without the good, or the (hu)man(ity)
Comment on Steve Jobs: The difference of stealing yourself vs being stolen from
Restaldt@lemm.ee 2 years agoSo elon but a good businessman
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 2 years ago
herrvogel@lemmy.world 2 years ago
There’s no version of this reality where Jobs isn’t a good businessman. You might not like the company or their products, but they’ve somehow managed to build a huge and successful business selling those overpriced toys to tons of people. They managed to create a cult around expensive consumer electronics. That is a massive success no matter how you slice it. And you can’t deny that Jobs played a big part in that.
jj4211@lemmy.world 2 years ago
The weird thing is that Apple without Jobs was a failure, but also Jobs without Apple was also a failure.
SCB@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Also you can tie it directly to Jobs, because when he was gone for a bit, apple fuckin tanked, and then he came back and they came out with the iPod.
That’s not an accident.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 2 years ago
it was just a gag for comic effect. it wasn’t the breadth and depth of my thoughts and feelings of the digital and manufacturing epochs since the 1980s.
But also, it was kind of begging the question of “is there such thing as a good business man?”
There’s good for /their/ business. But is that- in general - good?
hackitfast@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Yeah, Steve Jobs was definitely an asshole, and he didn’t personally design any of his products, but he did know what direction to move things in and what consumers wanted in a phone. He was the first to put a truly usable portable touchscreen computer into our pockets with a phone in it, and every phone nowadays is basically just a reimagined, upgraded version of the first iPhone. The way we communicate is forever changed because of the iPhone.
But yeah iPhone’s are kind of the pinnacle of “how much can we fuck you over before you notice” now. All because of the little Apple on the back of the phone.
general_kitten@sopuli.xyz 2 years ago
There is a story that the concept of touchscreen phones was stolen from a Nokia engineer who tried to get nokia to produce them but the feature was dismissed as a ‘gimmick’.
hackitfast@lemmy.world 2 years ago
I could believe that too tbh
Comment105@lemm.ee 2 years ago
He didn’t know what customers wanted in a phone.
He knew what customers would want in a phone when they were taught about its existence.
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Jesus I’m no Elon fan but how many companies do you have to take from a couple million to hundreds of billions before you’re good at your job?
What is it with modern society and the need to reduce everything about a person just because they’re a POS? He might be evil but he’s clearly pretty good at being a businessman or you wouldn’t even know his name.
Korne127@lemmy.world 2 years ago
But… he literally isn’t. Like just look at twitter, he has ruined it from day one with bad decisions day after day whose impacts haven’t shown directly, but now appear more and more with embarrassing effects (The verification badge which is now worthless and has been used to impersonate people and cooperations, the two factor authentification which stopped working, the self-DDOSing, the maximum amounts of tweets one could view per day, the old tweets that got deleted due to a glitch, etc.)
And in other companies it’s mostly other people managing the stuff and cleaning up the mess he leaves; especially SpaceX is currently just glad that he isn’t too busy with his X playtoy to bother them.
The only thing you may call him somewhat successful in is making out companies that have a potential so he could get into them early and claim their success.
SCB@lemmy.world 2 years ago
Elon is (maybe was) very much good at what he does. Twitter is a bad example because that whole shit show was a dick measuring content from the get-go.
Fact is, SpaceX wouldn’t be SpaceX and Tesla sure as fuck would not be Tesla without his leadership.
He’s a piece of shit and I’d never want to work for him, because his work ethic is unhealthy to say the least (and I personally have a pretty extreme work ethic).
RegularGoose@sh.itjust.works 2 years ago
You’re right, it wouldn’t; it would almost certainly be a better company.
Musk got Tesla where it is financially entirely through blatant fraud. “Earning” the company’s absurd valuation based almost entirely on dishonest promises of releasing a technology that is entirely unachievable, undesirable, and dangerous is an unsustainable business model, and it’s already showing cracks.
The fact that you seem to think that being highly profitable through constant ethical violations in every aspect of the company is to viewed as a succsess is honestly pretty gross.
c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 2 years ago
It’s a completely different business vertical. Running a government rocketship contract or vehicle manufacturer isnt the same as software development or social media. Plus he’s made so many decisions that are laughably stupid to the layman that it almost seems like he’s tanking it purposefully.
Businesses aren’t all the same and the same type of person can’t run all of them. It’s like asking your heart doctor to give you a urologists opinion.
Tesla started with almost nothing, SpaceX was his from the ground up. I’m not certain how much of Paypal was his but something tells me he was in management there too.
No one’s claiming he developed the Tesla Model 3, or engineered the landing system of the Dragon boosters himself. He has been in charge of the people who have though, and he seems to be doing well enough of a job to keep those companies going.
So he’s not good at managing a social media platform specifically, if he’s actually trying and this isn’t just a long con to destroy the site for some other end goal.
RegularGoose@sh.itjust.works 2 years ago
Being a succsessful businessman does not make one a good businessman. Half of the equation is ethics, because it fucking matters.
A successful businessman with bad ethics and an unsuccsessful one with good ethics are both bad businessmen.
The only good businessman is one who both succeeds and has good ethics.
jj4211@lemmy.world 2 years ago
While he has had some success, he’s also demonstrably been a glory hog benefiting from crazy good luck.
He had an Internet company during the first dot com boom. He got a bunch of cash from Compaq for effectively nothing, because businesses had to snap up anything vaguely Internet. Right place at right time, basically won a lottery.
So then he founded an Internet bank. But want allowed to lead it, no matter, either way it was overshadowed by PayPal, which was a runaway success. Somehow he managed a merger with him being put in charge of the joint company. Then he almost tanked it and was put aside to salvage the company. However, he managed to be popularly thought of as “the PayPal guy”
He founded SpaceX. Off the top of my head, that one seems fair enough.
Then you have Tesla, which existed prior to him Knowing about it, yet he still insisted on being called a founder. It’s possible that without him, Tesla wouldn’t have gone far, but either way, he’s been a glory hog about it to the point of again getting himself framed as “the” Tesla guy.