Elon Musk, meet Henry Ford

Elon Musk is seeming eerily like Henry Ford, said historian Stephen Mihm. Like Musk, the world’s richest man and CEO of the most valuable auto company, Ford once “parlayed visionary ideas” about automotive manufacturing into “unimaginable wealth and global fame.” His ideas for producing the Model T made him “an American folk hero,” but the adulation he received transformed his personality. Obsessed with staying in the headlines, he pursued massive side projects like building an industrial metropolis in Alabama, launching an airline, and running a newspaper that published anti-Semitic screeds. He “spent a fortune building Fordlandia, a bizarre utopian city in the Brazilian rain forest.”

But as Ford became increasingly distracted, many of his most capable lieutenants and engineers left, “replaced with sycophants.” Meanwhile, a rational and ruthless engineer named Alfred P. Sloan gradually assumed control of a misbegotten car group called General Motors. “Sloan had no interest in being a public figure. He simply wished to usurp Ford.” Within six years, Sloan’s singular focus had steered GM ahead of Ford as the world’s biggest car manufacturer—the title it would retain for seven decades. Musk’s Tesla is running laps around GM and Ford in market value today. But the competitors are waiting in the wings, and “history is breathing down Musk’s neck.”