[luriel]

And unlike Jobs, Elon is behind much of the engineering and research his companies work on.

And also unlike Jobs, you can sense a certain humility in how Elon talks both about himself and about others.

When Neil Armstrong spoke against private space companies, Elon didn't come out and demonize him, I remember watching him cry on camera when asked about it, and said he wished he'd come to Space X to see the work they were doing.

You don't see Elon going "thermonuclear" on his competition and trying to bury them, even when they are huge mega-corporations like Boeing that used all their government connections and lobbying to try to bury him.

[DeepDuh]

Well, you're comparing two visionary entrepreneurs at different stages right now. Jobs wasn't quite as arrogant after he fell from the throne and had to start from scratch (Pixar, NeXT). That's about where I'd put Elon right now, even though the circumstances of his departure from PayPal was of course entirely different. I'd like to see him once SpaceX or Tesla becomes a megacorporation like Apple - the judgement is still out on that. You can't compare the way SpaceX acts towards Boeing with Apple towards its competitors - one is an underdog that has nothing to loose, one is a goliath with the world to loose.

[geekam]

But Jobs wasn't as humble and polite even when Apple was an underdog and was competing in the world of IBM. Weren't those interviews where he calls out Microsoft as "they have bad taste" the same time period?

[DeepDuh]

It was 1996 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upzKj-1HaKw). No, Jobs was certainly never as humble as Musk and I never said that, they definitely have different characters. My point was that we still have to wait on Musk, this man and his companies are far away from their goals and it remains to be seen whether they can afford to keep being idealistic.

And don't get me wrong, I'm a space freak, I root for that guy as much as anyone.