The Genius of Madness

Visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk made big dreams a reality.  Will you?

The observation that genius and insanity are two sides of a coin dates at least to the ancient Greeks.  A Swedish study in May proclaimed the line between insanity and creativity “wafer thin.”

The New York Times business section extended that comparison to entrepreneurs last month, when they noted that physiological measures of a manic episode – heightened pulse rate, rapid speech, accelerated brain activity, grandiose ideation – measured similarly in entrepreneurs.

Are we surprised?  I can’t help thinking that one of the great entrepreneurs of our time must register off the charts. Elon Musk is a brilliant visionary, one whose trajectory has taken him from engineering to software and now – quite literally – into outer space.

If his many creative enterprises had failed, we’d have called him crazy.  How else do you explain dropping out of graduate school at Stanford after only two days to start a company with an unproven idea in a relatively new industry?  When Elon Musk started Zip2 with his brother, Kimbal, there was no guarantee that the company – which provided online content-publishing software – would sell to Compaq four years later for more than $300 million.  No guarantee either that his next project – a little thing that became PayPal – would flip to eBay for $1.5 billion.  Musk had just turned 31 years old.

To Boldly Go
I had the privilege of hearing Musk speak at Inc. 500 Conference in 2008 and was struck by his singular vision and high aspirations.  He identified three arenas of discovery that he believes will determine the course of our future: the Internet, clean energy, and space exploration.  Having made his stamp on the internet (and netted hundreds of millions), Musk set his ambitions higher – much higher.  Mars, to be precise.  In 2002, Musk founded Space Explorations Technology (SpaceX), of which he is CEO and CTO, to develop and manufacture low cost, high reliability space launch vehicles.

Musk’s vision was to make space flight affordable:  He engineered his vehicles from the ground up, starting with only $100 million of his own money and acting as lead designer himself.  Likewise, he had affordability in mind when he set about tackling problem number three – clean energy – with his California start-up Solar City, and the better-known Tesla Motors, where he is not merely CEO, but also the sole product architect.

The sexy Tesla Roadster, unveiled in 2008 is designed to lure affluent early adopters for the technology.  Using lithium ion batteries, the sports car can travel up to 244 miles on a single charge and accelerate from 0 to 60 in less than 4 seconds.  No other highway capable electric vehicle enjoys a serial production run in the U.S.  Musk is selling his vehicle in 28 countries while working on more mainstream designs, including family sedans and subcompacts.  In the meantime, his $100K+ Roadster is becoming the darling of movie stars and millionaires.

Of all the cocky enterprises Musk has conceived, SpaceX is the most audacious.  Musk wanted to prove that elegant, profound solutions to deeply complex engineering problems can be achieved quickly and affordably – and he has.  Still less than a decade into its endeavor, SpaceX has rolled out two launch vehicles, the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, and a spaceship, the Dragon.  In December of 2008, the company won a $1.6 billion contract from NASA for twelve upcoming flights.  SpaceX vehicles will replace the recently-retired Shuttle, delivering materials and personnel to the space station.

The Big Questions
Why aim so high and risk so much on something as “crazy” as space?  Because, he says, "An asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us, and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, catastrophic global warming or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Humankind evolved over millions of years, but in the last sixty years (we) created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond this green and blue ball — or go extinct.

In other words, Musk’s goal is the survival of mankind itself. That’s not a small undertaking.  Imagine waking up every morning with the sense of mission and purpose that is the survival of your species. It’s a pretty heady thought, one sure to give you the racing pulse and heightened awareness that is hallmark of both entrepreneurial zeal and outright insanity.

Whether you see Musk as a genius or a megalomaniac may well be a matter of perspective. Presumably his soon-to-be-ex wife (as part of the divorce proceedings, Musk is claiming to be cash-strapped) and former Tesla CEO Martin Eberhard (who sued and settled with Musk in 2009) consider him less than stellar.  But whatever the truth of the man on whom Robert Downey Jr. based his crazed hero Iron Man (Musk has a tiny cameo in Iron Man 2 as homage) his willingness to bite into the biggest challenges of his generation must be applauded.

So who is this guy?  Ultimately, he’s no different from any of us.  Maybe he’s flexing a little more brain muscle.  Maybe he just got an early “hall pass” to leave the classroom and dream big.  But the questions he’s asking – and answering – are the questions of our day.  Maybe we can not only build successful businesses, but also leave our footprints on the sands of human history.  Maybe we just aren’t asking enough of ourselves.

We don’t have to go to Mars: Challenges on Earth give us plenty of opportunity to make an impact. Perhaps it’s time to identify the big questions and ask ourselves how those problems manifest in our industry and how we can solve them. Because around the edges of every great enterprise are new opportunities to contribute, and to profit.

So I’d like to raise a toast to Elon Musk, as he has raised the bar on us all.  He reminds us to ask ourselves to aim higher, every day.  A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, after all – and each time we grasp the goal, we should reach higher still.  Maybe it will make us all a little bit crazy or maybe it will make us all geniuses.  Either way, it will be an exhilarating ride.

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