> He’s been know to take credit for a lot of things, and he could from the point of view of spending the money and maybe hiring some people, but ultimately he doesn’t make or come up with much of anything that I’m aware of.
The same could be said of Steve Jobs. It would be an unfair statement, for the same reasons I feel it's unfair with Musk: their vision strongly influenced the products their companies made.
> "A reality distortion field. In his presence, reality is malleable. He can convince anyone of practically anything. It wears off when he's not around, but it makes it hard to have realistic schedules. And there's a couple of other things you should know about working with Steve."
> "What else?"
> "Well, just because he tells you that something is awful or great, it doesn't necessarily mean he'll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he's really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he'll usually tell you that he thinks it's stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he'll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it
"vision" only goes so far and in the case of authoritarian narcissists like Jobs and Musk (perhaps more so Musk) can just as often sabotage progress as lead it. Elon Musk seems like the kind of leader you have to know when and how to lead out of the room just to keep things running sanely
At the end of the day, he isn't designing the rockets. He isn't building the rockets. He isn't even flying the rockets. He pays the people who hire the people who do those things. That has value, but not the kind of "billionaire genius entrepreneur who built a technological empire with his bare hands" value that society gives him. People have called Elon Musk the most brilliant man who ever lived, the man on whom the very arc of human evolution and progress depends, Tony Stark, Edison, Einstein and Davinci in one.
I don't think the parents' statement is unfair. I think it's unfair that the world will know Elon Musk's name a century from now and that no matter what he does (barring, maybe, mass murder) his carefully crafted narrative will live on, but the names and stories of the people who actually turned his vision into reality have already vanished under the sands of time because they are merely assets, no more important to the hierarchies of capitalism or the great man narratives of history than office furniture.
The same could be said of Steve Jobs. It would be an unfair statement, for the same reasons I feel it's unfair with Musk: their vision strongly influenced the products their companies made.