‘He is building a backup plan for Earth’

Entrepreneurs chase dreams. Elon Musk builds them. He is not your run-of-the-mill businessman; from electric cars to solar power to spacecraft, his interests run wild. Often, his ambitions defy logic and reason, but they mean business. And that’s why the South Africa-born Canadian-American techno-entrepreneur remains a mystery to many. In the recently released book, Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping Our Future,Bloomberg Businessweek journalist Ashlee Vance tries to solve the Musk puzzle. BusinessLine spoke to Vance to know more:

Can we call Elon Musk a philosopher entrepreneur?

Musk certainly has a personal philosophy that he lives by. It’s that of a logician. He’s decided that mankind should have a backup plan in case something terrible happens to humans. And he’s decided that we should make a very concerted effort to combat global warming.

He’s then built businesses from those principles. He certainly enjoys being wealthy and now relies on his fortune to advance his businesses. That said, Musk is most certainly driven more by ideas than money.

Is that why many take him as a unique business leader?

He presents all of his businesses to both outsiders and employees in extraordinary terms. SpaceX is not just about building cheap rockets. It’s about developing a colony on Mars — not a small colony, mind you, but a huge one with a million people.

Tesla is not just a car company. It’s about making electric cars dominant worldwide, changing the fuel infrastructure of the planet and building an energy storage company on the side. The breadth of these visions seems insane at times, but it also seems to get the brightest, hardest working people to join Musk’s companies. No other leaders push things quite as far.

Musk has gone into decades-old businesses and shown them what real disruption looks like when someone starts with a clean slate and compromises as little as possible. His ideas such as interplanetary travel are tough to sell. Many think they waste money.

Initially, Musk’s friends and family thought he was nuts. They tried to talk him out of building a space company. As it happened, he had enough money to get SpaceX going on his own.

He put about $100 million into it and pushed forward during a five-year span in which three rockets blew up, and Musk went down to his last dollar. Once the company proved it could build a rocket, it was surprisingly easy for SpaceX to raise money.

NASA bought rides from SpaceX and investors such as Founders Fund and Draper Fisher Jurvetson were banging on the door to try and invest in the company.

As for the team, this is where Musk really did some of his best work. He found people early on that wanted to get to Mars as badly as he did. They believed in him because he had deep pockets and also because he actually seemed to know something about space.

From there, young, bright engineers flocked to SpaceX in droves. It was the first really exciting company to appear on the scene in a long time that seemed like it could have staying power.

Though his firms are distinct entities run independently, they have a theme. Is this accidental?

I talk about a “unified field theory of Elon Musk.” This is a technology-based idea. You see obvious things such as Tesla making battery storage systems that fit in perfectly with SolarCity’s plans. There are other spots where materials advances made at SpaceX lead to stronger, lighter cars at Tesla.

I think Elon’s overall philosophy pushed things in this direction, but it is in many ways a happy accident just how closely things have aligned between all the companies. All three companies have done better than Musk would have once expected and this, in turn, has allowed them to have ambitions that run across each other and to have the companies support each other.

For shifting people away from fossil fuels, I’m sure he faces the wrath of the bad energy lobby?

He most certainly does. Tesla has taken some heat from car makers, car dealerships and the oil and gas companies. SolarCity has been perhaps even more combative with the energy companies and oil and gas industries really attacking it in Congress and behind the scenes. Musk was in a pretty tough spot here, although things have improved recently.

The success of his firms since 2012, and Musk’s rising celebrity status have made it more difficult for Congressmen to attack him. They don’t want to be seen as anti-innovation or to end up on the wrong side of history.

Musk has also now created about 20,000 jobs and has factories in California, Texas, New York and Nevada — some of the most powerful states.

A human colony on Mars; isn’t this a very ‘colonial’ idea? Who are we to conquer it?

There’s certainly some “Manifest Destiny” undercurrents running through Musk’s Mars ambitions. He, however, sees it in very logical terms — terms that make sense for a software developer. We need a backup plan in case everything crashes here on Earth. To Musk, this is just as important as, say, trying to cure cancer or end hunger.

How has SpaceX influenced space explorations?

It remains to be seen what the long-term effects of SpaceX will be. Will we get reusable rockets that dramatically reduce the cost of sending something to space? If so, then the human species is changed forever.

There’s no question, though, that Musk has already ignited the aerospace industry with a newfound enthusiasm and competitive spirit. While researching the book, I came away so disappointed by how old and uninspiring much of the aerospace technology was. SpaceX — with low costs, advanced software and cheaper electronics — has served as a wakeup call for the entire industry.

Musk last year made all of Tesla’s auto patents open source. Does he recognise the potential of open source?

Honestly, this is more of a publicity move than anything else. Yes, Tesla has open-sourced its patents, and, yes, this makes a statement that it wants the industry to move to electric cars and is willing to do anything to make that happen. Elon genuinely does want electric cars to be dominant and knows that Tesla can’t make all the cars itself. That said, I doubt that many – if any- of Tesla’s competitors will deign to use its patents.

One observer said Musk has “visionary intellect, fierce ambition, and fantastic wealth, but he is emotionally bankrupt”. Do you agree?

I am not sure I agree with the phrasing. He can come off as callous and, frankly, mean to his employees. He drives them so hard, and he does not reward their effort with much emotion or praise. He does, however, care deeply about the missions of his companies, his friends and his family.

Musk is quite a different character to those few that he’s opened up to. While Musk can come off as hard, he’s a very complex person with many layers of emotion.

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