Every single one of Musk’s ventures has been ridiculed as dumb and impossible. A private company building spaceships? Solar power for the masses? Sporty electric cars?
A lot of his ideas will fail, and that’s the price of taking risks. We need more people like him willing to do that.
The only venture of his that fully deserves ridicule is “colonizing Mars”. Other than that, the problem isn’t any one venture, the problem is that there are too many of them, and they’re in widely unrelated areas. Musk would be more productive if he had a coherent focus, like “electric vehicles and batteries”, instead of also trying to own the entire planetary system. His problem is that he thinks he can do it all.
Actually, there’s a good example of that in Ashlee Vance’s biography of Musk, which also serves as an example of both hubris and assholism. He had a loyal secretary/admin assistant who had been with him many years. As his ventures grew and her responsibilities increased, IIRC she asked for recognition in the form of a more appropriate title and salary. Musk’s response was to tell her to take a month off and he would see if he could do both his job and hers at the same time. When she returned, he told her that he had managed just fine without her, and fired her.
I obviously have no way of knowing whether this is just apocryphal or, if true, whether there’s another side to the story, but Vance seems pretty reputable.
So Elon Musk isn’t a cologne?
Well, if he could do both her job and his, maybe she wasn’t quite as important as she thought.
But of course anyone in his position has to be a bit of an asshole. Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Richard Branson, Larry Ellison…all assholes.
As far as being more productive if he focused more - what?? The guy is executing on a ton of things. He passes off things (like Hyperloop) if he doesn’t feel he can focus on them. Being productive is the opposite of whatever problems he might have.
But it certainly shows a lack of loyalty to those who work for him.
I hadn’t heard that story before so I googled it and the first result was this:
Of course, Mr. Vance stands by his work.
I don’t know why some reporter hasn’t just tracked down Miss Brown and asked her directly.
As I said, I’m obviously in no position to know the facts and I’m just citing the Vance biography. But Musk’s explanation smells like bullshit to me:
Why would Vance just make up a story like that in an otherwise very positive portrayal of Musk? Or alternately, why would the admin assistant lie about it if she had been treated well and fairly?
Why would someone who had been with him a long time be fired outright from a growing organization? Even if she was somehow not suited for the job, surely a rudimentary sense of ethics would dictate that she be placed elsewhere in the organization.
WTF is a “generalist” and a “specialist” in this context? It makes no sense. What people in Musk’s position generally need is an excellent organizer, a meticulous and disciplined handler of all the day-to-day administrative trivia. Maybe he was miffed at how this was portrayed because he felt that he was justified in not being happy with her work. Musk comes across as someone who would be relentlessly and incredibly demanding. But then, see above – she should have been moved, not fired. Unless, of course, he was pissed off at her and was being an asshole.
I have no idea, but a lot of your questions are things that are already run thru the filter of “did this happen” and are now asking about fallout. I’m stopped at “did this happen”. I see no need to speculate about why someone might have lied or not when we don’t know if anyone lied. Find that out first, then worry about the coincidents, IMO.
Also of note: in the entire history of teh Internets, no one has ever lied in a tweet! 
Now I see what he’s up to. He’s trying to create the most bankrupt company in history with products that are nothing but liability claims and lawsuit bait.
If I had all kinds of money and teams of people to make the strange devices I dream up I no doubt would want a flame pistol. But really, it’s kind of mundane. A freeze ray, or shrink gun is where it’s at.
Musk did not found either Paypal nor Tesla. Paypal was formed by a merger of Confinity, which was a company which originally based on the PalmPilot platform for encrypted payments, with X.com, a company founded by Musk that was originally an online bank. After a restructuring (in which Musk was forced out because of his abrasiveness with other board members and resistance to many of the business strategies which made PayPal successful) the company reorganized as what is now known as PayPal and developed the essential tools for its implementation as an online payment system. Tesla was founded by Martain Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning; Musk only came on later with the Series A VC financiing, later getting into a legal dispute with Eberhard over purported libel and forcing both founders into advisory positions and later out of the company entirely.
Musk did found SpaceX (he has a literal obsession wth the letter “X”, and reportedly originally wanted to name the company “X-Space” but financers thought that it sounded like a porn company) and in original publicity often claimed personal responsibility for many of the enabling technologies even though the original Falcon engine was heavily based on the TRW Low Cost Pintle Engine and VP of Propulsion Tom Mueller (who had worked on various pintle engine designs prior to the acquisition of TRW by Northrop Grumman) was hired specifically to develop the engine for the Falcon 1 and Falcon 5 vehicles. The personal bravado was somewhat toned down after three successive failures of the Falcon 1 vehicle prior to a successful orbital flight, after which the vehicle was retired along with the Falcon 5 because someone finally took a look at the costs and realized that it would not be profitable enough for a return on investment.
I’m personally pleased as punch that someone has put ULA to task on their costs and forced ULA CEO Tory Bruno to admit that their costs could be halved while increasing their flight rate, but I’m less enthused about some of the legal and political shenanigans that SpaceX has promulgated to challenge other competitors and win contracts. I’m also a little nonplussed about the claims of viability on a purely commercial basis after agresssively going after EELV contracts for NRO and GPS missions; I’m again happy that ULA has some competition (although on a FAR Part 12 basis rather than the FAR Part 15 that previous contractors have bid to) but there is a degree of unacknowledged hypocricy in bashing government contractors for bleeding the taxpayers only to turn around and bid for the same contracts. (It also illustrates that commercial space is still probably not large enough to sustain a commercial launch infrastructure as of yet, which has been one of the largest hurdles to expanding space industries; government subsidy, in the form of defense contracts, is still a financial necessity in the business.)
Musk is a far better promoter than he is a businessperson and (especially) an engineer. The SpaceX business model has changed radically since inception which one can argue is just being flexible but the core premises upon which ultimate success is predicated (in particular, the fiscal merits of reusability) remain unproven, notwithstanding any practical business case or practical feasibility for crewed exploration or habitation on Mars. However, it is in the technical arena that Musk’s bullshit really leaks out. His avowed techincal prowess may sound good to the general public but for people who actually work in the industry it is clear that he is repeating things that he has heard other people say, often lacking context or just being plain wrong. His reputation as a “visionary” often overshadows or is used to excuse the fact that he’s also a legendary asshole, implementing Silicon Valley-type workplace tactics like periodically firing the lowest X percentile of employees, threatening to or actually firing anyone who expresses disagreement on a technical point, and pushing out experienced people in favor of cheaper hires straight out of college, strategies that have at times backfired predictibly as turnover has resulted in lost knowledge and skill sets. Musk is known for denigrating people who express any disagreement with him which has resulted in many of the original employees leaving to join or start other ventures. (There is a story about Musk storming into the lab where engineers had been working on the in-house inertial navigation system to replace the commercial LN-200 system and separate flight navigator they currently use, slapping down his cell phone on top of the much larger flight navigation computer, and screaming about how the phone had more computing power despite the small size, apparently not understanding the difference in reliability and environments experienced by a nav system on a rocket versus a smartphone in your pocket.). Musk likes to present himself as the “real world Tony Stark” but he’s actually more of a Justin Hammer.
I’m thrilled that SpaceX has managed to be successful despite the many challenges faced by a new entrant into a particularly difficult and unforgiving industry, and impressed by many of their accomplishments such as recovery and soft-landing of the first stage (despite questioning the financial viability) but I’ll point out that SpaceX has effectively missed every technical milestone that Musk has aggressively promoted, often by many years. The Falcon Heavy, now due for an inagural flight next month, was supposed to first launch in 2012; Musk’s obtuse explanation was that “It’s one of those things that sounded easy…It was actually shockingly difficult to go from a single-core to a triple-core vehicle,” which reminds one of a similar statement about reforming health care by another famous braggart. (Everybody who has worked on or studied the use of multi-core rockets knows that the challenge is akin to launching three rockets simultaneously, except that a failure of any one rocket is a failure of all.)
There is something of a cult of celebrity around ‘difficult’/visionary/narcissistic entrepreneurs such as Musk or Steve Jobs that such assholism accompanies the supposed genius of innovation, which overshadows the fact that much of the actual technical part of innovation was done by people working on other efforts for years or decades. One could argue that the associated braggadocio is necessary to get these produces and services to market, but there are many equivalent technolgies developed with less bombast and roughshod treatment of others, and arguably with greater effectiveness of success not being dependent upon meeting unrealistically optimistic timeframes and accomplishments. This attitude of promotion over production is directly what lead to Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos debacle. There is also the problem that being ostensibly accomplished in one field has led Musk to believe of himself (and others of him) as having expertise in areas far away from his core experience, such as his pronouncements on artificial intelligence which to anyone actually working in the field are about as naive as a child’s conception of orbital mechanics. We now get regular popsci trashicals about how Elon Musk warns that AI is going to rise up and consume humanity despite the fact that he has no real knowledge of the state of the art in machine cognition. Similarly, he has expressed pretty uninformed viewpoints on energy policy strictly on the basis that he owns an electric car and solar battery company. It leads the public (or at least, journalists which inform the public) to give far more weight to his pronouncements and prognostications than his actualy experience would merit.
I’m glad SpaceX has shown the viability of a new entrant into the space launch industry, and I hope it is ultimately successful from a commercial standpoint to encourage others to compete and innovate in those fields; the same for Tesla and Solar City. (I’m less than enthused about Hyperloop or the Boring Company, both of which seem to be predicated on the notion that if you hypothetically have the technology all other logistical, fiscal, and legal issues will melt away like salt in rain, but I guess we’ll see what the future holds.) However, I’d like to see technical and entrepreneurial leadership that does not reinforce the idea that it is not only necessary but good to be a raging bombastic jerk in order to succeed and inspire others.
Stranger
Amusing, perhaps, but not really of note, no.
ETA: Even by the high standards you set, Stranger, that was an amazing post. More info in there than I’ll be able to sort out in just the afternoon, I reckon. IIRC, this is your field, isn’t it? Awesome to get your perspective.
Psst… See post #9. 
(Errata: I misspelled ‘Eli’.)
no they haven’t. “doubt” is not the same thing as “impossible.”
you sound like the conservatives who claim liberals think Obama was the “Messiah,” when the only people calling him that were conservatives.
By “impossible”, I meant impossible to build a successful company around, not that the the concept of solar power or a sporty electric car was impossible. Sorry for your confusion.
Stranger
The jury is out. By plenty of metrics, certainly not. But it’s a viable company, which is more than many thought it would be when it was first announced. Even if it ends up failing, it has had a major impact on the design and perception of electric cars.
Re: your longer screed, all excellent points. Any admiration I have for Musk is for his willingness to take risks and his tenacity at pursuing goals. As you say, any engineering prowess ascribed to him is misplaced. He’s a shrewd businessman who happens to lead technology companies, but his understanding of technology is very shallow.
And even in his role as a businessman, I have very mixed emotions. I respect what he’s accomplished, and still dislike the asshole behavior he has sometimes used to get there. One point I’m in slight disagreement with you is the separation of his skills as a promoter versus a businessman. Being a good promoter is a big part of being a good businessman, and he certainly has that skill in abundance.
it’s been most successful at creating an army of fanboys who strut around and gloat about everything this guy does as though they themselves have personally accomplished something. Oh, and didn’t give a rip about cars until Tesla showed up but now believe themselves to know everything about the auto industry.
I wouldn’t go quite that far; at a minimum, the achievement of Tesla in getting an electric car to market thst is actually desirable to more than the niche of ecologically conscientious car owners has spurred major manufacturers to embark upon or accelerate their own efforts for electric vehicles. (The costs and limitations of electrochemical battery technology remain, but appear to be at least adequate for commuter and short-range fleet applications.) But given the quality control problems seen in the early Tesla 3 models and stories of hand-fitment of this supposed ‘high production’ model, it would seem that the effort to scale up Tesla to achieve mass market penetration has had some serious (and predictable) hiccups that could have been ameliorated by partnering with a company already familiar with high volume manufacturing and outsourcing more of the component manufacture. Musk’s designs on ‘vertical integration’ as a philosophical approach to business notwithstanding, major OEMs in all transportation and machinery industries outsource because it is cheaper and easier to manage suppliers and force them to be accountable for quality control than it is to try to build an manage a qualiy organization capable of overseeing the manufacture of hundreds of different types of components.
The cult of personality around Musk’s smugging cockness is annoying, but then, that goes with the territory of self-promotional entrpeneurship that the tech-pop culture has embraced. The role is to make bombastic, unlikely pronouncements of near-term innovation today, and then ignore yesterday’s failures for tomorrow’s hypothetical victories.
Stranger
What innovation or new idea is his Boring Company bringing to the table? As far as I can tell, he’s buying COTS tunnel boring machines and proposes to use them to make tunnels in and around Los Angeles. Isn’t this something the city could do on its own? And isn’t there a lot of prep work needed before tunneling starts? (Investigating the geology, checking for water, sewage, electrical or other utilities, etc.)
