#048: The Elon Musk Story: Actions Speak Louder Than Words
“Pay less attention to what men say. Just watch what they do” — Dale Carnegie
Elon Musk is undeniably on the Mount Rushmore of great visionaries, thinkers and entrepreneurs of this generation. Just to get ahead of it, I’m not an Elon bro. I don’t view him as the messiah and I have issues with much of what he says. But it makes me sick that simply saying that he’s one of the geniuses of this era, which I don’t think can even be debated, would get pushback these days from a sizable segment of the population. We live in the influencer and social media age, where people do a lot of talking without much action to back it up. This is even more pronounced when living in a city like Los Angeles. But time and time again, Elon Musk has proven to be able to walk the walk and is already responsible with completely reinventing multiple industries.
PayPal, his first project of prominence, was the first large scale digital commerce company that set the stage for Venmo, CashApp, Apple Pay, Zelle and more. That alone would place him on a small list of developers who created a new sector within finance and it led to a $1.5 billion dollar exit in 2002 with it’s sale to eBay. But then Elon decided to tackle and reinvent aerospace and space travel with SpaceX in 2002. Followed by transforming the automotive industry when he launched Tesla, the world’s first large scale electric car company in 2008. During this phase, the expenses, risk and debt that he took on to grow Tesla and SpaceX nearly bankrupted him; but the fact that all of these companies were not only launched, but have become leaders in their respective sectors and highly profitable is astounding. Since then, Elon has launched StarLink, the world’s leading satellite wifi provider. Of the roughly 8,000 satellites that circle Earth, 4,500 of those satellites are owned and operated by StarLink. Just one impact of this company came in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and took out their Wi-Fi and internet infrastructure. Elon Musk and StarLink were able to come in and provide much needed WiFi – which they are still providing to this day – in order to keep their military communications, hospital operations, weapons systems and so much more function properly to prevent a full takeover by Russia. And then of course he completed his controversial takeover of Twitter, now branded as X, in 2022.
Elon Musk has always had a big personality and brash manner of how he operates. He believes that he’s right and many of the times he’s been proven true. But this isn’t a characteristic that sets him apart from other geniuses or people truly great at what they do. Would it be safe to say that Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, Kanye West, Tiger Woods and so many other ‘greats’ have their fair share of personal flaws, large ego’s and controversial actions over the years? I’d say so. But the public has become accustomed to this behavior and are willing to put up with it – to a degree – when someone is truly great. So then what was Elon’s grave mistake that caused a large percentage of people to now view him as a terrible person? He had the nerve to shift his political views over the years from the left-leaning/democratic team to the right-leaning/republican team. I consider myself a Centrist, but certainly left-leaning. So I don’t align with many of Elon’s political beliefs and stances on issues in recent years. But to allow this one issue to overshadow everything else that he does is at the very least stupid and could one day become a fatal flaw.
Of the top issues for the decades ahead, I would place climate change, social media’s influence on people, wall street’s dominance of the financial world and people’s access to technology as a few of the major issues to watch out for. Regardless of Elon’s public political stances or statements, I challenge you to find someone who is addressing these topics more directly. My generation claims to be pro-environment, but simply aren’t willing to reduce the number of packages that Amazon ships to us, the meat that we eat, cars that we drive or vacations that we like to take. Personal action is admirable and should be strived for, but a technological/government solution will likely go further in addressing the actual change that we need. That is why I feel it is short-sighted and misguided to villainize one of the forces who have proven to be a contributing factor to improve the largest issues that we face for the generation ahead. At the end of the day, actions speak louder than words.
