Elon Musk: Myths And Legends: Be That As It May

Tech’s Enduring Great-Man Myth

The idea that particular individuals drive history has long been discredited. Yet it persists in the tech industry, obscuring some of the fundamental factors in innovation. ...... usk is the CEO of Tesla Motors, which produces electric cars; the CEO of SpaceX, which makes rockets; and the chairman of SolarCity, which provides solar power systems. A self-made billionaire, programmer, and engineer—as well as an inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies—he has been on the cover of Fortune and Time. ....... Scholars are “eager to identify and give due credit to significant people but also recognize that they are operating in a context which enables the work.” In other words, great leaders rely on the resources and opportunities available to them, which means they do not shape history as much as they are molded by the moments in which they live. ...... Musk’s success would not have been possible without, among other things, government funding for basic research and subsidies for electric cars and solar panels. Above all, he has benefited from a long series of innovations in batteries, solar cells, and space travel. He no more produced the technological landscape in which he operates than the Russians created the harsh winter that allowed them to vanquish Napoleon. ...... the man’s repeated “willingness to tackle impossible things” has “turned him into a deity in Silicon Valley.” ...... Born in South Africa in 1971, Musk moved to Canada at age 17; he took a job cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill and then talked his way into an internship at a bank by cold-calling a top executive. After studying physics and economics in Canada and at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford but opted out after a couple of days. Instead, in 1995, he cofounded a company called Zip2, which provided an online map of businesses—“a primitive Google maps meets Yelp,” as Vance puts it. Although he was not the most polished coder, Musk worked around the clock and slept “on a beanbag next to his desk.” This drive is “what the VCs saw—that he was willing to stake his existence on building out this platform,” an early employee told Vance. After Compaq bought Zip2, in 1999, Musk helped found an online financial services company that eventually became PayPal. This was when he “began to hone his trademark style of entering an ultracomplex business and not letting the fact that he knew very little about the industry’s nuances bother him,” Vance writes. ............ When eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, in 2002, Musk emerged with the wherewithal to pursue two passions he believed could change the world. He founded SpaceX with the goal of building cheaper rockets that would facilitate research and space travel. Investing over $100 million of his personal fortune, he hired engineers with aeronautics experience, built a factory in Los Angeles, and began to oversee test launches from a remote island between Hawaii and Guam. At the same time, Musk cofounded Tesla Motors to develop battery technology and electric cars. Over the years, he cultivated a media persona that was “part playboy, part space cowboy,” Vance writes. ...... Those who survive under Musk tend to be workhorses willing to forgo public acclaim. ..... Musk’s success at Tesla is undergirded by public-sector investment and political support for clean tech. For starters, Tesla relies on lithium-ion batteries pioneered in the late 1980s with major funding from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Tesla has benefited significantly from guaranteed loans and state and federal subsidies. In 2010, the company reached a loan agreement with the Department of Energy worth $465 million. (Under this arrangement, Tesla agreed to produce battery packs that other companies could benefit from and promised to manufacture electric cars in the United States.) In addition, Tesla has received $1.29 billion in tax incentives from Nevada, where it is building a “gigafactory” to produce batteries for cars and consumers. It has won an array of other loans and tax credits, plus rebates for its consumers, totaling another $1 billion

Be that as it may. But there is something to Elon, and there was something to Steve Jobs. One example. Americas' original mission is a total spread of democracy. The Internet can help. Just beam the Internet everywhere and you have it. But the US government is not doing it. Elon is.

Elon Musk is no Isaac Newton. But there is one theory that says Calculus would have showed up around the time it showed up, with or without Isaac Newton. What does that take away from Isaan Newton? One trait of the entrepreneur is to be in his/her time but also beyond it. The entrepreneur floats in the time dimension, and helps us do the same.

The entrepreneur has a role. The receptionist has a role. The receptionist can always drop out and become an entrepreneur.

An entrepreneur is not CFO, or COO, or an engineer. Like someone on his team once asked Steve Jobs, "What do YOU do?"

"You play musical instruments, I play the orchestra," he replied.

This is not to say government is not important. And it is not just about cutting edge research it funds (and it, in turn, is funded by the people). It is also about basic law and order. And that is no small thing. There are a lot of countries out there that don't have that. It is about things like free speech. And that is a really big thing.

China did double digit rates for three decades. But America has always had the free speech advantage. China has been playing catch up. To dream up the industries of tomorrow, you need a culture of free speech. That is political innovation.

I have said somewhere, if India is to some day surpass America, it will be because India beat America at free speech and diversity. But first it has to do the China thing of getting the basics right.

Just like there are 100 Senators and one Barack Obama in Washington, there are 1,000 entrepreneurs and one Elon Musk in Silicon Valley. Technically he is in LA.

The entrepreneur is the life force inside a company. And there is no one else right now who is attempting the big sweeps.

And glory is to government R&D. Let's double that budget. And let's keep the pickpockets away.

Oracle was an itty bitty company, and then it snatched a contract from the CIA, and then there was no looking back for Larry Ellison. Elon Musk was dead, almost dead, and then NASA called with a billion dollar check. And he lived to see another day. Who says government does not have a role? Of course it does.

Also, Elon was a grown man when he showed up in America. He has said only in America is this even possible. How many times does he need to say that? Once is enough. Now on to Mars.





Not Mars
Musk's Cross Pollinating Ways
Elon Musk And Tesla Shareholders
Elon Musk: Pando Interview
Elon Musk: Funny Or Die
Elon Musk: Satellite Internet
Hyperloops And Self Driving Cars
Hyperloop
A Touch Of Asperger's
1% of 1% of 1%
Musk Magic
Musk Wisdom
Elon Musk: Internet Satellites
What Could Be A New Product Line For Tesla?
Elon Musk And Larry Page
Jack Ma And Elon Musk

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What's left to take? The White House? Too bad Bobby went all NRA and fundamental.

Not Mars

I don't feel any imminent danger that unless Homo Sapiens also colonize Mars, it is too great a risk. As of now, I don't believe in Singularity either. But I do see a lot of great things happening along the way. Like, truly, amazing, world changing great things. Man on the moon mission also gave people appliances.

But I see great promise in Elon Musk sending 4,000 satellites into low orbit to beam Internet to every corner on earth. And I see great promise in the Asteroid Belt. That is where he has to go to become a trillionaire.

Indians could use a little more gold.

Mars? I am way more excited about the earth's surface.

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Asteroid Mining

Musk's Cross Pollinating Ways

English: Elon Musk at the panel Tribeca Talks: Revenge of the Electric Car, for the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Musk, it should be noted, had no experience building rockets. All he knew about space exploration had been gleaned from books and training manuals. Vance describes in gleeful detail Musk’s improbable quest to build a NASA-worthy rocket essentially from scratch. “I am a billionaire. I am going to start a space program,” Vance reports him saying to the man he enlisted to go with him to Moscow to persuade the Russians to sell him an intercontinental ballistic rocket, which he planned to use as a launch vehicle. When that didn’t work out—Musk thought the Russians were trying to get him to part with too many millions of his billion-plus fortune—he crunched some numbers and determined that it made more sense to build the rocket himself. It would be low-cost, low-orbiting, and designed to ferry satellites into space on a regular schedule. The idea, he told the first employees of his new company, Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX), was to become the “Southwest Airlines of Space.” ....... the spirit of a Silicon Valley start-up—learn by doing and do it around the clock—and like those start-ups, it would take advantage of exponential increases in computing power. Software developers would tap into that power to design and build the company’s avionics, while the rocket’s components would be assembled, as much as possible, from equipment purchased off the shelf. ...... because of Musk’s relentless and successful pursuit of the best young engineers and coders and the unremitting demands he placed upon them, it would be made. ...... it, too, fell back to earth. The company was burning through Musk’s money; its margin for error was narrowing while Musk’s reputation as yet another rich guy with a vanity space program was growing ........ Finally, in 2008, six years after Musk declared his galactic intentions, and four and a half years after he said it would happen, the SpaceX Falcon 1 became the first privately constructed rocket to reach orbit. As Vance tells it, the human costs were at least as high as whatever number of dollars had come from Musk’s pocket (one estimate put it at $100 million) ......... Some of these people had spent years on the island going through one of the more surreal engineering exercises in human history. They had been separated from their families, assaulted by the heat, and exiled on their tiny launchpad outpost—sometimes without much food—for days on end as they waited for the launch windows to open and dealt with the aborts that followed. So much of that pain and suffering and fear would be forgotten if this launch went successfully. ............ The portrait of Elon Musk that emerges from these pages is of a man of visionary intellect, fierce ambition, and fantastic wealth, who is emotionally bankrupt. “Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter,” one former employee told Ashlee Vance. “What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition: used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded.” ......... Loyalty was expected but not honored. Fear of getting publicly dressed down by Musk—or worse—was rampant. “Marketing people who made grammatical mistakes in e-mails were let go,” Vance reports, “as were other people who hadn’t done anything ‘awesome’ in recent memory.” And then there was the employee who “missed an event to witness the birth of his child. Musk fired off an e-mail saying, ‘That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We’re changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don’t.’” ........... Musk’s severe rationality and emotional detachment, as well as his preternatural ability to master complex subjects quickly, have led to an ongoing joke among denizens of certain Internet forums that he must be an alien, beamed down from space. (No wonder he’s so keen to colonize Mars!) In fact, the man has all the attributes of a classic narcissist—the grandiosity, the quest to be famous, the lack of empathy, the belief that he is smarter than everyone else, and the messianic plan to save civilization. Steve Jobs comes to mind, though Jobs’s ambitions were pedestrian compared to Musk’s. ........... Twelve electric vehicles besides the Tesla Model S were brought to market in 2014 and fourteen were released in 2015. One of them was conceived and designed in Croatia. ....... He has applied to the Federal Communications Commission for permission to test a satellite-beamed Internet service that, he says, “would be like rebuilding the Internet in space.” ............ While SpaceX’s four thousand circling satellites have the potential to create a whole new meaning for the World Wide Web, since they will beam down the Internet to every corner of the earth, the system holds additional interest for Musk. “Mars is going to need a global communications system, too,” he apparently told a group of engineers he was hoping to recruit at an event last January in Redmond, Washington. ......... fifth mode of transportation ..... Musk’s critics—and he has many—are quick to point out that he is merely piggy-backing on existing technologies, not inventing them. There were electric cars before there was Tesla, rockets before there was SpaceX, solar panels before there was SolarCity, and even pneumatic tube travel has a long, if spotty, history. Yet as true as this is, it misses the point of what Elon Musk is doing. By now it is a cliché to put the words “Silicon Valley” and “disruptive innovation” in the same sentence, but disruption is precisely the point of every one of Musk’s ventures. He has made disruption itself his business plan and it is working. It required a lot of hubris to take on the aerospace industry and the automobile industry and the utilities, but he did, and he is, with precipitous consequences. Will they be precipitous enough to catapult the man to Mars, ten years hence?

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