Elon Musk: The art of putting dreams on space, AI, and memes.
Lessons from Elon Musk
I think we should build a habit of “reading” people we admire, people who inspire us, or the people whose bits from life are what we yearn to introduce into our own. Well, reading has been in human repertoire for ages. Books have been incorporated as part of our civilization since ages, be them in the form of religious doctrines, legal documents, works of fictions, or academic prints. Reading books facilitates a voyage through the mind of another person — a person who is probably smarter or eloquent on the topic one is writing on than the readers. With no refute, reading books is definitely a wonderful tool for language acquisition, worldview formation, and self-understanding. But I think we should expand the reading habit beyond published words.
We should be engrossed in reading people in actions, not just reading passively about visionary people but actively reading them. When it comes to representing successful people like Bill Gates or Peter Thiel, the mainstream media has one obvious function: to divide readers across spectrums, usually in two extremes. So when we read “about” successful people, we are basically being programmed to either hate them, or admire them, or juggle between these two extremes based on the inputs from journalists. This might be the one of the incentives to start reading successful people from scratch and quit reading about them on news outlets. This way we can form a very personalized comprehension about innovative people and their underlying principles. Obviously, it’s easier said than done, but it is also way easier not done than done. So here I go with my attempt to read a person who both inspires and amazes me: Elon Musk.
Disclaimer: It is a very subjective analysis of Elon Musk. Many of the things that I will embark on writing may not make sense to you or Elon Musk if he ever gets a chance to read this informative article. That being said and if you’re still voyaging through these sentences, you are always welcome to continue reading. 😅
One of the heuristics I adopted to select a person to dive deep into was to look for a person who had thrown himself into a super-risky industry ahead of time and still managed to make fun out of it. If a person choose problems so hard that he excites other to get back to work the next day with unparalleled energy and optimism, he is definitely a person to look into deeply and with reverence. Elon exhibited such tendency all along the way, and I devoured several of his interviews to make sense of his vision and mindset — at least on my personal level.
Sleeping today and waking up in future tomorrow
Perhaps the brevity and the absurdity of life is best responded and served with our bravery to choose what we want to make out of the limited time and space at our disposal. One of the stunning aspects of Elon Musk when it comes to his deduction of time, money, and cognition is that he opts long-term problems over short-terms. I will say Elon Musk thinks in an evolutionary scale when it comes to sorting out the most important problems to solve. Thinking in an evolutionary time scale definitely makes you realize early on that a tiny mass of sponge can evolve into a giant animal; it also cautions us that the complete extinction of human civilization and planet Earth is not an improbable event. So when it comes to choosing a problem, Elon has always chosen problems that don’t spiral down into other problems in the future but will secure the fate of humanity during its course of advancement.
With Tesla cars, Elon Musk is heralding automobile industry towards a more sustainable direction. But when you’re in a business that has not yet caught the imagination of public, one has to be really shrewd to be realistic and to possess a blue print to increase the viability of a company. Probably Elon and the team make Tesla cars more appealing by the combination of aesthetics, simplistic design, safety, autonomy, and their cause for environmental protection. One criterion to judge the integrity and seriousness of an entrepreneur is to observe how interested he remains in the problem he babbles about on magazines or Vanity Fair interviews after massive gain in wealth. I think Elon scores well. Recently he had allocated 100M $ carbon capture prize to fight climate change.
SpaceX is another of Elon Musk’s ventures which he started out of utter fear that aliens might start futuristic companies on Mars and become indomitable competitors if he slacked even a bit. That is just a proof how far his consciousness pervades when it comes to be ahead of everyone including aliens in the game he chooses to play. But Elon puts the mission of SpaceX in a nicer way when he sits for an interview. He says that he started the company to make human civilization a space-faring civilization and to ensure a potential way out of any possible existential threats like asteroid collision or global warming.
There is also a visionary communication technology being tested by SpaceX: Starlink. It is developed with a goal to make internet more accessible and fast, prioritized for the locations where traditional methods of connections are not yet in access due to geographical or other constraints. This will probably eliminate the compulsion to move to urban areas for a better connectivity and help to mobilize the population across various geographic locations. Starlink coupled with remote working might be a revolutionary way to reduce population density and pollution in big cities. Starlink might also usher an era of lesser government surveillance or censorship.
SpaceX is not all about competing with Aliens — be them existent or just imaginary — it is also about democratizing space. SpaceX is targeting to launch an all-civilian mission to space called Inspiration4 during which four people who are general citizen will be among the world’s first civilian to cruise into space by the end of this year. Essentially, Elon musk is putting his dreams out there in sky and space.
Here comes the fun part: As Elon mentioned in JREs, Elon was inspired to manufacture flamethrowers from the movie Spaceballs. Cool, but you know what’s cooler? SpaceX made starship more pointy even if it deviated from an ideal engineering parameter because Elon Musk was inspired from movie The Dictator. Elon brings romanticism and aesthetics along the way while solving some pressing problems of our generation and makes the future something worth looking forward to. If he is not the nicest of Aliens among us, I don’t know who is.
Another of Elon Musk’s involvement is Neuralink. The immediate mission of this venture is to relieve human suffering by treating brain injuries. Over the long term, Neuralink plans to augment mind’s bandwidth and facilitate brain-machine symbiosis. Wait till your brain and Neuralink’s implant sit in a conversation with each other for a Turing test. Future is exciting, for sure.
Elon Musk once said in an interview with Sam Altman, “I feel fear quite strongly.” Yes, he does. Seriously. He cofounded OpenAI out of utter fear that one day AI systems might be the sole reason for the failure of his attempts to save Earth and human civilization. Also, it is not idiotic of Elon Musk to take AI as an existential threat, for he is contemplating hard about broad AI and its evolution over decades.
Elon’s simple heuristic apparently is to solve the problems of future, to work on longer timescales. He hates labels like businessman, business magnate, investor, but prefer to be called just an engineer. Maybe dismayed by job titles or MBA-ized meetings, Elon started loving memes more than people or aliens unless they are the part of memes. Elon probably decided long ago to not play by the normal standards, not to hang a badge of an “entrepreneur” by solving problems of today, that were created yesterday, and might have been averted 42 days earlier. But that’s not how the real world works. It has lots of parts into motion, and it is super hard to detect whose part has rust on it. But screw that game, he might have told to himself, I want to step outside of the box and kick that box instead. He is kicking it hard; all there remains is its landing on Mars. So he didn’t comply with the rules most people were playing with rather invented his own. Maybe partly for money, partly for stamping his name on the pages of history, but mostly for solving problems no one or very few were solving and when there were limited or non-existent incentives and infrastructures for doing so.
Negative feedback mechanism.
Elon often mentions about “First Principles Thinking” which is a way of thinking from the bottom-up and understanding the fundamental mechanisms before solving a problem. Another striking tool at Elon’s disposal is his obsession with negative feedbacks to have extra eyes of scrupulous scrutiny to make his products better over time.
Well, biologically, we operate with negative feedback loops. You are visiting the Sahara desert, and scorching heat starts to interfere with your body temperature. Your central nervous system takes a notice and tries as hard as possible to dissipate the heat that your body is getting from the environment : you sweat profusely, for instance. So criticism is inherently intended not to cripple but to inform and increase our survival rate till bunch of apes evolved and equipped themselves with languages and jobs and employed themselves as journalists and made humanity dread the word ‘criticism’. Positive feedback is great, but negative feedback must not give you headaches either. Negative feedbacks should lift off your burdens, for you find some errors that you might have been biased enough to be conscious about them. Negative feedbacks do all the good unless they are from some institutionalized or propagandized journalists. That you don’t want to be wrong forever, or don’t want to be coaxed by the illusion that you’re already perfect is a wonderful mental tool to acquire. Such mental tool might probably made and will continue to make Elon Musk amass as much resources — money, mind, policy, meaning, or whatever — as he can and deploy all these resources to get the parameters right and have a glance at the brighter side of the spectrum.
Mindset behind spitting neuronal impulses on Twitter.
When everybody is focused to get inside your head and pluck every neurons possible to find your secrets, the default conviction will be to keep your cognitive faculties in check as much as possible. Or even when every word that leaves your mouth will be a potential headline, the survival or social instinct is to watch your mouth quite frequently and obsessively. But Elon practices his freedom of speech often in public, on Twitter. I am not sure how appropriate it is for a public figure like Elon Musk with such an influence to put his personal judgements online on subjects of global essence like COVID-19. I will only say that nothing will make a man of his repute and influence to put his thoughts — which are quite controversial sometimes — on public scrutiny but robust balls or gut or curiosity.
I will conclude the ultimate quest of Elon Musk as such: Not to be distracted much by money, fame, or hate. Not to abandon your craziness that you conjured and conserved against all the traps the world planned on you. To showcase that craziness publicly on Twitter or products. Not to trade your curiosity and passion for a clean name. To question authorities, challenge status quos, and share memes. To hold little into the innocence of a child for ever. To be a human sometimes.
