The Grand Theory of Elon Musk
So Elon Musk buying Twitter is making a lot of people feel some kind of way. Some of the most entertaining reactions are on the platform itself, from people claiming this is vital for free speech to others swearing they’ll never use the platform again. What is apparent though is the general confusion on what this means in the bigger context. For example here’s a poll from a survey posted on 9to5mac.com on the Twitter buyout:
Does anyone else remember this? Back in 2006 he shared with the world his master plan for Tesla. At the time people were befuddled, why would you let the world and your competitors know of your ambitions? What purpose does this serve? He basically threw his playbook at Toyota, VW, and GM and said: what are you gonna do about it? They’ve all laughed and ignored him mostly back in 2006, but now in 2022, there isn’t a single mass-market car company right now that does not have an EV strategy. Oh how the turns have tabled.
Elon Musk has never been shy about letting people know about his Master Plans, because for someone at his level, he knows that ideas are a dime a dozen. Anybody can have a great idea, but how you execute it is what separates the idealistic dreamers from the people that actually change the world.
Stealing a concept from the physics world here, I’d like to introduce the unified field theory of Elon Musk’s ambitions. What would possess a man to run not just one, or even two (h/t Jack Dorsey), but five different companies at the same time?
Even while doing his studies at UPenn, Musk had already envisioned that the three most important problems of his lifetime were:
Doing something on the internet
The advancement of sustainable transportation
Making life multi-planetary
The first one was fairly straightforward, he proceeded to drop out from Stanford after spending all of two days in the valley and immediately jumped into startup-land, eventually culminating in X.com which became PayPal. He also acquired a McLaren F1 as a trophy prize which he subsequently totaled going up Sand Hill without any insurance, with the famous last words “watch this!”
So that brings us to the question: Why? Post-PayPal he could be sitting on a superyacht somewhere bathing in pools of Dom Perignon, but he chose to risk bankruptcy and financial ruin to chase after his dream, humanity’s dream. Musk is not naïve, he knows that these types of missions are typically an undertaking by sovereign nation-states that are not looking for a return on invested capital. He needs an unspeakable amount of money to build the rockets, satellites, batteries, equipment, and technology necessary for a Martian expedition, not to mention the insane R&D spend necessary to develop it in the first place. If he tried to get it from the public markets, he’s going to face investor demands for returns and a board that’s second guessing every one of his decisions in the interest of return-seeking investors.
Let’s look at his companies in detail, but more importantly, what role they would serve when we’re on Mars and Musk is hailed as the God-Emperor of the Ares sector.
SpaceX: This one is pretty self-explanatory, in order to get to Mars, you need transportation. Rockets make the most sense. You could build a space elevator, but that won’t be able to take you to Mars by itself. Maybe in about 150 years into the future when we’re mining from asteroids and have orbital shipyards and fully functioning space elevators we can deprecate rockets, but for now at least, they are the best method for us to access the red planet.
Why make them reusable? Well you can’t really crash a rocket on Mars and call it a day, how are you supposed to get back? Plus there’s the fringe benefit of making launches cheaper, so that’ll placate some investors I guess. Landing on remote barges in the ocean because it saves fuel? More like practice runs for landing on asteroids so we can strip mine them for palladium and neodymium. It’s harder to be an asteroid hugging hippie than it is to be a tree-hugging one.
Tesla: The most public facing venture of the Musk empire by far. It was created to advance his vision of sustainable transport for all. Musk saw GM crush their EV1s in a junkyard and was in utter confusion as to why a company would terminate a product line that people were holding candlelight vigils for. Maybe the battery tech wasn’t there at the time, maybe oil money had a role to play, whatever the case, he set out to prove that EVs can be more than just golf carts.
On Mars, there won’t be sufficient oxygen (at least without terraforming) for internal combustion, so transportation would have to be electric. So throw some oversized mud tires on a Cybertruck and baby you got a UNSC Warthog stew going. Along with mobility, you’d have to consider the electric infrastructure, from generation (SolarCity) to storage (Powerwalls). There’s a reason why Tesla is the only car company that has their own battery plant (currently) and not just buys them from LG Chem or Panasonic like everyone else.
Starlink: When we get to Mars, how are we going to communicate with each other and more importantly back to Earth? You need satellites. Another nice thing about a satellite web is you get GPS with it as well, so communication and geolocation, two birds, one stone. If I can’t browse reddit or twitter while on Mars then I’m not going.
In the original Iron Man movie, there was a great scene where Stark got Jeff Bridges' character to chase him into the clouds, asked if he’s solved the icing problem, and then proceeded to bonk him in the head. Starlink is still very much in its infancy and I’d imagine it’ll have to go through its own “icing problem” journey before it’ll be ready for Martian primetime. I’d be very curious to see some of the deployments in desert locales and see if they devise some kind of 360 no scope option to shake off the sand/Martian dust. That would be pretty dope.
Boring Co: This one is a bit under the radar. On the surface it looks strange, a billionaire attempting to dodge traffic by digging tunnels under LA, but think about it from a Martian frame of reference.
Mars has a nasty habit of dust storms that make you feel like you’re playing dodgeball with wrenches. So you either build domes or dig tunnels to ensure habitability. Domes are hard and more of a phase 2/3 thing, as getting the necessary materials for domes is not trivial, so tunnels/underground habitats would probably be the initial phase 1 solution. The problem with tunnel boring machines (TBMs) is that they’re huge and crawl like an one-legged crab. He needs to make one small enough to fit on a starship and doesn’t take a year to dig a 5km tunnel.
A fun side note about the Las Vegas Convention Center Loop. A lot of people, including myself, think it’s pretty dumb. If you already dug the tunnels, then just put in trains and make it a mass-transit system. I suspect the real purpose is to get the Las Vegas government to essentially fund a proving grounds / controlled environment for Tesla Autopilot, where they can A/B test to their heart's content and far from regulatory scrutiny, in which case, galaxy-brain.
Twitter: When people discuss the Twitter buyout, they mostly look at it from a political lens, and most of the discourse I see out there neglects to mention the fact that: “Hey, this guy also owns Neuralink”. Even just recently during an interview for Ted2022, Musk remarked that it’s incredibly hard to solve full-self driving without solving for real-world general AI first.
Twitter has been around since 2006, it has one of the deepest corpus of thoughts without going back to print. Most importantly it showed how quickly and virally thoughts can evolve and take on meaning by themselves. The Arab Spring and the MeToo movement are some easy examples to reference here. From a machine learning perspective it’s also much easier to deal with 140 characters than video or images.
Twitter represents the best version of a collective hive mind (or global consciousness as Jack Dorsey describes) that we have today. It simultaneously presents us the best of humanity and the worst of humanity every single day. Microsoft tried to train an AI on twitter called Tay and 4chan related hilarity ensued. Musk probably knows you can’t train on a subset of tweets, you need all the tweets, and what better way to get all the tweets than to just buy out the whole company? Let’s just say when Neuralink gets folded into Twitter or vice versa, I won’t be a surprised pikachu.
What do you need an AI for on Mars? Well given that there won’t be many takers on the first trip, you need the AI to fly the ship, run the habitats, manage the equipment, so that the humans can focus on the problems humans are uniquely good for, and that’s creative thought and complex problem solving. Let’s just hope it doesn’t go HAL9000 on us and lock us out.
Do you see it now? Elon Musk is attempting to solve the problems that he knows he’s going to encounter on Mars while he’s still on Earth, and he’s building/acquiring businesses around them to make them self sufficient, accumulate capital, and continuously iterate on the technology so that they become as robust as possible because the number one rule of Space is that Space is always trying to kill you. This is exactly how I’d imagine the origin story of a company like Weyland-Yutani, a bunch of disparate seemingly unrelated entities tied together by one visionary founder that enjoys playing 5D chess.
Let’s briefly summarize each company again, now with their respective roles on Mars:
SpaceX - Logistics
Tesla - Energy
Starlink - Communication
Boring Company - Infrastructure
Neuralink/Twitter - AI
Just for fun, if you’re a Marvel’s Avengers fan, you can also map these to infinity stones
SpaceX - Space Stone (Travel between places instantaneously)
Tesla - Power Stone (Manipulate energy; increased strength)
Starlink - Time Stone (Control and manipulate time)
Boring Company - Reality Stone (Alter reality)
Neuralink/Twitter - Mind Stone (Control minds)
Thanos, I mean Musk, is one company / soul stone away from a full gauntlet. I’m not quite sure what is the appropriate emotion to express here.
A lot of ink has been spilt on the current valuation of Tesla. “It’s too high” they say, “it’s worth more than all other car companies combined” they exclaim. People get so hung up on the numbers they neglect to look beneath the surface. Tesla stands head and shoulders above their peers because they not only focus on the product, but the processes behind the product. From Elon’s memo banning all sub contractors to megacasting, all these process improvements culminated in the “automated-dreadnought” we see in GigaTexas. It didn’t quite work in Fremont like he wanted it but Musk never gave up on his vision. If you have any doubts about Tesla’s engineering prowess, just go watch some of Sandy Munro’s videos. He started off as a staunch critic of Tesla before he dove head first into the tech and realized that “Hey, these guys from the valley are not doing what people in traditional automotive are doing” and slowly over time he realized that Tesla was making leapfrog advances in materials and technology and eventually became a steadfast supporter.
Now I think is a good time for the standard disclaimer that none of my writings should be construed as investment advice. There’s no ARRs/IRRs for a Martian colony and I get confused when I see the superbulls or the superbears of Tesla. For the bulls, you do realize he wants to go to Mars and needs your money to do so and could care less about giving you a return? For the bears, you do realize his “get rekt” list so far includes Chanos, Einhorn, and Burry just to name a few. Do you really think you’re smarter than these guys?
Again these are just my crazy ideas attempting to connect the dots, I don’t know Elon Musk and I don’t speak with him. I really don’t know what’s actually jostling in that alien brain of his. My thoughts are my own, the ideas presented are most likely not original, and strangely I’m okay with that. Most of the content we encounter day-to-day is not truly original, but instead rehashes of a previously discussed idea framed in a different way. It’s why many of the great stories are just a derivation of the hero's journey. However, if I do know the etymology of an idea I will try to highlight or link it where I can. Tim Urban has a fantastic series on Elon Musk that I highly recommend if you have a few hours/days to kill.
I’m gonna end this article with a quote I feel is apropo:
“Ideas are worthless without the execution; execution is pointless without the ideas.” - Gary Vaynerchuk
Mr. Musk, if you’re reading, just tweet out a winky face emoji to help me confirm this mental model and I’ll be eternally grateful!
Feedback? Comments? Like? Dislike? Tweet @ProxyApex
P.S. Some additional half-baked / rapid-fire thoughts:
Musk getting rid of spam bots => improving the quality of twitter data feed for ML
The whole creepy robot thing => either Westworld or first wave Martian droids
Hyperloop => a public challenge to see if there’s another innovator that can execute like he can, so far the answer is still no