Elon Musk: A Master Realist
Word Count: 2143
Read Time: 9 min
Elon’s Trusty Musky Habits
Elon Musk is a master realist. His creations, his art objects, are algorithmic: Tesla, SolarCity, SpaceX, Boring, Neuralink. His creativity, thus inventions, arise from the interplay (or the gap) between known physical facts of the universe and already designed systems that, in some way, disobey those facts. (This gap even defines his humor.)
When the physical facts are ignored, or disobeyed, by the designers, inefficiencies arise. In some cases, the history of the aesthetics carries through and the design is propagated because “that’s the way it’s always been done” (like the scouts in Moneyball or the winged design of the space shuttle). Or, humanity has yet to take the next step to advance that inefficiency into the new known paradigm. For example, development of communication iterating to greater complexity through various forms from vocal, torch/conch signals, postal, telegraph, mail, phone booth, internet, email, texts, cellphones, Instagram, Snapchat, and, it sounds like, Neuralink.
The common trajectory for 20-year-olds among any discipline is to try to prove themselves by catching the market where the market is first, then branching out; writers like Hemingway get hired as journalists, actors like Heath Ledger, Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matthew Mcconaughey play heart-throb roles. Politicians tend to work the opposite direction (catch a niche at the extreme, then work inwards to the center), but it works similarly.
His first companies let him solve a current problem and prove his problem-solving abilities. Elon says repeatedly, “I just want to be useful.” In his twenties, his usefulness gained value at the timescale of immediacy by responding to others’ problems (Q: How do we democratize fintech? A: Paypal (Later, Bitcoin)). Now, his value for usefulness comes from looking at a timescale of millions of years.
During the time with his first companies, Musk honed his vision on what it was he wanted to solve, always having an interest in space and energy, and he has devoted all his post-Zip2 and Paypal time to such. Elon’s call-to-action (raison d’etre) is motivated by the desire for a happier future. With the help of artists, he’s developed an idea of a good future and his happy-future lens makes the status quo look dirty. He cleans any incongruency with his skills in engineering.
Now, his joke about changing his Wikipedia page is much deeper than a play on words between business magnate and business magnet. The very way he sees and lives his life, his tireless operation for cleaning the status quo to make a brighter future, attracts businesses. The businesses come to him. They’re a magnetic side effect of his engineering.
The incongruency between a brighter future and the status quo is hugely imbalanced in Elon’s eyes. And Elon Musk is all about balanced equations. They are a balance in power. They are a balance in dialogue. It is his understanding of this balance that creates the need for new products. It is the balance of an equation that allows him to solve the problem to create the new product.
Equations: Balancing the Dialogue
The equation is a dialogue. It has an aesthetic. When one side does something, the other side reacts. When the variables change, the system balances out. Equations posit causal relations. One of the big innovations in Einstein’s equation E = Mc² was that Einstein created a causal link between two fields of study that had yet to be related, physics and electricity. Einstein redefined the aesthetics by creating a new causal relationship. (Jackson Pollock changed the aesthetics of painting, he showed a new causal relationship between painter and canvas. He placed nature and chance as the ones in charge of the paint, not the painter’s hand.)
Elon Musk is great at working within the realm of the equations. He works within the causal chain each equation puts forth (y = 3x, y is dependent on x; when x changes 1 unit, y changes 3) and applies it in the world. He is not so much an inventor or changer of aesthetics at the physical or mathematical level. Rather, Elon Musk is an active agent, highly disciplined in using those equations and just those equations, to shape the design of the objects around him: rockets, cars, tunnels, solar energy, communication.
Particularly, Elon is very attuned to data-flow imbalances, as seen in the Joe Rogan interview. Some examples:
Two thumbs are horrible at data transfer. Photos are better. He created Neuralink to grant people more access to that flow.
Sometimes the data flow imbalance can be classified as a dimensional problem: 3-d to 2-d data transfer from work-space to travel-space. We live/work in a 3d space, roads are constructed in a 2d space. To rebalance this flow, we need to match the dimensionality of flow of people to work. How do we do that? Buildings are outpacing roads, roads need to increase in their dimensionality to match the dimension the work-space is in. How is that possible? Increasing to a 3-dimensional system requires space. Either the travel system can go up or the travel system can go down. Before executing a path to improvement, the benefits to above-ground or below-ground options are weighed. (Elon’s considered a lot of these options.) Above ground is prone to weather and natural disaster issues, plus it is simply ugly. Below ground presents a better strategy to start moving forward. Thus, Boring.
A.I. will be out of our control. The A.I. versus human equation, will get heavily one-sided. A.I. can “learn” very quickly, and operates within many, many dimensions (unfathomable), thus, Elon is worried it could grow too large without a way to rebalance it. Elon created OpenAI to democratize the power of A.I.
His VTOL plane design came down to a balance of power within the equation. And seeing the factors that can be changed in the equation. Push the plane way above 35,000 ft, decrease the one side of the equation, then the energy expended on the other side of the equation goes way down. A simple lift in altitude has exponential energy decrease on the other side of the equation.
Rogan asks, “What is holding you back?” Musk’s response, “Politicians need to be better at science,” should be heard and seriously taken into account. We know Musk makes his decisions based on some equation. Somewhere in it, Musk’s equation shows that technology and science are advancing fast. They are growing large on their own, becoming heavily one-sided. Man is a necessary factor of the advancement, so man must develop without getting left behind.
Many people have a hand in creating the balance: inventors, investors, users, and politicians. Musk says the serious inhibitor to holding back progress are the politicians. Progress does not mean his business progress. Remember, he’s an engineer, not a business guy, therefore reducing his actions to pure self-importance is not right. Rather, it is humanity’s need to flourish which is his target for dictating human progress. In his statement, Musk holds the politicians accountable for their deficiency and says they need to step up their game so the balance can continue.
Musk becomes hypocritical, but it is inevitable. An A.I. that makes dogs of people, reduces people to dumb robots, is bad. Yet, Elon Musk already is in the position to guide and steer human behaviors. The guy who fell asleep at the wheel of a Tesla and killed the cyclist fell prone to human error. Elon Musk took it upon himself to use the machine (the car) to prohibit the driver from making such an error. He put the need for autopilot into high-priority. In this way, he is exactly the A.I. he is afraid of: by responding to the problems of human beings, treating them like dogs, and training them, or prohibiting them, by using an intermediary technological step, the car, to keep the human from messing-up.
Musk’s intentions are good, they’re human-centered, they promote human-flourishing. Regardless, some level of hypocrisy is a feature of one who oversees a large system. His openness to talking about A.I., and his desire to even the balance of the A.I.-Man dialogue puts him largely on the positive side, and neither he, nor we, must fear him as a despot.
The Buzz Isn’t Real
In this link, Musk says, about batteries, “You can only believe 1% of what you read about batteries.” While the statement is said about battery technology, I think, Musk processes what he just said, and realizes it can be generalized, so he qualifies the previous statement with “maybe.” “You can only believe 1% of what you read about batteries…maybe.” As soon as the concept leaps from the scientific paper about batteries to people talking about the scientific paper, it has leapt mediums and is no longer the raw source. Some of the data of the original is going to be transformed. Similar to a game of telephone, at each iteration of passed information, the original truth gets distorted. Thus, what is often read is some distilled form of the raw data and only 1% can be believed.
I’ve seen this happen with machine learning. There’s a lot of talk about machine learning, and the public gets a wildly different image of it than what it actually is. Even when people among the field talk about it, they can ask a question about back-propagation, and someone else answers without going to the source, thus immediately distorting the principles of the concept. When they don’t directly communicate the statistics, they begin to engage in poetry, metaphors and simile, to communicate the mathematical concept. Those unskilled in language will distort the math taking place by giving a poor translation into language.
Doing this repeatedly creates a concept “Machine Learning” that is no longer the original. Then the term gets thrown around carelessly, and when people use it, a listener should be wary and heed precisely what Elon Musk says, “You can only believe 1% of what you read.”
Another clue to Elon’s realism is his attachment to time. He knows roughly the time he devotes to things when he says he devotes about 95% to Tesla, and 5% to the others. He is popularly asked, “How do you have time for that?”, which I’ll explain in a bit.
Elon also relates the occurrence of future things in a probabilistic state. He recognizes the potential of many different futures, and prefers to pursue a particular one over another. If time could be observed from a 5-dimensional viewpoint at its lesser 4-dimensional condition, the occurrence of something a few years from now or 100 years from now would be certain (“certainty” probably wouldn’t be a part of the lexicon or would be a descriptor of reality like color is to a solid). But such a statement is ideal. It is a realist perspective, given the human-limitations, to understand all occurrences of future things in some probabilistic manner. A realist must be ambivalent about future occurrences.
“How do you have time for that?”
Everybody has ideas. Everybody has many good ideas. Not everybody has a system in place to execute those ideas.
Elon has surrounded himself with buckets to collect his ideas. His buckets have the ability to take the ideas to action. Elon constantly thinks about efficiencies; space, energy, imbalances, and so on. His buckets reflect the general content of his ideas and he deposits them appropriately. His steady flow, “never-ending explosion”, of ideas get dropped into buckets and cumulate.
“How’s he have time for that?” A thought can appear from nowhere, and it takes just moments to write it down. For Musk, it takes a moment to tweet it, to send a directive, and that thought can propagate through other engineers’ minds and something can come from it. All the while, Musk himself has moved on to something else, and eventually the bucket spits back a response to him. For most people, that thought gets spoken at the bar at night, shared with the family at the dinner table, everyone entertains it for some time, then they go to bed. Some may even build it into a half-complete idea, like the famous “unfinished novel,” and it gets forgotten in a drawer somewhere.
Finally, art is a method that creates alternate aesthetics. Art creates new equations to operate. For a guy like Elon Musk, he needs artists to help paint a view of the future for which he can operate. He frequently references artists, sci-fi artists, who have shaped the equation he operates within and figures out how to balance it out (he even plucked his “not a flamethrower” from a sci-fi movie). Beyond having art to guide his own inventions, Elon also needs artists to paint a world where he can live a happy life now, during his PTS, after having imagined a horrible future with no humans in it.