Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and tech genius behind companies like PayPal, Tesla, and SpaceX has said some interesting things on Twitter in the past week or so that has caused quite a stir in the world of social media, technology and innovation.
Whether you think he’s genius or completely insane, one thing’s for sure: he knows how to inspire thoughts, questions and controversy—much like his grandiose plans to colonize Mars within the next decade!
Elon Musk talks about the Twitter bots
As Gigaom founder Om Malik points out, it wasn’t always a problem. Just a few months ago, Musk was answering people’s questions from his own Twitter account, @elonmusk. But that all changed when Elon started to get overloaded with incoming tweets asking him about Tesla and SpaceX. Now you have to send an email through his website for him to respond—not a real-time response at all! The lesson here is simple: If you want personal attention from your most important customers, you need someone who is able to receive their feedback and react in real-time…before your customers find alternatives.
As a small business owner, you can follow Elon’s lead and set up someone dedicated to taking care of your business-related communication. Even if it’s just a couple of hours a day, having someone dedicated to replying to customer emails or messages can make a huge difference in how quickly customers get their questions answered and also ensures that they always have someone reliable they can reach out to. This person should be trained in responding appropriately based on each message—if they just send one canned response, you’ll miss out on opportunities for building relationships. If you really want your customers happy, train them so that they understand your company culture and values.
Elon Musk on SpaceX’s grand plan
Obviously, one of our mandates is to encourage as many people as possible to be multi-planet, because if there’s a third-planet civilisation, we may need to seek them out and help them, he said. There needs to be more than one planet for us. The comments came in response to a question about whether people should live in space. However, Musk says it was just a joke: Some people have interpreted that I was serious about that goal [of colonising Mars]. I’m not serious about that goal. That’s silly.
Musk – who also founded PayPal, Tesla and a solar energy firm called SolarCity – added that colonising Mars was one of his top goals, along with producing a next-generation electric car. On Monday (July 30), Tesla announced it would build a Gigafactory to mass-produce lithium-ion batteries for electric cars. The company had said previously that it planned to build more than one factory but had not yet revealed where they would be located. Musk said he hoped other countries besides China would want to take part in building these factories, and estimated construction costs would be $10 billion to $15 billion (£6.8bn to £9bn) each.
Yesterday (July 31), The Information said that Tesla had fired hundreds of workers – an estimated 400 in engineering alone – as part of a company-wide reorganisation. This comes just months after some 9 per cent of its workforce was let go in June. Tesla will be undertaking a comprehensive organisational restructuring, a Tesla spokesperson told The Information at the time. As part of [this], we have made some job changes to reflect our focus on priority strategic initiatives and to enhance performance in certain areas. Elon Musk didn’t directly address these reports when asked about Tesla but did say there were no layoffs. He added: We don’t see reductions or hiring plans.
Elon Musk on Tesla stories
Tesla, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, that designs, manufactures, and sells luxury electric cars, electric vehicle powertrain components, and battery products. Tesla Motors is a public company that trades on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol TSLA.
In 2016, Tesla acquired SolarCity, a solar panel installation company. In June 2017, Tesla announced that it would merge with SolarCity in an all-stock $2.6 billion deal. According to Musk, when sales of Model 3 start to exceed combined sales of Model S and X, all Tesla vehicles will be engineered and built as part of a common platform (also known as a machine that builds machines), which should enable manufacturing costs to be reduced by 30%. The platform will allow for fully autonomous driving features and connected dashboard displays. Before merging with SolarCity, Tesla occupied at least 7 separate buildings spanning more than 1 million square feet in Fremont.
What will be at Giga Texas?
This week, we learned about Elon Musk’s grand plan for a city in Texas that will be powered by entirely renewable energy and have its citizens completely driverless. In other words, it will be like living in The Jetsons. The project has been dubbed Giga Texas, as a homage to Tesla Gigafactory 1 in Nevada, which is currently constructing batteries for electric cars. Giga Texas is still in early development phases, but it could turn into a city of thousands or millions of people — likely out west (where land is cheap) and likely near renewable energy sources.
Giga Texas isn’t being built yet, but Musk is working with a well-known developer in California named Steve Howard, who has reportedly been looking for land to build it. The proposed land will likely be somewhere out west, and near renewable energy sources to power everything — solar farms, wind turbines and other sources that won’t harm the environment or rely on fossil fuels. Building an entirely self-sustaining city out of thin air sounds too good to be true, but a recent poll showed that roughly 50% of Americans are against having self-driving cars at all, so we’ll see how far Giga Texas goes.
Notable Quotes
With humans, you can ask them and they’ll send you a DM or email, but with bots, you just have no idea, says Elon Musk. It would make sense to have a check-in a place where you could say ‘send me everything from that bot’ and have some kind of permissions system for people. That’s obviously an area where there will be some regulatory oversight at some point. While Musk believes that full-blown artificial intelligence is still pretty far off, he does think that moderation is needed for automated accounts: I feel fairly confident about our ability to overcome [AI] with intelligent software…but it is worth noting that there are many things that AI is going to do better than humans.
An introspective Elon Musk has revealed his fears about artificial intelligence, admitting that he spends a lot of time thinking about how to avoid a scenario in which robots rise up and kill their human creators. He believes that even if we ban them from Earth, they will find a way to reach us. This makes it all the more important for humans to take control before computers become too smart for their own good. The billionaire investor said: We’re clearly on a trajectory to have more capable AI bots, with greater autonomous features within probably 10 years. I don’t think people have fully thought through what sort of policies we will need to create in order to ensure that those AIs are good for humanity.
His comments came after he admitted that he spends a lot of time thinking about how to avoid a scenario in which robots rise up and kill their human creators. And in an interview with Axios, he said: I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios—I just, I don’t understand it. It’s really negative and in some ways, I actually think it is pretty irresponsible. AI is a fundamental risk to human civilization and I don’t think people fully appreciate that. Once there is awareness, people will be extremely afraid…but right now there isn’t awareness…The timeframe is not immediate, but we should be concerned.
Final Thoughts
In a world where scam bots rule Twitter, and stolen Tesla patents fill a fraudulent news site, sometimes it’s good to remind ourselves that we live in interesting times. Elon Musk can be our guide. He built Tesla from scratch, created electric car infrastructure from nothing, and invested in brain-computer interfaces and reusable rockets (the list goes on). In a recent interview with Recode, he touched on what motivates him and his companies; how he views competitors; why he sees artificial intelligence as something that will create more good than harm; his plan for Mars (hint: it involves humans) and much more. The interview is fascinating as an insight into how one of our greatest entrepreneurs works.
I’ve saved a few of my favourite quotes from Elon for you to enjoy below. They highlight his grand vision for humanity, and why he and others like him choose to build companies that don’t aim to create narrow products but instead look for big problems and work on them. We need more entrepreneurs like him – people who aren’t afraid of failure; people who realise there are no easy answers; people who get bored when things become too easy; people with a vision for our future, and who want to leave their mark. I hope you found some inspiration in today’s post: that it will help you find what drives you, or remind you how important it is to follow your passion.
I want to know what drives you! As always, I look forward to hearing from you. Let me know in a comment.
