By Jason Lim
The legend of Elon Musk has only gotten bigger in recent days with his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion. What's really interesting about this purchase is that Musk doesn't do things for the sake of doing the thing. He does things for the sake of doing the vision.
What I mean is that he established Tesla not to make electric cars but to use electric cars as a means to "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy." It says so on Tesla's webpage: "Today, Tesla builds not only all-electric vehicles but also infinitely scalable clean energy generation and storage products. Tesla believes the faster the world stops relying on fossil fuels and moves towards a zero-emission future, the better."
Basically, he's built an electric car company to change the ingrained habit of how we use energy.
Similarly, SpaceX is not about making reusable rockets to bring down the cost of rocket launches. As Musk is quoted on the webpage, it's about, "You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great ― and that's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about … And I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars."
It's nothing less than making human life interplanetary. Reading between the lines, my ultimate takeaway is that he wants to wean humanity's consciousness off of the earth itself and for us to start viewing ourselves as children of the cosmos ― basically, expand the mental guardrails in which we cage our own sense of existence.
When Musk bought Twitter, the first question that came to everyone's mind was, "Why?" One thing that Musk isn't is coy. So, it wasn't difficult to find out what he wanted to do with Twitter.
All you have to do is go to his Twitter feed, where he says, "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated."
"I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential ― I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it," he added.
The functional enhancements, such as end-to-end DM encryption, that he talks about are not mind-bending in and of themselves. I mean, "authenticating all humans," does seem like quite the challenge that I would love to tackle, given my day job, but it's also a means to an end. And that's the interesting question. What's the end for Musk when it comes to Twitter?
In other words, if the past is any indication, how does he want to change collective human behavior via Twitter? To do that, you have to have a sense of what he thinks is wrong with the current collective behavior of Twitter. Once again, he is very transparent about how he feels about today's Twitter. "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally," he tweets.
Basically, Musk doesn't feel that Twitter allows free speech to exist in a non-judgmental or biased fashion. He really wants to see Twitter as that mythical town square where people can come and say what they want to say and debate things that matter, which could affect the future of humankind. He wants a no-holds-barred, attributable but productive discussion among millions of people that can be sustained because he hates the way that both the left and right silence people who don't toe the orthodox line.
Once again, he basically wants to change how we behave. All these functional enhancements he talks about really speak to creating the incentives and disincentives to change collective human behavior of mutual engagement online. What he might be overlooking is that not everyone is like him. It's easy to project one's own behavior to others and assume that everyone will behave like oneself.
Anyway, all this tells me that Musk must be the biggest optimist and believer in the goodness of human nature in the world, which he confirms when he states on his SpaceX webpage: "It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past."
In a sort of Buddhism-speak, he is an anti-karma crusader, in that karma is an amalgam of collective subconscious behavior that drives people to act the way that they do.
He wants to train people to behave differently for their own good. He's like a bodhisattva who puts off his own entrance to nirvana to save humanity from suffering by helping them realize their own Buddha nature. Unfortunately, he could also be a bodhisattva in Sisyphus' body, where he's futilely rolling the boulder of collective human karma up a slippery hill.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
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What I mean is that he established Tesla not to make electric cars but to use electric cars as a means to "accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy." It says so on Tesla's webpage: "Today, Tesla builds not only all-electric vehicles but also infinitely scalable clean energy generation and storage products. Tesla believes the faster the world stops relying on fossil fuels and moves towards a zero-emission future, the better."
Basically, he's built an electric car company to change the ingrained habit of how we use energy.
Similarly, SpaceX is not about making reusable rockets to bring down the cost of rocket launches. As Musk is quoted on the webpage, it's about, "You want to wake up in the morning and think the future is going to be great ― and that's what being a spacefaring civilization is all about … And I can't think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars."
It's nothing less than making human life interplanetary. Reading between the lines, my ultimate takeaway is that he wants to wean humanity's consciousness off of the earth itself and for us to start viewing ourselves as children of the cosmos ― basically, expand the mental guardrails in which we cage our own sense of existence.
When Musk bought Twitter, the first question that came to everyone's mind was, "Why?" One thing that Musk isn't is coy. So, it wasn't difficult to find out what he wanted to do with Twitter.
All you have to do is go to his Twitter feed, where he says, "Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated."
"I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential ― I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it," he added.
The functional enhancements, such as end-to-end DM encryption, that he talks about are not mind-bending in and of themselves. I mean, "authenticating all humans," does seem like quite the challenge that I would love to tackle, given my day job, but it's also a means to an end. And that's the interesting question. What's the end for Musk when it comes to Twitter?
In other words, if the past is any indication, how does he want to change collective human behavior via Twitter? To do that, you have to have a sense of what he thinks is wrong with the current collective behavior of Twitter. Once again, he is very transparent about how he feels about today's Twitter. "For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally," he tweets.
Basically, Musk doesn't feel that Twitter allows free speech to exist in a non-judgmental or biased fashion. He really wants to see Twitter as that mythical town square where people can come and say what they want to say and debate things that matter, which could affect the future of humankind. He wants a no-holds-barred, attributable but productive discussion among millions of people that can be sustained because he hates the way that both the left and right silence people who don't toe the orthodox line.
Once again, he basically wants to change how we behave. All these functional enhancements he talks about really speak to creating the incentives and disincentives to change collective human behavior of mutual engagement online. What he might be overlooking is that not everyone is like him. It's easy to project one's own behavior to others and assume that everyone will behave like oneself.
Anyway, all this tells me that Musk must be the biggest optimist and believer in the goodness of human nature in the world, which he confirms when he states on his SpaceX webpage: "It's about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past."
In a sort of Buddhism-speak, he is an anti-karma crusader, in that karma is an amalgam of collective subconscious behavior that drives people to act the way that they do.
He wants to train people to behave differently for their own good. He's like a bodhisattva who puts off his own entrance to nirvana to save humanity from suffering by helping them realize their own Buddha nature. Unfortunately, he could also be a bodhisattva in Sisyphus' body, where he's futilely rolling the boulder of collective human karma up a slippery hill.
Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.
