Elon Musk

Elon Musk is the world’s richest man, serial entrepreneur and probably one of the world’s most famous people. Musk leads several large, often innovative, companies such as Tesla, Space X, The Boring Company, Neurolink and now even Twitter. He is also co-founder of the payment provider PayPal.

Elon Musk is a transformative and visionary leader with a time perspective that stretches at least 30-50 years into the future. His brain-to-brain company Neurolink is an example of an operation that will not fulfil its potential during the next 30-50 years.

All of his companies, while being commercially successful, have addressed one or more wicked problems. Tesla, for example, wants to reduce the use of fossil fuels and therefore reduce global warming. Space X wants to give mankind the chance of an interplanetary future and Neurolink wants to give all people the chance to communicate, even those with disabilities. Now Musk, through the purchase of Twitter, wants to create a global platform for the freedom of speech.

Elon Musk has 114 million followers on Twitter

The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You’re encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly, it allows you to keep people who aren’t that smart, who aren’t that creative.”

While Musk is something of a super elitist and an “enfant-terrible” he also allows his employees to fail. Fail again but fail better seems to be his credo. To achieve the exceptional, one must dare to take risks.

While Musk sets the bar high, he also realises that his team need a high level of psychological security to be able to reach these ambitious goals. He claims that failure is an alternative. If things don’t go wrong on occasion, then you are not being innovative enough.