Elon Musk. I love the guy. He says what’s on his mind. Sometimes that’s not always the best thing to do, but that’s who he is.
He’s usually the smartest guy in the room and not afraid to show it. And unlike the “Smart-Guy” syndrome in most companies where it’s usually some Princeton (or similar school) prick that needs to prove his worth or justify his place in said room, Elon is decades and billions past that.
Think about this for a second. Elon has out-banked the banks. He’s out-car’d Detroit. He’s out-spaceship’d NASA.
Let’s go back to the 1990s when PayPal and their rival X.com – not Twitter, but the other X.com Elon started (he’s owned the domain for decades) – were in the same University Avenue building in Palo Alto, toiling away until they merged into what we now know as PayPal.
PayPal was the first peer-to-peer payment platform to gain global acceptance where I can send my buddy $10 to cover lunch electronically. No paper checks.
Wow, the banks were pissed.
Then they aligned with eBay so buyers could collect funds through instantly rather than waiting for the paper check in the mail.
Wow, now the banks are really pissed and so is the United States Postal Service.
PayPal goes public, making millionaires and creating the so-called PayPal Mafia, who went on to found companies you may be familiar with – LinkedIn, Palantir, YouTube, Yelp, and a company that shared a building in San Francisco with Twitter, and was acquired for over $1 Billion by Microsoft – Yammer.
Then he helps fund a couple of guys without much business sense yet with a great idea for an electric car and eventually took control of the company. SIDEBAR – Check out the documentary The Electric Car which takes you through the process.
The industry laughed at the idea of an EV becoming anything more that a novelty item.
While he’s no rocket scientist, he started a company called SpaceX that makes rockets. He makes rockets better and cheaper than NASA. How’s that even possible? In fact NASA contracts with SpaceX because they can do some things better, faster and cheaper. If I was a taxpayer I’d be pissed. Wait…..I am a taxpayer. But let’s dive into why I have a man-crush on Elon beyond the fact he’s outmaneuvered three of the largest industries on planet earth.
We know Tesla. It’s synonymous with the electric car. Sure, Detroit dabbles poorly in the EV market, and China has a thriving EV industry with technology that may have been liberated from Tesla itself. Names like Fisher, Rivian, and Lucid may also ring a bell. A faint bell.
Here’s where he got me. Car companies advertise. They spend billions of dollars on billboards, mailers, television, print, online, and anywhere else one could fathom advertising dollars are spent. Yet until recently, Tesla resisted spending nary a single dollar with the newspapers, magazines, television networks or Google.
And man, they were pissed, have been pissed and are pissed off as I write this. And they hold grudges, have a grudge, and show that grudge in glaring headlines every time Elon says something off-color, Tesla stock drops, or they have a recall on their vehicles. Never mind all car companies have recalls.
Remember the 2014 CBS 60 Minutes episode when they added in sound effects of a car accelerating? Oops.
Or a year earlier, the New York Times wrote a hit-piece review on the Model S, with the now infamous photo of the car being loaded onto a flatbed tow truck after running out of juice. The Times’ writer, John Broder, wrote glowingly about the technology, and also how he followed the Tesla guidelines, yet wasn’t able to reach his destination. Ran out of juice he said. Stuck. Dead in the water.
When Tesla challenged his story, he claimed it was factual.
And then like an old episode of Perry Mason, here came the gotcha. Elon and Tesla are not stupid. They had a form of GPS software in that car and knew exactly where, when, how far and how fast that car went. He literally drove in circles in a parking lot. Did the Times retract the story and fire the journalist? Nah…they’re The Times.
Story after story on Elon is an ass. How Tesla is a horrible place to work because Elon is anti-union. How the Fremont, California plant is racist. Never mind that most of the workers are brown and black.
California politicians started an anti-Elon campaign for various reasons. Mostly because the United Auto Workers Union wanted to herd sheep and he didn’t care for the idea. The pandemic was another issue, as Sacramento leadership shut down the state and he got into a war of words with a few elected officials. Florida and Texas, two states with no state income tax, were relatively open and its citizens living fairly normal lives. Elon threatened to pack up and move.
Enter Lorena Gonzalez. Lorena who? She had her 15-minutes of fame when she tweeted “F*ck Elon Musk” on May 10, 2020. Stating, and I quote: “California has highly subsidized a company that has always disregarded worker safety & well-being, has engaged in union busting & bullies public servants. I probably could’ve expressed my frustration in a less aggressive way. Of course, no one would’ve cared if I tweeted that.”
Worker safety and union busting, she said. Right.
Hello, Texas. If they aren’t union jobs, it’s better to have less or no jobs, apparently. Gonzalez is now back to her roots as a union leader. Apparently the paycheck skimming from union dues is better than the taxpayer dime.
Now on to Twitter. Elon liquidated a whole heap of Tesla stock to help finance the purchase of Twitter and take the company private.
A bit of a disclosure here – I was in the Twitter building on average of 3 times per month for several years , working with various members of their tech-leadership teams. From the small offices on Folsom Street to the secure-floors on Market Street, I saw the growth first-hand.
Twitter got bloated. A company loaded with hipster-bros in skinny jeans, retro sneakers and shirts a half-size too small, everyone was scurrying to their next meeting, laptop tucked securely under their arm. Meetings to have another meeting. I was in many of these meetings in the main board room – 30 chairs wrapped around a lacquered split-in-half tree table.
Twitter became a company of like-minded liberal dweebs, who’d cross the street to avoid the mid-Market locals and step over or around the homeless camping on the sidewalk as they trot to their luxury shuttle bus to get them the hell outta that pit of an intersection. Entitled schmucks who thought they had something to do with the success and growth of Twitter. Well, that came crashing down pretty quick.
Elon whacked the majority of the engineers. Cleaned out the executive suite. Required staff actually come into work and document what they’re working on. What a concept.
Twitter had been accused of suppressing information and promoting liberal ideology during the 2020 election cycle, going so far as suspending the New York Post’s account for reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop. And when Elon began uncovering the lies and coverups, the media fought back. Hate Speech became the buzzwords for what Twitter now represented, according to the press.
And what exactly is hate speech? Maybe we know it when we see it. “White people can’t dance” or “Chinese kids are good at math” or “Jewish people are successful” or “Black people are the best athletes” – hate speech or stereotypes? Whatever it is, every single liberal / mainstream media outlet, network and blog jumped headfirst into the fray to get clicks and views with similar glaring headlines: Hate Speech on Twitter Surges!
Twitter is still humming along even after a huge dweeb reduction.
Would I want to hang out with Elon and have a beer and watch a game? Yeah, that would be fun. Would I want to work for the guy? Probably not. I think he’d be a nightmare boss. But, from everything I’ve heard from people who were there, so was Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison.
