The Problem With Elon Musk

Johnny Harris

- I mean, my mind is a storm. I don't think most people would want to be me.

They may think they would want to be me, but they don't, they don't know. - [Interviewer] Is your storm a happy storm?

- No. - I've grown tired of hearing the name Elon Musk and not really understanding what's going on.

Who is this guy? Where is he from? How has he built a huge business empire to become one of the richest people in the world?

And what can we learn about his purchase of Twitter? So I've been going on a deep dive, finding everything I can about this guy, his upbringing, businesses he's started, talking to people who have worked with him, who have worked for him.

Many of these people want to remain anonymous for reasons you will soon understand. I've talked to people who love him, people who hate him, people who used to love him and now hate him.

- If I were an employee at Twitter right now, I'd probably just do your job, don't let him know your name.

- So after a few months of reporting on this, I feel like I finally have a handle on who this guy is.

I understand how he built his empire, how he treats the people around him, and the real reason I believe he bought Twitter.

- Elon Musk put in an offer. - An unsolicited bid to buy the social media platform. - [Reporter] $44 billion.

- So let me show you the rise and rule of Elon Musk. - You're a supervillain. That's what a supervillain does.

- [Elon] Yeah. - [Announcer] He's addicted to drama, he's addicted to risk, and whenever things seem to be going smoothly, he almost has a compulsion to stir things up.

- [Johnny] Elon Musk was born in the summer of 1971 in South Africa. From a young age, he was bullied pretty relentlessly by kids at school for being scrawny and nerdy.

- You know, bullied quite a lot. I got punched in the face many times.

- [Johnny] Musk would later say that he's on the autism spectrum, though he was never diagnosed. It got really bad for young Elon.

Like one time. - When he got beaten up at school once and so bloody, he had to go to the hospital.

The scars were actually worse when he came home and his father made him stand in front of him and berated him for more than an hour, calling him stupid, saying it was his fault.

- Stories like this make me sick to my stomach and you realize that the trauma and scars from this kind of abuse, both physical and emotional, they don't go away easily.

Speaking of his dad, there's a lot of rumors that Elon came from a rich dad who owned emerald mines in South Africa and that he was set up to be successful because of family wealth.

Elon's dad did import emeralds, but there wasn't a lot of money in this family. - He never owned an emerald mine. This is total bullshit.

- If you want more detail on that, you can go check out our sources where we put the fact check for every of the assertions in this video.

Anyway, what Elon did have at a young age was a skill for computers and programming. - I taught myself how to program computers, but mostly 'cause I wanted to program games.

- At the age of 12, he invented a video game.

- Mom, do you remember when I was 12 and I created my own video game? - That he sold to a magazine for, - $500.

- It was his first business move in tech, his first interest in space. - Around 12 or 13, I had kind of an existential crisis trying to figure out the meaning of life.

- From an early age, Musk found meaning in the idea of the potential of humanity, what humans can do as a collective, how we as a species have somehow been able to work together to explore the meaning of the universe.

- My motivation was that if we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, maybe we can find out the meaning of life.

- I mean, you hear this and it kind of sounds overly grand, kind of delusional, overly idealistic, but honestly, this is what motivates Musk from a very young age and he doesn't bend on what he wants and what he's willing to do to achieve it.

So he leaves South Africa when he is 18 and moves to Canada and eventually ends up in Pennsylvania where he goes to college and gets a degree in economics and physics.

At the age of 24, he moves out to California to pursue a PhD at Stanford, but he never starts the program.

Okay, so I'm not gonna go into the details of every one of Elon's companies because there are a lot.

If you want to deep dive, read this very thick book. This was a foundational part of our reporting, and it details the play-by-play on all of these companies.

For now, let me give you a quick summary of the businesses this guy built to become one of the richest men on the planet.

His first company was called Zip2. He started it in 1995 with his brother, who seems to have an affinity for cowboy hats.

- Yee-haw. His company provided maps and business directories for online newspapers. I know those words sound very strange to us now, but back in 1995, it was a huge deal.

It almost was like the precursor to what Google Maps is today, and it was very successful.

- We helped bring online several hundred newspapers that previously were only in print. - It was acquired a few years later for $307 million, 22 million of those dollars going right into Elon's pocket.

Suddenly Elon is rich. - Receiving cash is cash.

I mean, those are just a large number of Ben Franklins. - He uses the money to start another company called X.com.

No, no, no, not that X.com, the first X.com, which you now know today as PayPal.

- So this is an ATM. All we're gonna do is transform the traditional banking industry. - It was basically an online bank and it was revolutionary at the time.

So much so that in 2002, eBay bought it for $1.5 billion.

Elon got 180 million of those dollars, and now he's officially super rich. - There it is, gentlemen, the fastest car in the world.

- So what to do with all of this money? The answer for Elon Musk was to try out the craziest ideas he could think of.

- Oh, I have like about 180 million from PayPal. I thought, you know, I'll allocate half of that to SpaceX and Tesla and Solar City.

That should be fine. I'll have 90 million. Like, that's lots. I thought our probability of success was less than 10%.

It would be foolish to think anything else other than that. (soft music) - Ever since he was a kid making video games about space, Elon has been motivated by this idea of humans expanding outside of Earth, humans becoming a, - Multi-planet species.

We would like to help make life multi-planetary. The extension of life to multiple planets. - In early 2000s, Tesla already existed.

They were making electric cars, but they were kind of high-end niche sports cars. Elon was really interested in this.

So he came in as an investor and eventually became the CEO with the vision of turning electric cars mainstream and ushering a whole new era of transportation.

But these ideas were more expensive than he anticipated. - Things cost more and took longer than I thought. So I had a choice of either put the rest of the money in or the companies are gonna die.

- His rockets kept blowing up. His electric cars were devilishly complicated to manufacture, but Elon developed this addiction to risk and intensity that kept him pushing forward despite these challenges.

Tesla reinvented how cars were made. Thanks to innovative technology and manufacturing, really clever engineering, and a waterfall of government subsidies.

He was able to skyrocket Tesla into one of the most valuable companies in the world, overtaking every other car company by a long shot in just a few years.

And this company was weird. It wasn't obeying all the rules, like there was almost no official marketing campaign.

And Elon decided to make all of his technology open source. The patents were not copyrighted.

Anyone could see them and use them with the hope that the market for electric vehicles would take off, and that the world would more quickly move away from the use of fossil fuels, which would ultimately benefit Tesla.

- So if somebody comes and makes a better electric car than Tesla, and it's so much better than ours that we can't sell our cars and we go bankrupt, I still think that's a good thing for the world.

- These were bold, crazy moves, but they were totally working. Meanwhile, Elon's Space Company was about to go out of business.

- For SpaceX, the first three launches failed. Just barely able to scrape together enough parts and money to do the fourth launch.

- And then, after six years and six months of stress and intensity, Elon's dreams of going to space started to come true.

I'm going to explain a little bit more about how he did all of this, but the big deal about SpaceX is that they created a reusable rocket.

Every other rocket is disposable. You can only use it once and it's very expensive.

But Elon proved that you could use a rocket and safely land it back down onto the surface of Earth and then use it again.

Soon, SpaceX would be carrying NASA astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station, launching military satellites into space for the Pentagon, launching dozens of satellites up into space for commercial use, and even launching the first ever private space flight for tourism.

Space travel was officially reinvented. - I think we're at the dawn of a new era, and it's a reason for people to be excited and inspired to be human.

- Okay? But what's crazy is that during all of this, Elon is also launching a bunch of other companies like The Boring Company, which is trying to revolutionize traffic and transportation by building smarter tunnels.

Oh my God, it just hit me that it's boring, like boring into the side of a mountain. Oh my God, that just hit me right now?

This company also turned into like a blank canvas for Elon Musk to play out all of his childish, silly ideas like selling a flamethrower or this perfume that smells like singed human hair.

And yes, Musk uses his businesses as kind of a way to troll humanity while also trying to save humanity.

It's this behavior that a lot of people find refreshing and ends up getting a lot of attention and becoming a marketing tool for all of his companies.

He starts building Neuralink, which is designing a way for humans to control computers with their brains, which is already having some initial successes.

And now that Elon's company can easily go to space, he starts sending up these small satellites, 6,000 of them that are orbiting the earth, and he starts providing internet to remote places, arguably changing the course of the war in Ukraine.

by providing Ukrainian
soldiers with internet during the initial invasion from Russia. Though that's gotten more
complicated in recent months, as Russian soldiers have
started to use Starlink, and it's a whole other rabbit hole.

Okay, but we're not done
yet with Elon's companies.

He also co-founded OpenAI way back in 2015, who went on to make ChatGPT. He later left the company
over disagreements and then has recently started
his own AI company called, you guessed it, xAI.

It's literally the name of
several of his companies and one of his children. Each one of these ventures points back to Elon's childish idealism: This grand vision of testing the limits of what humans can do by pushing
our understanding of physics and working together to
do crazy amazing things.

But then after building
all of these companies that are focused on
pushing the physical limits of human potential, Elon in recent years has set his sights on reshaping another industry.

(soft music) - [Announcer] Tonight, the richest man in the world is hunting for more.

- [Reporter] Put in an
offer of almost $44 billion to buy Twitter.

- [Reporter] All of Twitter. Is this all a troll, or is this very real? - Elon Musk has been
portrayed as both a reckless, unethical billionaire
as well as a visionary who is changing the world for the better.

And what you think about
him probably comes from what you read about him.

And what you read about him
was probably served to you by an algorithm. This is how our media
landscape works these days, and it's getting us deeper and deeper into trouble, which is a major theme in this video, but it's also in line with the sponsor of today's video, which is Ground News.

Ground News is a platform that I've been using to navigate this problem, to find a balanced view where I can see both sides of a news story.

Ground News aggregates tens of thousands of news articles from around the world into one place, and then allows you to critically examine how that news is being covered.

Here's a recent story that on the left you can see from the Los Angeles Times that engineers sue Elon Musk and SpaceX, saying that the company mirrored his juvenile, crude X posts.

While on the right, you've got the New York Post saying that Elon Musk was sued by fired engineers alleging Elon Musk allowed pervasive sexist culture.

These headlines have subtle bias in them. Like the left-leaning headline suggests that Musk's personal behavior was directly responsible, while the right-leaning headline emphasizes that they were fired employees and that there was an alleged sexist culture, softening any kind of blame towards Musk and his company.

This is really subtle stuff that's hard to pay attention to if you're just scrolling your algorithm.

Ground News emphasizes and highlights these biases and allows you to be more critical as a news consumer.

Not only do they show this bias distribution, but they also have a tool that rates how factual an article is, and my favorite, they have this blind spot detector that pays attention to the articles that you tend to read and presents you with stuff that might be outside of your comfort zone, but that you probably need to see to be a balanced news consumer.

This is a really cool tool. I'm very glad they exist.

I'm really glad they're sponsoring today's video. If you want to try this out for yourself, go to groundnews.com/johnnyharris where you'll get 40% off the Vantage plan, which is unlimited access to all of these features.

I use Ground News, I think it's really important in today's media landscape.

I'm grateful that they sponsored today's video. With that, let's dive back into the story of Elon Musk.

- [Announcer] Tonight, the richest man in the world is hunting for more. - Okay, so we're getting into this.

Why did Elon buy Twitter? What can we learn from it? Before we do that, I want to tell you a little bit about what I learned about Elon Musk as a leader after talking to people who have worked with him, people who have worked under him.

The Problem With Elon Musk

The Problem With Elon Musk

Scripts