I applaud Elon, but I gotta say I'm uncomfortable with the extreme adulation. His company merged into Paypal -- he did not invent that payment solution. He was an investor in Tesla before taking it over -- the original idea and company were not his. The press paints him otherwise on both counts. That's undoubtedly a better story (and perhaps we're at a point where we need to believe in a hero-inventor), but I don't think inaccuracy actually serves us well.
There is a certain kind of crazy, the one where you can have $10M in the bank after a lot of hard work and struggle. And then put all of it at risk for something you believe in and everyone else is telling you is stupid. In gambling it is that person who has a fortune in their chip pile and they say "let it ride", except in this case bankruptcy is on the other side.
I think Elon deserves all the credit there. I think of it as a Ferris Beuller complex, people who just "go for it" without a safety net, betting they will be able to adapt, avoid, and overcome any obstacle that gets thrown at them. It is a level of fearlessness that is not supported by any rational process, and it is the thing that turns people from ordinary into extraordinary.
It doesn't always work out. There are always stories of people for whom they didn't dodge when they needed to. And like stories of "can't miss" hedge fund traders, are suddenly just as broke as most of the world. But you have to respect people that can operate at that level of stress. The money quote is this one:
“What he went through in 2008 would have broken anyone else. Most people who are under that sort of pressure fray. Their decisions go bad. Elon gets hyperrational. He’s still able to make very clear, long-term decisions. The harder it gets, the better he gets.”
Bachelor's in physics, Bachelor's in Econ. at Warton, began PHd at Stanford, comes from a prominent family(usually meaning rich).
He had a safety net. Just wanted to keep it real Homies. (I think the guy is great. It's just he had a safety net. He wasn't going to be panhandling by risk. Plus, when he made his investments his resume was pretty impressive. My biggest hope is his battery factory, and he keeps Tesla afloat when the other car makers hit us with electrical automobiles.)
True, but having to fall back to getting a 9/5, however choice a position it might be, would be quite the blow after having tens of millions in the bank. It wouldn't feel like much of a safety net.
Many of the people who believe in him could very well be people who wish to be him. Likewise, many of those against Elon Musk might feel inferior to him and therefore try to diminish what he has accomplished.
I am of the opinion that self-value should not be contingent upon the perceived value of others.
Ambition and willing to take a risk is not a rare thing.
Musk is no different from the huge number of people involved in startups except that he is investing more money. Many of us are investing all of our valuable time and money in risky ventures instead of saving and taking the rational path in life.
And stop acting like Musk is doing this for pure altruism. He stands to make a lot of money and get written into the history books if these companies are wildly successful. And from everything I've read he has enough of an ego to make those goals a pretty significant reason for these companies.
"Musk is no different from the huge number of people involved in startups except that he is investing more money. Many of us are investing all of our valuable time and money in risky ventures instead of saving and taking the rational path in life."
Seriously? Like Are you actually serious when you write this? You seriously believe that the only difference between Musk and the huge number of people working on startups is that he is investing more money?
You do not think that it has something to do with working on hard problems that nobody thinks are worthwhile until later on. You also do not think it has to do with him actually solving said hard problems. You also do not think it has anything to do with him being smart enough to manage multiple fields like a physics, computer science, engineering and design and have in depth discussions about rockets and space explorations at the same level as he can about electric cars and software? You also seriously believe that someone who is motivated by money would go and try to start a private rocket company that can deliver people to Mars and is reusable? Seriously? They wouldn't just go make some web app and "flip it"? This response is atypical for me but it's hard for me to read this sort of response and respond normally.
Not to mention, risking everything when you have $10k in the bank is a hell of a lot different than risking everything when you have $50M. In the first case, if you fail, oh well, you get a job for a year or two and earn it back. In the second case, the impact is rather... more significant.
Honestly? The person with $50M is risking a lot less.
If you only have $10k to your name, that $10k might the difference between being homeless or not. If you have $50M, even in an extreme worst-case scenario (say your investment suffers a 99% loss) you still have $500,000, more than most people accumulate in a lifetime!
As someone who actually did start a company with a few grand in the bank, it felt like a lot less of a risk than it would now to put 99% of my savings into a new venture. I had a couple engineering degrees, and could have easily gotten a new job if I'd failed. If I risked my savings now and failed it would have a much more significant impact on my life.
One way to understand this is to include employment capital in your calculations. A person with $10k in the bank has considerably more employment capital than investment capital. A person with $50M in the bank has insignificant employment capital compared to their investment capital. So risking 99% of their investment capital would be considerably more, as a percentage of their total capital, than the first person risking their entire $10k.
> If I risked my savings now and failed it would have a much more significant impact on my life.
Is that really true? I guess I've never been that rich, so I don't have any personal experience, but it seems to me like the lifestyle impact of going from $10M to $1M would be a lot less significant than going from $10k to $1,000.
I agree with your analysis of "total capital", but I think you're neglecting the real lifestyle factors.
I can only speak for myself, and I'm not at $10M, but I can definitely say that for me the lifestyle change would be much greater in that case than in the 10k to 1k case.
$10M is, as they say, 'FU money'. $1M could be, maybe, but with a much different standard of living. Where I live you could easily blow the million just on a fairly standard upper middle class house. Losing most of your 10k on the other hand, while unfortunate, would hardly be life changing because it's not enough to do much with in the first place.
Now, if you reliably earn $1M a year, then sure, losing the 9M probably wouldn't be a huge issue. But that isn't the case if you're sitting on $10M from selling your startup.
> because it's not enough to do much with in the first place.
Uh...I mean, $10k would pay my rent for slightly more than a year (I don't live in SF). That's more than enough time for me to find a new job. On the other hand, $1,000 would pay my rent for less than 2 months. That's plenty of time for me to get evicted and be out on the street.
Yes, of course, initially. The risking it all period isn't when you're considering spending a few million to buy some rockets. But then the day comes when you're this close to finally succeeding, but you're running out of cash. You need more now to make payroll, and there's nowhere else left to get it. Sure, you could cut your losses and walk away with 3 million, but then a) you probably wouldn't have risked the 47M in the first place, and b) you likely wouldn't end up where Musk is now.
This isn't a hypothetical. As the article describes, there was a point when he was begging or borrowing every cent he could. I don't know what his personal financial situation would have been had it failed, but I doubt he held much back.
"Ambition and willing to take a risk is not a rare thing."
It is a bit more nuanced than that. When a 3 lb terrier starts barking and growling at you, you have one reaction, when a 175 lb rottweiler does the same you have a different reaction. Those situations are, on their surface, exactly the same. You are being threatened by a dog. But the realities of the two situations are very different because what is at stake. The terrier can be kicked across the room, the rottweiler will likely kill you. It is really impossible to know how you are going to respond until you're actually in the situation.
Perhaps not surprisingly, for a lot of people there are things worse than dying. And for many of the people I've known letting down people who are depending on them ranks pretty high on that list.
Musk is very different from "most" people. We know this because he has been in the fire and we've seen the result. Look at the stories of the fall of the twin towers on 9/11. Most people paniced and froze, a small number of people took action and evacuated.
At the critical stress level, when your limbic system cannot take it any more, it takes over. Some people become rabbits, some people become tigers, and the really weird thing is that I don't think you can really have any idea which way you'll go until you experience it. You can believe you will do one thing or another, but you don't really know. Scott McNealy shared with me that all you could do as a leader was to put people into really stressful situations, to see where they broke, and then note which side of the coin they fell on. It is why the armed forces put new recruits in to actual life threatening situations, to watch them panic and evaluate their response.
I don't know Elon, but if he is as characterized in interviews and by third party accounts, I don't think he altruistic so much as he is driven. The most amazing person I have ever met in person who is truly driven was Dean Kamen at one of the FIRST competitions in San Jose. It seemed like he could live to be 150 and still not get done all of the things he was driven to do before he passes. It isn't about altruism and it isn't about wealth, it is all about getting the important thing done. What ever that is. And someone who is driven AND functional in the face of extreme stress, is, in my experience, a rare individual.
Ambition and willing to take a risk is not a rare thing.
Yes, most will agree. But having ambition, taking risk and being successful is a rare, rare thing. Especially after you made your fortune AND having the gut to risk it all. Now THAT is a rare thing.
I think that's a weak argument. Apple doesn't make the profits cause it builds iPhones in California. It does so because it chose the Eastern shores for a strategic reason. If your aim is to go cheaper, then to not take advantage of global-trade is really going to set one back by a significant margin. But I understand that Elon Musk is a patriotic South African who wants to create jobs for South Africans, in South Africa... oh, wait, I meant, the United States.
Doesn't matter. Elon still relies on government funding because he's selling to government.
It's no different than when Rockwell/North American built the Space Shuttle.
The biggest problem is that his ideas are just so boring and uninspiring. How about a new idea for a change? (Hyperloop isn't more exciting than High-Speed rail)
Being known for someone that "did something for slightly cheaper" isn't exactly awe-inspiring. Sucks that millennials are stuck with him for inspiration.
SpaceX's manifest for this year [1] shows 7 US government launches, 6 commercial launches, and 1 SpaceX-paid R&D launch (Falcon Heavy). Yes the US government is pre-paying for some R&D for Crew Dragon, but no, it doesn't add up to 90% of revenue.
>Everything they're ... planning on doing, has already been done.
So landing a rocket after launch to re-use that rocket has already been done? Going to be interesting when they are the first to do so but it's already been done. I'd love to hear how you reason that.
Doing things in a more efficient, cheaper manner means innovating new ways of development, testing, and building. More 'affordable' ventures into space can lead to an array of improvements. More research satellites being sent into space, as an example, because instead of costing $12 million to ship into space it costs $4 million [0].
I'm sorry you don't see the value in such things, but rest assured it is there.
[0] figures made up, can't be bothered searching for accurate pricing
What other nation or private entity has come up with a visionary idea in space industry? Let me remind you he first thought about sending a life capsule to Mars on a former ballistic missile. Isn't that visionary enough ya?
With Jobs gone, we need a new hero-inventor to worship. Such is life.
Seriously though, when I was a kid I would read about "famous scientists of old" every night. They were my rockstars. Edison, Watt, Lister, the list goes on. I had a book about them, their lives, their inventions. Everything. I must have read that book a thousand times before I was 14.
Then one day when I was 18 I visited the London technical museum. In it was a Watt exhibit. It said "Watt bought a lot of patents, he invented a few small things, but his main innovation was leasing steam engines instead of selling them."
It was then that I realized all those scientists of old I worship weren't scientists at all. They were good engineers. Excellent integrators of other people's inventions and work. Magnificent funders of scientists' work.
But most of all they were businessmen. Because it doesn't matter who invents a thing, what matters is who uses the thing to bring actual change to people.
It doesn't matter who invented the lightbulb. It matters who invented the electricity grid so people could actually use lightbulbs in their homes.
The Story of Science is a great six part BBC documentary that talks a lot about the phenomenon you are describing, and episode four talks about Watt specifically. I highly recommend it, and it can be found online.
When I was young, I had a large amount of respect for Edison.
When I found out the truth - that he was a businessman more than an inventor - it was quite a let down. Many of his ideas were stolen from people who worked beneath him and the publicity campaign for DC power over AC power is simply terrible.
>it doesn't matter who invents a thing, what matters is who uses the thing to bring actual change to people.
And this is the sad truth of many famous 'inventors'.
He invented the modern research lab, which is kind of a big deal. Regardless of how many or few of the creative breakthroughs were his personally, he pushed a lot of technology forward, he was sort of the ultimate maker and deserves a great deal of credit.
So he should be credited for his achievements and not falsely accredited for others' achivements.
My respect for him was one of an inventor. The problem is everything I had respected him for inventing - he hadn't even invented!
It's like being told Superman isn't actually Superman, he's Batman. Sure, he's still a superhero and might do awesome things. But I like Superman, I'm not a big fan of Batman. *
*this is a terrible analogy, but I hope you understand what I'm trying to convey.
> And this is the sad truth of many famous 'inventors'.
Why do you think that? Is not the person who makes the lightbulb useful is deserving of more praise than the person who merely invents it?
There are a lot of prototypes out there that never make it in the real world. I don't think the hard work that goes into making things useful on a day-to-day basis should be disregarded.
My argument is not that a new invention cannot be based off of or require previous inventions in order to function. My argument is that improving an invention is not possible without the invention existing.
It's like improving upon a camera without cameras existing. The invention of the camera, in my opinion, is more important than the continued improvements of the camera, at least up until digital cameras - which is innovative enough to recapture the concept of photography but improve upon it in many significant ways. [0]
While improving upon an invention has its own worth and merit - I do not typically hold improving something to the same merit as inventing it. Coming from someone who often improves things, but does not create them.
When it is a drastic improvement or an entirely different approach (ie. innovative changes) - those hold a great deal of merit and may be worthy of respect. But being able to market something better is not something I respect.
I do not hold a lot of respect for marketers and advertisers. I see it as an abuse of trust against people by feeding them subtle lies and abusing how impressionable people can be. If you respect good marketers, then we're merely at a disagreement of opinion. I do not respect people who are skilled at manipulating people. While it may certainly take skill, require knowledge, and may even be difficult! It is not deserving of respect, in my opinion.
[0] Or arguably make it worse, depending on your artistic perspective.
Jobs is similar, not actually an inventor (people like Woz did that), but understood it, so could manage, inspire, promote it. A tech CEO. Jobs owned more than one co. too, Pixar.
Reading the article, there is enough even there to give credit to the adulation. The guy's main company is SpaceX, oh and while he was figuring out how to launch rockets into space at a fraction of the cost of the norm (a massive challenge), he happened to rescue another company that he became CEO of from bankruptcy.
The big losers in Musk's life are clearly his wife and kids, but I don't see how you can suggest he didn't do (and continues to do) some very very special things for humanity as a whole. If the electric car succeeds and we move from fossil fuels in a big way, he will be a major reason for this. If we commercialize space and become a space-faring species, the same position holds.
> The big losers in Musk's life are clearly his wife and kids
He met his first wife at age ~20 then divorced her at 37. He was already successful when he met his second wife, so she knew what was in the social contract and probably chose on purpose.
Paypal did not invent electronic payment.
Tesla did not invent the electric car or batteries.
SpaceX did not invent rockets.
SolarCity did not invent solar roofs.
But I have an enormous respect for this man, just making rockets affordable is a great service for humanity.
"That's undoubtedly a better story"
(Citation needed) This sounds to me like : I feel so envious because someone else did something remarkable, that if I accept to give merit to him I will be accepting that I could do better than I do. So something, somewhere must exist to prove he has not merit.
"but I don't think inaccuracy actually serves us well."
Again (Citation needed), after stating your prejudice, you jump to take it as fact.
What is inaccurate about Elon here?
The article talks about good, but also not so good things about Elon personality.
I created my own companies and had to take very similar risks in my life, with everybody in my life believing I was crazy when I put "safe" money in the bank at risk(specially in Europe and Asia taking risks is a big no,no). Everything in the article sounds pretty veridical for anyone with experience in this field.
> But I have an enormous respect for this man, just making rockets affordable is a great service for humanity.
His business means rockets are going to go from $400 million to $150 million. That's nice and all, but it's not an extraordinary revolution. For equivalent, or cheaper rockets, see the Indian space program. They've launched rockets to Mars for cheap already.
I don't get the millennials adulation for him, either. Seems like a random guy for so many millennials to latch onto.
My guess is, because millennials never grew up with the amazing Apollo or Space Shuttle era, they feel Elon is somehow doing something novel and innovative, even with the Indian/Chines space programs going on as well.
If you want to see some sci-fi magic, just look at the Space Shuttle, That's some amazing witchcraft right there. The ideas NASA were throwing around in the 70's were insane. They were talking about constructing giant space stations with multiple shuttle vehicles at a time, with artificial gravity. Too bad Nixon killed their funding.
> His business means rockets are going to go from $400 million to $150 million. That's nice and all, but it's not an extraordinary revolution.
Rockets didn't cost $400 million before SpaceX. You could already get a satellite into geostationary orbit for about $70 million -- or rather, you would have been able to, if politics hadn't intervened.
Twenty years ago, the Chinese were major players in the launch services market. They picked up quite a bit of business after the Challenger explosion. One of the two commercial satellites that was retrieved by STS-51A was re-launched on a Chinese rocket. One-fifth of the original Iridium constellation was launched on Chinese rockets.
In the late 1990s, the United States banned launches on Chinese rockets if the satellite had any American parts. That meant that no Western satellites could be launched on Chinese rockets. What happens to prices when the low bidder isn't allowed to bid? You guessed it.
What SpaceX has accomplished so far is to restore prices to where they would be if the Chinese had stayed in the market. It's impressive that they can match "the China price" from California. However, it's not exactly revolutionizing the industry yet.
A large communications satellite costs hundreds of millions of dollars. A large military satellite costs over $1 billion. Launch costs are simply not the constraining factor in the satellite industry.
However, SpaceX is promising to drive costs even lower through reusability. Then we'll see if there's actually as much price elasticity in launch services as Elon Musk is expecting. That will ultimately determine SpaceX's legacy, whether it is a revolution or not.
> If you want to see some sci-fi magic, just look at the Space Shuttle, That's some amazing witchcraft right there.
A reusable spacecraft that costs more than an expendable launcher?
>You could already get a satellite into geostationary orbit for about $70 million -- or rather, you would have been able to, if politics hadn't intervened.
Going to Mars is a first step. It wouldn't surprise me if large space stations with artificial gravity come about someday either - and come about much sooner than they otherwise would have if Musk hadn't decided to pursue his goal of making humans a multiplanet species.
Anyway, perhaps I could have worded things differently as I didn't mean to imply he had the exact same visions as those from the 70's, just that he decided to go after grand ideas now that the government decided it isn't worth their money.
All three of Musk's most recent ventures (SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX), depend either on direct or indirect government subsidies. It's not just that Musk is a workaholic, or possibly innovative, but his ability to "work" the system that sets him apart. US tax payers are paying a significant portion of the bills for his ventures. Since I agree with his goals, it doesn't personally bother me very much but it still is something worth thinking about.
US Tax payers will be paying for something, considering that the majority of the US economy is private, and the government has to get stuffs done somehow. So if you agree with the goals of a private entity that the government is spending the money on, it's about as good as it could be.
I've tried editing a bunch but always get downvotes, so here it is on a throwaway.
-> how would you work Hyperloop into your list of examples?
You couldn't, in my opinion, because it's counter to your argument and position, which is needlessly, gratuitously negative. Perhaps you can't see the difference between someone to idolize, who is an engineer that can proceed from first principles to leaving no stone, degree of freedom, or axis unturned and delivering a solution...and, someone like kzhahou above who literally ignores 1 out of 4 examples we have of Musk's invention, creativity and leadership. (The 4 examples we have are as a PayPal cofounder only, as a Tesla investor and ALSO product architect - his official role -, which we can see whenever he talks about the trade-offs, as a SpaceX investor, and in envisioning and engineering the basic constraints in HyperLoop.)
you are saying the "inaccuracy" of him being a hero-inventor doesn't serve us well. I say it does, because people will give him money, and he can deliver on great designs as he has proven an ability to do.
taking that away from him because you're uncomfortable with extreme adulation is the opposite of everything capitalism stands for: if you prove you can design, engineer, build, manage, and lead to great things, you get to do more of them.
(sorry you can't tell the difference, but reflecting on why you chose to leave out the quarter of his ventures that he is chief inventor on would serve you well. also reflecting on the degree to which he is product architect at tesla would do the same. finally you can look at zip2, which is what he did, including personally, before payapl.)
Hyperloop doesn't exist. Musk isn't even trying to implement it, and lots of good engineers think it's totally impractical. If anything, it's a good counter example to his other ventures, which are outstanding executions of non-visionary ideas.
At any rate, parent comment is correct that there's an unhealthy degree of hero-worship veneration for Musk around these parts.
I see. And if he does implement it, you will come back and say he didn't do that with his two bare hands, but basically had other people do large parts. You people in this thread just don't get it.
What's to get? Yes, if Hyperloop ever does get built, it won't be because Musk conjured it out of thin air with the sheer force of his genius-will. I don't believe in the Great Man Theory[0] and neither do most serious scholars. Humanity moves forward through the combined contribution of millions of mostly-unsung workers.
Also, I just think it's a bit creepy how many people on here wish Elon Musk was their daddy.
It's unfortunate that you try to tear other people's work down with negative commentary, and you should consider being more constructive about changing the world. In fact, other than the negative language you use, you have almost precisely described cause-and-effect.
Yes, if HyperLoop ever does get built, it will be a direct effect of Musk conjuring it out of thin air with the sheer force of his genius-will. Although you use derisive, negative, and quite unconstructive language.
You can use this language to dismiss anything. Go get a fork from your kitchen, put it on your table, and then move it so it falls to the ground. Why did it fall to the ground? It fell to the ground due to - in negative, dismissive terms, "humanity's almost preternatural ability to manipulate the environment in a way that transcends the abilities of plants and microorganism as shown through the genius-will of 'ForHackernews'". This description is correct except for the negative and unconstructive language.
The "Great Man theory" should probably now be called the "great person theory" as it is quite sexist, but other than that it is largely correct.
you don't want to make any positive impact on the world, then don't. but don't pull down those who do. I hope you will be more constructive in the future. good luck with everything you do that is in that direction.
Regarding Paypal, I think it's fair to say it was a merger of equals (Confinity and X.com). This post gives some more insights into the merger, I found it an interesting read.
He's a really smart guy, but there are lots of really smart guys out there.
He's a really lucky guy, but there are lots of really lucky guys out there.
There aren't many really smart, really lucky guys out there. One of the challenges is when we see really smart, really lucky guys, we tend to think of them as unbelievably smart and kind of lucky. One of the bigger challenges is when they start to see themselves that way.
No such thing as luck. I read the article and I wouldn't know what qualifies as outrageously lucky. The NASA deal that came just in time, maybe. But it's not luck to get a contract for launching rockets if you already demonstrated you can do it.
His parents were well-educated and part of the upper-class. This was pure luck and afforded him countless opportunities he wouldn't have otherwise. It's hard to overstate how lucky this was.
He had access to very good schooling in his childhood and free time to pursue his interests (computer programming). This was pure luck and critically important in forming who he is today.
He was able to obtain Canadian citizenship through his mother. This was pure luck and was very important when he emigrated to the US.
These are all incredibly lucky w.r.t the world at large. However, amongst HN readers and the tech community, there are millions of people who are U.S / Canadian citizens, with educated parents, and who know how to program. What were the 'outrageously lucky' factors that separated Musk from these millions?
I don't know, I just know he's one of the luckiest people on the planet. Even if we accept that there are, say, 100 million people who had the same luck in those three measures, that puts him the top 1.5% of the world's population. And that's all before he becomes an adult.
A bit over 400. Of those, 75% of them needed to be recalled due to manufacturing issues. [1][2]
My perception is that Musk brings very capable executive-level management to his projects. Tesla was dying without strong leadership (and had a string of temporary CEOs prior to Musk).
read heinlein's "the man who sold the moon" for a very good portrait of a hero-entrepreneur-visionary. i think that's more in line with musk's mystique than hero-inventor; he's not so much the man who invents things as the man who collects inventors together and makes things happen.
If you don't like this then I'm sure you'll hate the eventual, "Where did we go wrong with the electric car," articles after Tesla fails to deliver a $20,000 EV before going bankrupt. If the government pulls its corporate welfare, which it probably will under a GOP administration, Tesla is going to die a quick death.
Elon can't bring Li-Ion down to any level for compete with ICE cars, has terrible financials, and there's something very off putting politically about hard-working middle-class families subsidizing ultra-sports cars for the wealthy.
The title of this article is amusing because it seems to suggest that SpaceX is Elon's side bet and Tesla is some grand vision. Its not. If anything SpaceX is the great success here and if I was a betting man I'd say Tesla will become a footnote in history when SpaceX succeeds. I just wish he wasn't so anti-AI and anti-robot. I'm assuming he really needs to sell the public on human, not robotic, spaceflight for his company to succeed.
Only a very small part of income car is based on ZEV credits and if those were to go away they'd still have a ~20% profit margin which is well above most traditional auto companies. Their negative income has to do with the rapid expansion they are doing right now.
There always seems to be this ZOMG government bailout around Tesla when that's not really the case when you look at the entire picture.
They have a 22.6% GAAP gross margin excluding ZEV credits, BUT unlike every other car manufacturer Tesla doesn't account for R&D and engineering expenses as a fraction of COGS (that's why Elon can claim they are up there with Porsche and Audi, but that's a blatant lie).
Just examine their 10-K. Sometimes Tesla can be so opaque and impervious to questioning.
>there's something very off putting politically about hard-working middle-class families subsidizing ultra-sports cars for the wealthy.
It seemed to work out for our current President, who subsidized auto manufacturers through bailouts and "Cash for Clunkers" to buy electoral votes in OH and MI.
You can become a millionaire or even a billionaire by luck.
Risking an entire 9 figure fortune in order to run both
1) a business that most at the time thought was impossible (mass produced electric cars)
2) a space company that most at the time thought was impossible to do without being a nation state
and managing to against the odds make both of them succeed and become 11 figure companies is not luck. it is immeasurable slog, vision and competence.
there are tens of thousands of people worth hundreds of millions and ~1500 billionaires on earth, can you name a single one taking anything like the risks and producing the results elon is producing?
While both side are impressive, I think the risk is really the big story. Of those people worth at least tens of millions, how many would be willing to risk their entire fortune on a venture that, in their honest assessment, would probably fail? (There's a quote somewhere, where Musk actually says he expected SpaceX to fail, but did it anyway because of how great it could be if it succeeded.)
I bet the number is pretty damn small. A big part of how he got to this point is simply the fact that almost no one else would have been willing to try. Beyond that, he must have been extremely skillful and lucky to actually succeed.
I don't have a link to further into that story, but after being screwed by the Russians on the price (they did a bait and switch, increasing the price four fold when he arrived), he asked on the plane ride home "How hard can it be to build a rocket?".
EDIT: To add to this, the US government created sanctions against Russia, causing the Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin to say "Use a trampoline to get to the ISS then" [1], which prompted Elon to unveil the Dragon Mk2 crew capsule: "Sounds like this might be a good time to unveil the new Dragon Mk 2 spaceship that @SpaceX has been working on w @NASA. No trampoline needed" [2].
I love how Russian dishonesty led to SpaceX's success in a significant way. It almost like we've had a people who go about things the absolutely wrong way to for everyone else to learn from (Communism, Stalinism, Putinism, etc).
I guess I was so caught up in the fact that he was trying to buy an ICBM. I didn't really think about the timing as well. This would have been within 30 days of 9/11 happening. Hard to imagine even thinking about doing something like that.
What an absolutely riveting, brilliant article. The title doesn't give it justice -- this article is about a dream, and about a man's relentless pursuit of that dream. Incredible.
I wonder what SpaceX's long term goals are. Much of the article suggests that it's Mars. But SpaceX probably wants to do something that's profitable, right? Missions to Mars won't be profitable for probably a very long time, if ever. I wonder about something like a mining operation on the Moon or other near-Earth objects?
Right now, it's hard to imagine anything more profitable than deploying satellites.
Mars, vis-a-vis making buttloads of money on Earth.
Elon is positioning to launch a 4k-strong comsat fleet, with which he hopes to commandeer a large fraction of Earth's internet backhaul traffic (in addition to securing millions+ of internet customers around the planet, otherwise too expensive and sparse to reach with cables).
My bet is that it will turn out to be SpaceX's biggest financial play, and that the private + NASA orbital launch contracts are functioning as a way to get someone to pay for rocket development and build the necessary capital for the telecom move.
Although once a reusable first stage has been demonstrated, I imagine launch costs will drop by a large fraction, and possibly open up a new rush of investment and innovation in low Earth orbit-- with Musk selling pickaxes and shovels.
It's possible if more people knew the price drop that's about to happen in rocket launches, they'd be scrambling to launch their own 4k-satellite constellations, and that Musk's inside knowledge and control gives him a huge head start into the business.
Yeah, and as always, it comes down to energy -- there's an established way to turn CO2 and H20 into Methane and Oxygen, given enough energy for input. And SpaceX has put some research into methane-fueled rockets already. So some people are theorizing that the play is to plunk an unmanned nuclear reactor and electrolysis equipment on the surface of mars, let it crank out a trickle of fuel for a couple years, and we've got the infrastructure to send a there-and-back mission to mars with on-site refueling. No big deal, right?
The only thing that bugs me about this strategy -- whenever you look at a rocket launch, there is a lot of infrastructure and people running about doing stuff prior to the launch. So how is this going to happen on Mars? The only way the Moon return missions were possible was because of the low gravity and no atmosphere on the moon. I just can't see a rocket launch from Mars happening with on-site manufactured fuel and automated facilities.
I don't think it's coincidence that SpaceX is continually testing the automation of their launch and recovery processes. They aren't there now, certainly, but by the time regular there and back missions to Mars are viable, they probably will be.
Mars is substantially easier to launch from since there is less atmosphere and gravity. Still, it is going to need far more autonomous rockets that can launch with less infrastructure.
If Spacex to manage to make a "Just add fuel" rocket they're striving so hard to do, automating the logistics if a robot connecting a fuel pipe doesn't seem so bad.
That would certainly jive with the Oxygen creating greenhouses that he was playing with. Methane could be gathered from the same greenhouse idea but for animals. Funnily enough, both of those things work pretty well to support human life too... Interesting to see where it goes, that's for sure.
Super fascinating read. It's also great because it will create a commercially viable reason for companies to want to explore space, which will make it cheaper for everyone else.
1) Elon's tremendous luck. He took huge gambles, repeatedly, and they all turned up heads. They were all very worthy ambitions, but nine times out of ten, they would not have worked out. I don't condemn him for taking those risks at all (in fact I applaud it), but:
There are probably plenty of entrepreneurs out there with comparable intelligence or ambition, but when they fall on their faces, we just shake our heads at them and say "well, that's what you get". But each of them simply wasn't lucky enough to have an Elon story. We should keep this in mind either while heaping adoration on Musk or while rationalizing someone else's failure.
2) Elon almost didn't succeed on more than one occasion because somebody else was actively trying to screw him over. And that (human shittiness) is one of the stochastic forces that made his success so unlikely. The world would have been a worse place and civilization would have been set back, all by the selfish behavior of some VC company. It is reprehensible that lollipop-yanking and sandcastle-stomping is not only actively impeding our society's progress, but despite this, it is actually tolerated or even revered.
True. If NASA had awarded the contract to someone else and SpaceX had folded, we wouldn't be saying "look at that brilliant guy who got dealt a bad hand", we'd be saying "look at that asshole who earned a fortune and then blew it all on an idea that everyone warned him was nuts"... or more likely "who? never heard of him".
Altucher writes well, but I find it hard to overlook the relatively large inaccuracies in the bits I do know about, and keep wondering what else is equally inaccurate. E.g. he seems to think "Virgin Air" (the actual airlines are Virgin Atlantic Airways and Virgin America) is Bransons main business, but Virgin Group consists of a huge number of companies, and Virgin Atlantic revenue only accounts for about 10% of the groups aggregate revenue (Virgin Atlantic revenue is about 20% of Virgin Group revenue, but Virgin Group only owns about half of Virgin Atlantic)
EDIT: The story about how Branson supposedly got the idea also sounds apocryphal. In 1984 Branson was rich already - in fact Virgin Atlantic became profitable in large part because Virgin Records was doing well enough that Branson could use Virgin Records to finance lease of a secondhand plane for the company to start out with.. What was to become Virgin Atlantic was started by Randolph Fields and Alan Hellary before Branson got involved. It's not impossible Branson was thinking of setting up an airline before that, but he didn't start Virgin Atlantic until after he'd been approached by Fields.
Branson tells that story in his autobiography, Losing My Virginity. It's probably not fanciful to think that it happened given the crazy things he has done in his life.
The stories about how he got off his earlier enterprises - Student and Virgin Records - are possibly more inspirational because as you say he had already success to back up the air venture, but that success had really been built out of nothing.
It's quite possible he did something like that, but I think the connection to Virgin Atlantic at most would be that it may have been what made him willing to fund it. It's a matter of court records that he did not start Virgin Atlantic alone - it took a court case before he paid Fields, who had already started and operated an airline, the dividend payments he was due.
I agree you with you regarding his earlier ventures. There's the famous quote of his (not sure whether it's real or not) as an answer to a question of how to become a millionaire: Become a billionaire and start an airline.
With respect to his earlier ventures, I particularly like the story of how he at one point needed additional finance for Virgin Records and contrary to what most would do dressed down more than usual for his visit with one of the most stiff-upper-lip banks in London - his reasoning apparently that if he'd shown up in a suit, they'd know he was in trouble, so he went out of his way to appear like couldn't care less if they gave him the loan.
Also applies to other kinds of uber achievers outside of entrepreneurship. Like Mandela and Gandhi, both struggled with normal expectations a person has regarding the family. Hard to be a present parent/spouse when you are committing your life and mind to a country.
There are lots of point of views around the thoughts:
- He did not invent anything
- He had privileged background, education and luck
- He takes extreme risk but has background to fall upon
etc etc ... So he is not great or a hero.
The fact of matter is that he has a personality and attitude for getting things done. He dreams of something, faces extreme challenges but still pursues it and gets it done.
What matters is this attitude of never giving up. The extreme odds against which the person fights, makes him stand apart. But people with similar attitude, fighting against extreme odds can be found in all walks of life. Whether we find that narrative interesting or not depends on "our" background/interest etc.
Example could be someone with no means for basic education and learns on his own to become a great mathematician(or a architect who turns desert into greenfield) or someone who becomes a great artist/sportsman/writer(basically excellence in anything) against extreme odds.
I bet people with this kind of attitude don't care whether you find them heroic or not. The may even not care to read things like this. Fighting on this (whether its heroic or not) is just silly. Some people will find the story of single mother, working multiple jobs to provide for her family more heroic. But then that's good for them and does not steal the fact that Elon musk is hero for lot of us.
Here's the video of the first Falcon 1 launch that reaches orbit. The series of cheers at each milestone, as the article mentions, is pretty awesome.
https://youtu.be/8FQhtMrUQlE?t=18m34s
the man is pure inspiration. 10 years ago, i was asked who i admired, and couldn't think of a single answer. Maybe that's sad on my part, but when asked now, he's at the top of my list.
Don't forget Bill Gates. While many may (rightly) fault his business ethics and tactics, he is doing more for the bottom 20% of humanity than most others.
But, he set back all of computing 10 to 20 years (1995-2010 "dark ages" approximately) just for the sake of greed, dominance, and profit. Was it worth it?
I used to think this myself, but reading up on computing history I've somewhat changed my mind. If Bill Gates hadn't been born and Microsoft hadn't existed, what might have happened instead?
IBM would have still made the PC, only using another CP/M clone as OS, and would have owned that market because the other vendor wouldn't have written as clever a deal as Gates did. Two possible outcomes of that: either IBM would have replaced microsoft as center stone of the PC market and been no better and probably worse than microsoft (they were considered pretty evil in their day), or more likely IBM would have failed to create the PC platform (because that was really Microsoft's doing), and the personal computing market would have remained deeply fragmented on both hardware and software levels, tools for gamers and tinkerers but not business computing. In either case, OS/2 wouldn't have happened in the way that it did (especially since microsoft was a key developer behind that). Linux would have had a significantly tougher time happening, either because of IBM's control of the PC market (including the hardware), or in the fragmentation scenario because the lack of a hardware standard would have made it more difficult to build a community of OS enthusiasts. Apple would have probably gone bankrupt during Jobs' wilderness years. Without ms office propping it up as the only desktop alternative to DOS/windows it wouldn't have stood a chance given how incompetent apple's management was at the time.
So, maybe microsoft slowed down the personal computing market, or maybe they sped it up, or maybe they didn't change the timeline at all. I reckon there's no way to tell unless you have a time machine.
I wonder if Gates feels guilty though. His current efforts are laudable, but it always seems like he's compensating for something.
It's impossible to know as a whole, but you can still look at individual actions and say they were bad for the industry.
Probably one of the worst and most egregious is Microsoft's use of a "per processor" fee in the 90's which they only stopped when the government forced them to. If you were an OEM like Dell or HP, and sold Windows on any computers, you had to pay Microsoft for a copy of Windows on all computers you sold, even ones without Windows.
This anti-competitive move meant alternative operating systems, like BeOS, or OS2/Warp, or even Linux weren't really an option. BeOS died, not on any technical merits, but because Microsoft forced it out via other means. Linux only survived because its openness made it hard to kill.
I'm confused at how Gates set back computing by taking the PC from a geeky hobby item to perhaps the go to standard appliance in the modern home. Could you explain this a little better?
That was Apple. Microsoft mostly copied things after they got proven elsewhere first.
How many hundreds of billions of dollars have been lost to security issues in Windows? The design is fundamentally flawed and entrenched in our society for the foreseeable future (ATMs running 20 year old versions of Windows, etc).
How many other promising computer futures could we have had without abusive monopoly power? Plan9? Be?
How many millions of programmer hours have been lost to supporting broken Microsoft practices? IE, anybody? It didn't just "happen," it was their entire business model: destroy competition by abusing a position of power, become the only solution provider going forward, then stop developing the solution for highest ROI (just duplicate those bits for government contract money, baby. no need to maintain anything since we're the only game in town).
That was Apple. Microsoft mostly copied things after they got proven elsewhere first.
...and made it mainstream enough that every home could afford one. No, Apple did not do that.
how many millions of hours...
...that would never existed anyway because no other company had the vision and desire to penetrate the mass market like MS did. Pretty sure a hell of a lot of money was made maintaining MS software. It was hardly 'lost'.
I'm not sure if Gates slapped your mom or something, but you seem to be blaming MS for not being the best thing possible when the whole idea of mass market computing was nothing more than theory. Were you using the Internet when IE 5 came out? Because if you were you surely remember it was miles and miles ahead of Netscape. It was the best thing in the market. I can't fault them for the millions of dollars of development they invested simply because it hurt Netscape's non existent business case.
Do you reap the same scorn on google and Apple for their actions? Because they are doing exactly the same things as MS did, even worse, Google is just pumping what are often best in class products out to the masses for free!
Don't get me wrong, MS did a lot of shady stuff that hurt competition and served no other interest but their own, but they aren't unique in this regard at all; they just happened to be in a better position than most companies are.
Greed is a lousy sobrquiet to use here. DOS on an 8086 is a lot like the AK47. It's simple, you can take it apart blindfolded and it always fired. DOS was the substrate; everything else ( even the really bad stuff ) was ultimately gravy.
This was a hugely populist technology.
Gates identified a principle - software is inherently property - that was lying around unused. He built a big company out of that. Computers became mainstream.
If anything, Wintel stuff probably accelerated the progress of other architectures by the sheer increase in the size of the market.
I, too mourn some of the casualties, but an Amiga was 8 months house payment whilst my first 286 was only 3 or 4.
Compared to those stuck in poverty, computing can recover with relative ease from that kind of setback. Computing has boatloads of money and loads of momentum to overcome obstacles; people in poverty only have despair and oppression.
True. But he has successfully edited his reputation by using philanthropy, so you got a downvote. Which I reversed because you're right (taking "all of computing" to be mild hyperbole).
Wow, reading through this story and you can't help but notice some comparative traits to the late Steve Jobs. The incredibly high work ethic, not taking no for an answer and being highly optimistic in the face of bankruptcy. Those familiar with Steve Jobs and the story of Apple will know that Apple found themselves in this exact situation, a man with a vision burning through cash and not really making any ground - only for them to become a highly profitable company.
After all is said and done, SpaceX is not only profitable, but Musk somehow remains its largest stakeholder, even though he went through a desperate period of trying to raise more capital. Seems taking on debt helped Musk retain SpaceX's majority stakeholder (a brilliant move if you know you're going to succeed).
This is probably one of the most inspiring things I have read in a very long time. A very well-written article that doesn't skip on the details. Absolutely riveting, I was supposed to be working and I could not stop reading this. We need more opportunistic thinkers like Musk, everyone thought he was mental or was having a breakdown, but he proved his detractors wrong by not giving up (even when it looked like bankruptcy was the likely option).
This is a really great article. As a casual observer of SpaceX, it seemed to me that they just came out of nowhere a few years ago. It's really great to see a story about their origins.
> Downey appreciated that Musk was not a foul-smelling, fidgety, coder whack job.
Always good to know how the rest of us "coders" are looked upon by Bloomberg, and presumably the average person while they are busy singing Elon Musk's praises.
I think it is an overblown and mostly false stereotype that coders are foul-smelling. I've never actually met a foul-smelling coder. Ill-dressed, yes. But we mostly work in offices with air-conditioning, there isn't much sweating going on. All of my current and former coworkers seemed to wear antiperspirant and deodorant, and so do I.
As for "whack job", this is the kind of language that disparages our industry and unnecessarily lowers our social status. Would a doctor or lawyer take being called a "whack job" by default so lightly?
"they were in the process of finalizing the paperwork for the funding round when Musk noticed a problem. VantagePoint Capital Partners had signed all of the paperwork except for one crucial page...Musk believed that Salzman’s tactics were part of a mission to bankrupt Tesla. Musk feared that VantagePoint would oust him as CEO, recapitalize Tesla, and emerge as the major owner of the carmaker."
From other sources it seems that VantagePoint may have owned less than 10% of the company. I am surprised that a minority shareholder could legally have the power to block an additional funding round; couldn't the other shareholders have brought it to a vote and overrule VantagePoint? Was the reason this wasn't done just the lack of time, or could VantagePoint really have had some procedural right to block this?
Same thing on my iPhone. I gave up trying to read the article because of it.
Even safaris built-in reader mode didn't work, it wouldn't look past the first section of the article.
I'm guessing they're playing games with the DOM using JavaScript or something like that. Doesn't really matter, it completely broke to usability of reading the article.
I sent them a comment about it, I hope they listen. I really dislike this new trend of websites implementing their own custom scrolling behavior. I've yet to see one that improved on the default behavior in iOS.
When I was going through the article, these two quotes came to my mind.
“There are some people who just get what they want in the world. If you want to start a startup you have to be one of those people. You can’t be passive and wishy-washy,”
– Paul Graham
"A formidable person is one who seems like they'll get what they want, regardless of whatever obstacles are in the way."- pg
