How Elon Musk keeps ticking along

New Delhi April is just another month in the media for Elon Musk. Tesla, Musk’s iconic electric vehicle business, declared a 10% layoff of its staff and saw a 30% drop in share prices. The same week, Musk announced he was visiting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi to invest $2-3 billion in India in a new Tesla factory (only to announce later that his trip was postponed). Meanwhile, SpaceX, another company Musk is the CEO of, came under fire as its satellite-internet service is helping Russia in the war against Ukraine. Forbes yet again named Musk as one of the wealthiest people in the world with a net worth of $193 billion (down to $181 billion after the Tesla stock plunged). Meanwhile, Musk was being trolled on social media for making cartoonish Sim-like poses for photographers at the Breakthrough Prize red-carpet ceremony in Los Angeles. Love him or hate him, no one can ignore Elon Musk. The days that influencers, fanboys or the media are not going wild about yet another technological feat by one of his companies, they’re quoting or reacting to things he posts on his very active, sometimes witty, mostly opinionated X account where he is the most followed person with over 180 million followers. And if you’re in the Bay Area, and want to ignore this person and try to look for a rock to live under, you fail miserably. For as you drive, you see Tesla after Tesla plying on the freeways, clogging up the carpool lanes where electric vehicles are allowed. And, occasionally, you stare with wonder as a Cybertruck monstrosity drives by; a reminder of those bad 1980s sci-fi flicks. You head to the local Mountain View library to find a sharp-edged Musk biography written by Walter Isaacson in 2023, and that it is checked out and placed on hold by over a hundred people in a city of 50,000. Yes, he’s that omnipresent. If Musk was to start a religious cult, engineers, startup founders, car enthusiasts, venture capitalists, gadget-freaks, and space-dreamers would line up for its $1,000 membership. And it has been this way since the last 20 years or so. For, again and again, through different companies in very different technology baskets, Musk has dramatically announced new moonshots, and then gone ahead and done them. All in a ruthless, unapologetic, and aggressive way. From banks to rockets Born in South Africa, Musk dropped into Silicon Valley in the 1990s to do a PhD from Stanford University. It was a great time to be in the Valley. The internet, till now plodding in usage, had just exploded with startups such as eBay and Amazon bringing in e-commerce online. There were a lot of opportunities for people who know how to code, and venture money flowed. Musk, perhaps an instinctive businessman, saw his chance. He dropped out of his PhD program within two days of joining it, and co-founded his first software fintech company, Zip2, in 1995. In four years, the startup got acquired. Musk founded an online bank — X.com (name rings a bell?). X.com merged with competitor Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal – one of the most successful online banks to have come out of Silicon Valley. When eBay acquired PayPal in 2002, Musk was a major part of what is now known as the PayPal Mafia – a socially and ideologically close group of PayPal founders and employees who made a lot of money and invested it back in the booming startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley. The Mafia included names such as Peter Thiel (founded Founders Fund), Reid Hoffman (co-founded LinkedIn) and other influencers in the Valley. With the $100-odd million that he made from the PayPal sale, Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. The aim of the startup, which grew out of Musk’s voracious science fiction reading, was to colonise Mars via developing commercial spacecraft. The company was one of the first of its kind in the US. It was the same year that Musk became a first-time father with his Canadian wife Justine Wilson (the child sadly died at 10 weeks). It was SpaceX and its excessively ambitious product, more than anything else, that catapulted Musk into technology stardom across the world. For he dared to dream big and announce it publicly. And he had credibility and the network. Funders got behind him, as did everyone who had ever dreamt of doing a startup. Six years of failed attempts at launching a rocket almost bankrupted Musk till the company finally launched the Falcon 1 into orbit in 2008. By then, he had become a business icon. The year 2008, when the Wall Street-driven financial crisis was in full swing and he personally went through a divorce, Musk took over as CEO of Tesla. He had been involved in the electric vehicle company since 2004, when he invested $6.5 million in a Series A round of investment and became its majority shareholder. In 2008, Tesla started to deliver the Roadster, it’s all-electric car that ran on a lithium-ion battery – the first in the world. By 2010, the company had gone public and become wildly successful. Scholars at Harvard Business Review credit Tesla’s success to a unique combination of headline-grabbing moves (like Cybertruck, which people love or hate, but never ignore) and business strategy that transformed the auto industry by introducing new hardware and software architecture that made Teslas way more efficient. It also had to do with Musk’s personal popularity, not only with venture capitalists or startup founders, but with the general public. Elon Musk, wrote the Harvard researchers, has immense innovation capital – he is a creative problem-solver, has the right social connections, a proven track record and knows how to win support for his ideas. In the last decade, Musk has voraciously used this popularity. He has launched innovative startup after startup, with a drive that comes from working relentlessly. He was one of the co-founders of OpenAI, set up solar plants through Tesla Energy, co-founded the ambitious moonshot The Boring Company that digs tunnels for transportation in cities, and in 2016 founded a neurotechnology startup Neuralink which is attempting to integrate the human brain with artificial intelligence. Musk, who is 52 this year, has now fathered 11 children with three women.Top of his gameIn a way, 2022 was the heyday for Musk. He was at the top of his game – SpaceX launched 31 rockets into orbit and Tesla sold a million cars. Personally, one of his eldest children changed their gender and name, refusing their father’s surname. “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” Musk said the same year, according to Isaacson, whose Musk biography came out in 2023 after he had shadowed the tech magnate for two years. “Even as he said it,” wrote Isaacson, “he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter”. Isaacson called Musk a “tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama…and a maniacal intensity…”This intensity showed in his hostile and rather expensive takeover of Twitter in late 2022. Musk publicly announced and paid $44 billion for his version of a “free speech” platform and pushed out the company’s top executives, sending remaining employees an email which asked them to commit to “extremely hardcore” work which included working “long hours at high intensity”. The employees had to “click yes” to accept the new Twitter culture in an online form.This was the culture Tesla had, and thrived in, for years. Twelve-hour shifts, aggressive deadlines, and a rather moody boss. It made Tesla the most valuable auto company in the US. It’s also a culture that has caused many lawsuits to be filed against the company and the man.One of Twitter’s ex-employees told this writer that, after the takeover, the Twitter offices had just two working floors and one toilet for its employees. And the workers who had said yes on that email, walked on eggshells, scared to face Musk for he fired anyone at will. (This employee was fired in late 2023, though not by Musk himself.) But when about 80% of X’s employees were let go, and the platform continued to function, there was a lesson here for other leaders. Companies in the Valley began to wonder if they too were bloated. According to layoffs.fyi, in 2023, 1,192 tech companies laid off 263,180 employees – sparking panic as people from other countries desperately looking for a job – any job – to keep their H1 visas alive. What now?The question to ask now is whether the worshipping cult he formed around him has shifted a little after the aggressive Twitter acquisition. Tesla is laying off 14,000 employees, its market share is sliding, and the much-hyped and delayed Cybertruck has a faulty accelerator pedal. Starlink has come under fire because it is being used by Russia to stay connected online. New users on X are being forced to pay to post, and Musk is busy alienating Left-leaning buyers with his polarising tweets. He’s also throwing legal tantrums. Earlier this year, he sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI saying they abandoned the startup’s original mission to develop AI for the benefit of humanity and not for profit. And then there’s another case against National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the US’s top labour watchdog, because they called him out for illegally firing workers in SpaceX. But then, maybe roller coasters like this year are chump change for the billionaire who saddles multiple ideas, multiple companies, countries and perhaps planets. He rides high on risk, wants to reach Mars, and has shown again and again that he can deliver on big, unthinkable innovations. Moonshots are his norm.

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How Elon Musk keeps ticking along

A visionary technologist and a ruthless businessman, Elon Musk is a legend that viral media can’t get enough of. And now he’s coming to India.

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How Elon Musk keeps ticking along

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