Tesla CEO Musk recently said on social media that he expects personal taxes to pay more than $11 billion this year, and responded that he will pay more taxes this year than any American in history.
Musk is currently the world's richest man with a net worth of more than $250 billion, and this year he was named Person of the Year by Time Magazine and the Financial Times. Tesla's market capitalization also exceeded $1 trillion this year, surpassing the combined market capitalizations of GM and Ford.
Recently, Musk even directly posted that he was going to resign as an Internet celebrity. But in fact, the top full-time Internet celebrities are not as popular as him. In 2021, Musk will have the last hot search in an average of five days, including: launching a vote to let netizens decide whether to sell Tesla stock, selling out their houses, tweeting Chinese seven steps, protecting Dogecoin, and arching fire at the critical moment of retail investor war wall Street...
The reason why Musk has attracted so much attention is that on the one hand, he is indeed a talented and personality person; on the other hand, behind many seemingly nonsensical events, Musk, the world's richest man, likes to think about first principles.
Written by | Zong Bai
Responsible for the | Shi Yang
As a serial entrepreneur who has been successful every time, Musk has founded companies such as Zip2, X.com, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, SolarCity, hyperloop. The Zip2 he sold in 1999 is a website that lists corporate information, just like the original Alibaba. X.com is a pioneer of online payment, and later merged with PayPal, Musk and PayPal founder Peter Thiel two geniuses like a mountain and two tigers, after selling the company to go their separate ways, the two became close friends again, Musk said, Peter Till is also a believer in "first sexual principles".
The so-called first principle, for Newton, is the first driving force of the universe and the ultimate principle. In his later years, Einstein devoted himself to the study of the "Great Unified Field Theory", and also hoped to find the "first principle" that unified all the laws of physics. Dating back to ancient Greece, Thales's "All Things Are Water", Heraclitus's "All Things Are Fire", Pythagoras's Everything is "Numbers", Plato's "Phase Theory", Aristotle's "Metaphysics", all try to solve the "First Principle".
First principles is a method of action
Musk's First Principles is not so ultimate, it is just a method of action. He said: "No matter what field it is, it must determine the most fundamental truth, and it must have a very high degree of certainty." Before you can draw conclusions, you must draw conclusions on the truths of these most fundamental origins. So, the physical way of thinking is a very good framework. Including our energy consumption, products, etc., it all involves the application of the first law... Analogous thinking is to go with the flow. ”
The so-called analogy is to see how others do, and then through their own efforts to achieve a relative advantage, in the competition to win. This is a universal way of thinking of human beings. Management guru Michael Porter once said that the advantage of Japanese companies is often "operational effectiveness", and lean based on imitation and improvement is not a strategy. AlphaGo defeats human players in the same way, while Alpha Zero easily defeats Alpha Dogs using the so-called "First Principles."
Musk's "analogous thinking is a big stream" means that people's common way of thinking is to compare with each other, and their own existence needs to be defined by their peers, so that they can only be improved or fall into imitation, and it is difficult to produce revolutionary creation. At its best, it grows almost naturally.
People often think he's crazy
People who give up thinking by analogy are equivalent to standing on the opposite side of the mainstream values of society, and from then on they are bittersweet and self-aware. The Silicon Valley elite that was talked about the most after Jobs was such an indescribable heretic in the mouth of his ex-wife science fiction writer Justin: "If you are an extreme character, you have to be yourself, and happiness is no longer the most important goal of life for you." 」
These people are often freaks or socially out of place, and they always force themselves to experience the world in an extraordinary way. They find strategies for survival, and as they get older, they find ways to apply those strategies to other things, creating a unique and powerful advantage for themselves. Their way of thinking is different from ordinary people, always able to see things from a new perspective and find ideas with insights. However, people often think of them as crazy. ”
Musk became a rich man after selling Zip2 and PayPal companies, but he was not satisfied with making more money or enjoying life, but invested money in two completely "unreliable" companies at the same time, SpaceX and Tesla, looking like "unsuccessful and successful". Both companies were indeed on the verge of collapse and eventually miraculously survived.
At the end of 2008, both Tesla and SpaceX were on the verge of bankruptcy, the car could not be mass-produced, and the rocket failed three launches. Some say Musk almost became a classic case at Harvard Business School — a rich man who lost everything playing rockets. In the end, he mortgaged the property, sold the yacht and plane, distorted the reality on the board of directors, raised tens of millions of dollars, and was favored by fate, and the company turned the corner.
Whether it is Tesla or SpaceX, at the beginning of the startup, Musk himself estimated that the success rate was less than 50%, and he later said that if he felt that success was really crazy. In fact, despite being sought after by the stock market, Musk's companies have not had a good cash flow so far.
The man who works for him is like a bullet
Musk's success, on the one hand, has a religious, revolutionary passion; on the other hand, it also benefits from his extraordinary shrewdness, that is, the process and cost must be compared.
Musk's famous quote: "If you want to fire someone, you should fire them right away, otherwise it's a waste of each other's time." "Just as revolutionaries use executions to solve problems, for Musk, many problems can be solved with layoffs. Tesla fired nearly 1,000 people in October 2017, including engineers, some department heads and factory workers, according to a Silicon Valley outlet last year.
Tesla's vice president is also a high-risk profession, and dozens of executives have voluntarily left or been fired because of conflicts with Musk's way of doing things. Severance pay can be avoided by firing rather than severance, and Tesla's layoffs have also been hotly discussed on Twitter. A former employee said: "Many of us have been working hard for him for many years, but he can throw us like garbage on the side of the road without thinking." Maybe his purpose is to kill chickens and scare monkeys, maybe he really does not care about human feelings at all. It's clear that the man who works for him is like a bullet: it's thrown away when it's used up. ”
Interestingly, most of the fired employees were frustrated but didn't hate him because Musk himself worked 100 hours a week. His goal seems to be bright again, which makes people constantly attracted to follow. The people he started the business said Musk was fortunate to do "good for humanity" and that he "had a magic power that would make people dare to go to the guillotine with him." He likes to talk about "making human beings cross the stars", "surviving in the universe", "colonizing Mars" and "creating a new world", which undoubtedly brings a magnificent beauty, enough for those top talents to integrate the smallness of individual human beings into some great meaning.
Relative to the Japanese companies rarely dismiss employees, Musk's easy dismissal of employees may be because he regards human beings in danger without knowing it, and deeply feels that "time is not waiting", and backward employees have become a drag on the great cause, and must be eliminated quickly. Moreover, since the perception of what others have done about him is part of the "analogy," it is even more indifferent.
Adventure can also be said to be an escape from the status quo
In the eyes of a "thoroughly free willer" like Musk, the reality constructed by analogy is not solid, and the future is already there, the difference is whether to go by car or boat, or walk. His sister Tosca once called him after one of his successful rocket launches and said, "You seem to have traveled to the future and come back to tell us what the future looks like." ”
For those who think in this way, "risk-taking" is a common thing, and there is no such thing as "risk-taking". In 2014, Musk told students in a speech at the Southern California Business School: "It's time to take risks, and as you get older, your responsibilities increase." Once you have a family, you're not just risking yourself, you're risking your family. ”
"I'm a libertarian. ...... My theory is that design, technology, execution, putting them together, packing them up, blending them together in a way that people rarely do, the point is that you are so confident in the combination that you go crazy and even take wild risks. Musk's attitude toward the present can be described as a needle in a haystack. It's not so much about taking risks as it is about escaping the status quo.