by Jean-Louis Gassée
Of the companies Elon Musk started, two stand out: SpaceX and Tesla. They shook up their respective industries and made him a hero. It’s the company that Musk didn’t create, Twitter, that may be his “bridge too far”.
Let’s start with a list of Musk’s companies. ChatGPT being temporarily unavailable, a Google search led me to a Times article that supplied the following list:
1995: Zip2
1999: X.com
2000: PayPal
2002: SpaceX
2004: Tesla
2006: Solar City
2016: Neuralink
2016: The Boring Company
2022: Twitter
We could add the Musk Foundation started in 2002, as well as his 2015 investment and Board participation in the initially non-profit OpenAI. Musk was later to distance himself from OpenAI citing a possible conflict of interest with Tesla’s own AI work. (Imagine if he had stayed involved with OpenAI…)
It’s an impressive résumé, the result of an unusual combination of mental agility, vast amounts of absorbed and well-digested knowledge, and enormous, sometimes overflowing psychic energy. Understandably, this leads many to call Musk a genius. (We can skip spurious Steve Jobs comparisons. Apple’s co-founder and later rescuer was uniquely focused, something Musk can’t be accused of.)
Solar City is now part of Tesla, Neuralink is barely alive, beset by people and legal troubles, and The Boring Company hasn’t achieved much after a flurry of initial publicity. This leaves us with two proven companies, SpaceX and Tesla, and a very much “work in progress” Twitter.
SpaceX is a shining example of Musk at his best. His goal for the company was to revolutionize the space industry, and he mightily succeeded. Among his many achievements, we’ve seen the appearance of reusable launchers, capturing 45% of the commercial launch market by 2017; putting cosmonauts into orbit in 2020; and, days ago, proceeding with a static engines test-burn for the gigantic Starship. The Starship rocket, which has twice as much power as the retired Saturn V, is designed for missions to the Moon and Mars. A first test-flight is planned for the coming weeks or month. (I plan to discuss Musk’s plan to colonize Mars in a future Monday Note.)
Although SpaceX isn’t profitable yet and has sometimes risked bankruptcy, the company recently managed yet another round of funding at a substantial $137B valuation.
And that’s not all. SpaceX begat Starlink, a “satellite internet constellation” of about 3580 satellites as of this writing, with a plan for 12,000 units, possibly extended to 42,000. Starlink real-time coverage is spectacular:
(The two dotted-lines are recently-launched satellites that haven’t yet dispersed to their intended orbits.)
Among other feats, Starlink provides Internet coverage in Ukraine, albeit with an unexplained clause against its use by Ukrainian forces drones. Other restrictions apply: Musk’s taste for improvisation, a trait we’ll see again, seems to have caused miscommunication between teams resulting in redesigns and costly consignment of hardware to the boneyard.
Overall, a great success, arguably Musk’s best work.
Of course, the conventional wisdom is that Tesla is Musk’s crowing achievement. While Tesla’s dominance of the EV market is no longer assured (as things stand today, Chinese maker BYD sold more EVs in 2022 than Tesla did), it was Musk’s defiance of convention that led to him to jump on the opportunity to rescue a fledgling electric car company in 2004, ditch the old Lotus-based design, and design and build the Model S from the ground up including in-house software. Tesla forced the auto industry to invest — massively — in electric vehicles, and briefly made Musk the world’s richest individual. (As veteran readers know, I’m allowed to drive my spouse’s Model S and greatly enjoy the experience.)
Indebted as many of us are to Musk, we can’t ignore that his iconoclastic impulses and perilous flair for improvisation (recall the Model 3 “manufacturing hell”?) have caused confusion and frustration. He’s issued a constant flow of eventually disproved statements about the coming fleets of robotaxis, a Full Self-Driving car, the Tesla Roadster announced in 2017 and still not available, the 2017 Tesla Semi that’s only now beginning to ship in small quantities, and the 2019 Cybertruck that might ship late 2023…
If SpaceX is Musk at his best, Tesla is Musk at his complicated truest. A genius, certainly, but also “an ‘unapproachable tyrant’ who fires people ‘because of his ego’”
Moving to Twitter, we’ll first observe that Musk is a long-time, unusually prolix Twitter user with a huge following. Along with Barack Obama, Justin Bieber, and Katy Perry, Musk is a member of the 100 million Twitter followers club.
Thanks to the Washington Post we have an analysis of the more than 19,000 Musk tweets. It’s not always a pretty sight and tempts me to see Musk as a frequent mental petomane (or “brain flatulist”, if you prefer). Belated attempts to delete infelicitous tweets are met with the unforgiving attention of other users — and the Internet Wayback Machine.
By itself, Musk’s intense Twitter use doesn’t easily explain his decision to buy the company. Perhaps seeing his 100 million followers amongst a Twitter population of 368 million users worldwide led him to believe he could monetize his user base — as if followers might want to pay good money to inhale his wisdom. We don’t really know. What seems to have happened is that he intemperately played with the idea, perhaps getting high on follower reactions, and then imprudently made a formal offer to acquire the company. After quickly trying to get out of his hasty “just tweeting” no-due-diligence offer, he found out that it was ironclad and was forced to buy the company at the inflated price of $44B. A very expensive brain flatulence.
What happened next is still fresh in our memories. From firing close to 50% of Twitter’s employees, to announcing new programs that were promptly canceled, followed by ejecting well-liked apps from the platform, Musk now runs a disjointed operation that hiccups frequently and is riven with internal strife (Musk is said to have fired an engineer who explained to him why his tweet views were down).
At Tesla, Musk got to build everything: the product, the teams, the charger network, the distribution system…everything. At Twitter, perhaps feeling invincible because of his previous successes, Musk threw himself into a complex product/market/organization he thought he could master but only knew from the outside.
And now? Once upon a not-so-distant time, Twitter was well-liked but beset by a lax culture that slowed innovation and growth. Now, Musk has become Twitter’s main problem — and still shows no sign of fulfilling his promise to relinquish the CEO role. But who would be foolish enough to work for the man Musk has revealed himself to be?
— JLG@mondaynote.com