The Curious Case of Elon Musk
To slightly paraphrase Abe Lincoln: You can keep some people happy all the time, you can keep all people happy some of the time but you can’t keep all people happy all the time.
Perhaps no one has felt the brunt of this more in recent months than visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk. Musk has achieved what no one else has: he’s made me feel bad for a celebrity billionaire. Just as rumors of his sleepless nights, endless toil and loveless life were beginning to surface, the man got on Joe Rogan Experience possibly the most popular long-form web podcast series in the world. This subsequently produced the most enduring GIF of the past few weeks. Needless to say, images of the Tesla CEO smoking a joint on video were too scandalous for an already frustrated Board to handle. Much like most great men of history, all people either love or hate Musk. But irrespective of which side you fall on, you’ve got an opinion just like everyone else who’s heard of him. The MBA types are downright vicious on Musk- calling him a market manipulator and showman. On the flipside, I’ve heard science nerds say they think he gets too much credit- after all he’s just a business magnate, aren’t the engineers who work under him at SpaceX and Tesla the true heroes?
The truth is that Musk is an expert generalist, a rare breed of leader who possesses an almost superhuman-like ability to transfer knowledge and skills across disciplines. Musk has himself attributed most of his unconventional success to physics inspired first principles thinking. So instead of thinking that state of the art rocket propulsion at NASA costs a fortune so there can’t be another way, he thinks from the bottom up about how rockets are manufactured and reaches a staggering conclusion- NASA is overpriced. Now that the engineering thinking is soundly done, he explores the business reason for why this might be the case and realises that the heavy subleasing and contracting in play in bureaucratic government machinery has led to a slow, old fashioned, overpriced rocket industry still riding on the Neil Armstrong wave of the 1960s. If one followed the astronomical (no pun intended) progress of space technology in the 60s, the trajectory would have forecasted a million strong human colony on Mars by now. And yet it’s taking Musk’s entrepreneurial zeal and some very talented engineers at his companies to make this notion feasible. Much of this has to do with the end of the Cold War. It’s become clear that without fierce competition between superpowers, it will take inspired futurists to guide humanity forward.
After PayPal sold to Ebay, Musk pocketed about $180 million. Money he’s repeatedly said could have bought a sweet Greek island and blissful existence but instead he immediately initiated his plan to colonize Mars and SpaceX was born. Even 180 million dollars was not enough to make a dent in the US rocket propulsion industry so Musk made a business trip to Russia where he hoped to acquire Russian made rockets which were the cheapest at the time. There he discovered a stunning lack of innovation and bureaucratic sluggishness so he returned to America determined to build a private rocket company in the aviation belt of Southern California. The idea was insane- almost as radical as leading the first American car startup since Chrysler in a time when General Motors went bankrupt. Now compound on to this the fact that this car manufacturer aimed to build a fully electric vehicle running on solar powered batteries.
As Peter Thiel laments in the phenomenal Zero to One, innovation in the world of atoms is progressing sluggishly because the inertia is so great and the regulation is so tight. The world of bits however is fully empowered: and this is why we have 140 characters (now 280) rather than flying cars and Angry Birds instead of commercial jetpacks. Innovation in this space has become so difficult that the risks overpower the rewards for most entrepreneurs, but not Musk. None of this is to ignore the often rash decisions he has made and his own seemingly unrealistic planning. Tesla Model 3 suffers from production deficits, cars arrive years after they’re reserved. To reiterate my argument from Like Nodes on a Network, Tesla is a lot more futuristic than Uber. Yet the latter exploits an existing supply chain whereas the former is aiming to create a paradigm shift so understandably it’s not the same kind of readily milkable cow. Car manufacturing isn’t easy. Autonomous electric car manufacturing as its first major vendor in history is very difficult. Yet Musk has already succeeded- even in the unlikely event that Tesla crashes and burns, Mercedes and Audi have full electric Tesla lookalikes planned and they’ve got more reliable supply chain than Tesla so the self-driving electric vehicle revolution is fully upon us one way or the other.
Corporates obsessed with cow milking don’t understand Musk because like most of America, they are caught up in indefinite optimism- the notion that the future is building itself and we shouldn’t worry about it. He might be a dreamer but Musk understands that the future only happens because strong willed people make it happen and he’s decided to be the futurist strongman of our era. Some of his ideas might be too ahead of our times to find business success right now but he has convinced other companies to follow suit and inspired a generation to think beyond apps and tablets. Most thinkers like to do what they do best: think their days away while reality chugs along centuries behind their ideas. Very few decide to set out to execute their ideas as startup business plans. We look poised for a burgeoning wave of futuristic capitalism and Musk is at its vanguard.
