The Good, the Bad and the Elon
By Ashlee Vance
392 pages. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers
Is it possible for someone to be too smart for his own good?
That’s the question that echos through Ashlee Vance’s fascinating biography of Elon Musk. The SpaceX founder comes across as a brilliant visionary with a messianic zeal to improve the lot of humanity. His ultimately goal is to establish a settlement on Mars to ensure the the human race survives if Earth gets wiped out.
And yet, his brilliance, massive ego and single-minded ambition put him miles above the mass of his fellow human beings, who he tends to mistreat in the worst ways. At his best, he has the brilliance and charisma of Iron Man’s Tony Stark, at his worst, he turns into The Simpsons’ C. Montgomery Burns. And not in a funny way.
For space enthusiasts who have pinned their fervent hopes on Musk, this dichotomy raises a couple of disturbing questions. What sort of civilization would the man create on Mars? And how long would it be before settlers would want to toss him out of an airlock sans spacesuit?
Vance’s biography traces the billionaire’s path from a rough childhood in his native South Africa, where he was bullied by his father and schoolmates, to Canada, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles and outer space. Along the way, Musk and the brilliant employees he hired demonstrated the ability to look at how things were done in the banking, automotive and launch industries and apply new technologies and approaches to produce successful software, automobiles and rockets.
Musk is an enormous risk taker who has nearly bankrupted his greatest successes — Zip2, SpaceX and Tesla. The only company Musk is associated with that doesn’t seem to have ended up on the brink is Solar City, a provider of solar panel systems. It is the company Musk has had the least involvement in.
Vance makes it clear that if a few things had gone different, few people outside of Silicon Valley would have ever heard of Musk. But, he also demonstrates that the tougher things got, the more it seemed to bring out Musk’s iron will and ability to absorb enormous levels of stress.
Vance portrays Musk as often succeeding in spite of his worst instincts as a know-it-all who has no trouble belittling, berating, terrorizing and discarding subordinates. He always seeks to hire the best, challenging them to meet his exacting standards and to work insane hours in the process. Along the way, he left a fair number of people questioning his tactics and tactics.
“Elon’s worst trait by far, in my opinion, is his complete lack of loyalty or human connection,” one former employee said. “Many of us worked tirelessly for him for years and were tossed to the curb like a piece of litter without a second thought., Maybe it was calculated to keep the rest of the workforce on their toes and scared; maybe he was just able to detach from human connection to a remarkable degree. What was clear is that people who worked for him were like ammunition: used for a specific purpose until exhausted and discarded.”
Vance does a good job of describing the early struggles of Tesla and SpaceX, which both came to the brink of collapse at the same time. There are a lot of fascinating details about Falcon 1 launch operations in the remote Marshall Islands, where the first three launches failed. The next one had to succeed — and it did.
The rest of the SpaceX story is not as well told. Chapter 9, titled “Liftoff,” is the weakest section of the book. It’s a description of SpaceX’s factory, current operations and battles with its rivals that is so breathless one wonders whether the author passed out writing it.
There’s no doubt that Musk and his SpaceX team have done amazing things, but there are subtleties the author missed. For example, NASA accepted much higher risks than usual when it partnered with SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation (now Orbital ATK) to develop launch vehicles and supply ships for the International Space Station. NASA was fully expecting failures, which is exactly what happened to both companies over the past year. Two supply ships were lost.
For these reasons, the U.S. Air Force was right not to rush to certify the Falcon 9 to launch military payloads. United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V and Delta IV launch vehicles, which the military uses, were developed in close cooperation with the U.S. Air Force with much less tolerance for failure. These two rockets have flown about 100 times combined without a catastrophic failure. The Falcon 9 failed on its 19th flight.
I wish Vance had talked more to Musk’s competition and others in the industry familiar with the way he operates. It would have provided a broader perspective. At times, the author is too willing to accept some of Musk’s claims at face value.
“Blue Origin does these surgical strikes on specialized talent offering like double their salaries,” Musk complains in the book about rival billionaire Jeff Bezos’ company. “I think it’s unnecessary and a bit rude.”
That’s hilarious coming from Musk, who has turned raiding other companies’ talent into an art form. Partnerships and supplier relationships are routinely used to identify top talent to hire away, and to learn enough so SpaceX can bring production in-house. This is widely known in the industry, and it is one of the primary reasons why SpaceX is so hated within it.
Vance recognizes the central role that a human settlement on Mars plays in Musk’s long-term plans. He doubts that SpaceX employees would work 60 to 80 hour weeks without Mars looming out there as a long-term goal. To paraphrase William Adama, it’s not enough for them to work; they must have something to work for. Let it be Mars.
Unfortunately, the author doesn’t spend a lot of time examining the feasibility of this grand plan. Musk admits Mars is a “fixer-up of a planet,” a clever phrase that masks the fact that Mars is trying to kill you six ways to Sunday. It’s got the terrain of Arizona, the weather of Antarctica, the atmospheric pressure of a vacuum chamber, the radiation levels of an X-ray machine, and soil that is toxic.
For a gambler like Musk, the Mars settlement will the ultimate roll of the dice. It has the potential to go wrong in much worse ways than anything he’s ever attempted. Going bankrupt would be the least worst thing that could happen.
What little musing there are in the book about Mars involve Musk talking about how to get the Mars Colonial Transporter working so he can send enough colonists there to make a settlement viable. If he can solve that problem, it will be an easy task to set up an inflatable greenhouse structure for people to live in.
They’re going to need a lot more than that. Hopefully, Musk’s thinking on this is deeper than it appears in Vance’s biography. Or that it will become a lot deeper as he gets closer to actually sending people there.
One gets the sense that you need someone with Musk’s talents to get people to Mars, but that you wouldn’t necessarily want to live in a colony he ruled given his lack of empathy. SpaceX workers go home at the end of their long days; they can quit if they get fed up with the working conditions or Musk’s behavior. Those options will be much more limited on Mars.
After much effort, William Adama and his crew eventually found an Earth that was not at all what they expected it would be. One hopes that Musk doesn’t have a similar experience.
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“Blue Origin does these surgical strikes on specialized talent offering like double their salaries. I think it’s unnecessary and a bit rude.”
That’s hilarious.
Who wrote this?
Douglas Messier of course. But I agree that putting the title of the book and the name of the author right at the start is a little bit misleading.
I was confused by that at first glance, thinking Vance had written something for Parabolic Arc to promote his book.
Its a proper cite for a book review
It’s definitely a correct citation. It just ended up that it’s placement made it look like the title and author of the post when I’d scrolled the text into place to read the story.
Read the book as soon as it was released. It really is a fascinating tale and although it does a good job of highlighting Musk’s deficits, by the time you reach the end,you somehow feel like you understand Musk better than before.
But I agree that the SpaceX parts became quite weak after the focus switched from the Falcon 1 to the Falcon 9, that was a bit of a disappointment.
Vance tends to accept Musk’s claim that SpaceX is actually profitable. I’ve encountered some considerable skepticism about that. Especially with the low pricing and the low launch rates to date. Some people I know think the company is living off investment.
And that raises an interesting issue: you’ve got a company with a massive backlog that everyone (comm satellite industry, NASA, Pentagon) is depending upon that’s operating on the fiscal edge in an industry that’s very binary (rockets either work, or they don’t). It’s a black box in terms of its profitability.
I also wish Vance had examined some other incidents in the company’s history. The lawsuit against the safety expert who inquired whether there was an anomaly on an early Falcon 9 flight seemed poorly supported. The mass firing of employees in alleged violation of the WARN Act. And Musk’s attack on a US Air Force procurement officer that Shotwell ended up disavowing when asked about it in Congressional testimony.
I encounter a lot of skepticism about SpaceX’s profitability too, mostly in space blog comment sections like this. Perhaps your unnamed skeptics are a bit more credible than the general run of commenter. I would be interested to know why you think so.
There are a lot of folks out there who seem convinced that the old-line NASA contractors have figured out pretty much everything there is to figure out about rockets and that the way they do things is the only way things can be done – i.e., expensively.
Quite a few of these folks are current or former employees of said old-line aerospace firms. If these are the people whose opinions you are reporting, I can certainly see where your skepticism comes from, but, if so, it’s misplaced.
One characteristic of truly disruptive new businesses is that they find ways to change the fundamental rules of the game that have previously been seen to apply. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google all succeeded hugely by explicitly not doing things the way they had always been done.
This isn’t a recent phenomenon either. Examples can be found throughout American history. Eli Whitney arguably had even more influence on the course of 19th Century industrial history than even Henry Ford had on the 20th Century.
In the first half of the 20th century a company called Addressograph-Multigraph had a nice business enabling other businesses to do document runs of from a few dozen to a few thousand copies of documents ranging from a few pages to hundreds. They sold small offset printing presses. They had a very impressive big factory in Cleveland. Then Xerox came along, changed the rules completely, and put A-M in the ground.
That’s what SpaceX is doing in aerospace. They have a total of 4,000+ employees. 3,000+ work in the Hawthorne, CA plant, but there are a few hundred others scattered around at SpaceX’s other facilities such as the MacGregor test site and the south Florida launch complexes. With this many people, SpaceX designs, builds, tests and flies nearly everything they make.
In contrast, ULA employs roughly the same number of people at their Decatur, AL plant as SpaceX does at Hawthorne, but Decatur is a final assembly facility. It’s fed by tens of thousands of sub-contractor employees scattered all over the country. SpaceX, by design, has an enormously smaller sub-contractor “tail” than ULA. Elon has to pay three or four brigades. ULA has to pay the freakin’ Chinese Army. Just given the orders of magnitude disparity in head count, SpaceX has a much smaller “nut” to cover.
Given that SpaceX cranks out half or more as many complete rockets per year as ULA – and more all the time – with a fraction of the total workforce, it also seems obvious that the SpaceX production facility is much more highly automated than is typical of old-line aerospace.
Everybody uses CNC machine tools to make individual parts, but after that the processes used for assembly in most aerospace plants look a lot like Henry Ford’s pre-River Rouge operations – lots of individual people clustered around fixed workstations laboriously fitting up every part by hand.
It’s well-known that the Tesla plant is highly robotized and otherwise automated. The industrial engineers who set up Tesla have doubtless been tasked with doing likewise for SpaceX. It seems obvious that a Merlin 1-D, for example, has both a lower total part count and a much more robotically convenient and accessible basic shape (cylindrical) than, say a Tesla Model S. A Model S goes out the door for roughly 100 grand. Given that Merlin 1-D probably has a much less complex and expensive production line than the Model S is it too much of a reach to believe that the Merlin, even allowing for the lower annual production volumes, might cost no more than a million a pop? Elon has said SpaceX launches have a 70% gross profit margin. Million dollar – or less – Merlins make that math work out fairly well.
All good points.
A 70% gross profit margin? Wow! That’s really high. I guess you would need those margins if you’re pumping out that more rockets per year than your competitor while launching half as many or fewer.
How are SpaceX deals structured? There’s the initial deposit, but then what? How much is paid after a successful launch? Are there milestone payments along the way?
Out of curiosity, how many people do you think SpaceX would have to employ if most of them were working more normal hours instead of 60 to 80 hours per week that are expected? How do you think such a change would affect profit margins on launches?
I’m sure not all those people are classified as exempt from overtime, so the additional hours cost money. But, it’s not like hiring additional folks and having to deal with benefits and other related costs that come from increasing the f/t headcount.
Also, what portion of the workforce are temps and interns who are working extremely long hours without such benefits? How much does that keep costs down? Do SpaceX’s rivals use these same practices? And to what extent?
And what about the lawsuits claiming people were fired in violation of the WARN Act. There are also accusations of denial of overtime that employees worked. What about that? Do you think the charges are true? How widespread is it? What impact would it have had on this 70 percent gross profit per launch?
Then there are the other things that SpaceX is doing. Like the commercial crew program, where it has to lay out funding to complete particular milestones but doesn’t get paid until afterward. Total payments on those agreements are hundreds of millions of dollars. Even with a gross profit margin of 70 percent on each launch, how does SpaceX cover those costs given its low launch rates?
And how far has SpaceX gotten on its satellite program? That’s a highly speculative venture that is going to cost billions that won’t see profits for many, many years.
The point is folks are skeptical about SpaceX’s overall profitability. You can focus as much as you want on costs per launch vehicle, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
Musk jumped on the Hawthorne facility actually for a janitors storage room with a time portal to the year 1958. He buys all his raw materials for a mere pence plus the hamburger for his cafeteria. This is how he is achieving such profits. 🙂 play on a S. King story.
Exhausted, stressed people make more mistakes, miss obvious problems — this isn’t rocket science, it’s well-known human psychology. At a certain point, not hiring more people doesn’t lead to higher efficience, but higher error rates. This is less of an issue in an office at sea level; more of a problem when things can go boom on the ground or in the sky.
Tesla seems to have insulated himself from any criticism — never a good thing, because the metal cannot be buffaloed into submission. Nor can gravity. We shall see how this all pans out — hopefully without too many more losses of critical experiments and supplies, let alone lives.
Yes, but economies of scale has always impacted the cost of launch vehicles. Look at the cost of mass produced systems like Minuteman versus similar vehicles with shorter production runs.
In terms of the 70%, the question would be is if he is using total costs or marginal costs in determining that. Remember the marginal cost of a Shuttle launch was around $450 million, the rest of the total cost of $1.5 billion per launch was from annual overhead of around $3 billion/year and R&D costs amortized over the entire program history.
Also the management layers… are a lot higher in NASA and legacy contractors, hold overs from previous projects etc…
More to the point, it is also the way that NASA and the USAF want it done. I talked to a number of retired engineers from contractors who told me they pointed out ways it could be done cheaper, but NASA or the USAF wouldn’t buy into it.
> encounter a lot of skepticism about SpaceX’s profitability
> too, …
>
>….There are a lot of folks out there who seem convinced
> that the old-line NASA contractors have figured out pretty
> much everything there is to figure out about rockets and
> that the way they do things is the only way things can
> be done – i.e., expensively.
> ….
>….One characteristic of truly disruptive new businesses is
> that they find ways to change the fundamental rules of the
> game that have previously been seen to apply. …
Musk fans say things like that a lot. The problem is Musk hasn’t innovated anything of significance, and his prices are much higher then fans like to assume (or misquote). Mostly with SpaceX Musk insists all the quality efforts, techniques, etc engineering and manufacturing developed in the last half century was a stupid mistake. Not just in aerospace engineering, but pretty much all engineering. Focuses on very old designs, cuts a insane amount of corners, and has a very high failure rate. Plays nasty in business deals with others.
The hero worship does not extend to others in the business. Especially if you talk to them in private.
As to if SpaceX is profitable. Likely not directly. Tesla for example sells the cars for less then the batteries cost them, but make money selling carbon credits to other companies. SpaceX had most of their R&D cost picked up by NASA and DOD (after some political encouragement). But 4,000 employees in a engineering company, with facilities, equipment, etc (Musk tends to buy expense stuff, and in expensive areas.) runs $300,000 – $400,000 per person per year. So $1.2B-$1.6b per year basic expenses, (plus other expenses paid out to other firms new projects, etc), divided by how many flights a year?
> In contrast, ULA employs roughly the same number of
> people at their Decatur, AL plant as SpaceX does at
> Hawthorne, but Decatur is a final assembly facility…..
Note though, ULA have to fulfill full Federal Acquisition Rules on their booster sales to gov, which triples to quadruples cost to venders. And they do engineering of everything to much higher quality. Hence why of the hundred flights of the Delta-IV and Atlas-V (including all the test flights), they had paying customers cargo on every flight, and they were all successfully delivered to orbit. SpaceX has had 3 mid air explosions, a couple other partial explosion, several other systems failures, and eve after a large number of test fights, still destroyed cargo.
>…Given that SpaceX cranks out half or more as many
> complete rockets per year as ULA – and more all the
> time – with a fraction of the total workforce, it also seems
> obvious that the SpaceX production facility is much more
> highly automated than is typical of old-line aerospace.
Actually not. Wouldn’t help much given the low production rates.
The concerning part – is SpaceX actually does things in ways that drive costs up, not down. A lot of heavy expenses to do everything in-house, not sharing overhead across a industry, spending a fortune to develop from scratch (granted using old designs) that could be purchased for lower cost.
Makes you wonder where he’s cutting corners to compensate?
I agree, but I expect if he had he would have lost access to Elon Musk, so it was a tradeoff he made. Hopefully some other author will pick up from that point.
Companies being willing to take a bath on per-piece sales in order to butter up high-status clients in hopes of securing a long-term contract that will (hopefully!) be profitable over time, or to look more important and successful than they are, is not unheard of outside the aerospace industry.
Of course, you can only get away with this for so long, before you run through all your money — and if you lose money on every job, and this can’t be solved, a long-term contract is a form of slow institutional suicide.
It is unfortunate he fell in with the Mars crowd. If he had read Dennis Wingo’s book “Moonrush” he would have had robotic systems already laying the foundations for his lunar facilities. As it is he will just continue to see his Mars schedule slip as it becomes apparent that Mars direct is a lot harder and more expensive than it looks. It is like trying to settle the New World with rowboats.
Mars could end up playing to all of Musk’s weaknesses that are discussed in the book. He tends to grossly underestimate what is required to achieve something and lays out schedules that assume everything will go perfectly. Then he ends up about three years behind schedule (Falcon Heavy, for example) and struggling to execute on the next stage. It’s a pattern that has repeated itself at SpaceX and Tesla that Vance chronicles pretty well in the book.
A Mars settlement has so many moving parts and so many challenges in so many areas the schedule is going to move to the right for multiple reasons, and all cost estimates will be completely out the window. Musk tends to come across in the book as seeing Mars as an engineering challenge to be solved. But, it is much, much more than that. I really hoping his thinking is deeper than it appears in the biography.
I don’t care about his schedule moving to the right, this was completely expected. What he accomplished so far is really great and I hope he’ll continue.
Yes, even if he fails there will be a lot of advancements to be picked up and used by others.
Yes, I had the same sense in listening to the audio book. Sadly engineering is probably the easiest part. The difficult parts will be human physiology, closed ecosystems, additive manufacturing, and of course the economics. I hope Elon Musk has solutions there, but hearing his idea of nuking the poles of Mars makes me think he hasn’t really looked beyond the rockets.
That is also why the Moon is key to Mars, as a test ground for all of those technologies. But even more important is starting the work now on Earth. In my mind, and work, that really should be the focus of spaceports in addition to rocket technology and that is also developing space settlement technology needed. That is why I see spaceports as multiple use space industry parks, not merely launch sites.
Somehow I also suspect he knows less about subsistence farming than I know about rocket science — and doesn’t think that it matters, since if it were important he’d already know it all.
James Nicoll, science fiction reviewer with a numbers-oriented view of space colonization, frequently compares Mars and Moon base boosters to the Darien Settlements, such as they were…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
Yes, food production is basic to sustainability. Jamestown’s first wave included miners and aristocrats who planned on getting rich from all the gold in the New World, not farmers and so most perished. The Pilgrims too were mostly town folk who taught farming was easy, until they had to do it.
The first test for any settler for Mars, or elsewhere, should be to demonstrate by doing the ability to produce enough food to survive on for 1-2 years using the technology and resources available where they are going. But that is too practical to make a requirement 🙂
Also the failure to pick any farmers, or put the “100” to work farming, is to me another indication Mars One hasn’t really thought out what it will take to settle Mars.
Yes. All this. (You’ve seen the “Galt’s Gulch” cartoons that illustrate how well this would work with modern technocrats, right?) It isn’t as if this hasn’t been studied, extensively, and as though there weren’t documented examples of “self-sustainble” communities failing to do so, including the recent case of the Biodome fiasco.
But this is what happens when “hard” science people think that biology must be easy, since those “soft” types can manage it, and farming must be easier, if even uneducated peasants can do it, so of course they will simply have to, as the popular fiction puts it, “science the shit out of it” and it will be as easy as 3-D printing a new wrench or something to grow enough food to survive on (without growing things that can kill you one way or another.)
Of course NASA knows better, which is why the fact that the ISS crew was finally able to have a little fresh salad with their meals was hailed as the amazing achievement it is — an earth crop, successfully grown in space!
Of course it was only a few heads of lettuce in a terrarium, just try feeding a city on that! But you can’t tell the wild-eyed space colony faithers that. Why bother testing in the deserts of Terra or starting on the Moon first? You can’t doubt, or worry about breaking eggs while making a Space Colony Omelette.
I think there is some relevant quote about people who don’t study history, as well — but why look back at the past, when we are the Wave of the Future? And future historians will write about the sad fate of the Hellas Basin Party, as they write about the Donner Party today.
Agree
Always wanted NASA to use SpaceX tech to do robot mission to the moon.
I want to see a red Dragon mission to mars to pickup a few rocks.
Not mention the first tourists to see the backside of the moon before Orion/SLS ever flies humans.
sorry, but I think that you are wrong.
He would be in the same place right now if he was heading for the moon.
In fact, dragon v2 is not just for LEO, but the ability to go to the lunar orbit and back.
As it is, SpaceX and others will go to the moon and will make use of SpaceX’s launch and dragon capabilities.
Finally, I have no doubt that anything designed for mars will first be used on the moon. There is a difference, but not that much.
No, a lunar rover mission could be done for around $100 million or less using a F9. He would have probably have done at least one by now to scout for water. Carnegie-Mellon (Red Whitaker) has had a design of a rover/lander for years for just that purpose, all they need is money to launch it.
And remember, he started out with the idea of funding a robotic lander to Mars and just dropped it when he saw the mission cost. It wouldn’t have been so shocking if he had looked at a lunar mission. He could have up bought up Lunarcorp for almost nothing just as he did Telsa and used it for his lunar missions.
I hate to point this out, but it is similar cost to put 1 kg on the moon or Mars. As such, putting a rover on either would still incur a load of money, and most likely FH working.
Lunarcorp was not baselined on a FH but an EELV.
Also similar cost is just looking at launch cost. Getting the rover/lander to the surface of Mars is a lot more difficult, and therefore more expensive, not to mention establishing a good communication link and working around the time lag. So total mission cost for going to Mars is a lot higher.
People always talk about how great it will be when FALCON HEAVY flies.
But is the faring any larger than on a FALCON 9?
Isn’t the limited volume of a FALCON HEAVY a big problem?
Volume WILL be an issue with the F9/FH. In fact, in many ways, they are volume limited.
However, the one thing that FH DOES give, is the ability to launch same volume into GEO, TLI, or even TMI. There is nothing like that today.
But in general, beyond LEO, weight is the issue, not volume.
BTW, that is a big part of the issue with BFR.
It was originally going to be multi-cored. Elon has hinted that it will NOT be. I assume that is so that they can gain a lot of volume, which if launching humans, will require that.
Here again, I believe it was mars because of the whole “been there done that” aspect of Luna. America, Russia, China, Japan, India etc .. I believe Musk by passed Luna because of the “yawn factor” from people in general ..
Doesn’t stop people from climbing Everest…
Take a good look at musks actions and interactions since getting involved in spaceflight.. Mars society… Funding the Mars analogue station… This is a man who has read the case for mars and is trying to make it happen..as a savvy businessman he will obviously endorse activities that strengthen his own company… So orbiting the odd ba 330 or even dropping the odd payload on the moon doesn’t detract from that..but I’ve no doubt the ultimate goal is mars
I agree, He never allows the conversation to move to “lets do the moon first” kind of talk. He always returns the focus to Mars.
Will it really matter if SpaceX is just at the bottom line a transportation company? I believe that remark made at that MIT confrence was telling. Asked about utilizing the MCT for the moon he stated, that if you have a ship that can cross the atlantic then it would be foolish to not use it to cross the english channel.
The reason I believe they do not talk about the moon is they do not want to get bogged down there but very much plan to sell rides there as well. There isn’t any “been there done that” for Musk. for the press for the workers, investors, NASA etc.. it is all MARS or BUST…
No offense, but is this a paid posting? 😛 This book has been out quite a while now and most of your audience will probably have read it anyway, so what is the reason for this posting?
No. It’s not a paid posting. It’s my review of the book. I wrote it to review the book.
I’m rather surprised by all the confusion about this. You guys have read book reviews before, right?
Why not? It’s consistent with the personalities of a lot of idealists, obsessive, abrasive, demanding, with a twist of aspergers in Musk’s case.
By all accounts Mother Teresa was an utter bitch to work for. Wikileaks Julian Assange is a creepy little fuck. Florence Nightingale was a sour-faced cow. Issac Newton was a vindictive back-stabbing bastard.
are not a lot of great business leaders also
“Psychopathy (/saɪˈkɒpəθi/), also known as—though sometimes distinguished from—sociopathy (/soʊsiˈɒpəθi/), is traditionally defined as a personality disorder characterized by enduring antisocial behavior, diminished empathy and remorse, and disinhibited or bold behavior. “
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
You can’t take away his impressive successes but we are free to imagine what has driven him. Nothing here has mentioned the relationship of him and his father. Apparently, he and his brother were abused. In a talk show conversation the author said that Elon’s brother informed him that it was up to Elon to share (unload) their father-son relationships. Elon has shared little.
One has to consider that how he was treated as a boy and a son has translated into the exploitation if not abuse of thousands of workers. The 20th Century has so many documented lives that were molded by tragedy or extreme circumstances and either led to far greater tragedy or to incredible discovery and glory.
One can imagine that the great goal of Mars colonization hangs as the golden carrot attracting and driving his ‘X workers (as Doug likewise considers). The promise of Mars is like the promise of eternity in paradise in the company of 72 virgins. Its the high tech Silicon Valley version of Islamic martyrdom. It is possible that his workers are drinking the coolaid and those that trek outbound to Mars will bear tragedy like Jamestown settlers. For the society, essentially world society, Elon’s ideas and goals are constructive but one has to ask if it is really necessary to abuse and exploit to achieve these goals. How many times have I heard the question – will we get there in my lifetime? There is always something we want to see happen in our lifetime, Elon in his lifetime, but does it justify abusing or risking many human lives?
According to the book, he chose to live with his father even though his mother was awarded custody. That’s telling.
Don’t know South African law but around here unless your mother is a convicted axe murderer, she will be awarded custody of the kids. So he could chosen the lesser of two evils – his dad. With all I’ve said and conjectured, Musk is clearly well-intentioned. I think he has adapted and has been influenced by his rich and famous peers who on the most part have recognized the responsibility of the ultra-rich (Buffet-esque). While his SpaceX mission is rather self-centered, he has adapted its purpose and developed and invented other projects (Tesla, etc.) as vessels for improving humanity. Our self-centeredness of our youth can fade and evolve into something better. Whether he ever changes his labor policies inside SpaceX and Tesla remains to be seen.
I thought it was clear from the book that he went with his father because his father was a consulting engineer and gave Elon unlimited access to tech toys like computers. His first commercial success was writing a gaming program in his early teen years (early 1980’s).
I suspect he also learned his attitudes towards workers from his father in the Apartheid Era in which he was raised. And NO I am not saying he is racist, merely that he saw, from his father’s perspective, that workers were disposable and replaceable at will, clogs in a machine, and so he just doesn’t have any other baseline to view labor from.
Its not mutually exclusive. Despite such advantages, he could have had or apparently did have some stressful relation with his father.
I think making us multi-planetary Species sooner rather than later is pretty important. And I bet that if Musk doesn’t get it done in his life time it will not be done for hundreds of years. Whether that’s true or not I bet he believes that, therefore that’s his goal.
I thought it was interesting that he said to colbert that the most important technical challenge to be over come today is sustainable energy, not going to Mars.
The backing up humanity on Mars argument has some weaknesses. Imagine the following scenario:
Giant killer asteroid heading toward Earth. So big it will wipe out most if not all human life on Earth. Too big to destroy. And we discover it too late to do anything about it.
As 8 billion people contemplate their deaths, Musk pipes up and says, “Well, at least we’ve got 500 (or 5,000 or 50,000) people that I sent to Mars that will carry on. I’ve saved humanity.”
“Ah, yes, Elon,” the world responds. “But, you could have saved Earth. If you had put your money, effort and genius dealing with the asteroid threat, you might have saved 8 billion people. What we you thinking?”
This is one of the reasons Elon’s backing up humanity argument will be a hard sell politically. No politician wants to make that sort of an argument with an asteroid bearing down on us. The numbers don’t work.
MCT would get to that asteroid well before SLS!
Is that why we have SLS? Asteroid defense?
Seems to me Musk will make a reusable affordable giant heavy lifter before he dies.
What we decide to do with it is important!
I find red dragon very exciting because to me it is great progress in getting to Mars affordably.
Isnt it up to others to exploit SpaceX tech as customers or by copying them.
Why NASA doesn’t seem to have a polar lunar robot mining program detailed using FALCON heavies is beyond me?
Rand Paul just said on the tube we need term limits for the congress and senate 🙂
I can only dream I guess!
Because for NASA space begins and ends with Mars thanks to the “Mars Underground” that captured the agency in the 1990’s. The LRO basically required a Presidential command in the form of VSE to get approved.
Under what administrator for NASA did this happen.. who brought to the agency all mars agenda people?
Send the Weiner-mobile loaded with high explosives to blow that ‘roid to mistherines! It will fit in a Falcon 9 fairing won’t it?
Well said
Doug
An asteroid to big to stop from hitting earth with years warning and moving to Space, moon or mars the only option.
You just outlined a great movie 🙂
ELONS ARK
They are ways to whittle down even the largest credible impacter. The key is have the deep space infrastructure to send multiple missions to it quickly and the lead time to react to it.
The problem with existing asteroid movies is they are looking at it from the perspective of aerospace engineering, not civil engineering, and seek a single mission “magic” bullet to stop it.
Also in terms of “Arks”, the better strategy is to simply use the same habitat technology to dig in on Earth. Even after a major extinction impact event the Earth will still be a pretty good place to live.
“When World Collides” Paramount Pictures, 1951, starring Richard Derr, Barbara Rush and Peter Hansen
Pretty good movie
https://youtu.be/YN_siKJXevU
That is why creating a cislunar industrial capacity is the key first step, especially as it will help accelerate the NEO mining industry. Not only will it make it more likely to identify such a target early, but also develop the infrastructure of fuel depots, space tugs, etc. needed to address it.
There will be a NEO reaching Earth in the future. Its our choice if it will be in the form of an impact killing millions, or in the form of consumer products benefiting millions.
Killer Asteroid is not a likely scenario for the end of civilization or humans. Way down the list. If you consider the recent Ebola outbreak, a killer pathogen is unlikely that we could not foil. Remember that despite flu epidemics, starvation and wars, we quadrupled the human population between 1900 & 2000. But there are several things that could set back civilization in serious ways. So you go to Mars, Moon, Roids to expand civilization, create a space based economy that supports and eventually moderates the ups and downs of the Earthly economy. The future space economy will be based on robotics not human labor so there will be an incredible potential to throttle the space economy. So its really a means to minimize human suffering, achieving something more utopic, and lastly to save us from extinction. The world’s economy will be controlled by A.I.; were on this path now. Once our Earth and Space robotic-driven industries supply humans more resources than we demand, population growth ends and reverses, then the world economy, maintained by A.I., won’t have to make hard choices that sacrifices some humans for others. Until then, for the remainder of this century and a bit more, that’s what humans will be doing – making hard choices as we run the gauntlet. Also, I don’t want to imagine that some future tech will repair all the damage we do to biodiversity, climate and healthy ecosystems. That is something we have to take responsibility for now and part of the formula for improving our lot.
Maybe Google could save the earth instead? And you could make exactly the same argument for any one of a number of apocalyptic scenarios… Why is the onus on Musk to solve them? It’s easy to criticise the rationale for building such a civilisation on Mars but blaming musk for the opportunity costs of doing so doesn’t hold any water
You are absolutely correct.
The reason why I want to see us get several private space stations going, is that bigelow is adamant about getting to the moon. And he is correct. If all he does is put a space station up, then nations will be only so-so interested.
However, if he is showing that he is working towards going to the moon, then all nations will want to be on his station and putting together their space group. And yes, they will insist on going to the moon as well. NO nation wants to be left out of that. And yes, SpaceX, amongst others, will be launching continuously to make that happen, and lower their costs.
I think it’s hard to deny that Musk has to be credited for changing the way a hidebound aerospace industry – and government space agency – works. That is a good thing, overall.
But the most beneficial effect of SpaceX may be paving the way for more New Space companies – some of which may find a way to harness the zeal and energy of youth while rewarding them with greater loyalty. Competition can have good effects not only for customers, but also workforces, especially when the workforce talent in question is scarce.
Vance’s book doesn’t seem to be the indispensable Elon Musk book, but perhaps it’s a helpful contributor to telling the full story.
That is something I am hoping as well, especially as his strength is almost entirely in rockets.
“That would be the case if a new, significant space transport technology would be used by SpaceX.”
There’s no validity to that statement. The technology is not most of the cost of traditional launch suppliers to their customers, their business organizational model (predicated on spreading as much pork around as possible) is.
“Because his behavior shows that his objectives are not really altruistic and honest.”
How are they not honest? He wants to settle Mars.
This will be of immense benefit to all humanity when it happens.
What ill means are you pretending he is using? The people who work for him can go somewhere else if they want to.
Distruptive and Sustaining innovations:
“Sustaining innovations are innovations in technology, whereas disruptive innovations cause changes to markets. For example, the automobile was a revolutionary technological innovation, but it was not a disruptive innovation, because early automobiles were expensive luxury items that did not disrupt the market for horse-drawn vehicles. The market for transportation essentially remained intact until the debut of the lower-priced Ford Model T in 1908.[2] The mass-produced automobile was a disruptive innovation, because it changed the transportation market. The automobile, by itself, was not.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
That is what SpaceX is about .. mass production. from engines on down the line. He brought in automobile engine line engineers because Musk wants to mass produce rocket engines more in line on how automobile engines are built. Not the traditional way it is done.
Didn’t Musk say they will be doing 400 engines a year next year? How many main engines are built for the Atlas V per year? The Delta IV? Not massed produced for consumer consumption. More like relative to what others are producing per year? I do not buy into the launch a day senerio yet, but I believe Musk does include that for long term priced reductions.
500 Proton launches over 50 years, about 10 launches per year, about half with the RD253 and then the RD 275. It uses 6 main engines or about 60 per year…. still short of producing 400 per year.
So what you are saying, with an absolute and dictorial command economy a dictator can order something to be done and damn the costs to launch militiary payloads and it can be achieved? Wow.. who would have guessed.
I believe delivering 400 engines per year with an open market .. is just a TAD diffrent than what was achieved under the Soviet command economy.
You need a hinge for the Orion capsule? Well Congressman X has a mom & pop shop in their district, they can manufacture the hinge pin and send it to another mom & pop shop in my district, they can manufacture the hingle plates and send it to another mom & pop shop in my district and they can assemble the hinge and send it to another mom & pop engineering firm in my district and they can certify the assemply of the hinge .. on and on and on..
Musk stated that in typical aerospace cost of materials were 25% plus of total costs but he found with NASA contractors the material costs were only 3% of total costs.. THAT is what SpaceX went after to bring material costs more in line.