I just read the Musk bio by the well known journalist Isaacson. It is reasonably good journalism of who said what when. A recitation of the "facts" as he recorded them. Yet does it tell us anything about the man? He has been driven in so many disparate dimensions that one cannot get a handle. From rockets to cars to drilling, to satellites and then social media. The latter is the easiest to understand. The four others have been tried by others before. Satellites, low orbit ones for communications, were first proposed by a group at MIT Lincoln Lab in the late 1950s, actually millions of reflective needles to bounce transmissions back to earth. The rockets, well they have been around for almost a century and Musk realized that NASA was more a burden than an asset. A massive bureaucracy loaded with political appointees and massively risk adverse. So Musk took the next step shedding the Government mid set. Electric cars, well DoE had been working on them in the early 1970s, tells one has effective they were.
But Musk's success in my mind was based on three things; people, people, people. Musk was not an expert in any of the areas he is in. In fact he is really not an expert in anything, other than selecting people and using them for s while to better his progress. My question then is; where did he get them from and how did he select them?
That has always been my greatest challenge in the dozens of companies I have been with. Finding the right people. If you hire someone my experience is that at best 25% will be useful. The remainder become baggage. But you do not know that up front. Musk seems to have beaten the odds here. Is that because he has great Silicon Valley contacts, great head hunters, luck?
Isaacson tells us nothing of the business, the drivers, the selection of people. Possibly someone better will.
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