From Walter Isaacson's recent NYT review of two recent books on Elon Musk:
In his famous “Think Different” ad for Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs saluted people like himself: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels… Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Musk is in some ways the current incarnation of Jobs. As these two books show in vivid detail, Musk can drive people hard. He can drive them to distraction. But he can also drive them to do things they never dreamed were possible. “Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before,” he wrote in one staff memo. “Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart.”
Like Jobs, Musk has a reality distortion field. “In meetings, Musk might ask his engineers to do something that, on the face of it, seemed absurd,” Berger writes. But unlike Jobs, Musk has an understanding of physics and thermodynamics that has helped him know what boundaries could be successfully pushed. “When they protested that it was impossible, Musk would respond with a question designed to open their minds to the problem, and potential solutions. He would ask, ‘What would it take?’”
By drilling down to fundamental principles and the underlying science, he has built the globally dominant private rocket company whose Starship vehicle might lead the way in bringing humans to Mars, and Tesla has become the world’s most valuable auto company, one that will help wean humanity from fossil-fuel cars.
Regular readers will know I disagree with quite a bit of this. While the talented engineers at SpaceX and Tesla have accomplished some remarkable things and Musk certainly has proposed things that most engineers consider impossible or at least ridiculously impractical, those two sets do not overlap. The first consists of accomplishments that were seen as ambitious but feasible at the time such as using controlled landings to recover rocket boosters. The second consists of really bad ideas (like using air-bearings in a high speed vactrain) that have all been allowed to die quietly when Musk unveiled the next big thing. (When firms started raising money on the vactrain buzz and realized they'd have to come up prototypes, every last one of them discarded Musk's concept but kept the name.)
The idea Musk's success comes from his grasp of science is laughable. The man is a terrible engineer and whenever he goes off script, things go badly. He does have a tremendous talent for fundraising, generating PR, and creative accounting, but Isaacson lost me when he painted Musk as the next Steve Jobs, only smarter.
Of course, I'm not the target audience.
If you’re curious about Tesla, SpaceX & my general goings on, @WalterIsaacson is writing a biography
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 5, 2021
Ages ago I attended a talk by Buckminster Fuller. A friend of mine explained that Fuller wasn't an engineer or a scientist or even a designer, he was a poet. He captured ideas and dreams and turned them into words. Then he left the words for others to turn into reality. That's why geodesic domes leak, but people assess world wide energy usage and study global climate.
ReplyDeleteMusk has a lot of that. He comes up with the poetry and hopes others will turn into something he can make money from. It's like his tunneling idea. Tunneling is cheaper than ever, but it is still considered the high priced solution. If a company develops a tunneling "hammer", it might be able to find enough tunneling "nails". Running Teslas through a narrow tunnel is a dumb idea except as a novelty, but trying to make tunnels a less expensive go to option is actually sensible.
As with Buckminster Fuller, consider it poetry.
Steve Jobs was different. He was an impresario. His strength was that he had taste which is different from design sense, hence the Mac "cube". He recognized the computer zeitgeist and delivered a curated version of it. He sold it to people with taste, the kind willing to pay a premium for something with good design.
Yes, if your definition of poetry is broad enough to cover derivative doggerel.
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