Reaching for the stars (and the brain, and AI, and humanoid robots, and ...)

AS investments in new ventures go, it's hard to imagine Elon Musk being interested in developing a golf course or building a hotel, which is about as entrepreneurially adventurous as his most recent best friend Donald Trump is likely ever to be. But if the two of them were to dramatically part ways – which is quite conceivable, given how different they are in so many ways – it might well be only a matter of days before Musk comes up with an idea like making the Augusta course gravity-free or suggesting the hotels of the future be floating buildings that can autonomously move to wherever they're needed most. And even if Musk tells us that realising those dreams might take five or ten or 15 years, many people will immediately start counting the months for him to succeed. Not only will they believe him that it can be done, they'll also be ready to start investing in it alongside him.

If you ask enough people, you will hear either that Elon Musk is an extraordinary engineer, or that he is only slightly above average. You will hear that he is a visionary leader who gets involved in the very nuts and bolts of whatever he does, or that he is a horrible boss who sets impossible deadlines and demands extreme dedication from his employees. You will hear of the turbulent workplace culture at many of his businesses, but you will also hear of the loyalty he inspires through his willingness to take on personal risk and work alongside his teams when the going gets tough.

He can be as technologically innovative as he can be managerially backward. He could be the geeky guy in a T-shirt who smokes weed in Joe Rogan's studio one day and meets Cyril Ramaphosa in a slightly awkward-fitting business suit and tie the next. He runs or is involved in multiple and diverse businesses at the same time, yet always seems to know exactly what's going on at any of them: From Tesla and SpaceX to Neuralink to xAI to Starlink and X and The Boring Company, the list goes on.

Despite all that, we might hear one day that he had spent the previous night binge-playing some video game, or that he had slept on a factory floor at Tesla after working until the early hours to fix production issues. He might quote from The Iliad or Lord of the Rings on X, only to follow it hours later with some mindless echo of Trump's latest anti-immigrant drivel.

And if indeed Musk should lead the government efficiency commission that Trump envisions if he wins the US election in November, there is no suggestion that he would give up any of the private sector projects he spends his time on. In fact, part of Musk's motivation for considering the job might well be to ensure that the state's regulatory efforts can be reformed to match the speed of his own and other private innovations.

Even by Elon Musk's standards, the last two weeks have been extraordinary. On Sunday, SpaceX astounded the world by successfully launching the 122 m tall Starship for the fifth time; the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built. The crowd-pleasing highlight was when SpaceX returned Starship's huge first-stage booster, known as Super Heavy, directly to its launch mount, catching it with the “chopstick" arms of the launch tower in an unprecedented manoeuvre that must rank as a historic milestone in engineering achievement.

It was also a bureaucratic achievement, which again hints at why Musk would want to lead a government agency aimed at improving efficiency. As SpaceX noted in a previous press release: “We find ourselves delayed for unreasonable and exasperating reasons. Unfortunately, we continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware. This should never happen and directly threatens America's position as the leader in space."

Only three days before the latest Starship launch, Tesla unveiled its vision for a “robotaxi” or “cybercab” which aspires to herald the next era of autonomous vehicles. It has no steering wheel and will theoretically be able to drive itself without any human supervision. Musk says it will cost less than $30 000 and will be available before 2027. But as he acknowledged himself, “I tend to be a little optimistic.”

That may be more than just a little. Tesla's current autonomous driving technology is far from perfected and still requires frequent human intervention to avoid accidents or traffic incidents. In Musk's world it's almost as important to promise first as it is to deliver first, but producing such vehicles at a commercially viable cost is a whole different matter.

On the same day as the cybertaxi, Tesla showed off the latest version of Optimus, its so-called “humanoid" robot. A film clip showed it performing tasks such as mixing and serving drinks, playing board games with children, and unloading groceries from a car. Musk, seldom guilty of false humility, proclaimed: “This will be the biggest product ever of any kind.”

It doesn't end there. Tesla also surprised by unveiling its vision for a “robovan" at the same event at the Warner Bros. studios in Hollywood, California. The robovan can carry up to 20 people — basically Tesla's version of a driverless, fully autonomous Hi-Ace of the future. Again, Musk was unashamedly bold: “We’re going to build this.”

That might be so, but the question is when and at what cost, and is the technology going to be safe and reliable? Other companies are also in the race to offer a viable self-driving taxi. These include China's Baidu, as well as Waymo, a subsidiary of Google parent Alphabet, Cruise, a division of General Motors, and Zoox, which is owned by Amazon.

What often sets Musk apart from these rivals is how much decision-making and therefore agility is centred in him as the CEO, as well his unwavering appetite for risk and his commitment to reinvest the proceeds of each successful venture into his next project. Even fellow billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, whose politics usually run counter to Musk's, admires this: “Put aside his genius in coming up and running these companies, the one thing I respect the most about Elon Musk – and he does more than anybody I’ve ever seen – and that is that he goes all-in,” Cuban said on The All-In Podcast last week. “He takes every cent he has, and he believes in it, and he goes all motherfucking in. He never hedges his bet, at all.”

The one exception might be X, and even on other projects those bets don't always pay off immediately. SpaceX's first three rocket launches failed and nearly caused it to go bankrupt. The same applies to Tesla's initial production problems with its Model 3. Likewise, Neuralink's research and work could easily lead to a future medical or ethical disaster, but it could also cure blindness or enable the paralysed to walk again. And Musk himself has often warned that we are far from understanding the risks of artificial intelligence.

Any or all of those possible outcomes would be perfectly in line with the entrepreneurial Elon Musk the world has come to know: Forever testing the boundaries of what's possible, and always walking the fine line between humiliating failure and miraculous triumph.

At any given moment, either one of the two is entirely possible.

♦ VWB ♦

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