ONE STEP AT A TIME

Elon Musk thought that the internet was going to change the world. So, instead of going to Stanford, he went to the hottest startup of the time, Netscape, to get a job. He was too shy and left before the interview. Whatever, he'd start an internet company on his own. He did and he called it Zip2, an early and primitive Google Maps meets Yelp.

That went well, and he earned 22 million dollars. But he was frustrated there was no way to manage money online well enough. It was the late nineties and no startup or old bank had satisfactory financial services. Whatever, he'd start his own online bank named X.com, later to become PayPal.

That went very well, and he made 180 million. Now, that was some serious money. What to do with it? Well, he didn't really know. Anyway, he had time on his hands and could go back to his childhood obsession, space. Specifically, what was NASA's plan for going to Mars? He went on their website and discovered there really wasn't one. Whatever. He'd create his own space company, SpaceX.

At around the same time, Elon, a longtime tech nerd, learned about a startup that was making a cool electric car. Sweet! He'd invest in the smart engineers and let them run the show. The company was Tesla.

Those two didn't go very well. At least not initially. The Russians were the only ones with good intercontinental ballistic missiles, and they laughed in his face. And the guys leading Tesla weren't doing a good job, in his view. Whatever, he would make his own rockets and run his electric car company himself. He hired the best rocket engineers at SpaceX, and fired the founders at Tesla. As always, he'd do it himself. That's never failed him before.

After those succeeded, he started worrying about AI. That was an existential threat to humanity. And Google and Facebook had a monopoly on AI talent. Whatever, he'd cofound his own artificial intelligence company, OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT.

Then, after he'd succeeded and was the richest man in the world, there were fewer challenges for him. So he looked for them. Free speech was disappearing. He saw the views of only one side of the political spectrum could be heard, a phenomenon commonly termed as "wokeness." Whatever, he would buy and control the social media with the most impact, Twitter, now known as X.

What was left to do? Well, obviously this made him hated by the politicians leading the country at the time. Of course, if he's allowing the opinions of their enemies to surface, they wouldn't love him. Whatever, he would make sure they lost the next election. And sure enough, in 2024, Donald Trump won.

And now, he and Trump got into an argument. Whatever, he's planning on starting his own political party.

How? Seriously, what the hell? That's one guy. One guy! Who, during this time, managed to father over a dozen kids, married three times and dated celebrities. I haven't mentioned his many other ventures. And, it has been rumored, he plays a mean game of Diablo.

What's the lesson? Because, Elon Musk just does stuff. He's mastered the most difficult technical, economic, political and personal problems imaginable. Sure, it came close to killing him several times. But he always wins. At least so far. Is it brains? Luck? Charm? Or, as many have stated, he just must be an alien.

What I see though, is Elon's entire life, he's taken things step by step. He didn't attempt to do anything crazy, until he mastered the easiest possible step, then on to the next one. And the one after that, and on and on.

When starting Tesla, he knew it would be very difficult. That's why he started with an expensive and luxurious sports car. He could sell less of them, take time to build out manufacturing capabilities, and get a good brand. That's why he started with the Roadster. Then the less expensive Model S. Then the cheaper Model X's and 3's.

Or with SpaceX. He knew he wanted to make great rockets from day one. But he started with the Falcon 1. A tiny rocket, that had nothing new to offer in its technology. After mastering that, he made bigger rockets. Then he took on the super difficult problem of reusability. And now, he is taking on reusability at a huge scale with Starship, which itself failed completely the first time. And eight tries later, is super close to finally being complete and revolutionizing space travel, again.

Elon does incredible things, one step at a time. He divides up the task and asks, "what can I do immediately." Like the very first step when starting SpaceX was to read a book on rockets. For OpenAI, it was meeting Demis Hassabis, the current head of Google Brain.

Most people do one of two things. Aim extremely low and act accordingly. Or aim ludicrously high and find themselves overwhelmed. What Elon does is aim ludicrously high and asks, what can he do now. He always focused on where his current skills and opportunities were and how to develop them from there.

Genius helps, work ethic helps, a high pain threshold helps, friends in high places help, being a bit of a shit helps. But I think this makes sense that no matter how big your dreams, start with the smallest possible step forward. Break it down to manageable pieces. And solve each one, successively. That's how great things happen.