Monday, June 30, 2014

Elon Musk Delivers Through Adversity


I don't know if it's a YouTube block or a PC glitch, but I cannot copy
and paste these descriptions, as I've done countless times before.
But where there's a will, there's a way.

Elon Musk was afraid of the dark, as a kid, but smart as he was, he reasoned that dark was just the absence of photons.  It's silly, he reasoned convincingly, to be afraid of an absence of photons.  He read a lot of books, and just stayed out of harm's way, that is, socially speaking.  Then it was off to college, and he never attended classes.  He just read the books, and showed up for exams.  He was there, he said, to date girls his age.  Nice.
His various asset is his ability to take this big big dream, and make other people believe that it's true.
Musk sold his simple company Zip2 to Compaq for $220 million in 1999, and at age 28 he came away with $21 million from the deal. Which was exciting for him and his family, and it was an extraordinary sum indeed.  Three years later, he sold PayPal to eBay, this time for $1.5 billion, and his winnings were $180 million.  He had the technical skills, for example, to write code, and the entrepreneurial skills to sell what he made.  But he was clearly after something bigger, something that was tectonic in impact.  He was not inclined to luxuriate in his wealth.  
I'd really love to go to Mars, and that's the overarching goal of SpaceX.
Space Exploration Technologies aimed to do much better than NASA.  The challenge was not getting to outer space, but doing so affordably.  He is our Henry Ford for space; Ford didn't invent the automobile but rather came up with a way produce it so that regular Americans could purchase one.  If this weren't enormous enough of an undertaking for any technician and entrepreneur, he was also conceiving and creating Tesla Motors.  As with his previous businesses, he poured quite a bit of his net worth into the risky venture.  The idea for Tesla, in the first stage, was to produce high-end, low-volume electric cars, and market them to a select clientele.  Who happened to be celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Leonardo DiCaprio, and George Clooney.
Billionaire entrepreneur puts his money where his mouth is. 
This little saying means that Musk walks the talk: He delivers on what he promises.  But more than that, it means that he, as the game maker, is also willing to put his skin in the game.  He put his Zip2 and PayPal earnings on the line to save Tesla Motors, which encountered serious problems.  The problems?  Apparently engineering, at least in part, so Musk made himself available 24/7 to his frontline engineers.  Apparently financial estimation, which skyrocketed the costs of building their car more than 100%.  And apparently, too, management and personnel, which led to his pushing out co-founder and CEO Martin Eberhard.

It late 2008, and the global economy was collapsing, as if it had just rolled off the edge of the earth.  Along with it, Musk's three companies - SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity - were in free fall as well.  Established car companies like GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, as the downturn was disproportionately hard on this industry, never mind a small specialty car company that had eyes as big as the sky but had such difficulty simply getting off the ground.

Besides the economic disaster, Musk also came to face-to-face negative sentiments from key figures in the automobile industry - from New York Times writer Randall Stross, to Car Lab president Eric Noble.  Sure, they had reason to criticize an unproven concept.  But the irony, and the idiocy of it, as Musk bluntly admitted in an interview, is that it's much easier to dismiss a remarkable idea that hadn't worked yet, than a remarkable idea that was coming to fruition.  The thing is, history is loaded with skeptics and haters who fought to kill something off, because that something threatened the very heart of their own industry, economy or psyche.
He really wants to change the world. In Elon Musk's vision of the future, you'll have clean and renewable sources of energy, feeding the grid and all of our vehicles will run off of that. This is really the future. It's something you want to tell stories about.
In recent years, Musk attracted long awaited capital - from Chrysler and NASA, to the US government and investors to an unlikely IPO.  Those three companies were finally taking off, and with that, he is fulfilling that promise of a more energy-friendly planet.  My goodness, his confidence, brilliance and fortune were all certainly breathtaking indeed.  His story is definitely just half high technology.  It is also half human perseverance and drama.

Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!

Ron Villejo, PhD

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