Mike, thank you for the question, it’s something that I am frequently asked. Traditionally, we associate the term “genius” with icons like Albert Einstein who were visionaries in arcane fields populated with mathematical equations that extend beyond the grasp of most humans. However, true genius is characterized by work that stands head and shoulders above all others in both quality and vision, inverting accepted norms and showing new paths forward. This is captured in the famous quote by philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “Talent hits a target no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one else can see.”
Based on this characterization of genius Elon Musk qualifies 100%. Musk is a high IQ person with an eidetic memory. When he was 11 or 12 years old, Elon acquired a Commodore computer that came with a 60-hour course in the BASIC language. During a three-day period of relentless study, he mastered the course and became fluent in BASIC. He subsequently taught himself two higher level computer languages, Pascal and Turbo C++. By age 13, he had created a computer game named Blastar consisting of 123-lines in BASIC and Assembler for the IBM PC/XT. He sold Blastar for $500 to PC and Office Technology magazine who featured it on the cover of their December 1984 issue. Now let’s look at the targets that Musk has hit, some of which no one else thought were attainable.
Early in 1995, Elon (age 24) and his younger brother Kimbal conceived an interesting idea. Now that the internet was becoming ubiquitous, why not put list all businesses on line together with a street map to that business. This would mean that someone looking for a local dog groomer could go on line, get a map and zipto that location. They presented their idea to a senior executive of the Toronto Star newspaper. At that time the Toronto Star published the giant book called The Yellow Pages that listed the telephone numbers of all businesses. The senior executive merely tossed a copy of that tome on the table, stating, “Do you honestly think you’re ever going to replace this?” A few months later, they incorporated a company they called Zip2. By 1997, Zip2 was leasing their software to 140 newspapers, including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and even the former naysayer, the Toronto Star. In January 1999, less than four years after Zip2 was incorporated, Compaq Computer purchased Zip2 for $307 million. The executive of the Toronto Star later apologized for not seeing the target that the Musk brothers had seen.
Elon, himself had a series of remarkable achievements of which most people are aware, so I won’t explain them in detail in this post. They include:
• Founding the company that merged into PayPal.
• Founding SpaceX in 2002, that discovered a way to launch and recover rockets on land for re-use.
• Investing in and managing Tesla Inc., bringing it to a net worth exceeding GM, Ford, and Toyota combined.
• Founding OpenAI to expand artificial intelligence and make it accessible to all people.
…and a host of other companies including, The Boring Company, Neuralink and Solar City.
The success of these ventures is attributable to the vision that emanates from his problem solving ability and his capacity to abstract from what is to what might be. For decades, NASA relied on Russian rockets to get its astronauts to the International Space Station. On May 30,2020, America saw the successful launch of its Dragon capsule atop the Falcon-9 rocket made by the American corporation Space X–founded by Musk.
There are people who will denigrate Musk’s abilities because they don’t like his politics or his unfettered media comments, but his abilities and his achievements speak for themselves.
