Elon Musk: The 21st Century’s Greatest Innovator
With commentary from Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
Amirali Banani
December 4, 2023
Elon Musk is a man on a tremendous innovative mission with a higher purpose. He became convinced in college that three sectors would revolutionize the future of humanity: the internet, renewable energy, and interplanetary travel — specifically, becoming a space-faring civilization. Musk came to regard humanity’s place in the universe as a personal responsibility that rests on his shoulders. If that means pursuing greener energy technology or building never-before-seen spacecraft to expand the human species’ reach, so be it.
As Ashlee Vance stated in his book, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, Musk will leave an indelible mark on the world through his transformative work. Vance writes that “Musk is less a CEO chasing riches than a general marshaling troops to secure victory. Where Mark Zuckerberg wants to help you share baby photos, Musk wants to save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation.” Elon Musk’s mission has always been to step outside the bounds of innovation in the aerospace, automotive, and renewable energy industries and invent new technology from scratch like an innovator on steroids.
While many may speculate that Elon Musk is an alien, or more specifically, a Martian who is working really hard just to get back home, it is important to understand that, first of all, he’s an earthling just like the rest of us, and second that he started with many struggles. Elon Musk suffered many hardships as a child as his father was disgraceful to him and he was beaten many times in school. But these hardships did not pull him back or impede his spectacular creativity and ingenuity. At the age of 10, Musk developed an undying interest and love for computers. He taught himself how to program, and using his programming skills he designed a video game called Blastar which he later sold for $500. Musk’s software skills which he continued to develop and his ability to apply them to machines are what have ultimately driven his success.
Elon Musk’s gift of integration — the ability to flawlessly fuse software, electronics, new materials, and processing horsepower to produce innovative solutions that can alter industries — has awed many famed individuals in the field of software. Musk is determined to pave the way toward an age of awe-inspiring machines and make science fiction become science reality. He has already done so in a couple of out-of-this-world (some literally) ways including landing rockets on drone ships in the middle of the ocean from low Earth orbit and designing implantable chips that allow monkeys to play the game pong using only their mind with his more recently developed company, Neuralink.
Getting to where he is today was all but easy. When Elon Musk dropped out of Stanford University to launch a software company called Zip2, he and his brother had to rent a studio with minimal luxuries and write their program only at night when the internet was up. His pioneering rocket company, SpaceX, failed their first three launches before a successful fourth launch which earned them a $2 billion contract from NASA. Had the 4th one failed too, the company would not be alive today. Tesla, on the other hand, faced much criticism in its early days as the public believed that electric vehicles were impossible to manufacture and could not compete with traditional gasoline-run cars. In addition, Tesla almost died like SpaceX during the Great Recession of 2008, forcing Musk to work an astounding 22 hours a day and sleep on the factory floor just to rescue his company. However, the pioneering EV company defied all odds for success in the automotive industry with Musk’s relentless work ethic proving essential, and is now the world’s most valuable car manufacturer.
Going back to Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, on page 139 of the biography, there was a passage that really caught my attention because it described Elon Musk through a perspective that I had never seen before. The passage is a quote by one of SpaceX’s early engineers, Kevin Brogan. Here’s what he said: “Musk’s growth as a CEO and rocket expert occurred alongside SpaceX’s maturation as a company. At the start of the Falcon 1 rocket journey, Musk was a forceful software executive trying to learn some basic things about a very different world. At Zip2 and PayPal, he felt comfortable standing up for his positions and directing teams of programmers. At SpaceX, he had to pick things up on the job. Musk initially relied on textbooks to form the bulk of his rocketry knowledge. But as SpaceX hired one brilliant person after another, Musk realized he could tap into their stores of knowledge. He would trap an engineer in the SpaceX factory and set to work grilling him about a type of valve or specialized material. “I thought at first that he was challenging me to see if I knew my stuff,” said Brogan. “Then I realized he was trying to learn things. He would quiz you until he learned ninety percent of what you know.” People who have spent lots of time with Musk can speak to a quality of his that not many people have: the capacity to soak up vast amounts of information with almost perfect recall. It’s a skill that truly defines him and his ingenuity.
After just a couple of years leading SpaceX, Musk had turned into an expert in aerospace engineering on an astounding level that few technology CEOs have ever approached in their respective fields. “He was teaching us about the value of time, and we were teaching him about rocketry”, Kevin Brogan said.
What really caught my attention about this passage was Musk’s lifelong love for learning from the time he was a child feeding himself knowledge with the thousands of books he read, and above all, his bravery and willingness to take risks. Launching a rocket company is an incredibly ambitious undertaking that most people wouldn’t even come to think about, even more so when your knowledge of rocket science is limited. Many people, including myself, before reading this passage, may think that Elon Musk knew a lot about rocketry before launching SpaceX. But the reality is that for the first couple of years at the company, he was still learning a lot about the components of a rocket and rocket science from the SpaceX lead engineers, which eventually made him an expert in aerospace engineering and astrodynamics
Elon Musk does not have a degree in Engineering or Rocketry. He is a self-taught engineer and rocket scientist who has learned only from reading many books and the top engineers he hired at SpaceX, similar to how he taught himself computer programming. He is focused on what matters to him and is not afraid to take risks, to innovate, to be creative, and to devise daring plans. Musk’s unwavering dedication to his purpose and indomitable spirit will leave an everlasting influence on humanity.
As Ashlee Vance stated in Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, “Because of Musk, Americans could wake up 10 years from now with the world’s most advanced transit system run by thousands of solar-powered stations and traversed by electric cars,”. “By that time, SpaceX may well be sending up rockets every day, taking people and materials to dozens of extraterrestrial habitats and preparing for treks to Mars. These advances are simultaneously difficult to fathom and seemingly inevitable if Musk can simply buy enough time to make them work.”
