Visionary Lessons From Elon Musk

Visionary Lessons From Elon Musk
Red lighting fills the room, casting a bright neon hue on the buzzing crowd. As electronic music thumps loudly and white lasers cascade from the walls, the scene looks more like a rave than what it is: a massive gathering of reporters and tech geeks, all hyped for a moment they’ve been looking forward to, in some cases, for years.

Soon the music stops and the lasers disappear. The din of the crowd quiets. The giant screen on stage turns purple and an animated woman appears on one side, gesturing with both animated hands as she talks.

“The skies are polluted. The world is addicted to oil,” she says in a digitized British accent. “But we’re here to offer a solution.”

The animation points to the center of the stage and, as she says, “I now present to you my creator,” there are howls in the audience.

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This is the scene on Nov. 21, 2019, at the Tesla Design Studio in Hawthorne, California, just outside Los Angeles. There are hundreds of people in the room and tens of thousands streaming the event live around the world. Today, Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of Tesla, is unveiling to the public something he’s been talking about for nearly a decade, a new vehicle he calls “Cybertruck.”

Musk walks on stage dressed like a character fromBlade Runner: black boots, dark pants, a dark shirt, and a black leather jacket. Dozens of cellphones go up and start recording. Musk stands there, arms spread wide, as the cheers and whistles last for a full 25 seconds. Someone on the right side of the room screams “I love you!”

A series of photos flash across the screen behind him, one old pickup truck after another. Musk points out that the basic concept of a pickup truck hasn’t changed much over the last century. Then there’s a photo of new trucks from Dodge, Ford, and Chevy, each with the branding removed. They are basically indistinguishable.

“It’s hard to tell which is which,” Musk says in his trademark emotionless staccato. “We need something different. We need sustainable energy now.”

Then: “I present to you, the Cybertruck.”

For Musk, the 18 months leading up to this moment have been filled with turmoil and controversy. He’s probably the most famous engineer in the world, Silicon Valley’s heir to Steve Jobs, the real-life Tony Stark fromIron Man. But in the last few years, Musk—who turns 50 next summer—was sued by the Securities and Exchange Commission after he tweeted that he had the funding to take Tesla private at $420 a share. Then he was sued by the British diver he’d called a “pedo guy” during the rescue of a young soccer team stuck in an underwater cave in Thailand. Then one of his other companies, SpaceX, was investigated by NASA after Musk smoked pot on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Musk also feuded publicly with short-sellers betting on Tesla to fail and struggled with media coverage that increasingly painted him as erratic and immature. There were questions about whether he might even be ousted from the Tesla board. And, if all that weren’t stressful enough, he also started a new relationship, with the Canadian musician known as Grimes.

On this stage, though, Musk has the eyes and ears of the entire Valley and every car company on the planet. This is a chance for Musk to stun the world, grasp control of the narrative, and once again prove his doubters wrong. The top three selling vehicles in America are all gas-guzzling, carbon-spewing pickup trucks. If the introduction of the Cybertruck goes well, if he can get enough Americans interested in an electric-powered pickup, this moment could change the world.

Bright white lights flash from every part of the room. A deep bass thumps. Dozens of fireballs shoot into the air as the truck rolls onto the stage. In the room there’s more cheering. But online, snide comments about the vehicle’s angular, futuristic appearance commence almost immediately. The cold-rolled stainless steel used to make the body panels—the same material SpaceX uses for its Starship rockets—can only be bent along straight lines, giving the truck a slight origami look.

“It doesn’t look like anything else,” Musk says with a grin.

To demonstrate the strength and durability of the truck’s steel body, Musk invites Tesla designer Franz von Holzhausen on stage with a sledgehammer. First Holzhausen, also dressed in all black, whacks the door of a regular American truck and leaves a significant dent. Then he hits the Cybertruck twice, seemingly even harder, but there’s no dent.

Then Musk explains that the windows are made of “transparent metal glass.” He invites Holzhausen to try to break the windows by throwing a small metal ball, about the size of a cue ball.

“You sure?” Holzhausen asks.

“Yeah!” Musk assures him.

The designer winds up like a pitcher and throws the ball at the driver’s window, and… the window splinters. Tiny shards sprinkle off. The crowd collectively gasps.

They try the same demonstration on another window: wind up, throw, and… again the window splinters, leaving two enormous white imprints in the dark glass.

Musk is clearly unnerved. He stares for a few seconds at the crushed glass. His arms are crossed. This is clearly not the way the demonstration was supposed to go, and now his entire thought process has been disrupted.

“Alright,” he says, trying to get back on track, despite the broken glass a few feet behind him on the stage. “Ah, let’s see. So, yeah.”

FREDERIC J. BROWN / AFP / GETTY IMAGES Love him or hate him—and there are a lot of people who feel passionately each way—his entire life has been a series of lessons. In the months following the unveiling, this moment, too, will prove to be yet another lesson from the career of Elon Musk.

THERE ARE PROBLEMS TO SOLVE
(NOT JUST PROFITS TO MAKE)
By now, Musk’s backstory is entrepreneurial lore: Born in South Africa, designed and sold a videogame at age 12, moved to Canada for college, then to America, then dropped out of Stanford two days into graduate school. His first company sold for more than $300 million, his second company—what would become PayPal—sold for over $1.5 billion, earning Musk personally more than $150 million. Then he started SpaceX, the first successful private space travel company, and helped create Tesla.

Often lost in this story, though, is the fact that while Musk has built four billion-dollar businesses, money was never his driving motivation. In fact, on several occasions, he invested nearly all of his fortune in large-scale bets on himself, on his own ability to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. With his first company, Zip2, Musk and his brother sought to provide local businesses with an early internet presence. Then they aimed to simplify online financial transactions. With Tesla—and also SolarCity, the solar-panel company he started with his cousins—the goal is to help both generate and consume renewable energy. He’s said that he created SpaceX in an effort to eventually make humanity a multi-planet species and he hopes to have a colony of thousands on Mars by as early as 2040.

But even in his lesser known endeavors, the initial impulse has been the desire to solve large-scale problems. In 2013, Musk showed the world his plan for a “Hyperloop,” a high-speed transit system involving massive de-pressurized tubes, noting that he’d like people to be able to get between San Francisco and Los Angeles—roughly 350 miles—in about 35 minutes. A few years later, Musk announced his desire to change the way tunneling is done.

It was early one morning in 2016. Musk was apparently stuck in rush-hour gridlock when he sent a series of tweets: “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” he posted. “I am actually going to do this. It shall be called ‘The Boring Company.’”

At first, it sounded like an off-handed joke. But then a month later, he tweeted again: “Exciting progress on the tunnel front. Plan to start digging in a month or so.” Replies asked him if he was serious—and Musk said he was.

While this was happening, Musk and SpaceX were looking to solve what they viewed as yet another problem. Starting in 2015 the company started working on something they called Starlink, a proposed constellation of satellites that would provide world-wide high-speed satellite internet access. This would provide low-cost broadband capabilities to underserved communities around the planet. The plan involved launching thousands of satellites into orbit at a reported cost of $10 billion. Over and over, the theme of his work is an attempt to find unmet needs—and meet them.

Some of the problems he’s trying to solve are existential. Around this same time, Musk also created OpenAI, a nonprofit research company dedicated to mitigating potential dangers from artificial intelligence—something he sees as a potentially deadly risk to our species. The next year he founded Neuralink, a startup focused on creating implantable devices that could merge the human brain with software in an effort to keep pace with artificial intelligence and help avoid the extinction of our species.

IMPOSSIBLE IS AN OPINION
The original idea behind SpaceX was that private enterprise could do better than America’s military-industrial complex and eventually re-energize space travel. Because so many other people scoffed at his ambition, Musk was, for years, the company’s sole investor. Meaning, even after creating two massively profitable companies, he couldn’t convince anyone else of his vision.

He had never worked in the field of aerospace engineering, but that didn’t deter him. After several trips to Russia to price rockets, Musk decided the most efficient way to get a vehicle into orbit would be for the company to build it using raw materials, inventing new parts and procedures as they went along. This helped him streamline the entire process.

Years before SpaceX was even close to launching its first rocket, Musk turned his attention to yet another seemingly unsolvable problem: weaning humanity from fossil fuels. In 2004, Musk became an early investor and chairman of the board of Tesla Motors (now Tesla Inc.). Electric cars had been tried a number of times, for decades, with no success stories. But Musk believed it could be done.

The goal was to first build a limited number of luxury sport cars that could outperform the best vehicles on the road without burning gas. Step 2 was to make a medium-priced electric car at a higher volume. Then, the plan was to build a larger number of lower-priced electric cars and trucks.

©ART STREIBER / AUGUST IMAGE All of his companies were successful within the first few years. In 2006, SpaceX secured funding from NASA worth nearly $300 million. Tesla started manufacturing its Roadster in 2008, a sleek two-doo