ELON MUSK
Musk has proved commercially indestructible and Tesla has now sold tens of thousands of its revolutionary cars. $500 at the age of 12. Already living with his British father after his parents separated, Musk emigrated to Canada at the age of 17, since Musk senior was determined to get his family to the United States and this was a good prospective route. After studies in both Canada and at The University of Pennsylvania, gaining degrees in both physics and economics, Elon Musk embarked on a PhD at Stanford University where the founders of Google had studied. But he was by this time hungry for commercial life and quickly dropped out to launch his first enterprise. Although he has won countless awards and plaudits for his multiple CEO roles across his multi-billion dollar companies, Musk appears to be far more of a visionary, inspirational, catalytic figure than someone who is concerned with the ‘E’ and the ‘O’ of the role. His time spent actually being an executive or operating any of these businesses is surely minimal. Instead, Musk concerns himself with the biggest of big pictures. He speaks of the necessity for the human race to become a ‘multi-planetary species’ as a form of insurance against catastrophe, whether man made or natural, occurring to our current planet. He is
committed to colonising Mars, predicting that the first manned flights will take place in the mid-2020s (though he has rowed back on that in later comments) and sees Tesla cars as a means to reverse climate change, saying that we need to make more than 800 million electric cars by 2040 to make a difference. Reports from Musk’s SpaceX plant in California describe a working environment similar to many a start-up, with bearded young guys in t-shirts and trainers, women in Indian print dresses and an informal, relaxed and almost playful mood to the enterprise. Indeed, his whole business ethos from the beginning has been more about transformation, creating extraordinary outcomes and benefitting humanity. “Engineering is the closest thing to magic,” says Musk. “A lot of my motivation comes from looking at things that don’t work and feeling a bit sad about how it would manifest in the future. And if that would result in an unhappy future, then it makes me unhappy. And so I want to fix it.” So far, he has fixed an extraordinary number of things, using technology to make payments
easier and cheaper, electric cars practical, space travel cheaper and more efficient (he’s working on a reusable space module, which wouldn’t have to be jettisoned into the sea) and more efficient solar power. Technology has allowed Musk to perform all these roles, including his multiple CEO positions, without any of the thousands of employees or shareholders making any public complaint, that he is spreading himself too thin, for example, or not committing his energies sufficiently to a business when it most needs his attention. There have already been difficult times, but somehow, he’s emerged still smiling, still coming up with new ideas, designs and technological advances, leading businesses which change the world. With half of his lifetime still to go, Musk surely has many more surprises in store.
Biography Ø Alexandra Skinner is CEO Magazine’s Group Editor-in-Chief.
CEO MAGAZINE
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