Over the summer, I made it a goal of mine to try and finish one book. I hate reading, but one book I really found myself engrossed in was Elon Musk, by Ashlee Vance. In 2019, one would be hard-pressed to find a person who does not know who Elon is. He is the owner of a plethora of companies, such as Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company, while also having created Paypal. While people know of him as a quirky genius billionaire, Ashlee’s book offers an interesting insight into the mind of Elon.
Gardner talks about Freud’s observation about the child at play when talking about the personality tradition. Elon, just as a playing child, “create[d] a world of fantasy which he takes very seriously” (Gardner, 24). For Elon, that was two main goals: to conserve what we have left on earth and to create a new future for us by looking at other planets. While the first one seems reasonable, the second one seems definitely lofty, given the current circumstances that we find ourselves in.
However, that has not stopped Elon at all. When Elon bought his position as chairman of Tesla, he made the company into what it is today through sheer determination. He has a history of treating his employees like garbage, and he is definitely not someone you would want to find yourself working for, unless you share the same interest and drive that he has. He worked beyond his pay grade in a sense, learning about engineering, finance, and entrepreneurship in his time prior to and on site of his job. He collected these experiences throughout the various ventures that he indulged in throughout his life, such as his education at UPenn, his internships, and his startups, which further cultivated his creativity and allowed for him to apply himself in his current ventures.
His diversity in experience coupled with his expectations for his employees gives us an insight as to what kind of work environment Elon runs. In the autobiography, Ashlee describes the SpaceX hangers and offices as open spaces with all kinds of workers surrounding Elon and giving him various inputs, trying to negotiate with Elon with budgeting, deadlines, and expectations. This culmination and open interaction among specialists reminded me of the Lehrer article, and the instance of having to break down an idea on a foundational level in order to identify the problem and offer the solution. Although Elon is a collector of these experiences, he does not match the level of expertise that his Ivy League subordinates have. The possible reason as to why Elon’s model works is because his workers break down the concepts in order for Elon to rationalize when making an appeal, and Elon offers his vision and criticism (often by firmly rejecting the appeal), while the workers potentially use the process of explanation in order to actualize the problem and fix it.
Although Elon exhibits a high level of energy and motivation to his work life, his personal life is another story. Freud talked about the redirection of “libidinal energy into ‘secondary’ pursuits” (Gardner, 24). Ashlee Vance highlights this in the autobiography, talking about Justine Musk’s battle with having to deal with both being with and not being with her husband. She would constantly find herself alone with her husband detached from their personal life, although Elon would remain controlling in any facet that he could. When their first child died as a stillborn, it was a major contributor to the end of the marriage due to their inability to cope, with Musk still remaining career oriented and refusing to deal with it. This leads into the idea of intrinsic motivation. Musk may have been feeling something akin to a “period of flow”, where his motivation to continue was so strong, that he was able to put aside something as heavy as the death of his child in order to continue moving forward (Gardner, 25). He was immersed in his field, living and breathing in his companies.
Elon Musk is an innovator (and probably every other word in the thesaurus that goes with innovator, creative, etc.) in every aspect of the word. He is truly inspiring, and his ability to not only create these highly imaginative visions, but to also be able to back up those visions makes him a creative, and in my opinion, a source of salvation from a potentially bleak future.
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