Elon Musk shares almost 20-year-old Steve Jobs video on ideas, teams and people

Steve Jobs Elon Musk

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has been an inspiration to many entrepreneurs over the years. Tesla CEO Elon Musk shared an old video interview of Steve Jobs from 1995. In the video, Jobs is talking about ideas and the importance of working with the right people. Musk, in fact, a few years ago mentioned that how he wished he had got an opportunity to speak to Jobs.

“One of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left, John Sculley got a very serious disease, and that disease… I’ve seen other people get it, too. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work, and that if you just tell all these other people, “Here is this great idea,” then, of course, they can go off and make it happen,” Jobs said in the interview.

Musk in a one-word post on X said “precisely” implying with Jobs had to say in the video.

In the video, Jobs further pointed out the problem with that notion is that “there is just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows.”

Any idea, according to Jobs, never comes out like it starts “because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it, and you also find there is tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make.” He further said that it is the process that is the “magic”. Every day you discover something new, that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently. And it’s that process that is the magic.”

The late co-founder of Apple further pointed out the importance of a team of people doing something they really believe in is like. He cited an example of an 80-year-old man who he met as a young kid. The old man took some mundane rocks, water, and grit powder, filled the canister and let it whirl. “The next day, we discovered stunning polished stones,” Jobs said. He further said that the encounter with the old man became a “metaphor for a team working really hard on something they’re passionate about is that it’s through the team, through that group of incredibly talented people, bumping up against each other, having arguments, having fights sometimes, making some noise, and working together, they polish each other and they polish the ideas, and what comes out are these really beautiful stones.”

Also read: AI will become smarter than humans in the next few years, says Elon Musk

Tesla's entry in India will be a 'natural progression', says Elon Musk