Humanity as a whole.

SpaceX and Starlink just by themselves are enough to catapult him beyond Jobs, but you add on Tesla, which pretty much single-handedly pushed electric cars into mainstream culture, and he's easily there.

This isn't even really a subjective perspective, you could objectively argue it.

[thomassmith65]

The personal computer revolution (kicked off in 1977 by the Apple II), and the smart phone era (kicked off in 2007 by iPhone), have done at least as much for humanity.

[cbozeman]

> The personal computer revolution (kicked off in 1977 by the Apple II),

This is an oversimplification. Apple II was a huge part of it, but didn't kick it off. The real revolution was the IBM PC in 1981. It definitely did not kick it off single-handedly though, since you had the TRS-80, Commodore PET, and Altair 8800 before, or alongside the Apple II. You could argue the IBM 5100 I guess, but it was too expensive for most people.

And like I said above, the iPhone did not "kick off" the smartphone era. It was transformative, sure, but didn't kick it off.

IBM Simon, BlackBerry, Palm Treo, Symbian Phones, Windows Mobile, all came before it, and everyone could clearly see where the entire market was headed even in the early 2000s.

[thomassmith65]

Most of the prevailing narratives about pivotal moments in technology leave out nuance. Still, to say the Apple II and iPhone kicked off new eras is closer to the truth than to credit those eras to the Altair and BlackBerry.

If a person is nitpicky, they could use the same kind of objections to minimize Musk's accomplishments - and the accomplishments of many, many others (Edison, Marconi, Watson & Crick, etc)