What can you learn from Elon Musk’s way of thinking?
How Tesla and SpaceX’s CEO manages large disruptive projects, is what makes him so unique and, at the same time, extravagant.
Although a couple of years ago he was almost unknown, his success has put him in the media often enough to turn him into a very well-known person. Admired and sometimes hated.
Last year he was Time Magazine's “Person of the Year”. In 2022 he has become officially the richest person in the world, as stated by Forbes Magazine, and these last few days he has been in the news because of the acquisition of Twitter. What makes Elon Musk such a different person?
When we hear some of the interviews he has recently given, we see him talking about topics, such as colonizing mars, autonomous cars, humanoid robots, and brain implants.
These statements, that sound impossible to most people, will probably realize in the mid-term future and, as they progress in smaller steps, will look almost natural to us when looking back. Musk has the capability to see them in advance and, to him, it seems obvious that they will become reality. That’s why he speaks with such confidence when telling us about them.
It probably seems so obvious in his mind that these events are going to happen in the following years that I’m not sure who is more surprised: people, that have a very hard time believing him or Elon, that cannot understand why we are not seeing how obvious is for them to happen.
It is all about disruptive innovation
For the definition, according to Wikipedia:
In business theory, disruptive innovation is innovation that creates a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances.
It isn’t easy to detect disruptive innovation when it’s starting. At this stage, growth is still slow and there is no evidence that it will change how we do things for the affected market.
But, at some point, the new technology is perceived so much better than the previous one, that users start adopting it. At this stage, it is still more expensive and sometimes more difficult to operate and maintain, so only the “early-adopters” are eager to take the risks, but in a short period of time, advantages grow and price lowers so fast, due to economies of scale, that the adoption curve rises and before we realize, it replaces the older technology.
One of the latest, and easiest to understand disruptive technology, is smartphone penetration.
In 2007, mobile phones had been around for a couple of decades already. We used them to talk and text people and had become almost ubiquitous.
But when Apple unveiled its iPhone, something started to change. At that moment people didn’t realize how profound the change would be. Neither did some of the leaders in the industry such as Nokia, Ericsson, or Motorola which continued their product roadmap as if nothing happened. But Apple, a newcomer to the mobile phone industry, introduced a new concept for the phone: a device that could connect to the Internet and browse content in a similar way we did on our computers.
Another newcomer did see the opportunity and partnered with other manufacturers to launch a similar version of the user interface. Android was born and Google started the domination of user, and location data.
The first two or three years were of slow growth. These new phones were more expensive than the old ones, but customers started to see the benefits and switched. The later progressive adoption reduced prices helping in its acceleration.
In a few years, most people had smartphones that could be bought for less than $200. This price reduction also had a side effect: connecting people in countries where wired communications didn’t develop due to infrastructure costs. With this cheaper-to-roll-out technology, they started connecting to the internet and to the wide range of services that it comes with.
Today, in 2022, this disruption seems so obvious to everyone, but, back then, only visionaries, such as Steve Jobs, could see it coming.
There are lots of examples of similar technologies, such as digital photography or streaming video. Each of those has its own story on how a newcomer, like Netflix, disrupted several decades-long and well-stablished businesses changing how users interact with technology in a significant manner.
Splitting large projects into smaller tasks
This is why the further in time we perceive the announcement, the harder it is for us to get an idea of the possibility.
It is a lot easier to imagine how Tesla can reach volume production and build 10 to 20 million cars in ten years once we know they already have four factories opened and looks like they can repeat the process to build as many as they need. It looks feasible now and probability rises in our minds.
But, affirmations such as “having a one million population on Mars” are a lot more difficult to process. It seems like science fiction to reach that goal.
And here is where Elon Musk can see ahead of us. He can figure out the odds of it happening. He already thought about If the technology is ready, if it is economically viable, and what is needed to achieve the goal. He has calculated the chances of its success and knows that he needs to start mass-producing rocket engines today. This determination and confidence when assessing his goals is the key to his success.
Also breaking huge complex projects into smaller, more feasible tasks, makes the goal easier to manage. Regarding Mars’ colonization, we are talking about a fifty to one-hundred-year time horizon. It is impossible to plan it as a whole today. It has to be split into individual projects such as:
- Mass production of Starship rockets and Raptor engines.
- First Starship on Mars to bring infrastructure and bots.
- First human on Mars
- First permanent base with a small crew of humans
- Construction of a larger base
- Reach one-thousand population
- Industrial facilities and mining
- Construction of a small city
- Reach fifty thousand population
- ….
These steps, which could be spanned along 20 or 30 years, have to be achieved one by one in order to continue the gigantic task of building a human colony on Mars.
Other large projects such as the Tesla humanoid robot or AI-related goals, although on a smaller timeframe should be approached in a similar manner.
When we see these incremental steps, progress comes in a more natural and easier to comprehend manner. When we try to look forward, it seems impossible but, once inside, or looking back into the past, it now seems it couldn’t have been done any other way.
Disruption is difficult to detect when it is at an early stage but Elon Musk talks about it in such a natural way, that seems he is understanding all the implications and explains it as if it couldn’t be in any other way.
Another characteristic of human progress is exponentiality. This is also a hard-to-imagine way of growth. Most of us think of growth as a linear phenomenon while people such as Elon Musk can figure out exponential growth and take it into account when assessing his projects and setting timelines and budgets.
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