The deeper meaning behind each of Elon Musk’s companies
And what every entrepreneur and creative can learn from it
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Spend just a little bit of time reading today’s tech publications and you’ll learn that Elon Musk is a smart, successful businessman who makes sexy electric cars and really cool rockets that land themselves. The media loves Musk because his actions pretty much write their own headlines.
If you’re like me, you’ve been reading these sorts of stories for the past few years and have a pretty solid grasp on his companies’ accomplishments. I could list the car models Tesla makes, and even take an educated guess as to what SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink do. I also understand that Musk seems to care somewhat about the environment and has a bunch of crazy ideas about the future.
Thanks to what I’ve read, I thought of Musk like pretty much like every other tech celebrity: a disrupter with big ideas, a bigger ego, lots of money, eccentric behaviors, and a track record of successes. Sure, I could have read that Ashlee Vance biography or listened to some interviews, but ain’t nobody got time for that.
Until I did. I recently spent an ungodly amount of time reading Wait But Why’s masterful post explaining Musk’s newest company, Neuralink. Tim Urban of Wait But Why is known for going deep. Like insanely crazy deep. And I’m so glad he did.
In the two hours I spent reading Wait But Why’s post, I broke open and completely reformed my conception of who Elon Musk is and why he makes companies.
Here’s a two-minute breakdown of everything Tim Urban taught us about the deeper meaning behind each of Elon Musk’s companies:
We learned first and foremost that Elon’s companies are all aimed at creating a better future for the human race. It’s quite formulaic. He starts by identifying an existential risk. Next, Musk finds a sustainable business model that can fund the creation of new technology innovations. These innovations become the match that ignites investment in the industry, which brings everyone closer the the goal.
Thanks to Wait But Why, we’ve got a handy formula for each of his companies.
For Tesla:
The existential threat Tesla aims to mitigate is environmental collapse. Tesla makes and sells cars that fund the continued progression of battery and automotive technology, getting us one step closer to a cheap all-electric car for the masses. In this future, with solar panels from Solar City and a Tesla PowerWall, any Tesla owner can cut their non-renewable energy use to basically zero. If Tesla succeeds in its mission it will undoubtedly help mitigate global warming, one the of the biggest threats to humanity.
But the learning here goes much deeper. Elon Musk and his companies don’t aim to save the world themselves. They aim to create the technology and momentum required to galvanize the rest of the world to take action. This is evident in Tesla making many of their patents open source, free for anyone to use and improve on. If they’re successful, the story won’t be all about them.
When I realized this, the typical tech-celebrity ego I thought he had began to melt away.
Now, for SpaceX:
The goal of SpaceX is to make human life multi-planetary, so that if catastrophe strikes here on earth, humanity perseveres. As we learned, again from Wait But Why, Musk wants to build a thriving colony on Mars by 2070, with the first people landing on the planet by 2027. That’s a much different story than the ones I’d read. What I knew was that space travel was too expensive and Elon was having huge success using cheaper, reusable rockets. I had no idea these rockets needed to be cheap and reusable so over 1,000,000 people could afford tickets to Mars.
Again, SpaceX achieves its vision through technological innovation in rocket design, and is most successful when more companies begin to do the same. When I first saw Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin building reusable rockets, I was annoyed. I thought they were just copying Musk’s designs and being a nuisance. Now I see that companies like Blue Origin are necessary for us to become interplanetary, and that Blue Origin would have never launched without SpaceX taking a leap of faith into unknown waters.
Finally, Neuralink:
The goal of Neuralink is to reduce the risk of Artificial Intelligence vastly outpacing humans’ abilities by creating widespread human-AI integration. The fear is that with so many technology companies investing in the creation of general Artificial Intelligence, one of their powerful AI systems may get out of control and do massive harm to the human race. Imagine a malicious botnet that takes down the internet, or a droid in the gigafactory that builds a small army of self-aware robots. It’s all been played out in movies, yet the threat is more realistic than you might think. After all, AI is being built to replicate the human brain, and all you have to do is look at human history to see some of the atrocities that ‘intelligence’ can create.
Neuralink aims to mitigate the risks of AI by giving millions of humans access to AI systems through Neuralink’s brain-machine interface, or BMI. Through BMIs, humans would be able to use the incredible advances of AI in their daily lives, distributing some of the raw power of AI around the world. Democratizing access to AI keeps these incredible technologies from being locked up and exploited from inside the offices of Google and Facebook.
Musk feels this risk acutely, so much so that he also helps run OpenAI with Sam Altman, President of Y-Combinator. OpenAI aims to make open-source AI the way of the future by employing some of the best researchers in the field and publishing, publicly, all of their research. The belief is that many individual AI would be able to defeat any bad actors created in the space. Musk and Co are again putting the collective good before their own.
The Implications:
1: Start with a mission. Musk cites purpose as a key factor in motivating employees and attracting the top talent.
2: Make sure you have a sustainable business model to support your mission. Investing in the future is easiest when your bottom line is supported today.
3: Be open. Very few people have been successful in a vacuum. Share what you’re doing with the world. Make it known and accept that, in many cases, competition is a good thing.
4: Take a long-term view. If your industry is on fire right now, you’re too late. The best businesses create a small ripple and ride the wave.
5: Find the people who will go deep, and let them inside. Sure, Wait But Why won’t cover all of our startups, but others will. Find a tribe of people who are interested in your why, and make sure it’s out there for them to find.
This story(and another post that we wrote) were inspired by the making of a Hardbound story about Wait But Why’s exploration of Neuralink. That story comes out soon, so head over to Hardbound.co and subscribe. We’ll send that, and all of our free stories, right to your inbox. Thanks!
