Opinion

Elon Musk: What’s His Game?

The Opportunistic Visionary — Engineering Utopia a Piece at a Time.

Andrew Dart

Published in

Predict

10 min readJan 10, 2024

Elon Musk, is he a man or a meme? Some see him as an alien, like the hero in the novel, “The Man Who Fell to Earth.” Yes, he’s a Tech Entrepreneur and building a spaceship. But it’s not some grand plan to save an alien race; instead, it has been a series of risky technology adventures to subconsciously manifest his grandfather’s utopian vision.

Forget about the price tag.

At school, Musk was bullied, and his tormentors called him “Muskrat”. Perhaps it was more prescient than they realised. The hero Remy, in Ratatouille, was told never to worry about food as long as he cooked. “Food will come, Remy. Food always comes to those who love to cook,” Similarly, Musk would never worry about money — money always comes to those who love to engineer the future.

Musk has little regard for money, saying recently it’s imaginary and only goods and services form the real economy. He scorns those who would use money as a means of manipulation. Like Remy, he avoids “taking” the bread and becoming a thief.

Indeed, as an entrepreneur in the Dotcom era of the late 1990s, Musk learned quickly how the money would come. He started a Yelp meets Google Maps directory website in 1995, which was sold to Compaq for $307 million two years later. Musk’s share was $22 million. Next, he started a banking website, which merged to become PayPal in 2000. That was sold in 2002 for $1.5 billion, and Musk’s payday was $175 million. He was just 31 years old.

Money was never Musk’s motivation.

A Utopia Born of Technology

Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua N Haldeman, was a Canadian member of Technocracy Incorporated in the 30s and 40s. This movement was born from the Depression era and the seeming failure of Capitalism and Communism in delivering promised benefits for society. The Technocracy’s vision was for a society governed by scientists and engineers, as these were the only people intellectually and practically equipped to deal with the modern world. Traditional politicians were all flawed with greed and irrationalism.

The Technocracy sought to sweep away the structural impediments holding back the forces of abundance and provide a utopian society where machines provided all the basic human needs. A revolution in technology and automation, coupled with the elimination of money, would bring this new era into existence.

These ideas have seemingly seeped into Musk’s worldview, making his business decisions understandable once you comprehend this motivation.

Seeds to an Engineered Future

Most people probably think of SpaceX and Tesla when the name Elon Musk is mentioned. And more recently, Twitter, X, crazy arguments about free speech, and pissing away a $44 billion investment are likely to come to mind. These seemingly disparate companies are all pieces in a complex jigsaw puzzle that makes perfect sense given Elon’s latent Technocracy views. Yes — rockets, cars and social media, along with his other ventures — because they are, in truth, much more than what they seem.

In 2001, after he left PayPal, he established the Musk Foundation, a charitable organisation. Its focus areas include renewable energy, human space exploration and safe artificial intelligence. These themes have resonated throughout Musk’s career and would have made his grandfather proud.

That same year, Musk’s next venture focused on Mars — he was briefly a member of the Mars Society. Initially, he wanted to launch a science experiment to land on the surface of Mars, but the Space Industry didn’t take him seriously. Like his grandfather, he could see incompetent people were in charge and that money concerns had overridden sound engineering.

By 2002, Musk founded SpaceX with $100 million and envisioned drastically reducing launch costs through superior engineering.

Musk’s renewable energy concerns got him involved with electric vehicles, and in 2004, he invested in Tesla. His stated objective was to bring affordable electric cars to the mass market.

Driven by similar renewable energy sentiments, he co-founded SolarCity, a rooftop solar power generation company, with his cousins in 2006. Many consider this a failure, but as you will see, this puzzle piece became Tesla Energy ten years later.

By the end of 2008, both Tesla and SpaceX had come within “inches” of financial ruin, but Musk’s certainty in his vision had overridden any concern for his economic welfare. In September, SpaceX exhausted its remaining funds to launch its Falcon 1 successfully after three previous failures. Only on the 23rd of December did NASA award SpaceX with a $1.6 billion ISS Resupply contract. The following day, on the 24th of December, Musk successfully thwarted his ouster as Tesla CEO and secured additional funding to avoid Tesla’s bankruptcy. Perhaps Santa does exist?

Rather than being chastened by these experiences, Musk’s dreams only became grander.

Vertical Integration

A key tenant of Musk’s engineering philosophy and his vision for maintaining tight control over costs was building critical components in-house. This was a driving force for both SpaceX and Tesla, where affordability was critical — for access to space or access to cheap electric vehicles.

SpaceX is said to manufacture 70% to 80% of the Falcon 9 in-house. They use industry-standard materials with transparent costs to avoid the price “padding” rife in the aerospace community. Coupled with its engineered reusability design philosophy, it delivered breakthrough savings of hundreds of millions of dollars per launch. This shook up the legacy space industry, where a cost-plus and a throw-it-away mentality had prevailed since the Apollo era.

Tesla doesn’t disclose the exact percentage of parts they make in-house, but it is estimated to be around 30% to 40%. This includes the electric motor, the all-important battery pack, and the charger.

Tesla epitomised this “do-it-yourself” mentality when it began rolling out charging stations across America in 2012. As of 2023, there are over 70,000 of their plug-in charging stalls deployed across the US. Tesla can construct these charging stations at half the price of their competitors. Additionally, Tesla’s plug design became the North American standard. Consequently, Ford and GM have signed up to use the network for their electric vehicles.

Similarly, in 2013, when the utility of self-driving became obvious, Tesla kicked off its in-house engineering developments to deliver this capability. It unveiled its first version of Autopilot in 2014 and has been a leader in artificial intelligence ever since.

In 2021, Tesla Dojo was launched to provide the supercomputer power to maintain Tesla’s leadership. Initially, it used chips designed by Nivida, but now it uses Tesla-designed chips. In 2023, it was one of the top five compute facilities globally. It trains the machine-learning computer vision models at Autopilot’s heart.

It is hyped that Dojo could be the dawn of artificial generalised intelligence.

The final piece in Musk’s vision of an autonomous transportation utility has a “last-mile” problem — how to get the pizza to and from the self-driving car? Obviously, it’s a robot, so Tesla launched its own TeslaBot in 2022 — Optimus. It is again manufactured in-house and incorporates all of Tesla’s intellectual property, from battery designs to advanced AI capabilities, enabling it to become state-of-the-art rapidly.

Musk’s intention goes far beyond pizza delivery. Optimus will manifest the technocracy utopia his grandfather envisioned all those years ago. Musk expects these robots to become personal servants and factory workers — to do the bulk of the work humans do today.

Musk proposes that Tesla will manufacture billions of these robots.

Convergence — Maximising Utility

The idea of vertical integration permeates all of Musk’s businesses, so I won’t go on proving that point. The issue is convergence — how these jigsaw puzzle pieces fit together, forming an engineered utopia in the tradition of Musk’s grandfather.

By 2015, Tesla’s battery division was already exploring energy storage products beyond electric vehicles. Around the same time, Musk’s SolarCity was experiencing some difficulty but was the second largest provider of US solar systems. The convergence of these two businesses established a renewable energy utility — Tesla Energy, with applicability in various sectors. It underpins his 2023 master plan to eliminate fossil fuels and create a sustainable energy civilisation — how Grandpa would have smiled.

Having made access to space affordable, Musk saw an opportunity to improve broadband communications, so his next jigsaw puzzle piece — Starlink — was established in January 2015. By 2018, the prototypes of a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit were first launched. They have already proven their utility in the Russo-Ukraine war. The 2024 version of Starlink can make direct connections to mobile phones. What better way to enable communications with self-driving cars and legions of robots that must roam across the planet, far away from any cell tower? The convergence is coming soon.

Musk co-founded OpenAI in December 2015. As an ethical non-profit, it was considered the right way to proceed with artificial intelligence. But six months later, Musk was running scared from the approaching “singularity” and founded Neuralink, a medical technology to connect the human brain to artificial intelligence. He believed this was how humans would survive the AI apocalypse.

By 2018, Musk had departed OpenAI due to conflicts of interest with Tesla’s AI initiatives. In 2023, Musk set up xAI, a large language model artificial intelligence company. It released “Grok” in November, touted as a direct competitor to ChatGPT and Google Bard. In another example of convergence, Musk used data from Twitter/X to train his new chatbot, explaining why he was prepared to pay such a high price for Twitter. In the ultimate convergence, the Musk X App is becoming a super App to which all his businesses will be connected.

The Starship Escape

It is 2024, and Musk’s dreams of Mars from twenty-two years ago remain unfulfilled. Yet his passion continues to burn bright with a far grander vision — to make Humanity a spacefaring multi-planetary species. Unlike in the past, today, everyone takes him seriously. So, we collectively hold our breath for Starship’s next integrated flight test, knowing that even if it fails, Musk won’t quit.

Mars could end up being Musk’s greatest triumph.

It was Nixon, the president of the United States, who decided Humanity would stay at home, and now it’s Musk, a private citizen, who will determine when we go to Mars. He has all the puzzle pieces to make it happen — robots, AI, satellite communications, ground transportation, power generation, habitat excavation, manufacturing capabilities, and a reusable rocket. In a few years, the only thing that will hold Musk back will be the permission to launch. And once off-world, no one will stop him from creating a utopia on Mars in his image.

Grandpa would be so proud!

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