Insane Mode

lt;b>Hamish McKenzie is a writer from New Zealand who lives in San Francisco. He has worked in communications for Tesla and Kik and was previously a journalist whose primary interests were technology and social issues. He is the cofounder of Substack, a subscription publishing start up.

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A Kiwi and a Black Swan Walk into a Rocket Factory . . .

"He's so audacious, it seems limitless."

As a child, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, was an avid reader. At elementary school in South Africa, he worked his way through all the books in the school library and had to resort to reading the encyclopedia. "I read everything I could get my hands on, from when I woke up to when I went to sleep," he said. Musk learned to appreciate the art of storytelling.

Among the books he devoured were a few about Thomas Edison, inventor of the phonograph and the practical light bulb. Musk would come to admire him as a role model who set an example for how to turn flights of fancy into workable technologies that transformed society-all while making a profit.

Edison knew that the commercial viability of his inventions depended on his ability to garner support from the public and investors. By contrast, Nikola Tesla, arguably a more talented inventor, frequently found himself short of funds and subsequently saw his brilliant creations founder in the marketplace. Like Musk more than a century later, Edison would woo the public and investors with audacious claims about the transformative powers of his technologies. In 1878, he promised a reporter from The New York Sun that his just-conceived incandescent bulbs would, with the help of up to twenty dynamos powered by a 500-horsepower steam engine, light up the entire lower part of New York City in just a few weeks. His electric light would replace gas lights, Edison predicted, and the wires that carried the light would also be used to transport power and heat.

The electric power would run an elevator, sewing machines-anything with a motor-and the heat would cook food and provide warmth in winter. This fantastic electric network, in other words, would facilitate nothing less than the creation of a new world. "It was an incredibly wild boast bordering on fantasy, yet the paper took it seriously," wrote Maury Klein in The Power Makers. "If nothing else, it made good copy."

Edison failed to mention that his bulbs at that point could burn for only a few hours and that the electrical infrastructure needed for them to work at scale was as yet undeveloped. It took another two years for him to discover that a carbonized bamboo filament could burn for more than a thousand hours. What mattered most for the promise, however, was the story.

Today, Musk makes wild claims about a radically advanced future. Electric vehicles will replace all other cars on the road, he says. The sun will provide most of the world's power. By 2060, there could be a million people living on Mars, which would in turn create a "strong economic forcing function" to improve space travel, leading almost certainly to the colonization of the rest of the solar system. Musk's conception of the future is like something out of an Isaac Asimov novel. However, now that his companies have made reusable rockets that can land themselves on the launch pad and have created award-winning electric sedans that can outperform million-dollar supercars, the papers take him seriously. If nothing else, it makes good copy.

Like Edison, too, Musk is willing to combat opponents who would undermine his vision. During a public relations crusade to discredit alternating current, a form of electric power that posed a commercial threat to his preferred direct current, Edison went so far as to support the use of the electric chair for executing criminals who had been sentenced to death, paying an engineer to use alternating current for the task. Musk's arguments against competing technologies have been less ruthless, but he has nev