Henry Ford. Sam Walton. Thomas Edison. Alexander Graham Bell. Andrew Carnegie. John Rockefeller.
Steve Jobs is not only in this pantheon of great American industrialists, Cramer said Thursday, he transcended it.
"He created machines that made the impossible simple. He created machines that brought the democratization of thought to all. He created machines for which there had been no need and it turned out they were necessities," Cramer said of Jobs. "He had vision. He had brilliance. He was otherworldly."
As co-founder and former CEO of Apple , Jobs created an ecosystem that allowed all people to figure everything out, Cramer said. Where other companies created just a few individual products, Jobs created an entire product line that kept pushing the envelope. Where the great industrialists before him revolutionized one industry, or created a game-changing product, Jobs continued to change the game time-after-time.
"It's as if Jobs invented the wheel, the wedge, the screw, the pulley, the level and the inclined plane," Cramer explained. "We take them for granted now, like the iPod, iPhone and the iPad, but they were all invented once, too. Can you imagine if just one man invented all of them?"
It's important to note that in a time, where Americans are so self-critical, Jobs was "uniquely American." To Cramer, Jobs was "the best we had."
When this story was published, Cramer's charitable trust owned Apple.
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