Musk, MAGA & Me

Sometimes our memories play tricks on us. Mine, thinking it’s Houdini constantly makes things disappear and appear randomly.  Such was the case with an interview I did with Elon Musk back in 1998.  He was then at Zip2, his startup which helped put newspapers across the country – including the NY Times – on the Internet.  At the time the nascent Internet was a sliver of what it is today and not surprisingly, Musk was on the bleeding edge of it. 

After I did the interview I didn’t think about Musk again until sometime around 2004 when I read something about SpaceX. I emailed him but by that time the address I had was dormant and we never connected. 

Then I literally forgot that I’d interviewed him for years, to the point where in 2013 I was a student at Founder Institute’s inaugural Founder’s Lab startup bootcamp in Palo Alto.  The leader of the program was Adeo Ressi, Musk’s roommate at Wharton. Ressi showed us his new Tesla, that Musk had given him because he refused to buy one. Despite this my memory wasn’t jogged about having interviewed Musk. 

It wasn’t until years later that for some reason my mental Houdini reminded me that not only had I interviewed him, but that the guy whose program I attended and who showed us his Tesla was his roommate! In a very George Costanza moment I remember thinking “Gee, what could I have said that would have connected me with the juggernaut that Musk was?”

Whatever I might have come up with, like George, I had missed my opportunity.  But it did cause me to go back and see if I had a copy of the interview.  I eventually found one online.  I read it and two things stood out: Prescience and spirit. The first has to do with knowing that the Internet was going to change the world and knowing that most big companies were clueless about how to harness it. I remember being amazed that the NYT (back when it was a big, somewhat respected newspaper) was using the relatively unknown Zip2 to get online. They were, apparently, clueless about how to do it themselves and that’s the opportunity Musk was exploiting.

As someone who was hyper focused on that space at the time, I kick myself for not recognizing that Musk was at a whole different level in terms of understanding where things were going. In a word, prescient.

The second thing that stands out from that interview is his entrepreneurial spirit. “When it comes to a recommendation for would-be entrepreneurs, Elon suggests that when you get an idea for a business, take a page from Nike and "Just Do It"! "Learn as you go" because there is no better way to learn about business than to get out there get your hands dirty by doing. "Attack the creation of a business enterprise with creativity and intensity." Don’t be scared to take risks, because there is always a fall-back position, (such as getting a regular job or going back to school and getting another degree) especially when you are young.” 

That entrepreneurial spirit has driven the American enterprise for much of her history and been a core driver of a prosperity greater than any in history.   

Fast forward a quarter century and last Monday Musk had a “conversation” with entrepreneur, president and future president Donald Trump.  As I was listening to the conversation I couldn’t help but thinking about how older Musk echoes younger Musk. He told Trump “…there has to be an active process for reducing rules and regulations because otherwise they just keep building up every year, and you get hardening of the arteries and eventually everything’s illegal or takes forever, and then we just ossify as a society, we can’t make any progress, and it’s a really big deal.” Musk correctly articulated that regulations are strangling America’s productivity.  Indeed they are. 

This followed an exchange between the two moments earlier: Musk “Well, I think part of what people in America want to… People in America want to feel excited and inspired about the future. They want to feel like the future’s going to be better than the past, and that America’s going to do things that are greater than we’ve done in the past, reach new heights that make you proud to be an American and excited about the future.” To which Trump responded:  “They want the American Dream back. They want the American dream back, more important than anything else.”

That may not sound like anything extraordinary, but step back for a moment.  On one end of the conversation you have Musk, easily the greatest and most accomplished entrepreneur in a generation if not longer.  On the other you have a man who spent half a century in the trenches building a multibillion dollar empire around the world and the last decade enduring literally constant abuse from the media and political opponents and intellectual elites as he seeks to rescue the country from the Communist Democrat leviathan known as the Swamp.  They set fire to his last year in office, they leveraged Covid to steal the election, they bastardized the judiciary to jail him and they literally shot him… and the guy’s still standing!

So what we had was two extraordinarily accomplished men just talking about the future of the country, both the potential and the roadblocks. And unlike the Democrats who rule America, these two have actually accomplished things, built things, made things work and provided incomes for tens of thousands of Americans.  Virtually no Democrats in America from Joe Biden to Kamala Harris to the sainted Barack Obama to Bernie Sanders or Pocahontas have ever held a real job in the private sector, have no clue how to run anything, do anything other than incite mobs.  Yet they are in charge of our country.  In one sentence Trump hit the nail squarely on the head:  "These people are lunatics... In many cases the people from within are more dangerous for our country than the Russias and the Chinas..."  That sentence was by far the most powerful in the entire conversation because it demonstrates that unlike almost every other politician in America, Donald Trump understands where the enemy of the Republic is and who they are. 

The ideas covered in the conversation, government regulation, crime, the American dream, and the traitors within are rarely so well communicated directly to the American people.  Usually they’re processed like sausage by the Democrats and the mainstream media (apologies for the redundancy) so that they come out sounding like Nazi propaganda.  Which is exactly why the left is having convulsions over their inability to twist and manipulate and, frankly, lie about the message. 

And that my friends, may be the turning point in this election and in the direction of the country.  In buying Twitter and freeing it from government censors, Musk may finally create a connection between candidates and the American people that cannot be manipulated by the propaganda ministry.  In doing so he’s certainly taking the advice of his younger self: ”Don’t be scared to take risks.” He, like Trump, is risking much, and for both, perhaps more than just money.  But sometimes there’s a calling that goes beyond ourselves.  America is most certainly one such calling and I’m grateful these two men have decided it’s worth the risk.