Elon Musk's Three Secrets of Success

Elon Musk has had his fair share of negative events: personal and family crises and traumas, and his businesses on the verge of failure. He has expressed that he would either have to be severely incapacitated or dead in order to give up. His ex wife Justine Musk has expressed him as someone who is obsessed with having success, and others have said he focuses on an objective, and does whatever it takes to achieve it. He has his own version of a ‘reality distortion field,’ and encourages others to push beyond what they believe is possible in order to attain an outcome. For example, he has stretch goals: when he was making the Tesla Roadster, he expected the vehicle to get to New York, and then the result was that the car arrived in New Mexico, twice as far as what was expected.

A stretch goal is something that Musk uses amongst his engineers at SpaceX and Tesla in order to get them to achieve beyond what they believe they perceive they are capable of achieving. It means that if someone believes they are capable of building a car that will travel 100 miles, Musk expects the car to go 200 miles. The final result, although it may be less than what is set on the deadline, is still more than what was originally perceived by the engineer team thought they could make possible. Stretch goals often make the team quite stressed, and Musk has been known to be quite demanding of his engineers, but the result means that he is able to have products that are on the market, and he has made NASA’s budget feasible, has relaunched the rocket industry, and made electric cars have widespread demand.

During the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, Elon Musk tried to sell Tesla to Apple, and was worried that the company would go bankrupt. When he sold the shares in his company PayPal, and invested in starting Tesla and SpaceX, he had to borrow money for rent. Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008, and SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket failed three times before they had a fourth successful launch.

Musk has said that SpaceX and Tesla were only alive “by the skin of their teeth,” and when he was on the verge of losing everything he put money into both companies and was grateful that they both came through. He had $40 million left around the time of the Global Financial Crisis, and both companies he worked in order to pull them back into a stable status.

The Global Financial Crisis was a black swan event; it’s an event described originally by Nasim Nicholas Taleb, a wall street trader. He described a black swan event as the following:

• The event is unpredictable;
• The event results in widespread severe negative consequences;
• After the event, people will rationalise the event as would have been predictable.

For example, people are now saying that the international global COVID-19 pandemic was a predictable event, because with disease modelling and epidemiology, we could have prevented these. There are historical pandemics that have been repeated, such as the Spanish flu of the 20th Century that was widespread, it is thus to be expected as medical and epidemiological experts are now claiming that a pandemic will occur. Asia has had epidemics for a considerable amount of time, for example, the swine flu, the avian flu, and historically, the father of the modern Chinese public health system, Dr Wu Lien Teh, helped prevent the Manchurian plague from becoming widespread, and introduced surgical masks in the early part of last century.

In an article by Murphy and Jones (et. al 2020), they describe the pandemic as a potential black swan event, and outline how this event could have been prevented through the same kinds of processes that are applied during a hazardous chemical containment process. By this, they are saying that this adverse widespread event was in fact predictable, even though it was highly regarded as “unpredicted,” and through their argument, it can be then deduced as a black swan event.

For something to overcome a black swan event, it is regarded by Taleb as “antifragile,” so Elon Musk, having gone through a number of black swan events both personally and professionally is a man who is clearly antifragile. In Taleb’s book Antifragile, he describes people and nature as being able to be beyond resilient, and the systems that make gains as a result of being antifragile are the ones that are not just resilient, but determined to become stronger from the reorganisation of the system.

Antifragile patterns in nature follow like a fractal, nature tends to reorganise things in order to improve them, for example from chaos comes order. The global pandemic has led to the World Economic Forum setting an agenda for the Great Reset. That is a system wide reorganisation for something that was at capacity, and then set to make regains for something that was not working. It seems that Elon Musk seems to emulate this, where he is able to go away, to rethink his systems, and then to improve upon them.

He recommends anyone who wants to start a business to have a high pain tolerance, and has mentioned one of his friends as describing a company as ‘eating glass and staring into the abyss.’ So Musk seems to be both antifragile, resilient and obsessed with his life purpose. This leads to the pondering, was Musk privileged to learn his life passion early on in life? Often when someone learns their life passion in life, they are able to focus on something and rise above the common levels of everyday success. As Justine Musk has said, Elon Musk is obsessed with what he does, so his passion helps him to overcome his pain and what is necessary in the reorganisation of his businesses, personal life and systems in order to succeed.

References

Black Swan Event - Guide to Unpredictable Catastrophic Events. (2021). Retrieved 10 March 2021, from https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/finance/black-swan-event/

Elon Musk: SpaceX and Tesla alive 'by skin of their teeth'. (2021). Retrieved 10 March 2021, from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43365710

Elon Musk's ex-wife explains what it takes to reach 'extreme success'. (2021). Retrieved 10 March 2021, from https://www.businessinsider.com/justine-musk-reveals-the-secret-to-becoming-great-2015-5?IR=T

Frank, T. (2021). How Elon Musk Gets So Much Done: 5 Productivity Lessons. Retrieved 10 March 2021, from https://collegeinfogeek.com/productivity-lessons-from-elon-musk/

Ma, Z., & Li, Y. (2021). Dr. Wu Lien Teh, plague fighter and father of the Chinese public health system. Retrieved 10 March 2021, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4791421/

Murphy, J., Jones, J., & Conner, J. (2021). The COVID‐19 pandemic: Is it a “Black Swan”? Some risk management challenges in common with chemical process safety. Retrieved 10 March 2021, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7235516/

Taleb, N. (2013). Antifragile. London: Penguin.

The Great Reset. (2021). Retrieved 10 March 2021, from https://www.weforum.org/great-reset