It's been 100 years since we've seen anybody like Elon Musk - here's why that's so disorienting

I don't mean literally crazy, of course. But if you intend to enter the auto industry with a new brand, you have to defy the odds, conventional wisdom, and probably the advice of everyone who doesn't want you to lose every dime and the shirt off your back.

It's been over a century since feverish entrepreneurship around the world gave us the first automobiles. Unbridled creativity and risk-taking were the order of the day back then, and hundreds of people wanted in on the action. Imagine a world filled with dozens of Elon Musks.

Nowadays, there are still some serious "car people" in the car business, but the industry is so large and global that the managerial skills needed to run it reward MBA types more so than madmen.

When Jim Hackett became CEO of Ford a few years ago, he realized that he was coming from a non-automotive background, so he needed to develop a grasp of the business.

He talked to a lot of people, and one major takeaway stood out for him: people truly love cars and have an emotional investment in them.

Hacket knew that, at some level, but he didn't know how much that love defined his customers' relationship with Ford's products.

That revelation is one that Musk knows well. He set out to produce cars that owners could adore, and he's succeeded. Tesla might have its problems, but building dream machines isn't one of them.

For years before Musk and Tesla came along, people wanted great, widely available electric cars, but the industry wasn't able to make them. They were a dream. Tesla made them a reality.

Musk is one of the more technically knowledgeable CEOs in the auto industry, at least when it comes to electric cars. He also knows about rocketry, given that he's also CEO of SpaceX. I can safely say that no other CEO in the car business can call themself a rocket scientist of any sort.

Musk is also not as operationally disadvantaged as some of his critics think. His problem isn't that he doesn't understand how cars are built and sold; it's that he's too ambitious about improving a manufacturing process that might not need it.

But the truth is his real job, his most important one, is to be a car salesman.

The only other top exec to come along in the past few decades who was as effective as Musk was Lee Iacocca, who ran Chrysler in the 1980s. The business world has sort of forgotten about Iacocca, who was an old-school, cigar-chomping cheerleader for his company.

Much of this is because the type that Iacocca embodied isn't effective at overseeing most big, global carmakers in the 21st century. They need to be futurists and diplomats, leaving the rough-and-tumble of grinding out sales to capable lieutenants.

Musk is certainly a futurist, but he's rarely a diplomat. His driving goal is to sell as many Teslas as possible, to end humanity's dependence on fossil fuels. That requires something more like a field general, or a king.

Iacocca didn't tweet. Neither did Henry Ford nor Enzo Ferrari.

In fact, none of the auto industry's great visionaries — with all their faults and flaws — had to worry about 24/7 media or the internet. When Iacocca was running Chrysler, there were basically three network channels on broadcast TV.

When Henry Ford started his car maker, radio was a new thing.

And Enzo Ferrari wasn't called il Commendatore because he spent a lot of time worrying about Twitter trolls.

There are exceptions, of course. Lamborghini and Ferrari can still thrill, and newer exotic manufacturers such as Pagani have taken up that torch. But automakers for the past few decades have been far more about processes and management than about raw excitement.

Tesla's cars are all about excitement, even if they aren't particularly outlandish. They're certainly fast — sometimes faster than supercars. And they symbolize the future.

This situation is changing, as Tesla sells more vehicles to less affluent buyers and moves away from cars such as the high-performance original Roadster and embraces stuff like pickup trucks.

But the buzz remains. And Musk is its conductor.