Bill Gates: you wouldn't confuse Elon Musk with Steve Jobs September 17, 2020 Bill Gates compares Elon Musk to Steve Jobs and draws a sharp distinction: Musk, he says, is a hands-on engineer and manufacturer rather than the design-and-marketing showman Jobs was.
Bill Gates compares Elon Musk to Steve Jobs and draws a sharp distinction: Musk, he says, is a hands-on engineer and manufacturer rather than the design-and-marketing showman Jobs was.
Transcript Speaker A
You've described electric cars as the quote unquote easy part of the green economy. Is that to say, Bill, that there isn't perhaps as much value to companies like Tesla or Nikola as the stock market suggests.
Bill Gates
No. Well the fact that Elon Musk and others did a great electric car is a huge contribution to the climate change effort. You know, he did it with quality. It's still a little premium priced but fine. You know, he's got that initial market and that market's going to grow. And all the other car companies seeing his success will come in the question of, you know, what's the profit per car and you know, what's the market share of Tesla? That's for stock people. That's not a climate change issue at all. The difficulty on the other areas is much higher. So I'm not saying that I'm not trivializing in any way the need to raise the market share of EVs but on a relative basis that's far easier than the industrial economy where our progress is very, very small. And even the Department of Energy, because you know, it really isn't part of their writ to think how to make steel. So we are grossly under invested in these hard areas.
Speaker A
Elon Musk has built a great electric car. He's designed and built reusable rockets. He's an innovator in tunneling technology. Bill, you knew Steve Jobs relatively well. Microsoft competed vigorously with Apple. Microsoft when you were CEO was invest, was an investor in Apple. People have described Elon Musk as the new Steve Jobs. Is he the new Steve
Bill Gates
Jobs? If you know people personally, then that kind of gross over simplification seems strange. You know, Elon's more of a hands on engineer. Steve was a genius at design and picking people and marketing. You wouldn't walk into a room and confuse them with each other.