Text: Olaf Adam • Photos: NASA, TESLA, Shutterstock (Kathy Hutchins, AoC)
This article originally appeared in 0dB - The Magazine of Passion N ° 2
Elon Musk obviously enjoys shaking up established industries. As early as 1995 he and his brother founded a business directory called Zip2 in the then still young Internet. It linked the address data of the registered companies with a route planner for the journey. Just take a look to see where there is a good pizza nearby? Normal today, but in the late 90s it was simply revolutionary. And lucrative, because the (then) computer giant Compaq acquired the start-up just three years later. And suddenly Elon Musk was a multiple millionaire - at the age of 27.
But Musk is an entrepreneur by conviction, so he invested in his next idea and founded the Internet financial services provider X.Com, from which the online payment service PayPal emerged. When it was finally taken over by Ebay in 2002, the founder couldn't care less that he had just been ousted as head of the company. Because of his share of the purchase price, in his early 30s he had an estimated cash fortune of around $ 200 million. Since then, it's obviously no longer about money; Nevertheless, the dynamic, multi-founder only really turned up afterwards: His company SpaceX, founded in 2002, is the first private space company with a reusable rocket and is now one of the most important suppliers of the International Space Station. By the way, the long-term goal of SpaceX is to enable a colonization of Mars. And that is meant completely seriously.
Musk's most famous company, Tesla, is much more down to earth. Initially ridiculed by the competition as a fun project of an eccentric millionaire, nobody in the auto industry laughs anymore at the company that is practically single-handedly advancing the electrification of the automobile and is a pioneer of autonomous driving. With its power storage systems called Powerwall and Powerpack, Tesla also has a technology in its range that could revolutionize energy supply worldwide.
Musk's reflection on mobility concepts for the future culminated in his concept of “Hyperloops” in 2013 - underground maglev trains that will soon be able to cover distances of up to 1,500 kilometers faster, more efficiently and more cheaply than with airplanes or conventional trains. In addition, Musk is planning to move all inner-city traffic in large cities completely underground. And because a lot of fairly large tunnels have to be built in a fairly short time for both projects, Musk also founded The Boring Company, which wants to develop new tunnel boring techniques that, you guessed it, should be cheaper and faster than conventional methods.
The naming of this last foundation is typical of the sometimes eccentric entrepreneur. The play on words made up of the English word for boring and the word for to bore was simply too good to ignore. Musk also explains the advantages of the solar-powered Tesla with the same ease Supercharger in a zombie apocalypse, calls a particularly effective setting of the outside air filter in Tesla “Bioweapon Defense Mode” or baptizes the particularly rapid acceleration levels of its e-cars based on the cult film Spaceballs “Insane Mode” and “Ludicrous Mode” ”(Roughly“ insane ”and“ ludicrous ”).
But sometimes this carelessness goes too far. For example, when he names an extensive update of the driver assistance systems in the Tesla as autopilot. Tesla had expressly pointed out that the driver must be attentive at all times, even when using the autopilot system. But some Tesla owners had probably not read the small print, as numerous YouTube videos of newspaper readers or otherwise distracted drivers and, unfortunately, several accidents with at least one fatality prove. In more conventional companies, these flippant names would have got stuck somewhere in the filter network of marketing experts, corporate lawyers and other questioners. In the same networks, however, many good ideas would also be caught, delayed in their implementation or swept under the carpet entirely. In this way, real innovation can be nipped in the bud. But that is exactly what Musk wants to avoid at all costs, which is why all of his business ideas to date have been based on shaking up sleepy, crusty or complacently frozen industries.
Zip2 showed the yellow pages of this world how the Internet works, Paypal snatched what is perhaps the most important piece of the modern financial market's pie from the established banking system. SpaceX proved to time-honored NASA that space travel is still not only possible, but also affordable. And Tesla has been driving the global auto industry for 15 years now; not only in the development of electric drives, but also in the assistance systems, in the development towards autonomous driving, in the design of the interior and in matters of sales and business models.
Elon Musk wants to use a much-used buzzword to be “disruptive” under all circumstances, that is, to stir up existing structures, thought patterns and behaviors, to mess up and, if necessary, to tear them down. Because only in this way can something really new, something revolutionary emerge. Conversely, it can be extremely obstructive when companies or entire industries are so trapped in well-established structures that they cannot implement important new developments quickly enough or do not even recognize them. Tradition and experience are certainly important for a company, but you also have to develop further. Otherwise it's like Nokia, which still dominated the cell phone market in 2007, only smiled at the iPhone and had to give up not six years later. Or like the Kodak group, a giant in the photo sector for over 100 years, who practically invented digital photography itself, but failed to understand the scope of this development and in the same year as Nokia disappeared into insignificance.
If he had stayed in the software and internet industry, Elon Musk might not have received the same amount of attention, because hip start-ups with “disruptive” ideas spring up almost every day. So it is perhaps due to a certain calculation that the professional lateral thinker Musk is involved in extremely conservative industries, of all things, after PayPal. Space travel is ruled by stiff authorities like NASA; the automobile companies are desperately clinging to age-old concepts that can only be sold as future-proof with great marketing effort and technical trickery. In such encrusted structures it is relatively easy to be different. Installing software updates on your own cars via the Internet while the competition is still promoting USB interfaces as high-tech that is subject to a surcharge - it's easy to get noticed.
However, even an Elon Musk is not immune to setbacks. Tesla makes millions in losses every year, the start of production of the Model 3, which is planned as a mass product, is extremely slow and the first product recalls due to production defects in the Model S have already been made. Of course, such missteps are received with a certain malicious glee by the duped competition and spread widely in the media. And it is certainly also correct that the step from a small manufacturer to a mass producer presents a small, innovative company like Tesla with challenges of its own. But the courage to try things out also requires the courage to possibly fail. And Elon Musk obviously brings this with him.
Yes, Musk undoubtedly has a strong ego and enjoys the media attention he gets. And I'm sure he's a for-profit businessman too. But he sets himself much longer-term goals than is usually the case, and the fact that he really really wants to make the world a better place is taken from him. Certainly not all of his ideas will work, even an Elon Musk knows that. Nonetheless, with a disarming naturalness, he tackles projects that others consider to be science fiction at best. If you want to create something really new, the first thing to do is to overcome the limits of human imagination. And that, it seems, is what Musk made his real life work.
