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Comment by dos1 | Hacker News Reader

Everything I've read about Elon Musk recently has really made me root for the guy. He is disrupting two very difficult industries.

This was posted on HN a few months ago, but I really thought this interview with him was exceptional: http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/08/musk_qa

What's most impressive to me is that this interview was almost 4 years ago, and he's done exactly as he said. He's focused on results and he's spending his considerable capital on things likely to make an impact on the world, not on frivolous applications like social networks.

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I'd really like to know how he's doing it. Is it because he's personally a brilliant engineer, micromanaging the projects to success? Or does he have an eye for great talent, able to rapidly put together highly productive teams? Or is he so motivational that he can take ordinary engineers and inspire them to do extraordinary things? The stuff they're doing is hard. A lot of very talented people have failed in the space and automotive businesses. To succeed in both to the degree he has is mind-boggling. Tesla and SpaceX still have a long way to go, but where they've been in a few short years is remarkable.

Probably his companies have less than your average share of bickering VP's and MBA class business types waging corporate warfare with his resources.

I think one major reason is that his companies have a 'strict no-assholes policy.' [Clip http://www.oninnovation.com/videos/detail.aspx?video=1256...]

I have seen a few of his talks and he makes it look really easy.

It's probably well known already, but in case you missed it, Iron Man's character in the movies is based off of him to some degree.

I keep hearing the Iron Man thing, but honestly I'm not sure I see it. I've seen interviews with Musk and he's way less cocky and more down-to-earth than you'd expect with that basis of reference.

I think they were basing it more on the whole "Renaissance man + entrepreneur" thing rather than personality.

Iron Man is decades old. If anything, the reverse is true: The popular perception of Musk is based off the Iron Man archetype.

Allegedly the character, as portrayed in the recent movies, took inspiration from him.

The Tony Stark character, billionaire-industrialist-brilliant-engineer superhero, has existed in the comics since 1963, 8 years before Musk was born. So, the claims of Musk as a model for Stark are best taken with a grain of salt.

Most likely, the Iron Man movie team -- including Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. -- just finds it helpful to reference Musk as a modern Stark-archetype. (Starketype?) The original Stark drew from Howard Hughes, but Hughes isn't as familiar to the movie's modern audience. And, our other modern billionaires, like Gates and Jobs, don't quite have the same rockets-and-motion pedigree as did Hughes and now Musk.

Howard Hughes is very much the same type of man as Musk. He was at the forefront of both movies and aviation, both of which were young industries at the time.

A lot of attention is focussed on Hughes' later years when he turned basically insane, but in his productive years he pushed forwards the design of the airplane and motion pictures.

If anyone is unfamiliar with his work, I'd recommend picking up a biography and giving it a read.

Second this. He's also seems just an exceptionally sweet and lucid man. If anyone has actual knowledge about this question, I would love to hear about it. Worth a blog post, or a book contract, even.

He is one of the most strikingly rational and sincere people I have ever met.

Starting without the 80 years of inertia that all the established auto makers have accumulated certainly helps too.

He's extremely smart and extremely hard-working; he has personally, aggressively recruited others whom he's identified as the key people he wants working for him, and by all accounts he inspires them to work as hard as him; he's trained himself into deep domain expertise in both rockets and electric cars and serves as the chief designing engineer of his companies' products; but maybe most important, he has really extreme determination. Consider this exchange after SpaceX had lost its first three launches in a row:

Wired.com: At the end of the day you're still zero for three; you have so far failed to put a rocket into orbit.

Musk: We haven't gotten into orbit, true, but we've made considerable progress. If it's an all-or-nothing proposition then we've failed. But it's not all or nothing. We must get to orbit eventually, and we will. It might take us one, two or three more tries, but we will. We will make it work.

Wired.com: How do you maintain your optimism?

Musk: Do I sound optimistic?

Wired.com: Yeah, you always do.

Musk: Optimism, pessimism, fuck that; we're going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I'm hell-bent on making it work.

http://www.wired.com/science/space/news/2008/08/musk_qa

Compare Paul Graham:

"I now have enough experience with startups to be able to say what the most important quality is in a startup founder, and it's not what you might think. The most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence-- determination."

http://paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html

I just wanted to include the last line of the interview that you left off, as I think it's actually pretty important:

Wired.com: So what have you learned so far? Musk: Patience is a virtue, and I'm learning patience. It's a tough lesson.

Thanks for that, it's an excellent survey -- a stunning combination of factors that he worked like hell to align (that the universe didn't simply take care of....).

He's also comfortable being honest, as in that bit about optimism, and other comments in other interviews.

Also, here's Max Levchin's explanation: "One of Elon's greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven... He is very much the person who, when someone says it's impossible, shrugs and says, 'I think I can do it."

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20071201/entrepreneur-of-the-yea...

> based on small, executable ideas over grand strategies like Martian colonization

I think many startups actually do have a grand vision - it's just that their initial money-making product is a small executable idea. e.g. the article dismisses google as just a "better way to search the web", but they had a vision of accessing the world's information (all human knowledge). It's also long seemed to me they are really about strong AI, but they don't talk about that...

Elon Musk does the same thing. He has a vision, but pays the bills with satellite launches. He's not going direct to a Mars colony. Similarly for Tesla, the first model was very niche. Even with the sedan, it's still a tiny tiny fraction of Toyota's output.

This is the way you accomplish great things: one step at a time.

There's another key here: both those industries were calcified with few innovators, so they had large latent pools of super-talented people that had been previously under-utilized.

By offering a compelling vision, Elon has sucked up much of the top talent in the space industry who had just been waiting for someone to come along with an uber-cool program for them to work on. His vision is so cool, in fact, that they are willing to work for much lower wages than they would make at a big defense contractor.

Similarly with Tesla, there was a large pool of talented engineers who are passionate about electric cars, who had just been waiting for the right company to come along and rescue them from dead-end projects at the big car companies.

This is very true - for example, his VP Propulsion Development, Tom Mueller, spent 14 years as a rocket product manager at TRW, and spent 6 years leading a team of 80 engineers developing a candidate engine for the Delta IV, and winning plaudits like a chairman's award for technical excellence but without anything he worked on actually getting launched. I can't imagine how gratifying it must feel for him now to watch things he made flying into orbit and opening access to space. It's hard to beat that kind of real accomplishment as a job perk.

Honestly, this is by far the best explanation of Musk's success I've seen. Target calcified industries where great talent is under utilized.

Could he target healthcare next? :-\

Seriously -- it's not glamorous but it could really use an innovator.

(Then again, who would have said an electric car could be glamorous?)

Very unlikely according to what Elon said in an interview: Source: http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/200901/elon-musk-...

----------------------------------------------------

Elon: "It's important enough to be on the scale of life itself, and therefore goes beyond the parochial concerns of humanity," Musk says of our interplanetary destiny. "We're all focused on our little things that are of concern to humanity itself. People think of curing AIDS or cancer as being very important, and they are—within the context of humanity. But curing all forms of cancer would improve the average life span by only two to three years. That's it."

"In other words, while eradicating disease is a worthy pursuit, and would extend the lives of individual human beings, my life's work is extending the life span of life itself."

----------------------------------------------------

Elon did talk about some projects he would like to do if he had the time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FESP1h7IZM

1. VTOL supersonic electric jet: fast, quiet, low-cost to operate (what he jokingly referred to in Iron Man 2, IIRC)

2. Prefabricated metal sections for creating a double-decker/box highway, that could be dropped in place like a lego system with minimal disruption to traffic.

3. Fusion problem, magnetically-confined fusion, gets easier as you scale it up.

People of all ages get cancer, including children.

Yes.. it was interesting to hear that coming from someone who has 5 kids: http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mkm45fjlie/elon-musk-10/#gall...

Aside: "all-or-nothing" thinking has been described as a cognitive distortion, which can lead to depression and other problems. In the interview, he frames the failure as an test flight, from which they are learning - so it is not "nothing" (despite the loss of satellites and people's ashes). Choosing this frame has worked well for him, just as it has in treating depression.

Great points. Elon himself did mention about the importance of determination in order to get things done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOPgM7Sc2VQ

He also talked about the greatest factor of his success: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hedxehSr-I A really high intrinsic drive.

You can really see the determination in his eyes. Just 3 months ago, Elon was visibly quite disappointed in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJnW7vtqaf4&feature=relat...

2 months later, the Dragon successfully docked with the space station. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjuvIlskUf4#t=7m20s Just look at Elon's excitement at the 9:36 mark of this video as well as all of SpaceX employee's enthusiasm. Amazing. :)

> He is disrupting two very difficult industries.

If you don't count his earlier internet work, he's still active in 3 difficult industries. He's also chairman of SolarCity, a solar panel installer with some innovative financing options. I think he had the idea for the company and provided funding, and his cousins (?) are running it.

You're correct, Lyndon and Pete Rive are Musk's cousins.

He has invested a considerable amount of money in SolarCity and oversees the board; both are indispensable as the former allowed SolarCity to scale (which was the main problem with lowering installation costs outside of material procurement) and the latter has provided the Rives guidance when they needed it.

But as Musk has said, his main role at SolarCity is showing up to the board meeting and hearing the great results.

> he's spending his considerable capital on things likely to make an impact on the world, not on frivolous applications like social networks.

While I agree that the guy is awesome, his projects are inspiring and I dislike this social everything wave as much as you probably do, social networks do make an impact on the world, probably even faster and more direct than space ships.

Yes, they do, but we should rename them to social ad networks.

Do you call it Google Ad Search?

Do I think of it that way? Yeah, sometimes I do.

Good point - I guess my biggest complaint is that companies like Facebook and Twitter pull some of the most brilliant minds. These minds, in my opinion, could be better spent finding solutions to big problems like cancer, space exploration, green energy, clean water etc. I guess it's not so much that I dislike social networks, more that I dislike the opportunity cost of having smart people go work for them.

Space exploration has little benefit to the average person, esp. for the environmental damage it does. For most people it's just interesting news. I'd like to see more of that innovative talent and gov't money applied to environmental concerns. (That said, I'm still looking forward to tuning into Mars via a microphone/video placed there. Just no ultra-expensive humans, please.)

While space travel may be irrelevant to most today, thanks to those like Musk, it may be very relevant in tomorrow's society.

Why? I see no net benefit to the general public.

Then go do something else.

Why? I'm not doing space exploration as it is.

Not even the offshoot technologies that have been (and will be) invented and improved as part of space exploration?

Doubtful a net benefit. Those come at tremendous cost to the public, like years of extra work per person. We haven't even paid for the Vietnam War yet, and the interest is compounding on that. We're quickly approaching half of every tax dollar spent on interest. Add space exploration, it could reach 90%.

Extra work compared to what? Is there any other reasonable way that space-derived technologies (e.g. those on this list[0]) could have been invented?

If the US wants to pay off it debts, maybe the first thing to do is reduce the amount spend on, for example, the military. The US spends $700+ billion dollars (or 4% of GDP) on its military[1], on something that is even less of a net benefit to humanity: killing people.

Surely the $20 billion[2] currently spent on NASA pales in comparison to that, and the benefit to humanity of non-military technological improvement is far larger. (Clearly, DARPA et al. fund technological improvement too, but the purpose, and first use, of these technologies is normally quite saddening.)

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_e... [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

One net benefit created by 'space' travel are satellite systems. GPS, and more used by billions every day to make them work better.

Well, that's not space exploration. For example we knew about the benefit of satellites before we spent a dime to achieve orbit; there was no exploration required.

You wouldn't rather we, for instance, mined lifeless asteroids instead of mountains here on Earth?

So much cheaper and environmentally better to tax people for having 3 or more kids instead. Get the population down and we don't need to mine so much. Rockets pollute our atmosphere.

This is an incredibly very simplistic view. Consider the following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition

P.S. It looks like a Falcon 9 uses about 25000 gallons of kerosene. Assume everyone drives Priuses and gets 50 mpg while driving a reasonable 18000 miles per year. A Falcon 9 launch burns less fuel than less than 100 people do in a year of just living their boring old lives.

Rocket launch pollution is pissing in a metaphorical ocean.

(And of course LOX/LH2 burns to produce water...)

I'd say there should be no harm done to the environment that isn't a net benefit to the public to compensate. If private companies want to recompense the public in full for each 25000 gallons of kerosene burned in the atmosphere (perhaps times thousands of rockets), I'm fine with that. But that's unlikely to happen. It'll just become another public cost instead, to make rich people richer, so I'm against it.

That may be what you wish the world was like, but you must realise that expecting that to actually happen is absurdly unrealistic. Don't expect anyone to take you seriously.

I do realise that expecting the world to be improved for the general public is unrealistic, and the vast majority effectively don't support it. Should I just shut up then?

It doesn't really matter what you do. If you are concerned about looking foolish, then probably yes. Otherwise, have at it.

25k Gallons of Kerosene is roughly half the fuel capacity of a 747. (48-65k gallons, depending on which 747). So, that's equivalent to one plane flight from the US to Europe/Asia.

Cheap Space Exploration is like planes or ships were for various generations in the past. It is hard for a man in the old stone age to think of the value of the ships or planes. They look like pointless "advanced technology" to go to places that do not matter. But then time passes and we figure out things like carts,trains,ships,planes and space elevators or solar sails or ion engines are just an obvious part of our economies.

I get your point, and it's a good one. I just don't think it'll work that way with space exploration. I don't believe that spending $trillions we don't have (we'd have to borrow it) will pay off enough to make that money, and the ten times more in interest we'd have to pay, worth it to the general public. As it is my kid will likely have to work until he drops dead at work (no retirement for future average Americans). We've been off course for a long time, and space exploration is part of that veering.

Space flight is an absolutely infinitesimaly small portion of the national budget. You are wasting your brain-cycles worrying about it.

It's 1.4% of discretionary spending today. That's only the principal; another 10X+ is interest payments. Exploring beyond what we have explored so far (e.g. humans on Mars) would take it far higher.

Exactly, it is piss in an ocean.

Regardless, people like you are actually the reason I am thankful that SpaceX exists. It really doesn't matter to them what people like you think, thank FSM...

I support private space exploration, if they recompense the public for any damage they do (unlike, say, mining companies).

Do you really believe that spending trillions fighting for oil is somehow money better spent?? Do you have any clue how much the US blows away on airconditioning in Afghanistan?

Study: Patent Trolls Cost Companies $29 Billion Last Year

It sad that people still believe Space Colonization is so pointless.

> Do you really believe that spending trillions fighting for oil is somehow money better spent??

No, and I didn't imply that either.

You reminded me of this quote:

"It has always appalled me that really bright scientists almost all work in the most competitive fields, the ones in which they are making the least difference. In other words, if they were hit by a truck, the same discovery would be made by somebody else about 10 minutes later." -Aubrey de Grey

If only there were a way to get the truth of that statement across to patent advocates.

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