A Touch Of Madness

The Gap Between Genius And Insanity Appears To Be Closing For Elon Musk As His Outlandish Predictions Come True.

- Stephen Corby

Elon Musk might have one of the most fantastic, freakish and freewheeling minds currently operating on this planet, but as a CEO he makes an extraordinary corporate disrupter. While his behaviour has never been exactly businesslike, his recent misadventures into accusing popular heroes of paedophilia, smoking pot – on camera – during an interview, and toying with taking Tesla private have caused financial-market conniptions.

The question is whether it’s possible to describe someone as being in danger of running off the rails if they were never on them in the first place. And the problem for his various companies, and their investors of course, is that he is those brands, just as much as the futuristic electric cars, flamethrowers, rockets and moon tourism they’re selling.

For more than 15 years, Musk has made a habit, not only of making outlandish predictions and grandiose mission statements, but of then going ahead and making the impossible not only possible but also profitable.

Although, once again, when it comes to things like profit, Musk can tend to sound not just un-CEO-like, but unhinged. While his satellite-launching company SpaceX is valued at a useful US$25 billion, the world’s most famous electric-vehicle company, Tesla, only posted its first profit in October 2018.

“Given that Tesla has never made an annual profit in the almost 15 years since we have existed, profit is obviously not what motivates us,” Musk told his employees by email a few months prior. In fact, Tesla lost nearly US$2 billion in 2017, US$675 million in 2016 and US$889 million in 2015.

“What drives us is our mission to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable, clean energy, but we will never achieve that mission unless we eventually demonstrate that we can be sustainably profitable. That is a valid and fair criticism of Tesla’s history to date,” he admitted.