Musk Rat, Musk Rat...

 

Back in the mid-1990s, Elon Musk was a start-up founder in his twenties, working illegally under a student visa to bring a phone book–style directory online with his company, Zip2.1 One day, Derek Proudian, a partner with one of the start-up’s key investors, stopped by Zip2’s Cambridge Avenue offices to grab lunch with its precocious founder, who’d already blown away his eventual financial backers with his unrelenting drive to be successful, Proudian recalled to me nearly thirty years later. 

Walking to lunch that afternoon, Proudian was preoccupied with the company’s priorities: bringing in engineers to scale the product, conducting a search for a chief executive, capitalizing on what he thought might be a $10 billion industry. 

Musk was thinking bigger. “It’s going to be global,” he said, in Proudian’s recollection. Zip2 was “going to be the biggest company ever.” 

“Well, maybe it’ll be the biggest company ever,” Proudian said. “Right now, we’re focused on the Yellow Pages. We’re not getting a whole lot of traction with these small businesses.” 

Musk’s mind was elsewhere. 

“I have bigger visions,” he said. Proudian tried to interject, hoping to redirect the conversation. 

“No—you don’t understand,” Musk cut in. “I’m the reincarnation of the spirit of Alexander the Great.” 

What? 

Proudian had to bring him back to earth. “What if you swing for the fences and you strike out?” 

“I’ve got the samurai spirit,” Musk declared. “I’d rather commit seppuku than fail.” 

That day, Musk saw the roadblock as a peer’s limited thinking, his realism. Today, his thinking seems to suggest, incompetence at the federal level—the abandonment of meritocracy, in favor of mediocrity—is the obstacle between him and his ultimate goal.

Siddiqui, Faiz. Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk (pp. 264-265). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

 

 

A total shitshow