Elon Musk Is the Id of the Tech Sector
A lot of people have been asking me for my take on what’s going on with Elon Musk these days. But what they’re really asking is obvious: Is he crazy?
In the past few months, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX has: ear-boxed analysts on an earnings call; made bankruptcy jokes about the health of his companies; attacked journalists as shills; relentlessly baited short sellers who have bet on his downfall; and called a diver in the Thai cave rescue with whom he wrangled a “pedo” — as in phile.
In mid-August, Mr. Musk revealed via a terse tweet that he wanted to take Tesla private and had the “funding secured.” No surprise — since it is clear that his announcement was premature — that it set in motion a boardroom kerfuffle about what to do about his Twitter addiction. And more problematically, it has reportedly triggered an investigation by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission about the circumstances of that tweet, which sent Tesla’s stock zigzagging.
Most of these high jinks have played out on Twitter, where Mr. Musk’s pronouncements too often land with the force of a stink bomb. They have prompted speculation about what is up with the entrepreneur, who is often compared to the fictional Iron Man, Tony Stark. Words like “erratic” — first used by those short sellers who have been trying to paint Mr. Musk as insane — are now being uttered by analysts and journalists to describe him.
The image being drawn is of a man on the edge of a digital nervous breakdown, and the theory is that the once unstoppable Mr. Musk is now untethered and unhinged. So is he crazy? No, he’s not. Not, at least, in my encounters with him over nearly two decades — including recently — in which he has been alternately funny, rude, compelling, obnoxious, accessible, easy to deal with, hard to deal with, always on, outspoken to a fault, angry, charming, intense and also strikingly confident. Which is a long way of saying deeply human.
And that is why, to me, Elon Musk has become the id of tech. But his desires and needs are never unconscious or hidden; they are all out there in the brightest Technicolor for all to see.
In the oddest of ways, he is transparent, so utterly direct that it is unsettling and even painful at times to those around him.
I have recently talked to a lot of people who know Mr. Musk, including those who adore him and those who have tired of his brusque intensity. And what I found among his current and former colleagues is that they really have the exact same story about an impulsive and driven boss who runs a very hot and messy kitchen and does not spend a lot of time apologizing for it. Some left, while others thrive under the withering lights. Still others left and then came back, drawn in by the glow.
This is not a new phenomenon in tech, and especially in Silicon Valley, a place that needs its complicated gods.
For a long time, it was Steve Jobs who was essentially Zeus (to, I guess, Bill Gates’s Hades) in that pantheon. In Mr. Jobs’s early days, he was a seeker of wisdom who took LSD to find it. Then he was a tech brat in a bow tie, who was cast out in the wilderness for his brashness. Still later, the fallen immortal was redeemed and returned to Mount Olympus, wielding an iPod as his thunderbolt.
Too much? Sure, but it was a pretty good myth and even better since it was largely true. Over the ensuing years, Mr. Jobs used his famous reality distortion field to bend the news media and investors and everyone else to his will. He also warred many times with some journalists and investors, but no one remembers that anymore. His death sealed his epic tale for eternity.
But it left Silicon Valley without a flawed hero figure to lavish praise and heap envy and scorn upon. Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google: Too odd; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook: A nice boy but, um, no; Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: I guess if necessary, but he probably couldn’t care less about being anyone’s god.
And so it was Mr. Musk who became the obvious choice, although the comparison to Mr. Jobs is not a perfect one. Mr. Jobs was elegant and spare and even quiet; Mr. Musk is all pomp and circumstance. Mr. Jobs traveled in his mind; Mr. Musk wants to die on Mars.
What they do share is a proclivity for what is perhaps the most important element of all truly legendary makers of important things: Creative destruction.
For Mr. Jobs, it was a bet-the- company approach that ushered in a whole new way of computing. For Mr. Musk it is a lot of big notions, any one of which would be hard to do alone, from electric self- driving cars to ubiquitous solar energy to landing a spent rocket ship on a platform in the ocean.
This whole debate brings to mind something that an angel investor named Pejman Nozad said to me many years ago, when he was bemoaning all the stupid start-up ideas that he saw littering the landscape. Silly social networks, dumb photo filter apps, yet another delivery service for millennials. “Silicon Valley,” he said, “is a lot of big minds chasing small ideas.”
Make no mistake, Mr. Musk’s mind and ideas are big ones.
He has said publicly, and others agree, that he is simply exhausted and under intense pressure, and these recent mistakes will soon be forgotten. But he has been careless, and fewer people are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He has tarnished his reputation by going after imagined enemies, fair critics and those who don’t wish him well with the same tweet daggers. It’s a huge waste of time, when what he has to do to seal his status is actually to build a strong and stable company that is not just revolving around his aura, and a team that does its best work with or without him.
And, of course, delete that Twitter app off his phone. After all, can you imagine Steve Jobs tweeting?
No, neither can I.