Silicon Valley has a saying.
“Don’t bet against Elon Musk.”
In the last decade, one person has become America’s name for big ideas.
- Mass-market, self-driving, auto-navigating electric vehicles (via Tesla);
- Cost-competitive solar and battery technology (via Tesla);
- Reliable, cost-efficient private space flight with reusable rocket boosters (via SpaceX);
- Traffic-bypassing tunnels underneath LA (via the Boring Company); and
- Neural laces shunted into living beings with robotic surgeons (via Neuralink).
What will he do next? The wildest of Elon Musk’s visions have a tendency to become a reality, given enough time.
A few years ago, these were all sci-fi concepts. Now, they are the cusp — the border between present and future. Even in the height of the COVID-19 crisis, a brighter tomorrow isn’t quite out of reach.
So, how can Elon do all of this?
1) Dream — Look to “Unsolvable” Problems
By the time Elon began working on SpaceX and Tesla, he had already made hundreds of millions of dollars successfully starting, running, and selling two companies — Zip2, and Paypal.
Via his work on these two companies, Musk made north of $170m. From a financial perspective, there was no reason for Musk to work again. He didn’t need to risk it all on more startups.
But money alone isn’t what drives someone like this. The goal wasn’t getting rich — freeing himself from a 9–5. The goal was solving “too big” — common-pool problems that were seen as too impractical given the constraints of the day’s thinking. The goal was bridging sci-fi with modernity.
They weren’t kidding when they said nerds would rule the world one day.
In Praetoria, South Africa, Elon was a small and lonely child known as “Muskrat.”
He won Dungeons & Dragons tournaments. He was a voracious Sci-Fi fan. He “credits superhero comics with inspiring him to save the world.”
Elon was subject to ruthless bullying. At one point he was beaten unconscious and taken to the hospital. He nearly died. Through all this, Musk learned to dream. He found solace in fantasy and science fiction writing, becoming an avid reader of series like Lord of the Rings and Foundation — in which the protagonists “always felt a duty to save the world[.]”
Whatever the cause, Musk’s goals and ambitions have always seemed a little bit broader — more ambitious, more far-fetched. He’s always pushed himself towards what seemed impossible.
There’s a lesson here. Dream big. Define yourself. Don’t settle.
Impossible can become impractical more easily than we might think. And from there, it’s a slippery slope to changing global norms.
2) Inspire — Show What is Possible, Incrementally
Mass-market was always Musk’s plan for Tesla.
But the path to that wasn’t always so clear. Before the Model 3 and Model Y was the “Roadster.” Whereas Elon saw a carbon-free future — with solar homes, and a Model 3 in every garage… others saw a Lotus Elise — with laptop batteries and an oversized golf cart motor.
Back then, Elon Musk was another Silicon Valley oddball with strange ideas. This was someone who believed hard in a vision and who persisted tirelessly when doubters insisted he was courting ruin.
The mainstream auto industry had all but given up on electric. They mocked Musk’s concepts as impractical, far-fetched, bizarre. As Jeremy Clarkson so colorfully pointed out, the Roadster cost three times more than a Lotus. Before the Model S came out, there were questions as to whether Tesla would deliver the Roadsters it had already sold.
Still, the Roadster led to the Model S, which led to the Model 3, and now the Model Y. Gradually, incrementally, we’ve come to see the future Elon was after.
The changes were never too radical — but they were continuous, and they were steady.
And look how far we’ve come. Over the years, Tesla’s stairway of technological progress has added to something extraordinary. From the original Tesla Roadster to the Model 3 has been a long and winding stairway of improvement.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. (千里之行，始於足下.)”
-Chinese Proverb
Even beyond Tesla, we’ve seen a global change in perspective.
World governments and competing carmakers are committing to an all-electric business model. Zero-carbon remains on the horizon, but it’s demonstrably possible now. It wasn’t before.
3) Plan — Balance Emergent Strategies with a Long-term Deliberate Strategy
To use the terminology of Harvard Business School Professor Clay Christensen, Musk has employed a consistent deliberate strategy.
This was Tesla’s goal in 2006:
The strategy of Tesla is to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium, and then drive down market as fast as possible to higher unit volume and lower prices with each successive model.
Musk knew where he wanted to be before he set out. He pursued the plan consistently for more than a dozen years — iterating and combining that deliberate endpoint with emergent strategies along the way. He didn’t lose the forest for the trees.
Ask yourself — have you ever pursued a deliberate strategy over the long term?
Have you maintained any singular goal for a decade?
Many of us go to university because it’s the next step in our education process. We have a deliberate strategy of attaining a deliberate strategy later on, at university, via emergent goal-setting. And if we don’t “find our way,” we go to grad school — and so on. The problem with a lack of personal goal-setting is that time passes, one way or the other. Everyone sets goals — whether they want to, or not.
Emergent strategy in our personal lives tends to come from other peoples’ deliberate strategies.
If your goal is non-specific, your substitute can become “wealth,” “success,” or something else generic and nonspecific. In the absence of a deliberate strategy, emergent strategy takes the reins.
Set clear goals, or they will be set for you.
4) Persist — Pull Strength from Others’ Doubt
Short sellers, betting against Tesla, have been with the company since the 2010 IPO.
Their fate has been as consistent as Musk’s plans.
The magnitude of losses short-sellers have endured is “just absurd[.]”
Elon Musk has famously feuded with short-sellers on his Twitter account, with the notorious “$420” tweet prompting an SEC investigation and subsequently settled 2018 legal dispute. But let’s put Elon’s tweets aside for a moment.
Musk has publicly aimed to create an energy infrastructure, transforming the world’s transportation infrastructure and use of power. That’s a lofty goal — almost certainly destined to fail from the start. It’s not surprising that powerful people would throw their resources into betting against it. What is surprising is that they’ve lost so much.
Musk has been criticized for advancing a “cult of personality” around himself and his brand — a bit like a more polarizing Steve Jobs with Apple. “Elon,” “Tesla,” and “SpaceX” are colorful, divisive names. People love them or hate them.
In context, is controversy so surprising?
“A friend of mine has a saying: ‘Starting a company is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.’ You have to do lots of things you don’t like.”
Elon Musk has been described as ruthless. He came to lead Tesla in the first place by ousting its former CEO (and his former business partner), which resulted in a 2009 lawsuit. Tesla has been the subject of several controversies as to COVID-19, employment law, and working conditions.
But controversy shouldn’t be too unexpected here. Musk’s firms are home to big ideas. And big ideas mean big risks.
- Several SpaceX rockets have exploded on the launchpad. (As Musk has said in the past, “[t]he passing grade for a rocket is 100%.”)
- Tesla’s facilities have encountered “production hell” and reliability challenges.
- Short-sellers have consistently tried to draw a comparison between Musk’s efforts and pre-2008 Lehman Brothers.
- More than once, Tesla and SpaceX have teetered on the edge of bankruptcy.
And yet, the brands move forward and keep progressing. None of this seems to have fazed Musk — now the world’s wealthiest person.
Global perceptions of a nascent technology clash with a creator’s vision of a different future.
It’s not easy to outcompete millions of unflattering views of something you hold dear. But Musk has held to momentum, all the same.
As of the writing of this article:
- Tesla trades on the NASDAQ at about $845/share.
- Tesla’s market capitalization is more than 800b.
- Top Gear (sued by Tesla in the 2000s) calls the Model 3 “[t]he most impressive electric car this side of a Porsche Taycan.”
- US News & World Report Ranks the Model 3 #2 in its category; and
- Jeremy Clarkson (plus a team of lawyers) sung the praises of the all-electric Model X. (I’ll repeat that — Jeremy Clarkson praised an American electric car.)
- SpaceX privately brings astronauts to the ISS.
- SpaceX launches dozens of global broadband satellites to orbit; and
- SpaceX achieved propulsive vertical landing of rocket boosters on automated seafaring landing platforms.
So yes. Elon has become a polarizing and larger-than-life figure — at times bold, brash, aggressive, relentless, even angry and litigious. But there’s no denying the struggles, the goalposts, or the forward momentum.
Fortune favors the bold.
5) Learn — Grasp Foundations, then Find Connections
Elon Musk is historically noteworthy for making transformative business contributions to seemingly disparate industries.
But where did he learn this?
Musk has no MBA. He has no advanced degree beyond a dual BA/BS in economics and physics. He dropped out of his Stanford Ph.D. after 2 days. In our COVID-19 job market, 2021 American HR screeners would probably reject 1990s Elon Musk for almost any corporate position. Even in the 90s, Musk couldn’t get a contemporary “Big Tech” job (Netscape).
“For whatever reason, I didn’t get a reply from Netscape and I actually tried hanging out in the lobby, but I was too shy to talk to anyone. So I’m just like standing in the lobby.
It was pretty embarrassing. I was just sort of standing there trying to see if there’s someone I could talk to and then I just couldn’t, I couldn’t… I was too scared to talk to anyone. So then I left.”
So, Musk delved into startups instead. He has credited his subsequent success with the ability to learn — specifically, to grasp broad fundamentals, then to join disparate concepts.
Musk draws an analogy to a “semantic tree of knowledge.”
The fundamentals in any field are the tree trunks — the disparate concepts are the branches. You don’t seek the advanced concepts in a field before the fundamentals, or else your tree branches won’t adhere to a trunk. Without a trunk, the branches are forgotten. The more trunks you have in your mental forest, the more readily the branches connect with other trunks.
Broad-based knowledge of fundamentals and cross-disciplinary reasoning by analogy have allowed Musk to re-approach unquestioned assumptions in several specialized fields — from aerospace, to neurosurgery, to transportation.
Specialization leads to rigid and inflexible thinking, stifling progress. General knowledge allows for innovation. There’s a reason Da Vinci and Michaelangelo were generalists.
If you want to be ahead of the curve, find ways to learn things outside your field of expertise — then bring them in.
As the saying goes, “leaders are readers.” Elon Musk reportedly reads 60 books/month. Reading exposes you to the direct perspectives and ideas of others. But knowledge doesn’t have to come from books. It’s everywhere now. TEDx Talks are on YouTube by the thousands. Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and other online learning platforms now share lifetimes of experience for free.
There’s no excuse not to be curious. Seek out new knowledge, new ideas, new perspectives. You’ll be the better for it, and your businesses will stay a step ahead.
Time will tell whether Tesla or SpaceX can become the industrial titans they have the potential to be — or whether the short-sellers will be proven right in time. Either way, there’s a lot to be learned from a study of Elon Musk. Few throughout history have prompted so much social and technological change in so little time, or courted so much controversy. From a nerdy kid buried in sci-fi books to the world’s wealthiest person, Elon will go down in history — whatever comes next.
