Revolutionary - Elon Musk

Text: Olaf Adam - Photos: NASA, TESLA, Shutterstock (Kathy Hutchins, AoC)

This article originally appeared in 0dB - Das Magazin der Leidenschaft N°2

Elon Musk obviously takes great pleasure in shaking up established industries. As early as 1995, together with his brother, he founded a business directory called Zip2 in the then still young internet. It linked the address data of registered companies with a route planner for getting there. Want to quickly check where to find a good pizza nearby? That's normal today, but in the late nineties, it was simply revolutionary. And lucrative, because the (then) computer giant Compaq acquired the start-up just three years later. Suddenly, Elon Musk was a multimillionaire—at the age of 27.

But Musk is an entrepreneur by conviction, so he invested in his next idea and founded the internet financial services company X.Com, from which the online payment service Paypal emerged. When the latter was finally acquired by Ebay in 2002, it probably didn't bother the founder that he had just been ousted as CEO. Thanks to his share of the purchase price, he had an estimated fortune of about $200 million in his early 30s. So, clearly, money hasn't been his motivation since then; yet, the dynamic serial founder really kicked into high gear afterwards: His company SpaceX, founded in 2002, is the first private space company with a reusable rocket and is now one of the most important suppliers to the International Space Station ISS. By the way, SpaceX's long-term goal is to enable the colonization of Mars. And that's absolutely serious.

Modern Mobility

Musk's probably best-known company, Tesla, is much more down to earth. Initially ridiculed by competitors as the pet project of an eccentric millionaire, nobody in the automotive industry is laughing anymore at the company that almost single-handedly drives the electrification of the automobile and is a pioneer of autonomous driving. With its energy storage systems called Powerwall and Powerpack, Tesla also has a technology in its lineup that could revolutionize global energy supply.

Musk's thoughts on future mobility concepts led in 2013 to his concept of "Hyperloops"—underground magnetic levitation trains, which should soon make it possible to travel distances of up to 1,500 kilometers faster, more efficiently, and more cheaply than by plane or conventional trains. Musk also plans to move urban traffic in large cities completely underground. And since both ventures require quite a few very large tunnels to be built in a very short time, Musk founded The Boring Company, which aims to develop innovative tunneling techniques that are, you guessed it, cheaper and faster than conventional methods.

Quirky Humor

The naming of this latest company is typical of the sometimes eccentric entrepreneur. The pun on the English word for boring ("boring") and for drilling ("to bore") was just too good for him to ignore. With the same ease, Musk has explained the advantages of solar-powered Tesla Superchargers during a zombie apocalypse, named a particularly effective setting of the Tesla's external air filter "Bioweapon Defense Mode," or christened the especially rapid acceleration modes of his electric cars "Insane Mode" and "Ludicrous Mode," inspired by the cult film Spaceballs.

But sometimes this nonchalance goes too far. For example, when he labeled a comprehensive update of Tesla's driver assistance systems as Autopilot. Although Tesla explicitly pointed out that the driver must remain attentive at all times, even when using the Autopilot system, some Tesla owners apparently didn't read the fine print, as shown by numerous YouTube videos of drivers reading newspapers or otherwise distracted, and unfortunately, some accidents with at least one fatality. In more conventional companies, such flippant designations would have been filtered out by marketing experts, corporate lawyers, and other risk assessors. However, in the same networks, many good ideas are also caught, delayed in implementation, or swept under the rug entirely. Real innovation can be stifled at birth this way. That's exactly what Musk wants to avoid at all costs, and that's why all his business ideas so far are based on shaking up sleepy, ossified, or complacent industries.

Disruption as a Principle

Zip2 showed the Yellow Pages of the world how the internet works, Paypal snatched perhaps the most important slice of the modern financial market away from the established banking system. SpaceX proved to the venerable NASA that space travel is not only still possible but also financially viable. And Tesla has been pushing the global auto industry for 15 years now; not only in the development of electric drives, but also in driver assistance systems, the move toward autonomous driving, interior design, and in terms of sales and business models.

Elon Musk wants, to use a much-used buzzword, to be "disruptive" at all costs—that is, to stir up, shake up, and, if necessary, tear down existing structures, mindsets, and behaviors. Only in this way can something truly new, something revolutionary emerge. Conversely, it can be extremely detrimental if companies or entire industries are so trapped in entrenched structures that they can't implement or even recognize important new developments quickly enough. Tradition and experience are certainly important for a company, but you also have to keep evolving. Otherwise, you'll end up like Nokia, which dominated the mobile phone market in 2007, laughed at the iPhone, and had to give up less than six years later. Or like the Kodak company, a giant in the photography sector for over 100 years, which practically invented digital photography but failed to recognize the significance of this development and disappeared into insignificance the same year as Nokia.

Smart Calculation

If he had stayed in the software and internet industry, Elon Musk might not have attracted the same level of attention, since hip start-ups with "disruptive" ideas pop up almost daily in that sector. So it's perhaps also a result of careful calculation that the professional maverick Musk became involved in particularly conservative industries after Paypal. Space travel is dominated by sluggish authorities like NASA; car manufacturers desperately cling to ancient concepts that can only be sold as future-proof with a lot of marketing and technical tricks. In such fossilized structures, it's relatively easy to be different. Rolling out software updates to one's own cars over the internet while competitors still tout USB ports as high-tech features that cost extra—it's easy to stand out.

However, even Elon Musk is not immune to setbacks. Tesla racks up millions in losses year after year, the production start of the mass-market Model 3 was extremely sluggish, and the first recalls due to production defects in the Model S have already happened. Of course, such missteps are greeted with a certain schadenfreude by the competition and are widely covered in the media. And it's certainly true that the step from small manufacturer to mass producer presents a small, innovative company like Tesla with challenges of its own. But trying new things also requires the courage to possibly fail. And Elon Musk obviously has that in abundance.

Egomaniac or World Savior?

Yes, Musk undoubtedly has a pronounced ego and enjoys the media attention he receives. And he is certainly a profit-oriented businessman as well. But he sets much more long-term goals than is usually the case, and it's easy to believe that he genuinely wants to make the world a better place. Not all of his ideas will work out—Elon Musk knows this as well. Still, he tackles projects with disarming confidence that others at best consider science fiction. If you really want to create something new, the first thing to do is overcome the limits of human imagination. And that, it seems, is Musk's true life's mission.