Should We Be Defending Elon Musk?

Misunderstood Visionaries

There’s a growing contradiction that’s happening that’s really starting to perplex me.

We live in a world ripe with problems and crisis, amplified incessantly by what’s left of the news, and driving us all slowly mad.

Yet when a person comes along who demonstrates that he’s a humanist, willing to take on the big problems, and making a real change in the world in real time, for some reason the irrepressibly dark nature of the human soul seems to take great joy in crab-bucketing him and working diligently to tear him down.

In this instance, I’m talking about Elon Musk, and what I want to know is why are so many people endlessly criticizing him?

In many ways he seems to be a shining individual, living his own joyful life, and in a world plagued by problems, he seems to be stepping up to prove that there are solutions all around us if we’re just willing to go after them.

I get that he’s upset more than a few people along the way as he tries to establish new paradigms and engrain new ways of doing things within what were once well-established enterprises, and that he can be very opinionated, and in some ways be seen as sticking his nose in areas where some say he doesn’t belong.

But there are very few in our world that are willing to lay it all on the line, day-after-day, for everyone to see, and being enormously successful doing it.

Maybe, instead of complaining about every little step or misstep that he makes, and in many cases seeming almost gleeful to point out the errs of his ways, it’s time that we looked at things from a very different perspective.

First off all, he’s not one of the Kardashians that people can just cat stomp and criticize weekly because they poorly (intentionally or not) Photoshopped a picture of their waistlines on one of their Instagram posts.

We’ve all seen paparazzi snaps of Elon without his shirt on and it’s obvious that he’s not vying to compete with Kim and her family.

And we’ve definitely heard some of things that he’s said, sometimes out of context, and sometimes as a free thinker and without the filter that our rapidly divided society increasingly seems to constantly demand.

But why is it that we expect our celebrities and innovators to be good at invention, creation, and art and also be good at life?

I would argue that the very nature of being a creative person is probably the result of having grown up under different conditions with a different set of rules and a dissimilar way of thinking that are the very things that make them unique and increasingly needed.

Look back at the Einsteins and the Edisons and the Teslas and you’ll constantly find a robust group of individuals whose very existence broke the norms.

In Elon’s case, it seems that it’s not good enough to simply be a successful CEO with a track record that’s been proven over-and-over again, but that he also has to be flawlessly great at everything else he does or tries to do or else we strive to cancel him.

I would challenge anyone to tell me how they personally made over 186 billion dollars bringing world shaking innovations and corporations to life, managed to have a perfect personal life with unblemished relationships, never upset a single soul, and at the same time managed to say all the right things, all of the time, when virtually every word you utter gets reported somewhere in the press.

How is it that we expect great change to happen and for change makers – who face unyielding opposition for the simple sake of sport or our society’s obsession with elevating people to great heights and then working furiously to drive them down – to be expected to pull the human race out of the death spiral that it’s presently in if we don’t back off and stop incessantly condemning them?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not some Elon Musk fanboy trying to get an invite on the next SpaceX flight to Mars, but I am someone trying to figure out why we go after a person for thinking and acting differently, and who seems to be doing things from the position of a humanist who cares about what happens to us.

Is it because Musk seems carefree, happy, perhaps a tad eccentric, and potentially exemplifies the best qualities of a human that should be emulated? Or is he really so dangerous in his thoughts and actions that he embodies a clear and present danger that we have to be especially mindful of because he could bring down the entire edifice of human civilization?

To better understand our reactions to him, perhaps we need to look at our understanding of wealth from a slightly altered perspective for a moment.

Why are Billionaires Different?

So lets do a little thought experiment.

If a single dollar were to represent a single second of time, how many days would you have if you had a million dollars?

The answer is 11.57 days give or take a little.

Now, if you had a billion dollars representing a billion seconds, how many days would you have?

Did you answer 31.7 years?

With this in mind, if you personally had, give or take a bit depending on market fluctuations and other economic peaks and valleys, Elon Musk’s worth of 186.8 billion dollars, how much time would you have?

Did you answer a little more than 5,900 years?!

I say this to help put into perspective just what the difference is between a millionaire, a billionaire, and a crazy rich billionaire.

Yet for a great many people in the world, they’ve somehow elevated themselves to be able to have some very strong opinions about Elon Musk, as though their almost 12 days – if they even had a million dollars – can somehow comprehend the 5,900 years of time that a guy with 186.8 billion dollars has to play with.

And why?

And more importantly, what makes you think that he might even care?

He’s proven himself to be time and time again, one of the most remarkable and amazing innovators alive, and yet so many feel that it’s somehow their right to question him obsessively.

Of course, for stockholders and those with a direct vested interest, they do have a right to question some of his decisions, but they can do this by buying or selling the portions of his companies that they own. They can let their dollars and their investments do their talking.

Why Can’t We Shut Up and Just See What Musk Can Do?

What I’m wondering is, especially in terms of Twitter, why can’t we just leave him alone for a little while so that we can see what he might be able to actually accomplish?

Because since he put up the $44 billion to buy Twitter a few months ago, Musk has been pilloried almost relentlessly in the press for a thousand supposed transgressions.

He’s been accused of letting hate speech run wild on the site (which may not be an argument any longer or even be able to be substantiated given the few days he needed to mostly tighten things up, but there are still some obvious areas that need to be fixed), weakening Twitter by the indiscriminate firing of staff (and very flamboyantly in some cases), shutting down the accounts of several journalists (well, for at least a few hours for violating Twitter rules), failing to pay rent on Twitter’s San Francisco offices (currently in a lawsuit), messing with people’s blue check marks (including letting some people he likes getting to keep theirs’ for free), hurting Tesla’s stock price (this is debatable), and damaging his own reputation.

Yet who does it really matter to except the guy himself, if indeed any of what’s being bandied about is really accurate at all?

There’s an old adage that says that any press is good press as long as they’re talking about you. For Musk, 44 billion to buy Twitter might be a bargain investment in pure marketing terms and a clear demonstration of his ability to move markets simply through his words.

Apparently for many though, the aggressive disparagement by the press has spilled over to supposedly impact Musk’s main company, Tesla.

Though Tesla increased sales an impressive 40% to 1.3 million cars in 2022, The Wall Street Journal chose to emphasize how he came up short.

While Tesla posted a rather incredible 60% rise in earnings to $3.7 billion, the Journal headline says,

“Tesla Warns of Uncertainties …”

Yet General Motors’ profits, for a company that’s been around for 115 years, is expected to be less than half of Tesla’s sum and no one, including institutional investors, is jumping all over them.

Maybe they should be…

Let’s zoom in on Twitter for a moment.

Twitter is now a private company; it belongs to Elon Musk and the investors and the banks that backed him.

For all intent and purpose, it’s his to do with as he wishes.

This is what happens when the original founders yield to new buyers.

The new folks usually have some ideas and are set to disrupt the status quo.

That’s what Musk is doing. For lack of a better term, he’s rattling the institution’s bars and is shaking it to its very foundation.

Along the way Musk has racked up impressive wins at Twitter. His trademark approach of “run fast and fix it on the fly” is also waking up other entrepreneurs to alternative possibilities.

The Japanese called it Kaizen. Continuous improvement. Elon Musk just runs it like he’s on meth.

Although he has fired some 6,000 of Twitter’s 7,500-person staff with record-setting speed, the Twitter platform is arguably more robust today than ever before.

And let me add that, while putting people out of work is never easy on anyone, including those directly affected, if Twitter would have been allowed to fail on its own, the impact would have been dramatically worse.

Doomed to Fail?

Bloated companies have a tendency to collapse.

Now, were these layoffs the most gentle and smooth, perhaps not.

But on the balance sheet, Musk has also hired hundreds of thousands of people to work in his other industries including SpaceX, the Boring Company, Starlink, Tesla, and a whole bunch of sundry, ancillary, support, and supplier companies.

So somewhere on the “employed” versus “let go” actuarial balance sheet, 6,000 people are a rounding error. And again, I don’t mean to demean anyone’s livelihood or income stream, but Musk’s basic philosophy of whether or not to fire someone is to ask them to describe exactly what they do, have them answer in simple terms, and then have them tell him how it directly adds value to the company. Do this clearly and succinctly and you stay, fail and you go.

While he’s been performing this dramatic and sometimes questionably executed downsizing, and taking large amounts of flack for it in the press, Musk also claims that Twitter is offering more features and at a much faster pace of implementation than ever before.

For example, Musk points to the newly added ability for posters on Twitter to know, instantly, how many people are viewing their tweets, without “likes” or “retweets”, and that for this to happen it required the platform to ramp up to be able to handle three million transactions per second, and that it’s now able to do this.

During the World Cup, Twitter hosted 147 billion exchanges online about the matches.

Apple, Chevrolet, Chipotle, Ford, and Jeep all missed out, because they were among 50 of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers that left the platform, simply because Elon Musk bought it and they had an opinion about who he is and what he might do with it.

Budweiser stayed on board and achieved massive reach.

Now, let’s not be naive, having a media platform the likes of Twitter places Musk on the same footing as other multi-billionaires with huge media outlets of their own. No doubt he has some aspirations for Twitter that may one day reach into the public sphere and perhaps he may try to shape opinions. He hasn’t outwardly done so overly dramatically or resoundingly successfully yet, as was demonstrated by the launch announcement failures in the DeSantis campaign, but time will tell if he manages to find the right recipe to match his aspirations or audience intentions.

Right now it seems like his whole modus operandi is just to shake things up and get in the news himself for doing it.

The thing is though, fundamentally Musk sees Twitter as far more than a mere billboard for ads.

He wants it to be a transactional platform for all kinds of commerce including existing formats and those to be newly envisioned.

He wants it to be the kind of space that Zuckerberg bet on and missed with Meta, and he wants to do it quickly and efficiently, and so be it if he leaves some blood on the floor.

It’s Not personal, It’s Just Business…

I believe the expression is,

“It’s not personal, it’s just business.”

To the investors and the banks that put their money where their mouths are when they joined Musk in this Twitter enterprise, their mandate wasn’t to let the thing die a slow and painfully expensive death, it was to fix things quickly.

And yes, Twitter may have lost 66% of it’s value since he first bought it, according to his own estimates as well as some of the financial institutions like Fidelity Investments that bought a share in it, but it’s 80% leaner and is moving more rapidly than ever to incorporate more effective AI and other offerings of value to the corporations, marketers, and the everyday people that use it.

He’s weathered the rough patch of downsizing and streamlining, and he’s lost by some estimates 625 out of the top 1,000 corporate advertisers who have left the site due to it’s new policies and his presence, but his number of visits to the site have been starting to skew upwards and as advertisers have to spend dollars to reach their target audiences, will they really be able to stay away from Twitter as a critical mass of users once again begin to regularly populate and navigate the site?

On top of this, Musk is now aggressively pushing for accelerated action to also have Twitter become the number one

“truthful and reliable news provider on the planet”.

He knows how and when to push all the buttons to garner public interest unlike anything ever seen before, and then after he creates a whirlwind of media attention, he has the wisdom to pass off the management of companies such as Twitter to executives that have the ability to execute the vision he laid out as he goes off to attend to the many other parts of his burgeoning empire. In Twitter’s case, we’ll soon get to see what Linda Yaccarino accomplishes in her new role as company CEO.

So, when it comes to grand visions, why not bet on Musk?

From near scratch, he co-founded and elevated Tesla to where it is today, the most successful electric-vehicle maker in the world, that still holds 65% of the U.S. market for e-cars, with EV sales rising 66% last year alone. On top of that, he’s meeting manufacturing targets, even with all the Covid related supply chain fubar that we’re still dealing with.

Elon also created SpaceX for ferrying satellites and people into space. He created a reusable rocket and launched it in only seven years. This is an achievement that took NASA over 20 years to do. He proved that for things that didn’t involve just pure “what’s out there” exploration – and that the government is best suited for – that for space commerce to work, a private company can build it better, faster, and cheaper.

On April 20^th, 2023, he launched SpaceX’s Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever constructed and flown. Even before the launch, Elon cautioned that there were a million things that could go wrong, and some of them did as the rocket exploded a few minutes after launch and SpaceX acknowledged that several of the Super Heavy’s 33 powerful Raptor engines malfunctioned on ascent and that the booster rocket and Starship second stage failed to separate as designed before the ill-fated flight was intentionally terminated. But Musk also called it an unqualified success as it both met and exceeded the objectives for the maiden flight as defined within SpaceX.

He also created a telecommunications network called Starlink for inexpensive and fast satellite communications around the world. This alone is already playing a vital part in the course of human evolution by bringing data and the internet to places that were never going to receive them, especially if they waited for traditional ground-based hook-ups. Aside from just reaching neglected rural corners of the planet, it’s already played a huge part in global dynamics as evidenced in the way it’s being used in the war in Ukraine.

Want Free Press? Sell Flamethrowers!

Sure, he may have put 20,000 flamethrowers into the hands of anyone who ponied up $500 bucks for one, but come on, it was a flamethrower…

In terms of traffic and material transportation issues, never mind the fleet of electric transport 18-wheel semi-trailers that Pepsi now uses, through his venture, the Boring Company, he’s starting a revolution of moving vehicles underground by digging dedicated traffic tubes starting with one beneath Las Vegas. While the world dreams of flying cars, it may very well be that moving them underground will be the next real leap forward.

As a humanist, he maintains that for our civilization to survive that we need to be a multi-planet species and he has a vision for taking people to Mars, colonizing it, and then seeding the human race throughout the cosmos. Somewhere out there right now, a red Tesla is doing large orbital laps around the sun to both announce and remind us of Elon’s determination to have a meaningful presence in space.

As a little personal insight, interplanetary space always has been a fascination of mine, along with no doubt millions of other people as well. We dined on Star Trek as kids and thought that strange new worlds and new civilizations were meant to happen in our lifetimes. That’s why I’ve invested in my own space transportation company dedicated to affordably getting spacecraft and cargo into orbit.

When Musk first started pursuing his space venture in the early 2000s, he visited a few dubious rocket suppliers in Russia, accompanied by Jim Cantrell, my fellow co-founder and CEO of the satellite launch venture, Phantom Space.

Jim tells a great story about his Elon exploits in this article in Business Insider here.

You see, Musk’s mind, to whom some have noted a certain level of autism, affords him unique ways of looking at the world, and then provides him with the balls to go out in search of achieving those visions.

On YouTube, Elon Musk said at the Recode Code Conference in 2016 that we’re most likely living inside a virtual reality simulation so realistic that we don’t even know it.

Who can say for certain? He may be right. Infinite universes in infinite dimensions filling space and time, with infinite realities and boundless limits are thoughts as old as Socrates and almost as common to many of us as breathing.

It’s almost a certainty that Musk believes that in the simulation that he’s living in, and that we’re sharing, that he’s found the keys to manipulating it to its maximum personal capacity.

Frankly, it’s tough to argue otherwise.

So people, let’s really think about this. He spent a few billion on Twitter, and more than most of it wasn’t even his own money, and he’s making some changes fast and hard.

When it comes to big ideas and bold innovations, he’s succeeded with virtually everything he’s touched, so why would you bet against him?

Even when it comes to fixing Twitter…

How Many People Do You Know That Have Started 3 Successful Multi-Billion Dollar Companies?

If history has shown us anything it’s that Elon Musk continues to dare to put himself out there despite a great many people that’ll tell you what they think he should be doing and how they think he should be doing it, especially if you let them.

Frankly, I don’t know how many of them have at least 186.8 billion dollars in their pockets to be able to support their positions, but based on Musk’s track record and how badly the world needs innovators to ultimately save us from ourselves, instead of looking to knock him down, shouldn’t we be defending him?

– Written by a human.

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Michal Prywata: Inventor, entrepreneur, and multidisciplinary engineer with a focus on frontier technologies. Founder of ventures in healthcare, agriculture, space, and AI. On a relentless quest to solve complex problems and extend the boundaries of human potential.