Elon Musk: Crazy Like a Visionary

By Published on August 24, 2015

I have to admit that I think Elon Musk is (to use NASA-speak) a “steely-eyed missile man,” i.e., a powerfully impressive chap. William Blake (the last poet, I promise, whom I’ll quote) once observed that “energy is eternal delight.” Musk exudes energy. Data point: the average American flies about four times a year. In 2013, Musk flew 185 times.

Yes, I know: Hillary Clinton flies a lot, too. Musk is different: he actually accomplishes something as he shuttles between Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and the rest of the world. In interviews, Musk is sometimes asked to account for his stunning success in so many different ventures: After a bit of throat-clearing, he generally says, “I work really hard.” You can see just how hard by paging through Ashlee Vance’s lively and sympathetic new biography, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future.

Vance, a veteran of the New York Times and Bloomberg News, began as an Elon Musk skeptic. So did I. But the more you know about Musk, the more impressive he seems. Born in South Africa in 1971, he grew up in Pretoria, the eldest of three children. An affluent start in life—Musk’s father was a successful engineer, his mother a local beauty—gave way to darker times when his parents separated and then divorced. Elon and his brother Kimbal—another impressive chap even if he insists on misspelling his name—went to live with their father, Errol, whom Vance paints as a domineering, unpleasant fellow. Elon always had his nose in a book. Kimbal recalls him reading for upward of ten hours a day. When he exhausted the usual fare, he started in on the Encyclopedia Britannica, which he read from cover to cover and, like one of the offenders in Koko’s “little list,” was up on dates and other data and would “floor you with them flat.” At twelve — twelve! — he published a computer game called Blastar in 167 lines of code, for which he was paid $500.

My edition of The American Heritage Dictionary has only one definition of “nerd”: “A socially inept, foolish, ineffectual person.” Ept or non ept, there is nothing foolish or ineffectual about the co-creator of PayPal (yes, he was in on that, too), the man who helped create and then successfully commercialized the Falcon 9 rocket, Tesla’s Model S sedan, or SolarCity, which since its inception in 2006 has become the second-largest provider of solar-energy systems in the U.S. I think this definition of the word, provided by the dictionary on my computer, comes closer to the truth: “A single-minded expert in a particular technical field: a computer nerd.”

Read the article “Elon Musk: Crazy Like a Visionary” on city-journal.org.

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