Musk has had 3 huge successes - Paypal, Tesla, SpaceX. Having one such success might be luck. But when it's 3 times, dismissing it as luck is not very credible.
The same goes for Steve Jobs. 3 enormous successes.
And Bill Gates: 1. dominate 8 bit microcomputer software 2. pivot to 16 bit DOS. 3. pivot to 32 bit Windows. 4. pivot to internet. If you don't think that was a big deal, none of the other microcomputer software companies survived. Lotus, for example, muffed the pivot to 32 bits.
Pivoting to internet didn't work great for Bill Gates. Nobody really used MSN other than for chat and possibly hotmail, the browser wars were lost, and the bulk of the revenue was done on Windows at the time Nardella took the helm. However Microsoft was big enough to afford a failure.
Microsoft pivoted to the internet very successfully in the 90s under Gates, and the stock went up like a rocket.
Nadella didn't arrive until a full 10 years later.
I appreciate the value Nadella brought to the company (as I own some MSFT), but have pivoted away from Windows to Linux for development work. I remain with Windows 7 for other uses, so much so I bought a complete set of spare parts for my Win7 box for when it inevitably fails.
In the 90s what made MSFT shoot up was Windows becoming a household name, and Windows NT becoming the standard enterprise setup (often at the expense of mini-mainframes like the AS/400, rather than Unix); not Microsoft network.
The (almost successful) EEE strategy with Internet Explorer was the only part of Gates's internet strategy that survived the 90s.
This also explains why Ballmer went full in on Windows: there had been no pivot to speak of.
The same goes for Steve Jobs. 3 enormous successes.
And Bill Gates: 1. dominate 8 bit microcomputer software 2. pivot to 16 bit DOS. 3. pivot to 32 bit Windows. 4. pivot to internet. If you don't think that was a big deal, none of the other microcomputer software companies survived. Lotus, for example, muffed the pivot to 32 bits.