What struck Elon Musk’s colleagues at PayPal, Walter Isaacson explains (in his biography of Elon), was his willingness, even desire, to take risks:
“Entrepreneurs are actually not risk takers,” says Roelof Botha. “They’re risk mitigators. They don’t thrive on risk, they never seek to amplify it, instead they try to figure out the controllable variables and minimize their risk.” But not Musk. “He was into amplifying risk and burning the boats so we could never retreat from it.” To Botha, Musk’s McLaren crash was like a metaphor: floor it and see how fast it goes.
That made Musk fundamentally different from Thiel, who always focused on limiting risks. He and Hoffman once planned to write a book on their experience at PayPal. The chapter on Musk was going to be titled “The Man Who Didn’t Understand the Meaning of the Word ‘Risk.’ ” Risk addiction can be useful when it comes to driving people to do what seems impossible. “He’s amazingly successful getting people to march across a desert,” Hoffman says. “He has a level of certainty that causes him to put all of his chips on the table.”
Nor are capitalists takers of risk, and are in fact even more cowardly than entrepreneurs, which is why they must be abolished.
Yes, my loathing of capitalists is otherworldly.
Courage or fatalism, Musk has it. And strength, and smarts.