Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow
It's mid-afternoon on a Friday at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and three of Elon Musk's children are gathered around him - one of his triplets, both of his twins.
Me, "To understand Elon Musk, you have to understand that he is motivated by a deep passion on certain subjects and will invest every dime and every human strength into these projects because they mean the most to him. Remember that when you read the bottom quotes."
From article, (what he [Elon Musk] has done is something that very few living people can claim: Painstakingly bulldozed, with no experience whatsoever, into two fields with ridiculously high barriers to entry – car manufacturing (Tesla) and rocketry (SpaceX) – and created the best products in those industries, as measured by just about any meaningful metric you can think of. In the process, he's managed to sell the world on his capability to achieve objectives so lofty that from the mouth of anyone else, they'd be called fantasies.
The New York Times has called him "arguably the most successful and important entrepreneur in the world." It's an easy case to make: He's probably the only person who has started four billion-dollar companies – PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City. But at his core, Musk is not a businessman or entrepreneur. He's an engineer, inventor and, as he puts it, "technologist." And as a naturally gifted engineer, he's able to find the design inefficiencies, flaws and complete oversights in the tools that power our civilization.
The accomplishment, for Musk, is not just in making a $35,000 electric car; it's in making a $35,000 electric car that's so good, and so in-demand, that it forces other car manufacturers to phase out gas cars to compete. And sure enough, within two months of the launch, both GM and Jaguar Land Rover announced they were planning to eliminate gas cars and go all-electric.
"The fundamental intention of Tesla, at least my motivation," Musk explains in his halting, stuttering voice, "was to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. That's why I open-sourced the patents. It's the only way to transition to sustainable energy better.
"Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI," he continues. "I keep telling people this. I hate to be Cassandra here, but it's all fun and games until somebody loses a fucking eye. This view [of climate change] is shared by almost everyone who's not crazy in the scientific community."
When he got into a fight with the biggest bully at school and knocked him out with one punch, Musk noticed that the bully never picked on him again. "It taught me a lesson: If you're fighting a bully, you cannot appease a bully." Musk speaks the next words forcefully. "You punch the bully in the nose. Bullies are looking for targets that won't fight back. If you make yourself a hard target and punch the bully in the nose, he's going to beat the shit out of you, but he's actually not going to hit you again."
So what is Musk about?
"I try to do useful things," he explains. "That's a nice aspiration. And useful means it is of value to the rest of society. Are they useful things that work and make people's lives better, make the future seem better, and actually are better, too? I think we should try to make the future better."
When asked to define "better," Musk elaborates, "It would be better if we mitigated the effects of global warming and had cleaner air in our cities and weren't drilling for vast amounts of coal, oil and gas in parts of the world that are problematic and will run out anyway.
"And if we were a multiplanetary species, that would reduce the possibility of some single event, man-made or natural, taking out civilization as we know it, as it did the dinosaurs. There have been five mass-extinction events in the fossil record. People have no comprehension of these things. Unless you're a cockroach or a mushroom – or a sponge – you're fucked." He laughs sharply. "It's insurance of life as we know it, and it makes the future far more inspiring if we are out there among the stars and you could move to another planet if you wanted to.")
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