Author: Chen Wei Zhenghe Island Editor-in-Chief Source: Zhenghe Island (ID: zhenghedao)
Man is a rope between Superman and beast. - Nietzsche
If there are a few people on this planet who can make you proud to live in the same era as him, Musk should be one of them.
He has been bullied by his peers since he was a child, but now he is regarded by many people as the "savior" of civilization; the company he founded has been on the verge of bankruptcy many times, and now his Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Starlink and other companies are far ahead in their respective fields. He often sighs and wanders in the middle of the night, often lifting a rock to shoot himself in the foot, digging his own pit and jumping by himself, but he always ushers in the dawn, when he will wear protective boots and jump out of the deep pit he dug.
In terms of imagination, willpower, action, and drama, this man is rare among the earthly species.
Musk once again proves the fertility of the American soil for innovation, and also shows the power of entrepreneurship - when a person is exerted by this magical power, he will exude a charming halo in the deep pain and happiness intertwined, as Walter Isaacson, the author of "Elon Musk's biography", said, "Musk's real world may be more exciting than many people's fantasy world".
may be in response to the fragmented media era, "Musk's Biography" has completed the puzzle of Musk's current life with nearly 100 story fragments, and it is a little fragmented to read.
But in this real, concrete, and meticulous narrative, we can still see several distinctive characteristics of first-class characters.
01 Start with good things first, and then ask about the future
2008 was Musk's darkest moment.
Tesla and SpaceX, which are running in parallel, have become two gold-eaters.
In the face of a huge financial black hole, people expect this magician to keep turning from a hat into one rabbit after another to solve the problems of capital, technology and production capacity, and even his parents-in-law at the time were considering mortgage loans to help, and Musk's pressure is boundless.
His wife, Dalula, was a witness to this dark time.
Musk began to hunch, walked with stiff toes, and gained and lost weight sharply. When night falls, she watches in horror as Musk mutters to himself in his sleep, occasionally waving his arms and screaming.
Under pressure and in desperation, Musk sometimes rushes into the bathroom to vomit, "If the vomit flows back into his stomach, he will yell and retch." Dalula stood by the toilet bowl, holding his head, pitying and terrifying.
At this time, he had to make a choice between the two companies, and if he chose one, the other would survive.
Otherwise, it is likely that nothing will be found, and it will be a mess.
But Musk is unwilling to decide the life and death of his children, "I can't do this kind of thing." In his view, if Tesla is abandoned, it will be tantamount to telling the world that "electric vehicles are not reliable", and in that case, "a world driven by sustainable energy will never be realized". And SpaceX can't give up either, "Then we may never be a transplanetary species." ”
Isaacson, who wrote a biography of Musk, initially heard of Musk's bold words and thought he was inspiring the team, but as he came into contact with them, he found that these lofty missions were Musk's motivation and what set him apart from other entrepreneurs — GM had just exited the field of electric vehicles in 2008 when Musk entered the field of electric vehicles.
And his idea of creating a rocket company to go to Mars did not see any commercial justification at the time. "While other entrepreneurs are still trying to form a worldview, he has developed a cosmology".
Isaacson said in an interview with the media that Musk always starts with the mission and then tries to find a profit model for it.
"Elon Musk is not a mercenary person, he doesn't use the balance sheet as a starting point to drive his actions, unlike many entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. ”
Driven by nature and a sense of purpose, Musk embraces risk and never overprotects the booking process.
In December 2010, SpaceX planned to launch the unmanned capsule into its intended orbit and recover it safely.
During a final inspection the day before the launch, the team found two small cracks in the engine skirt of the second-stage rocket, which would normally require the engine to be replaced, and the launch date would be delayed by several weeks.
One engineer warned that the thrust of the engine would be slightly reduced when the "skirt" was shortened, but Musk had calculated that the thrust would be enough to complete the task.
In less than an hour, they trimmed the skirt with a pair of large scissors and then launched the rocket the next day as scheduled, leaving the people of their partner NASA stunned.
He always strives to cut out the redundant "skirts" of the product, even if there is a certain risk, after all, it does not affect the big picture, in his opinion, "it is like peeing in the pool, it has no effect on the pool".
A sense of mission allows him to live in the future.
The long journey to Mars is a beautiful dream for others, but it is a concrete and subtle roadmap and timetable for him. The company's countdown board counts down to the second, nervously reminding the arrival of each key node.
"We have to get to Mars before I die," Musk said, "and there's no coercion to make sure we get to Mars, except for us as a group, except for myself." ”
02 Starting from the essence, seeking simplicity, innovation, and difference
Only those who have great wishes can achieve great things.
But there are also some people who fall on the road to pursuing their ideals. Musk can go all the way through traps and dangers, why?
It is the principle of "first nature" that escorts and blesses them all the way.
After Russia's purchase of a rocket was met with the other party's lion's mouth, an angry Musk began to think first principles on the return plane, he listed the various materials needed to make the rocket, calculated its cost, and then a major discovery emerged - the "idiot index", which is used to calculate how much more a finished product costs than the cost of its basic materials.
He found out that the cost of the rocket was at least 50 times more than the cost of materials. He decided to start his own company to build rockets.
In addition to the "idiocy index", Musk has gradually formed a unique "five-part working method", which is also the landing method of "first principles":
1. Question every request. When any request is made, the person making the request should be attached. Never accept a request from a department, such as "Legal" or "Security", you must know the name of the person making the request.
Next you should question it, no matter how smart the person is. It is the demands made by smart people that are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. This thing has to be done forever, even if the request comes from me Musk himself. After questioning, everyone needs to improve the requirement to make it less stupid.
2. Delete all parts of the request and processes that you can remove, although you may have to add them back. In fact, if you end up adding less than 10% of the deleted part, you haven't cut enough.
3. Simplify and optimize. This should be placed after step 2, because a common mistake people make is to simplify and optimize a part or process that shouldn't exist in the first place.
4. Speed up turnaround time. Every process can be expedited, but it can only be done after the first three steps have been followed. At the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of energy on speeding up the production process, only to realize later that some processes should have been taken out in the first place.
5. Automation. One of the big mistakes I made at the Nevada and Fremont plants was that I was trying to automate every step in the first place. We should have questioned all the requirements, removed unnecessary parts and processes, screened out the problems, dealt with them, and then moved forward with automation.
What Musk is not good at is empathy, which he feels is more of an obstacle to business activities.
Musk often sleeps in his office, and he expects his team to be made up of competitive and upright people. He would summon an employee who was on vacation into the office at any moment, or kick a subordinate he felt was unqualified. He despises managers who seek to be "liked", preferring instead to be a fire-breathing dragon that drives employees to work frantically with a sense of urgency.
He has a "reality bending force field" as powerful as Steve Jobs, and often sets his subordinates tasks that are impossible within the deadline.
Later, some of these goals proved to be impossible, while others miraculously were achieved.
Those who have read "Musk's Biography" should be impressed by his talent and requirements in terms of cost, this business tyrant can be called a master of cost management.
When an engineer told him that the Falcon 9's air-cooling system in the payload compartment would cost more than $3 million, he asked a female executive: How much does a home air conditioning system cost?
It is obviously unfortunate to be a companion to such a terrifying "price butcher": a SpaceX employee who previously worked for Lockheed Martin and Boeing, who had rebuilt a launch pad complex for a heavy rocket, spent only 1/10 of the time to build a similar facility for the Falcon 9.
When Falcon 1 made history as the first privately built rocket to enter a predetermined orbit from the ground, Musk's team had only 500 employees, compared to 50,000 in Boeing's similar division.
The core of business is to reduce costs and increase efficiency, lower cost than others, and higher efficiency than others, it is inevitable not to win in the competition.
"First principles" dramatically reduces product and organizational costs, and has a proven track record of being innovative and design-driven.
In 2016, when Musk was on a business trip to Hong Kong, he had a "first-nature" inspiration.
He asked his colleagues in the room, "Have you noticed that urban construction is three-dimensional, but road construction is two-dimensional?" "You can dig tunnels under the city, so you can build three-dimensional roads," Musk explained. According to media reports, the tunneling company, known as the Boring Company, is now valued at more than $7 billion.
Similarly, after noticing that the pickup truck industry has rarely changed for 80 years, Musk also thinks from the first nature, why not use rocket material stainless steel to make pickups? This avant-garde, sharp style, as if from the future pickup truck has conquered the market, has not yet been officially launched, and the pre-order has exceeded 2 million.
It has to be said that the advantage of Chinese businessmen is to "look left and right", look at peers, and quickly copy and surpass after seeing, while Musk's product creativity is characterized by "looking ahead and looking backward", which stems from the yearning for the future, or a review of the past - the science fiction novels, science fiction movies and games he watched in his childhood gave him a lot of inspiration.
03 Incomplete and beautiful
In the embarrassing years of South Africa, science fiction was a rare delicacy for him.
"Stern Moon", "Base Trilogy", "Robots and Empires", and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" are all his favorites. These youthful dreams were the source of his career, and he acknowledges that the "base trilogy" is the foundation of his creation of SpaceX. The original idea for the Cybertruck came from Rust in 007: Underwater City and the cars in Blade Runner.
Outside of the fantasy world, Musk's childhood was undoubtedly a nightmare.
In kindergarten, Musk is seen as a freak with mental retardation, because most of the time he is in an absent-minded trance, and when he thinks about a problem, all the people and information from the outside world will turn a blind eye in front of him.
His relationship with his classmates is also strained, because he is different, he doesn't please others, he doesn't understand human feelings, he has no friends, he is a lonely and gloomy person. He and his brother Kimball were often beaten beyond recognition, and bullying was considered a virtue in South Africa at the time.
At home, Musk has to face his rogue father. He will use the worst words to insult Musk to nothing. Later, to the pain of adult Musk, his father married his stepdaughter, who was more than 40 years younger than him.
Several of Musk's girlfriends have admitted that although Musk hates his father, he also has a shadow of his father in his personality.
Many times, he will also fall into the darkness, using the most ugly words to rudely accuse and abuse the people around him, pouring out the shadow of his childhood and the pressure of reality.
Like his father, "his emotions would go back and forth between clear skies and dark days, between passion and numbness, between cold and alienation and true feelings, and occasionally fall into that "demonic mode" of dual personalities that frightened those around him. ”
Perhaps it was the depression of his childhood and the ups and downs of his growth that made Musk obsessed with risk, turmoil and drama, making him instinctively resist the quiet years and yearn for the endless baptism of torrents and storms.
His younger brother Kimball said, "Drama is the best companion in his life," and "He can't live without this, he can live and die for it." This drama also caused the energetic entrepreneur to deviate from his duties as an entrepreneur and intervene in a series of political disputes and public events, causing a lot of controversy.
Isaacson's heirs were celebrities: Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Kissinger... One of the most influential is "The Biography of Steve Jobs".
Steve Wozniak, Jobs' partner, once said of his former partner: "There is a very important question, is it necessary for him to be so mean, so ruthless, so indulged in dramatic conflict?" Wozniak imagined that he would be friendlier if he managed Apple himself. But he is also aware that in that case, many of Apple's unbeatable products may not come out at all.
After the emergence of Steve Jobs and Musk, two love-hate figures, Silicon Valley even has an index: "bastard productivity" - the more a person is a jerk, the more he can stimulate the highest productivity and make unimaginable results.
This also gives inspiration to the current Chinese entrepreneurs: seeking efficiency rather than stability, seeking depth rather than perfection, and seeking difference rather than common ground.
By secular standards, heroes are not only scarred, but also inevitably flawed. The destiny of entrepreneurs should be to devote themselves to what they want and want, and to gamble on groundbreaking products, rather than falling into cultural involution and indulging in the myths and delusions of becoming morally perfect and saints.
The public should not blame entrepreneurs, find faults, and project excessive imagination.
Recently, Ren Zhengfei's speech has been widely disseminated and aroused a lot of resonance.
"A perfect person is a useless person", if you always take a microscope and a magnifying glass to study and discover the shortcomings of excellent people, it can only show that the audience is short-sighted and has a dark mentality.
An intolerant, pan-moralistic society is destined to have no place for genius.
Exceptional people are often a combination of genius and bastard, and a person's shortcomings and strengths are two inseparable sides of the same coin, and opposites complement each other.
In this sense, Musk is a broken-arm Venus, and only when it is mutilated can it be beautiful.
"If we don't accept the complexity and multifaceted aspects of his personality, can we still send rockets into space? Can we still have the epochal transformation of the electric car revolution? Sometimes, the great innovators are the children who dance with risk, and they refuse to be disciplined." They can be reckless, awkward, and sometimes even cause crises, but perhaps they're also crazy – crazy enough to think they can really change the world. ”
Musk's self-confession is equally thought-provoking: "To all those who have been offended by me, I just want to say to you, I reinvented the electric car, and I want to send humans to Mars with a rocket spacecraft." But if I were a calm, easy-going ordinary person, do you think I would be able to do that?"
Typography | Ran Run
Edit | Zhengfeng Rotating Editor-in-Chief | Xia Kun