I'd really like to know how he's doing it. Is it because he's personally a brilliant engineer, micromanaging the projects to success? Or does he have an eye for great talent, able to rapidly put together highly productive teams? Or is he so motivational that he can take ordinary engineers and inspire them to do extraordinary things? The stuff they're doing is hard. A lot of very talented people have failed in the space and automotive businesses. To succeed in both to the degree he has is mind-boggling. Tesla and SpaceX still have a long way to go, but where they've been in a few short years is remarkable.
He's extremely smart and extremely hard-working; he has personally, aggressively recruited others whom he's identified as the key people he wants working for him, and by all accounts he inspires them to work as hard as him; he's trained himself into deep domain expertise in both rockets and electric cars and serves as the chief designing engineer of his companies' products; but maybe most important, he has really extreme determination. Consider this exchange after SpaceX had lost its first three launches in a row:
Wired.com: At the end of the day you're still zero for three; you have so far failed to put a rocket into orbit.
Musk: We haven't gotten into orbit, true, but we've made considerable progress. If it's an all-or-nothing proposition then we've failed. But it's not all or nothing. We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take us one, two or three more tries, but we will. We will make it work.
Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?
Musk: Do I sound optimistic?
Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.
Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.
"I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination."
There's another key here: both those industries were calcified with few innovators, so they had large latent pools of super-talented people that had been previously under-utilized.
By offering a compelling vision, Elon has sucked up much of the top talent in the space industry who had just been waiting for someone to come along with an uber-cool program for them to work on. His vision is so cool, in fact, that they are willing to work for much lower wages than they would make at a big defense contractor.
Similarly with Tesla, there was a large pool of talented engineers who are passionate about electric cars, who had just been waiting for the right company to come along and rescue them from dead-end projects at the big car companies.
This is very true - for example, his VP Propulsion Development, Tom Mueller, spent 14 years as a rocket product manager at TRW, and spent 6 years leading a team of 80 engineers developing a candidate engine for the Delta IV, and winning plaudits like a chairman's award for technical excellence but without anything he worked on actually getting launched. I can't imagine how gratifying it must feel for him now to watch things he made flying into orbit and opening access to space. It's hard to beat that kind of real accomplishment as a job perk.
Elon: "It's important enough to be on the scale of life itself, and therefore goes beyond the parochial concerns of humanity," Musk says of our interplanetary destiny. "We're all focused on our little things that are of concern to humanity itself. People think of curing AIDS or cancer as being very important, and they are—within the context of humanity. But curing all forms of cancer would improve the average life span by only two to three years. That's it."
"In other words, while eradicating disease is a worthy pursuit, and would extend the lives of individual human beings, my life's work is extending the life span of life itself."
1. VTOL supersonic electric jet: fast, quiet, low-cost to operate (what he jokingly referred to in Iron Man 2, IIRC)
2. Prefabricated metal sections for creating a double-decker/box highway, that could be dropped in place like a lego system with minimal disruption to traffic.
3. Fusion problem, magnetically-confined fusion, gets easier as you scale it up.
2 months later, the Dragon successfully docked with the space station. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s Just look at Elon's excitement at the 9:36 mark of this video as well as all of SpaceX employee's enthusiasm. Amazing. :)
Aside: "all-or-nothing" thinking has been described as a cognitive distortion, which can lead to depression and other problems. In the interview, he frames the failure as an test flight, from which they are learning - so it is not "nothing" (despite the loss of satellites and people's ashes). Choosing this frame has worked well for him, just as it has in treating depression.
Thanks for that, it's an excellent survey -- a stunning combination of factors that he worked like hell to align (that the universe didn't simply take care of....).
He's also comfortable being honest, as in that bit about optimism, and other comments in other interviews.
Also, here's Max Levchin's explanation: "One of Elon's greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven... He is very much the person who, when someone says it's impossible, shrugs and says, 'I think I can do it."
> based on small, executable ideas over grand strategies like Martian colonization
I think many startups actually do have a grand vision - it's just that their initial money-making product is a small executable idea. e.g. the article dismisses google as just a "better way to search the web", but they had a vision of accessing the world's information (all human knowledge). It's also long seemed to me they are really about strong AI, but they don't talk about that...
Elon Musk does the same thing. He has a vision, but pays the bills with satellite launches. He's not going direct to a Mars colony. Similarly for Tesla, the first model was very niche. Even with the sedan, it's still a tiny tiny fraction of Toyota's output.
This is the way you accomplish great things: one step at a time.
The Tony Stark character, billionaire-industrialist-brilliant-engineer superhero, has existed in the comics since 1963, 8 years before Musk was born. So, the claims of Musk as a model for Stark are best taken with a grain of salt.
Most likely, the Iron Man movie team -- including Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. -- just finds it helpful to reference Musk as a modern Stark-archetype. (Starketype?) The original Stark drew from Howard Hughes, but Hughes isn't as familiar to the movie's modern audience. And, our other modern billionaires, like Gates and Jobs, don't quite have the same rockets-and-motion pedigree as did Hughes and now Musk.
Howard Hughes is very much the same type of man as Musk. He was at the forefront of both movies and aviation, both of which were young industries at the time.
A lot of attention is focussed on Hughes' later years when he turned basically insane, but in his productive years he pushed forwards the design of the airplane and motion pictures.
If anyone is unfamiliar with his work, I'd recommend picking up a biography and giving it a read.
I keep hearing the Iron Man thing, but honestly I'm not sure I see it. I've seen interviews with Musk and he's way less cocky and more down-to-earth than you'd expect with that basis of reference.
Second this. He's also seems just an exceptionally sweet and lucid man. If anyone has actual knowledge about this question, I would love to hear about it. Worth a blog post, or a book contract, even.
