Ambition and willing to take a risk is not a rare thing.
Musk is no different from the huge number of people involved in startups except that he is investing more money. Many of us are investing all of our valuable time and money in risky ventures instead of saving and taking the rational path in life.
And stop acting like Musk is doing this for pure altruism. He stands to make a lot of money and get written into the history books if these companies are wildly successful. And from everything I've read he has enough of an ego to make those goals a pretty significant reason for these companies.
"Musk is no different from the huge number of people involved in startups except that he is investing more money. Many of us are investing all of our valuable time and money in risky ventures instead of saving and taking the rational path in life."
Seriously? Like Are you actually serious when you write this? You seriously believe that the only difference between Musk and the huge number of people working on startups is that he is investing more money?
You do not think that it has something to do with working on hard problems that nobody thinks are worthwhile until later on. You also do not think it has to do with him actually solving said hard problems. You also do not think it has anything to do with him being smart enough to manage multiple fields like a physics, computer science, engineering and design and have in depth discussions about rockets and space explorations at the same level as he can about electric cars and software? You also seriously believe that someone who is motivated by money would go and try to start a private rocket company that can deliver people to Mars and is reusable? Seriously? They wouldn't just go make some web app and "flip it"? This response is atypical for me but it's hard for me to read this sort of response and respond normally.
Not to mention, risking everything when you have $10k in the bank is a hell of a lot different than risking everything when you have $50M. In the first case, if you fail, oh well, you get a job for a year or two and earn it back. In the second case, the impact is rather... more significant.
Honestly? The person with $50M is risking a lot less.
If you only have $10k to your name, that $10k might the difference between being homeless or not. If you have $50M, even in an extreme worst-case scenario (say your investment suffers a 99% loss) you still have $500,000, more than most people accumulate in a lifetime!
As someone who actually did start a company with a few grand in the bank, it felt like a lot less of a risk than it would now to put 99% of my savings into a new venture. I had a couple engineering degrees, and could have easily gotten a new job if I'd failed. If I risked my savings now and failed it would have a much more significant impact on my life.
One way to understand this is to include employment capital in your calculations. A person with $10k in the bank has considerably more employment capital than investment capital. A person with $50M in the bank has insignificant employment capital compared to their investment capital. So risking 99% of their investment capital would be considerably more, as a percentage of their total capital, than the first person risking their entire $10k.
> If I risked my savings now and failed it would have a much more significant impact on my life.
Is that really true? I guess I've never been that rich, so I don't have any personal experience, but it seems to me like the lifestyle impact of going from $10M to $1M would be a lot less significant than going from $10k to $1,000.
I agree with your analysis of "total capital", but I think you're neglecting the real lifestyle factors.
I can only speak for myself, and I'm not at $10M, but I can definitely say that for me the lifestyle change would be much greater in that case than in the 10k to 1k case.
$10M is, as they say, 'FU money'. $1M could be, maybe, but with a much different standard of living. Where I live you could easily blow the million just on a fairly standard upper middle class house. Losing most of your 10k on the other hand, while unfortunate, would hardly be life changing because it's not enough to do much with in the first place.
Now, if you reliably earn $1M a year, then sure, losing the 9M probably wouldn't be a huge issue. But that isn't the case if you're sitting on $10M from selling your startup.
> because it's not enough to do much with in the first place.
Uh...I mean, $10k would pay my rent for slightly more than a year (I don't live in SF). That's more than enough time for me to find a new job. On the other hand, $1,000 would pay my rent for less than 2 months. That's plenty of time for me to get evicted and be out on the street.
Yes, of course, initially. The risking it all period isn't when you're considering spending a few million to buy some rockets. But then the day comes when you're this close to finally succeeding, but you're running out of cash. You need more now to make payroll, and there's nowhere else left to get it. Sure, you could cut your losses and walk away with 3 million, but then a) you probably wouldn't have risked the 47M in the first place, and b) you likely wouldn't end up where Musk is now.
This isn't a hypothetical. As the article describes, there was a point when he was begging or borrowing every cent he could. I don't know what his personal financial situation would have been had it failed, but I doubt he held much back.
"Ambition and willing to take a risk is not a rare thing."
It is a bit more nuanced than that. When a 3 lb terrier starts barking and growling at you, you have one reaction, when a 175 lb rottweiler does the same you have a different reaction. Those situations are, on their surface, exactly the same. You are being threatened by a dog. But the realities of the two situations are very different because what is at stake. The terrier can be kicked across the room, the rottweiler will likely kill you. It is really impossible to know how you are going to respond until you're actually in the situation.
Perhaps not surprisingly, for a lot of people there are things worse than dying. And for many of the people I've known letting down people who are depending on them ranks pretty high on that list.
Musk is very different from "most" people. We know this because he has been in the fire and we've seen the result. Look at the stories of the fall of the twin towers on 9/11. Most people paniced and froze, a small number of people took action and evacuated.
At the critical stress level, when your limbic system cannot take it any more, it takes over. Some people become rabbits, some people become tigers, and the really weird thing is that I don't think you can really have any idea which way you'll go until you experience it. You can believe you will do one thing or another, but you don't really know. Scott McNealy shared with me that all you could do as a leader was to put people into really stressful situations, to see where they broke, and then note which side of the coin they fell on. It is why the armed forces put new recruits in to actual life threatening situations, to watch them panic and evaluate their response.
I don't know Elon, but if he is as characterized in interviews and by third party accounts, I don't think he altruistic so much as he is driven. The most amazing person I have ever met in person who is truly driven was Dean Kamen at one of the FIRST competitions in San Jose. It seemed like he could live to be 150 and still not get done all of the things he was driven to do before he passes. It isn't about altruism and it isn't about wealth, it is all about getting the important thing done. What ever that is. And someone who is driven AND functional in the face of extreme stress, is, in my experience, a rare individual.
Ambition and willing to take a risk is not a rare thing.
Yes, most will agree. But having ambition, taking risk and being successful is a rare, rare thing. Especially after you made your fortune AND having the gut to risk it all. Now THAT is a rare thing.
I think that's a weak argument. Apple doesn't make the profits cause it builds iPhones in California. It does so because it chose the Eastern shores for a strategic reason. If your aim is to go cheaper, then to not take advantage of global-trade is really going to set one back by a significant margin. But I understand that Elon Musk is a patriotic South African who wants to create jobs for South Africans, in South Africa... oh, wait, I meant, the United States.
Doesn't matter. Elon still relies on government funding because he's selling to government.
It's no different than when Rockwell/North American built the Space Shuttle.
The biggest problem is that his ideas are just so boring and uninspiring. How about a new idea for a change? (Hyperloop isn't more exciting than High-Speed rail)
Being known for someone that "did something for slightly cheaper" isn't exactly awe-inspiring. Sucks that millennials are stuck with him for inspiration.
SpaceX's manifest for this year [1] shows 7 US government launches, 6 commercial launches, and 1 SpaceX-paid R&D launch (Falcon Heavy). Yes the US government is pre-paying for some R&D for Crew Dragon, but no, it doesn't add up to 90% of revenue.
>Everything they're ... planning on doing, has already been done.
So landing a rocket after launch to re-use that rocket has already been done? Going to be interesting when they are the first to do so but it's already been done. I'd love to hear how you reason that.
Doing things in a more efficient, cheaper manner means innovating new ways of development, testing, and building. More 'affordable' ventures into space can lead to an array of improvements. More research satellites being sent into space, as an example, because instead of costing $12 million to ship into space it costs $4 million [0].
I'm sorry you don't see the value in such things, but rest assured it is there.
[0] figures made up, can't be bothered searching for accurate pricing
What other nation or private entity has come up with a visionary idea in space industry? Let me remind you he first thought about sending a life capsule to Mars on a former ballistic missile. Isn't that visionary enough ya?
Musk is no different from the huge number of people involved in startups except that he is investing more money. Many of us are investing all of our valuable time and money in risky ventures instead of saving and taking the rational path in life.
And stop acting like Musk is doing this for pure altruism. He stands to make a lot of money and get written into the history books if these companies are wildly successful. And from everything I've read he has enough of an ego to make those goals a pretty significant reason for these companies.