Why is there only one Elon Musk?
blog.paintbottle.com
blog.paintbottle.com
Husband: I am the head of the household! I determine our family's position on all of the major economic, political, and social issues of the day!
Wife: I decide the little things, like where we'll live, what we'll eat, and where the kids go to school.
As much as I admire the dreams and accomplishments of Elon Musk, I have trouble getting past the idea that he failed to maintain his marriage (the biggest promise of them all) and rarely sees his own children.
Maybe the answer to OP's question is, "Because many who could dream and do like Elon Musk would rather focus on the "little things" like life, love, and family.
But the quality Musk has that almost no one in his position has is the willingness to risk it all for the dream. Musk himself almost went broke on SpaceX and Tesla. Most billionaires are into preservation of capital in a big way.
This is surprising to me from a behavioral economics stand point. Seems like billionaires would know they've very nearly maxed out their utility function in terms of material stuff. I'd think it would be very worth it to them to risk a billion dollars (which, remember, is something like the cumulative life's work of a thousand human beings) on mere personal glory or hubris.
Are you speaking from personal experience, or is there some conventional wisdom or data I should know about?
Even young Mark Zuckerberg would not take the money he made on Facebook and turn around and start a company where he could lose 66% of his fortune if it didn't work out.
Most serial entrepreneurs work on borrowed money after the first exit, or only invest a small part of their wealth on the next one.
Even Warren Buffet, who is renowned as an investor and sometimes a wild speculator (like trying to corner the silver market), won't risk more than a small percentage of his wealth/Berkshire on a risky investment.
Elon Musk made $160MM on Paypal, invested $100MM of his own money in SpaceX which was an all or nothing bet. And the rest $60MM in Tesla (and a divorce), and in 2010 had to borrow money from friends to live on. That's guts! And believing in yourself!
Depending on how you define "are into", this could be argued as empirically wrong. A study done by the editor of the updated edition of Graham's "The Intelligent Investor" shows that the Forbes 400 (400 Richest Americans) only had 68 members who stayed on the list from some time in the 1980 to the early 2000s. The author calculated the return required to stay on the list and it was approximately 4.8% annually, which is very reasonable with their level of resources.
Due to these results (only 68 out of 400 richest people staying in that position), you could say that billionaires are NOT into preservation of capital, when making 4% annually is not even accomplished.
The hypothesized reason for these results is that most billionaire's fortunes are tied to one or two major companies/investments. Fluctuations in business over time eventually devalue their investment in the single entity. If they really cared about "preservation of capital", they would liquidate more of their stakes when one company made them rich then diversify their holdings.
Apologies for the vague dates. I am at work and do not have the book handy, but just read that passage 48 hours ago. If someone replies that they want more specific numbers and references, I can update this post in 10 hours.
Reference: http://www.amazon.com/Intelligent-Investor-Book-Practical-Co...
That might not always be possible. If the shares they own are a substantial portion of the total company, selling a lot of them at once would cause the share price to plummet and a lot of their wealth would disappear.
Most of them do sell off stock in the companies that made them rich, they just do it gradually, so that they don't cause the price to drop. For instance, Bill Gates has been dumping Microsoft stock for several years. The stock he sold in the past few years amounts to about 3% of all of Microsoft.
Also, it's not like Elon its doing all the math and engineering, he has people that does that for him, which is the hardest thing in the putting-rockets-into-space business
Inspecting into his marriage feels dirty and indeed, tabloid. But if we want to get the full picture of entrepreneurial life, we can't ignore personal life. If you want to be the next Elon Musk it is probably worth noting that his marriage failed- if nothing else, just to remind you that even when you're a billionaire it is very difficult to have it all.
I'm not going to disagree on this being a private issue, but if we're talking about why billionaires do not share Elon Musk's personality, doesn't it make perfect sense to discuss things like this?
It is very hard to judge a relationship from the outside because a lot of what goes on in a relationship is private: private conversations and communication, the way a person expresses love or likes to be shown that they are loved, the way romantic conflicts are handled, what initially attracted a couple to each other, minor quirks and eccentricities, pet peeves, sexual compatibility, changes in personality and values, and so on.
I don't think we really know most of these things about Elon Musk's marriage, and I would be hesitant to draw broad conclusions without them.
On the contrary, you can, and you should. The era when a man or a woman is defined by his relationships and family is over, and good riddance. People shouldn't be pressured into a family lifestyle if they don't feel a motivation in that direction.
Can you tell me the names of Einstein's children? No? How about two-time Nobel Prizewinner Marie Curie? Ironically, on Curie's Wikipedia page, her children (two) are only mentioned in passing -- they just weren't important enough to include in her list of noteworthy lifetime accomplishments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie
And if we accept the idea that children are an option, not a requirement, guess who benefits the most? Children, of course. The children who are brought into existence without social pressure can feel assurance they they were planned, not mistakes.
No it's not. Those things help to define a person. I don't think you entirely got the nuance that the OP was getting at.
> No it's not. Those things help to define a person.
When you try to refute someone's position, it's expected that you will offer a counterargument, not a different topic. Yes, relationships help define a person. No, that doesn't mean the era hasn't ended in which one's relationships are central to one's identity.
You are making the same fallacy that your parent post accused another poster of making, you're failing to address to argument at hand.
Eras are defined by society at large (as much retroactively defined by future generations as defined by the present). Disregarding what society thinks refutes your entire argument. Two people caring about a certain thing is an anecdote, not an era.
Note that he never said "relationships are not worth having", merely that "The era when a man or a woman is defined by his relationships and family is over".
Your GGP's post's conclusion holds, even if what you are saying is true.
I never said that. I recommend that you argue against my positions, not yours.
> This is a ridiculous argument ...
Yes, it is -- and it is your argument, not mine.
Your argument goes downhill from there, relying on the much-revered but meaningless "who cares?" meme.
> ... it's absurd to assert that they're not worth having just because they're not preserved for all eternity.
Yes -- good thing that I didn't make that argument, only you did.
My advice is to try to stick to the content of the other person's post, rather than make something up to conveniently argue against.
The point is that when you show Musk as an inspiration for entrepreneurship, you should look at his whole life- because being a serial entrepreneur absolutely has an effect on your personal life.
The title of the story is "Why is there only one Elon Musk"- there are many, connected answers. His personal life is part of that. Just because it doesn't define him doesn't mean it isn't relevant.
Think about what you're saying. I hope by now you are aware that women rightly object to this kind of mixing of the personal and professional, and that to refer to a woman's personal and relationship choices in connection with her professional standing is an obvious and much-lamented kind of sexism.
> Just because it doesn't define him doesn't mean it isn't relevant.
Do avoid saying this about a woman, about, say, Marissa Mayer, present CEO at Yahoo. Her personal and professional lives are rightly evaluated separately.
When you listen to Musk's interviews, what strikes you is the degree to which his accomplishments and his value system are strongly connected -- that what he accomplishes has everything to do with his approach to problem solving, and nothing to do with his relationships.
They aren't, though. When she announced the "no remote working rule" she was criticised for having babycare facilities next to her office, allowing her to care for her child at work. And it was a valid criticism- she was subjecting her employees to conditions that she insulated herself from.
If you are evaluating a person as a whole (which the article is), you can't ignore their personal life without also losing a lot of important context.
Think about what you're saying. I hope by now you are aware that women rightly object to this kind of mixing of the personal and professional
I think they object to being unfairly singled out on that basis, not that people shouldn't ever take someone's personal life into account in general.
Agreed. But what does that have to do with this discussion? Are you saying that Elon Musk only got married/had children because he was pressured into it? And now that he is divorced and apparently doesn't see his kids much (as the article states, I really have no idea), well, all the better for him, because maybe he never wanted any of that to begin with?
If you don't want to get married, or if you don't want to have children, that's awesome. You'll be free to devote more of your time to your work or hobbies. If that's what you find most fulfilling in life, then that's what you should do.
Once you do have children, and to a lesser extent (in today's world, at least) get married, you've now made promises that you ought to keep. I'm not sure where your "children are an option, not a requirement" tangent is coming from -- surely not from anything I read in the article or comments here. Unless, again, you're arguing that somehow Elon Musk was required to have children?!
I have no idea. My only point is that's a common problem in modern times. It's unfortunate, it disproportionately hurts women in their careers, and it is slowly changing for the better.
> Unless, again, you're arguing that somehow Elon Musk was required to have children?!
To the young, something may seem a requirement that to a more mature person is obviously just a choice. And intelligence seems not to play a large part in that age distinction.
Hacker News is not used to the answer being social and not technical and suggesting that this mention of his marriage and an unnecessary value judgement on its failure by OP is not tabloid levels of personal investigation.
I don't want to generalize but I feel this extremely non-trivial notion is often overlooked in this community. Couldn't upvote you enough here.
As someone who grew up not spending that cliched ooey gooey version of "family time" that we always see on television and someone who has been married once, I'm fairly sure it's a lot more complicated than "oh always working, and doesn't care about his family? --insert underhanded "I'm better than you statement here"--. My parents worked hard to take care of me and my sisters. Did I see them all the time? nope. Was I bothered? nope. At the end of the day whenever I needed them they would drop everything and show up. We never had dinner at the table, as a matter of fact I pretty much up and moved out when i was 17. But we're a very close family. As for my marriage, despite how hard we tried to maintain it, one can't control feelings, and eventually we realized that even though we were comfortable with each other, we couldn't get those feelings back.
Now, I don't know Elon Musk, and quite frankly I think there's a bit too much hero worship surrounding him - don't get me wrong, he does some crazy stuff, but he's not as much a sage entrepreneur as we make him out to be. Having said that, the reality is that life is a lot more complicated than what it looks like on Little House on the Prairie. A "close family" doesn't have to sit around the table and chat, a close family doesn't even have to have members who live in the same country - I'm a case in point. So people talking about how he's some bad father as if they live with him or know him personally should go focus on their own personal lives. And to John Battelle's, quite frankly rude statement at SXSW, well he works at a media company that hosts conferences, not running and re-imagining two pillars of heavy industry.
He does have too much hero worship going on - the example in the article of Bill Gates proves this. Bill is maintaining a healthy family life (as far as one can tell that doesn't know him or his family) and he's doing "sci-fi s$#t" (thorium reactors? curing malaria? MICROSOFT!?!).
Judging billionaires is silly - if the OP thinks there needs to be more Elon Musks in the world then he should be working on it. I personally don't think we need more of any person in the world; they are all fitting in precisely where they should be.
Indeed. As far as we can tell, Gates is quite the family man. The reality maybe opposite, or it may be in line with what we see. Either way these are people with lives that don't or shouldn't fall into any static schema that we formulate in our heads. I think everyone has a little TMZ in them. While we like to look at the Hollywood and People magazine set and decry them for being trashy, we do the exact same thing; we just have our own celebrities that we pester.
What could be more important than a happy family and personal life? How on earth is this considered "hype"?
I would trade any amount of billions for that, in fact I probably have, because I decided long ago that family and my personal happiness are more important than millions in the bank.
Perhaps to you nothing is more important, fortunately people can do what they want - some choose family, some choose other responsibilities, most choose a balance. Whether Musk is happy or not he seems to have made his choice.
>What could be more important than a happy family and personal life? How on earth is this considered "hype"?
That may be all well and good for you, but first, you have a terribly ethnocentric and rather simplistic view of life as seen only from your perspective. Some people want to get enough and retire and frolic. Other people want to discover. Your ideal life may be sitting on the porch waiting for little Timmy to get back from school so you can build a go-kart; that's great, but that's not everyone's ideal life - and it doesn't in any way mean that little Timmy is any less important to anyone else. So if your thesis is that your vision of life is somehow better simply because it's the most traditional, you're going to need a more robust argument for that.
>I would trade any amount of billions for that, in fact I probably have, because I decided long ago that family and my personal happiness are more important than millions in the bank.
Also, you make the assumption that the man is somehow concerned about money. Whether you do that on purpose to further your point, or whether you didn't take full stock of the situation, I don't know. But the man is rich. And if he wasn't rich before, he's certainly "fuck you" rich now. He could be earning multiples on his money without even lifting a finger. It's not about money, it's about interest, and apparently, for him, about vision. My comment was about people self-righteously trying to compare the amount of time and the way they spend time with their families to someone who - regardless of how you feel about him, and I don't feel as hot as everyone else about him - is taking on two immensely difficult tasks. So when John Battelle, and everyone else self-righteously comment about not using email when spending time with their kids as if they were some martyrs of child-rearing, I'd have to say there's some insecurity involved.
So it's great that you wouldn't trade money over your children. That's great and I'm sure no well-adjusted person would. However, there are things in life that do not fit in to the inane work-life paradigm, and people expecting it to, either have very limited scopes of what life is and how one should live it, or they have their eyes glossed over by nicely packaged institutions of socialization. The truth is, a lot of people have very complex family lives. It's nice when you look at social studies textbooks and see two parents, one son, and one daughter, but life's never been like that and a happy family can't simplistically be reduced to "one that doesn't check email and text while spending time with each other - which, by the way, must be x amount of hours if you really want to be considered a close, happy family"
-Also a child of divorce
It takes two to tango. Maintaining a marriage is under no one person's control.
Look at the personal histories of accomplished men and women throughout history, and you will see many examples of lives in which personal relationships and children were a low or nonexistent priority -- these are often lives dedicated to doing something important instead.
To put this in the simplest possible way, can you tell me the names of Einstein's children? I can -- they're Special Relativity, General Relativity, and the photoelectric effect. They look great together in family photographs. Einstein actually had biological children, but they just weren't very important to his life or his work.
How about the children of two-time (1903 and 1911) Nobel Prizewinner Marie Curie? She had children, but they just weren't very important, either to her personally or to her place in history -- consider that, in her lengthy Wikipedia article, her children are only mentioned in passing (she had two):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie
> Maybe the answer to OP's question is, "Because many who could dream and do like Elon Musk would rather focus on the "little things" like life, love, and family.
Yes, and, given what extraordinary people can accomplish when they are more focused, that's often a tragedy. Consider how often one hears stories of people who inadvertently get involved in child-raising who have no aptitude for it, and who do a terrible job.
My point? Relationships and family are a choice in life, not a requirement. People -- men and women -- should feel free to focus on career instead if they wish. The idea that relationships and family are primary requirements is a persistent myth that disproportionately hurts women in their careers, but men as well.
Giving birth to a child is nice, but there's no shortage of people doing that. Giving birth to an idea is extraordinary, and far too few people make that life choice.
He may not have the skills/patience to lead a family life, and is not alone in this regard.
As for his children, think of it this way: if SpaceX manages to pave the way to a "Space Age," then billions and billions of children in the Earth's future will benefit from it in more ways than imaginable.
[1]The caveat here is that the problems have to be both difficult and important to solve for humanity as a whole. Space travel, global warming, cure for cancer, etc. The big problems of our day.
I see one as an individual perspective and one as a society perspective. Musk will be remembered for his incredible achievements, he will not be remembered for being father of the year (any time soon at least according to your post).
Precisely why would Elon Musk care to be named something that has, for all practical intents and purposes, no value?
Although he is a sample size of 1 I'm betting that Elon's family life is not much different than other billionaires. but I'm betting most of the damage came from the rough road of making that first billion.
You're right, becoming rich or famous probably involves a decision at some point of prioritizing that over the "small things" like family, but that's a decision the rest of the billionaires have made as well. the question is "if you're going to work incessantly and sacrifice so much, why not work towards truly great things instead of 50% off coupons, places to post pictures of cats, or time-wasting games?"
John D. Carmack: Armadillo Aerospace http://www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home
I'm tempted to throw in Google's Sergey Brin (Larry Page too?) for Google Glass.
And I'm sure there are a few others. Elon Musk just shows up more in the news due to his success.
Also, not all billionaires are technically inclined geeks.
In addition to glass, the google guys get credit for http://www.planetaryresources.com/ and the driverless cars ;)
edit: meant as reply to GP :)
The link I've posted is the press release announcing him joining the company.
If he decides to pick up from a point where progress has been made, that's just less time wasted reinventing the wheel.
It's the same reason why Bill Gates has gotten such attention for his philanthropic work. He lends something which is in a way more valuable than his money: his personal time and ability to execute.
ratan TATA , who pushed the low cost indian car , which is a sort of science fiction in his culture.
Idan ofer , who invested in "better place" the electric car company with the swappable batteries.
And BTW , i'm sure bezos see full e-commerce(including groceries and fashio and furniture) as a science fiction.
http://www.virgingalactic.com/ http://www.virginearth.com/ http://www.virgingreenfund.com/
+ Massive, continued, success in countless other markets (+ set a few personal world records)
Branson seems to be deeply rooted in a business-first approach to creative innovation. "Yeah, we'll do it, but if the market accepts it."
I'm not sure if we really need to value one over the other. The fact that Musk threw caution to the wind I do not believe is really a virtue - it just weaves a more interesting tale after the fact.
It is unquestionable that Rb has pursued many different avenues despite there being little to no obvious commercial benefit. I do concede that you could argue it is just in the name of building his own profile, but for example did you know he started a charity aged 17, the Student advisory centre where he used to personally give advice over the phone (apparently still running) and that he started mates condoms[1] (UK based). He is also the one behind the eldars[2] (http://www.theelders.org/) and countless other projects including helping african communities establish sustainable business (to name just one).
1: http://www.mates.co.uk/mates-expert/history/ 2: http://www.theelders.org/about
Personally I've always found them far and away the best company - but they have the misfortune of running "cross country" routes, which go through every bottleneck in our rail system :D
Toilets frequently out of order. Carriages with toilets reeking of urine. Reservations downloaded to the train maybe one time in 5. Empty first class carriages while standard contains double the number of people. Attempting to stop people with open walk-on tickets from getting on valid trains. etc. etc.
Maybe it's just my (and everyone I know's) bad luck that these things happen every single time I (we) use them.
What is the requirement here?
A space company? There are several of those.. Jeff Bezos (worth 23b) has Blue Orgin.
He says "cool sci-fi shit"...
What about self-driving cars? Those aren't sci-fi enough for you? How is Tesla's battery powered car MORE sci-fi-ish than a self-driving car?!
Look, I wish the best for Musk... but the author needs to take a look around at what other people are doing.
I think most people would agree that Bezos is a runner up, but how many is several? I can think of him and Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic). And neither of them seems to have made it their mission in life rather than just a billionaire's hobby.
SpaceX
Blue Orgin
Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic
Armadillo Aerospace
Bigelow Aerospace
Stratolaunch Systems
On the other hand, I don't believe John Carmack is a billionaire, and in any case Armadillo Aerospace has only had a few million invested in it. (Whether or not these guys are billionaires is very important. The question is about rarity, and the pool of people under discussion gets much bigger if we consider people with merely 100 million and who are consequently restricted to more modest goals.)
In any case, I think the point may still stand that these people devote much less of their emotional and temporal capital than Musk. I'd love to hear alternative evidence.
EDIT (in reply to jlgreco since I can't do it in the normal way): Yep, according to the side bar on Wikipedia his net worth is 2.3 billion as of March.
OTOH, do you really need to be a billionaire to do "cool sci-fi shit"? Arguably, Musk didn't get rich with amazingly cool stuff, he just got a bit luckier than most people with the valuation of Zip2 and early PayPal.
His point is less about a dearth of cool sci-fi shit than a lack of extremely wealthy individuals wielding their fortunes to aggressively push these things.
Edit: And not just "a space company." A space company, an electric car company, a renewable energy company, and the crazy passion to make these things work. What results has BlueOrigin produced? SpaceX is actually Getting Shit Done.
And with the possible exception of Branson, none of them are close to doing as big of things, with as much success, and as much inspirational flair and passion, as Musk.
He starts the criteria with "billionaires".. 0.000000215% of the worlds population.
Then to narrow it down farther he says they must be working on 'cool sci-fi shit'. Ie: they can't just be doing innovative things, they must be sci-fi things, and even if they are sci-fi, they must be 'cool'.
Of course there are only a few people who meet that criteria.
There's a lot of ways to contribute to society, to each their own.
Maybe its 12 years of catholic school plus a philosophy degree talking, but in times of peace my brain likes to hold everyone guilty of all the good they didn't do. This applies to me, you, congress, billionaires, and so on. The author swaps my "good" for "awesome stuff", but I think the feeling is probably similar.
In other words, I think that being a billionaire and doing nothing ambitious with their money is much less impressive than not being a billionaire. I think the author is remarking upon that in a similar way.
I think the author is slightly incorrect in thinking Musk is the only one, but that doesn't really detract from his general point.
(Of course, billionaires don't "owe" us/society anything, though some might be able to argue that society allowing one person to accumulate such wealth ought to have some kind of obligation, but as it stands they don't, and that's probably a topic for another time)
When you think of a crazy idea, out of the first few questions that come to your mind, one of them is probably, "Is this idea feasible?" To Musk, the idea of Tesla and SpaceX were both feasible, BECAUSE he had the necessary base knowledge in those areas to realize that with money, these visions could become realities. I like to think many people, other billionaires included, have had the idea of cool battery charged vehicles but without the ability to realize it is possible (aka the base knowledge), they stopped at that. Good or bad, this is most likely the reality of it.
All of that being said, I would like to see billionaires do what J.P. Morgan and George Westinghouse did for Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, respectively--and that is to find and fund geniuses with these revolutionary, futuristic, 'really cool sci-fi sh!#' ideas. If more billionaires sought out to find scientists/engineers working on 'the next big thing', I imagine more would happen and newer, more fascinating, industries would be formed.
My plea: If you're a billionaire who appreciates what people like Elon Musk has done/is doing but don't have the skills to do so yourself, go find more people like him (in the sense that they have crazy futuristic ideas) and help them to help the world.
Would be really interesting to know how many billionaires have STEM PhD's after controlling for their general intelligence.
Of course part of that is because the petro-chemical industry mints a lot of billionaires. E.g. Charles and David Koch both have bachelors and masters degrees (mechanical and chemical engineering) from MIT.
Thanks, do you have a cite for this? My intuition is still that a much higher fraction of billionaires are business/management types than the general population of people at their intelligence level.
It's both. Nobody becomes a billionaire doing engineering all day, but a great many become billionaires by doing business with an engineering background.
If you look at the major industrialists of our era (and before), many of them come from technical backgrounds, and have done their time in the trenches. When Ford hired the first all-management CEO (i.e., did not rise through the ranks in the auto industry) it was a Big Deal.
It can be true that business types and engineers are over-represented among billionaires.
It also depends on how you define "engineer." Nobody makes billions as a line engineer (but nobody makes billions as a line "manager" either). But in my experience once you get a degree in engineering, that totally shapes your world view and how you approach problems even if you go on and do other things. So I think those people should count too.
Using a relatively narrow definition, out of the Forbes 25 you might count Charles and David Koch (BS/MS in ChemE/MechE), Jeff Bezos (BS EECS), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (BS CS), and Mukesh Ambani (BS ChemE). These guys all made their fortune at companies related to their engineering discipline. Broadening the definition, you can also throw in there Larry Ellison (no degree, but worked at Amdahl and Ampex as a programmer on databases), and Bill Gates. Finally, you could throw in Michael Bloomberg (BS EE--went straight into finance) and Bernard Arnault (BS CivE, worked as a civil engineer but made his fortune elsewhere).
That's disproportionate, considering that only 1-3% of the population is engineers.
> So from our records, which is a little skewed because it lists anybody who was at some point a billionaire (just shy of 2k in our records); of the people who went to college:
> ~ half were STEM related in their undergraduate. I excluded business studies but included math, applied math, etc.
> ~2/3 of the STEM undergrads went on for a business masters, these are more recent than say the Rockefeller generation.
> Many of the other half have a note for a major relationship with wealth (this could be family or friend or marriage).
> ~ 4% of our people have a PhD which I think is above the average.
> The interesting part is what are the other degrees: Many were/ are philosophy or law degrees of some sort. The next popular masters degree after business/ finance is law.
Very strong evidence that the lack of more Elon Musks (if there is one) can not be explained by billionaires being predominately educated in business rather than STEM subjects.
Take Mark Cuban. After he sold broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5 billion, why didn't HE start a space company? Instead he started another TV channel - we already have a bunch of those.
I think Richard Branson is the counter point. There are actually two Tony Starks - Branson and Musk.
I think the problem is legacy. People like that are trying to create the businesses that will define their legacy after they are gone. If you've worked 30-40 years to build a company from scratch and become a billionaire off that (like Walmart or Fedex), that is your legacy. You work til your dying breath trying to make Walmart successful. You don't go try starting robotic or advanced tech businesses.
Perhaps we just need to look more closely at the list of billionaires "running the businesses that made them billionaires"? Making a spaceship certainly sounds (and is) sexy, but those spaceships are built on top of other technologies like material science, energy storage, communications, etc (and those in turn are built on other technologies like extraction and manufacturing). I'd bet a number of those "businesses that made them billionaires" are working on that kind of tech, but those technologies don't generate the kind of headlines in mainstream media outlets like self-driving cars.
It's the difference between developing packet-switching technologies and Google fiber. You can't have one without the other, but only one sounds exciting.
In all seriousness though, are we sure not one of those other 1,225 billionaires is "pursuing major advances in technology with a childlike wonder about the world’s potential"? When I hear about Elon Musk I tend to draw a different conclusion from the author of this piece: not that he is one of a kind, but that there are many more like him out there. I'm not sure which of us is right, quite possibly the author and not me - sometimes seeing X suggests 'generally ¬X' (http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/03/when-seeing-x-suggests...).
And then, of course, the question is: with so many billionaires out there, why?
Exactly in the way you describe. I was indeed using it to support the OP and not myself: "I'm not sure which of us is right, quite possibly the author and not me - LINK".
Do you really think there are a bunch of Elon Musk's out there who, say, just aren't doing as much self-promotion?
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the author has overlooked a lot of cool stuff to make his point. While I agree that there needs to be more billionaires doing cool s#!t, don't overlook the people and organizations that are already doing it.
edit: In the time it took me to write this comment, a whole bunch of other examples popped up in the comments, further reinforcing my point that there are already a lot of people doing cool s#!t.
When Norman Borlaug died a few years back, there were a lot of people who thought, "Who?" And when they learned that this farm-raised Iowan is credited with saving a billion human lives, they said, "Well why wasn't he celebrated more?"
And the mindset of the OP, well, there's your answer.
In fact, I would argue even that Gates' path is even far more crazy and childlike. In order to do what he has done, he's had to get out of the relatively clean, logical bubble of technology and deal with messy, real world politics to accomplish his goals...and yet he still pushes forth in idealism. Contrast this with Musk, who after a less-than-favorable review in the New York Times, threw a fit. I'm not saying Musk was or wasn't justified, I'm pointing out that real world revolution takes both child-like wonder and an ability to handle out-of-your-realm realities...Gates is farther along in this difficult path than Musk, though I agree, Musk is more likely to have an Iron Man-like movie made about him.
This was not the claim made by GP. He did not object to any attempts to prescribe behavior to billionaires, his objection was this:
> "if shit ain't being blown up, then who cares?"
Which is an admittedly snarky summary of your post, but accurate. As you said, your complaint is that people aren't doing enough to inspire childlike wonder.
Except they are - Borlaug as a good example. He saved literally billions of lives, revolutionized our every day lives, and has changed the face of food forever using science and technology. When he died, the bulk of HN didn't even know who he was.
Likewise, others in this thread have brought up a great many people - many of whom billionaires - who are doing "cool sci-fi shit", where "sci-fi" means more than putting stuff into low Earth orbit.
The answer to "why aren't more people doing cool sci-fi shit?" is "you need to look harder, because cool sci-fi shit doesn't always have a solid fuel booster attached to it".
That is: it's easy to imagine a world where half of the billionaires are doing outlandish things, and the outliers are (say) the guys who are putting men on Mars at a reasonable price. Why isn't the world like that?
Secondly, if half the billionaires were to do the same outlandish things, we wouldn't call them outlandish.
For example, there probably was a time when quite a few billionaires went elephant hunting. Then, that was not outlandish. Now, it would be.
Now, I think there are plenty of billionaires doing outlandish things, but just not in a highly visible technical direction. For example, Ted Turner started a world-wide news network, tried to start his own Olympic Games, and has a huge herd of bison. Others buy sports clubs, try to win the America's cup, or try to build a mechanical clock that will run for 10000 years (http://longnow.org/). Yet others see it as their goal to get higher on Forbes' list of billionaires (http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml)
Another thing I am curious about: who are the one or two billionaires at the other end of that curve?
Note: Inherited wealth tends to be further from the top, while 4 of the top 20 inherited it from Walmart the percentage increases when you look in the 1-5 billion range.
You also find people like Alfredo Harp Helú (born 1944) is a Mexican businessman of Lebanese origin, and as of 2011, with a net worth of $1.0 billion, is according to Forbes the 1140th richest person in the world. He is also the cousin of Carlos Slim Helú, who as of 2011 is the richest person in the world as ranked by Forbes.
http://blog.paintbottle.com/post/46266111738/how-we-convince...
- John Carmack - id software and Armadillo Aerospace
- Jeff Bezos - AWS, Kindle, Blue Origin, and the Long Now Clock
- Larry and Sergei - Google, Android, Google Glass, self-driving cars, etc.
I'm sure we can think of others.
This is ridiculous. Bill Gates is creating real impact to people's lives with his money and charity, and the author just dismisses that as being not cool enough.
Instead of applauding responsible and charitable behavior, we want them to be playboy types?
My point remains that we shouldn't be so quick to judge the altruistic intentions of entrepreneurs based on their first ventures; it may be a means to a more noble end. I'm sure many, if not most, aspire to contribute more to society beyond photo sharing apps. In fact, PayPal was voted one of the worst companies when it debuted, so I'm willing to give everyone the benefit of doubt.
The thing about "cool scifi sh!#" is that it stands a very good chance of not being profitable, and an even greater chance of not being profitable any time soon.
The author writes:
> As more entrepreneurs become self-made billionaires in the Internet age, I think we’ll see the Tony Stark Rating rise
I disagree. I think the only thing that will make that happen is inflation. When the value of a billion is halved, then we'll see it rise.
I would be surprised if there weren't plenty more Sub-Billionaire Elon Musks, who have reached a level of wealth that they consider sufficient for future-proof work-free financial independence, and decided to pursue their least profitable or most fanciful of dreams. The author himself points to various cool projects that don't have a single Tony Stark figure at the helm.
To become a Billionaire, whilst still being of a mind to do "cool scifi sh!#" requires at least one of these three things:
1) Suddenly becoming very rich (at least a near-billionaire).
2) Some of your "cool scifi sh!#" becoming profitable.
3) Persisting in moneymaking when you could be doing the cool stuff instead.
Also, how many billionaires (openly or anonymously) fund chairs or grants at universities? A billionaire of the sort that inherited multiple millions, then made a load more money through speculative finance whilst also working as a corporate barrister is not going to be a Tony Stark; but they may want to see robots with Genuine People Personalities become a reality. It would be far better for someone like that to fund existing university research than to set up their own version of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
A non-negligible amount of wealth is inherited. Again, not to say that inherited wealthy aren't going to be making innovative companies - Tony Stark himself inherited Stark Industries. But I think the Elon Musk assumption is for serial ambition in entrepreneurship, which probably more likely comes from self-made people.
A lot of wealthy (and innovative) people like doing things behind the scenes. Like Tony Stark, but without the fireworks and cheerleaders.
Finally, as others have said, there are other people who have made multiple innovations on the scale of Musk - Edison, Tesla, Ford, Howard Hughes in the past, more recently Gates and Allen, Steve Jobs, Larry and Sergey. Maybe Zuckerberg and Dorsey are the next to join these ranks. And that is just in the computer and internet industries.
As the article suggests hopefully some of the Zuckerburgs and co will help remedy this.
At the company I work are 2 +50 people I work with. The dev is like "give me any programming language and I will programm with it" The admin is like "I give you the IDE I choose and you use it!"
The undiscussed metastory aside from the opinions about good or bad, is probably that neophilia, or STEM fixation, or citizen science, or whatever you want to call it, apparently does not correlate with wealth. Not an amazing cultural observation, I'm sure any starving PHD student would tend to agree, the world's full of ramen eating phd students and $25K/yr nontenured postdocs. Academia/STEM-ish workers have replaced religious orders as the cultural place for vows of poverty, with a couple rare exceptions such as applied science (especially CS). Also lots of managers, who work at STEM companies, and perhaps may have even started as STEM people long ago, get confused as currently being STEM people.
There is an interesting effect that is also not being discussed which is most of the billionaires are paper net-worth billionaires. Most of them don't have a billion cash equivalent on hand, for example if they sold 50% of their company stock, the stock price would crater enough because of sudden volume to take their net worth down quite a notch. Its quite possible to end up in a situation where you own a billion sized fraction of a multibillion dollar company, but you can only sell a couple million per year without cratering your net worth. Your net worth does not necessarily equal what you can spend today.
I don't wanna know how much brain power is burned for no good in other academic fields...
(Yes there is also burnd much of in the STEM fields, but somehow they still get stuff done)
Most of the time I even don't bother taking a detailed look at the new stuff and just discount it as "stupid hipster crap".
I try to combat that behaviour but it gets harder. And I don't know how I will act in 20 years. (God, I'm old.)
One reason is that people in the past just didn't have that kind of money. The very wealthy today are a lot richer than the very wealthy of the past century.
Another reason is legalistic and infrastructure and technical stuff. There are laws governing every aspect of this stuff, and to get involved takes considerable planning and etc.
Finally, the tech just wasn't available in the past. It's much easier to build a few schools and pay for opera than it is to set up a rocket company.
I guess it's interesting to know what those billionaires are doing with their money. Maybe it's not liquid? Maybe they're happily oppressing a nation. Maybe they're building shape-shifting buildings.
I think it's worth noting that many of the areas are saddled with burdensome regulation, with the caveat that this is certainly not the only or even the primary hindrance, and that the fact they may be hindrances doesn't in itself mean they aren't warranted.
Fortunately internet happened and a lot of people who would suck at making money in any other circumstances made a lot of money anyways. So we have Elon Musk, Larry Page and hopefully we'll get more of them in the future.
There are not a lot of t-shirts available of Elon so I made one myself: https://www.teepublic.com/show/2278-elon-musk
#1 To edw519 on Elon's failed marriage, I'm reminded of that economist joke about "is that expensive or is it valuable?" For me, my family is priceless I cherish them with all my heart, but for others I know their work drives them. I don't begrudge them for having different reward structures in their brain, and I would never go so far as to suggest that one set of choices is "better" than another. I share the opinion that making a vow of marriage is a pretty huge promise, but that is because in my context it was a huge promise that I made. As opposed to folks I've known who got married but made a different sort of promise. I attended a wedding where the vows were not "until death do us part" but were "for as long as we both shall love." To which I said, "Seriously? Until you decide you are tired of it?" But my point is that we don't know what promise Elon made when he married.
#2 on the "where are they" question, the author (jnp) doesn't take into account that first you have to be a billionaire and then you have to care about "sci-fi stuff". When I sample the general population I find that people who care about science fiction type technologies and making them real is a small fraction of the general population, so I am not surprised that only a small fraction of the billionaires have similar ideas about interesting questions. What I find even more amazing is that none of them have apparently taken any of the 'unconventional' fusion projects under their wing (which is almost thematically Tony Stark).
The last bit I'll add is a bit I've added before which is that I have observed that "rich you" is a different person than "not-rich you" for most technologists I've met. (sample size isn't large but I think over the years I've known/observed on the order of 200 people who have gone from "not rich"[1] to "rich"[2] and in most of the cases there was a pretty big shift in what they valued and who they were. Because of that one has to add that someone who is interested in sci-fi stuff now, needs to still be interested in it post-change. And as others have pointed out, Elon has put everything on the line to advance sci-fi stuff a number of times, and that willingness to risk being "not rich" again is perhaps the rarest trait of all.
[1] Defining "not rich" as having debts that they would have to forfeit if they lost employment and future obligations that are not yet funded.
[2] Defining "rich" as having no debts for which forfeiting them would change their lifestyle, and having a source of income from passive investing that is sufficient under both optimistic and pessimistic economic scenarios.