Is Elon Musk Different? [Progress]

Walter Isaacson reviews two books about Musk in the NYTimes:

LIFTOFF: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX, by Eric Berger.
POWER PLAY: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century, by Tim Higgins.

He tells how Musk went for broke in 2008 when the Falcon 1 had crashed and burned three times and they only had parts for one more flight. That forth rocket worked. At the same time Tesla only had three weeks of cash left. By putting millions of his own cash at risk, Musk coaxed more money from his investors and Tesla and avoided bankruptcy. He drove the Model S prototype in March 2009.

Miraculously, Musk had survived what seemed like two certain flameouts. “It felt like I had been taken out to the firing squad, and been blindfolded,” he said. “Then they fired the guns, which went click. No bullets came out. And then they let you free. Sure, it feels great. But you’re pretty [expletive] nervous.”

In his famous “Think Different” ad for Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs saluted people like himself: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels… Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” Musk is in some ways the current incarnation of Jobs. As these two books show in vivid detail, Musk can drive people hard. He can drive them to distraction. But he can also drive them to do things they never dreamed were possible. “Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before,” he wrote in one staff memo. “Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart.”

Like Jobs, Musk has a reality distortion field. “In meetings, Musk might ask his engineers to do something that, on the face of it, seemed absurd,” Berger writes. But unlike Jobs, Musk has an understanding of physics and thermodynamics that has helped him know what boundaries could be successfully pushed. “When they protested that it was impossible, Musk would respond with a question designed to open their minds to the problem, and potential solutions. He would ask, ‘What would it take?’”