Elon Musk
Brilliant; Crazy; or Both?
H. A. G. Longstaff
“The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics, whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were”.
– President John F. Kennedy
Address to the Irish Parliament
28 June 1963
THE WORLD IS EMBRACING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (A.I.) and Large Language Models (L.L.M.s), schooled as they are seemingly on the entire contents of the internet (or interweb as my father insists on calling it). A.I. will be brilliant at synthesising the current extraordinary body of knowledge, but I wonder if we will lose the role of innovators, the people who can “dream of things that never were” and make them happen.
In this, it is hard to look past Elon Musk. Many genii have changed the world in one way … think Bill Gates with Microsoft, Alexander Graham Bell with the telephone, or Dr Alexander Fleming with penicillin. But Musk is remarkable for having changed the world in multiple ways. Sadly, this extraordinary method is tinged with a touch of madness. Can one exist without the other? Let’s examine this.
The Brilliant
1. Co-founded PayPal: Musk co-founded PayPal, an app that allows purchases on the internet by storing your credit card details in one secure place. It was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion.
2. Transformed Tesla: Electric cars (think the SMART car) were previously wholly underwhelming. Musk took over a struggling Tesla and transformed it. With the first principles of engineering, he created cars and unique production processes that mesmerised the industry with speed (2.3 seconds to 100km/h for the Model S Plaid, faster than any Ferrari) and popularity (the Model Y was the world’s best-selling car in 2023). Legacy carmakers have been left flat-footed.
3. Founded SpaceX: Post the Space Shuttle’s 2011 retirement, the U.S. space industry was in a funk. Legacy producers were cripplingly risk-averse and over-priced. Musk re-imagined space flight, again from first principles engineering. He drove down costs and created a reusable rocket. Prepared to fail at first to learn and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, he created the Falcon rocket and Dragon spacecraft that are now mainstays of the U.S. space industry.
4. Next horizons: Musk has other projects, including ‘The Boring Project’ (tunnelling under major cities with autonomous vehicles travelling over 200km/h); Neuralink (a device embedded in the brain to integrate with artificial intelligence and control machines with thought); and others.
The Crazy
1. Mars: Musk has a stated ambition to enable the colonisation of Mars, which he sees as essential to the survival of the human species.
2. Twitter: in a fit of pique, Musk said he would take over Twitter to protect free speech, then changed his mind, and then found out that the law required him to buy it. Since renaming “X” (he is obsessed with X as “the everything app”), it has been a rocky journey.
3. Style: Musk is reported to be a manic micro-manager with an abrasive and confrontational style who sets goals that are unreasonable in scope and time.
Ultimately, it’s hard to conclude that there could not be the brilliant without the crazy. Musk certainly has “ignored the obvious realities” and “dreamed of things that never were”. No ordinary person would take the risks or work as hard as needed to achieve what Musk has done. The breadth of Musk’s mind is extraordinary. Still only 52 years old, Musk has the time to achieve some of his crazier dreams, and it would be unwise to bet against him.