Category: Musk, Elon

As Sole Owner Musk Was Able to Act Quickly to Cure Twitter’s “Systemic Paralysis”

(p. A17) Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he has undertaken a rapid restructuring that few large technology companies would attempt unless faced with an immediate liquidity crisis. Minutes after closing his purchase of the company, he started a process that reduced the workforce from 7,500 to 2,500 in 10 days.

Media pundits immediately slammed him, arguing that his slash-and-burn strategy would destroy one of the world’s most important social-media platforms—already in danger under the burden of $14 billion in debt. Much of this criticism came in the form of tweets, as the irony of using Twitter to denounce Twitter apparently escaped Mr. Musk’s critics. But the restructuring of Twitter won’t destroy the company.

Mr. Musk is trying to cure a degenerative corporate disease: systemic paralysis. Symptoms include cobwebs of corporate hierarchies with unclear reporting lines and unwieldy teams, along with work groups and positions that have opaque or nonsensical mandates. Paralyzed companies are often led by a career CEO who builds or maintains a level of bureaucracy that leads to declines in innovation, competitive stature and shareholder value.

Mr. Musk set his new tone immediately. He eliminated a 12-member team responsible for artificial-intelligence ethics in machine learning, the entire corporate communications department, and a headquarters commissary that cost $13 million a year (despite prior management’s pandemic decree that Twitter employees would be “remote forever”).

Three attributes give Mr. Musk a better chance of rebuilding Twitter into an innovative force in social media: He is an operator, an engineer and a sole owner.

For the full commentary, see:

Rob Wiesenthal. “Elon Musk Slashes Bureaucracy, Giving Twitter a Chance to Soar.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Dec. 9, 2022): A17.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 8, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

Jack Welch’s Protégés “Were Just Cost Cutters”

(p. 8) . . . in more than 100 conversations for “The Man Who Broke Capitalism,” my new book, from which this article is adapted, a broad range of people said some version of the same thing: While it has been more than two decades since Mr. Welch was C.E.O. of G.E., his legacy still affects millions of American households.

. . .

For a time in the early 2000s, five of the top 30 companies in the Dow Jones industrial average were run by men who had worked for Mr. Welch. “That’s why they got hired,” said William Conaty, G.E.’s longtime chief of human resources. “Because they had the playbook. They had the G.E. tool kit. And boards back then thought that was the answer.”

. . .

The Welch protégés who struck out on their own rarely fared well. At Home Depot, Albertson’s, Conseco, Stanley Works and many other companies, the same story seemed to repeat itself ad infinitum.

A G.E. executive was named C.E.O. of another company. News of the appointment sent the stock of that company soaring. The incoming leaders were lavished with riches when they took their new jobs, signing multimillion-dollar contracts that ensured them a gilded retirement, no matter how well they performed. A period of job cuts usually ensued, and profits sometimes rose for a few quarters, or even a few years. But inevitably, morale cratered, the business wobbled, the stock price sank and the Welch disciple was sent packing.

“A lot of G.E. leaders were thought to be business geniuses,” said Bill George, the former C.E.O. of Medtronic. “But they were just cost cutters. And you can’t cost cut your way to prosperity.”

For the full essay, see:

David Gelles. “Jack Welch and the Rise of C.E.O.s Behaving Badly.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, May 22, 2022): 1 & 7-8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated June 27, 2022, and has the title “How Jack Welch’s Reign at G.E. Gave Us Elon Musk’s Twitter Feed.”)

The essay quoted above is adapted from Gelles’s book:

Gelles, David. The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster 2022.

Share of Insulin Revenues Going to Middlemen Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs) Increased by 155%

(p. B12) Pharmacy-benefit managers, or PBMs, have captured a growing slice of America’s world-leading drug spending during the past decade. The spotlight could soon shift to them.

. . .

While the three largest manufacturers of insulin—Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk and Sanofi—charge more for their products in the U.S. than they do elsewhere, their take of overall spending has been decreasing in recent years as the relative power of middlemen has grown. PBMs have steadily gained negotiating clout by consolidating and merging with large insurance companies. The three largest PBMs are owned by CVS Health Corp. (which owns insurer Aetna), UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Cigna Corp.

. . .

. . . increases in recent years have mostly been passed on to PBMs in the form of heavy discounts that are hidden from public view.

A recent study by University of Southern California scholars showed that, between 2014 and 2018, the share of a hypothetical $100 insulin expenditure accruing to manufacturers decreased by 33%. During that same period, total U.S. spending on insulin hasn’t budged, but the share of insulin expenditures retained by PBMs has increased by 155%.

. . .

“What’s happening in this market is that the middlemen are making more and more money,” said University of Southern California professor Neeraj Sood, one of the authors of the study who has previously done consulting work for drug companies.

Yet the drug-pricing provisions in the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act singularly focused on what manufacturers charge while ignoring other players that take a slice of profits farther down the chain.

For the full commentary, see:

David Wainer. “HEARD ON THE STREET; Sanders, Musk Miss the Mark on Insulin.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, November 22, 2022): B12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 21, 2022, and has the title “HEARD ON THE STREET; Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders and Others Miss the Mark Over Pricey Insulin.”)

The academic study co-authored by Sood, and mentioned above, is:

Van Nuys, Karen, Rocio Ribero, Martha Ryan, and Neeraj Sood. “Estimation of the Share of Net Expenditures on Insulin Captured by Us Manufacturers, Wholesalers, Pharmacy Benefit Managers, Pharmacies, and Health Plans from 2014 to 2018.” JAMA Health Forum 2, no. 11 (2021), doi:10.1001/jamahealthforum.2021.3409.

If Apple and Google Ban Twitter from Their Phone App Stores, Musk Will Start Making Phones

Elon Musk said he would make his own smartphone if Google and Apple were to ban Twitter from their app stores.

Musk said in a tweet responding to conservative podcaster Liz Wheeler that he hopes the situation does not come to that but that he will make that decision if necessary.

“I certainly hope it does not come to that, but, yes, if there is no other choice, I will make an alternative phone,” he said.

Wheeler first proposed the idea, saying that half of the country would “happily ditch the biased, snooping iPhone and Android.”

“The man builds rockets to Mars, a silly little smartphone should be easy, right?” she tweeted.

For the full story, see:

JARED GANS. “Elon Musk says he would make his own smartphone if app stores ban Twitter.” THE HILL (Saturday, Nov. 26, 2022). URL: https://thehill.com/policy/technology/3750849-elon-musk-says-he-would-make-his-own-smart-phone-if-app-stores-ban-twitter/.

“Self-Taught Rocket Engineer” and Entrepreneur Nimbly Launches “Light Rockets”

(p. B12) On Thursday [August 4, 2022] a spy satellite run by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office shot into space from New Zealand. The rocket carrying it, the Electron, was built by Rocket Lab increase; green up pointing triangle, a U.S.-Kiwi startup founded in 2006 by self-taught rocket engineer Peter Beck.

Shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, satellite-intelligence firm BlackSky asked Rocket Lab for an orbit change just days before it was due to launch, in order to place its satellites more directly over the conflict zone. While changing such missions has traditionally taken months, Rocket Lab pulled it off in 45 days.

These are examples of the new opportunities opened up by governments’ desire for “responsive launch.” While Elon Musk’s SpaceX has spent years revolutionizing the space economy with its large reusable Falcon rockets, a raft of startups have recently stepped in to provide light rockets that are more expensive in terms of price per kilogram, but can send small satellites to specific orbits with extremely fast turnaround times.

. . .

After a year of unrestrained euphoria, when all sorts of “pre-revenue” startups merged with special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, rising interest rates have prompted traders to shun speculative ventures, including fintech innovations, air taxis and, yes, small-satellite launchers.

This has shrouded Rocket Lab, Virgin Orbit and Astra Space, which all went public through SPACs last year, in a cloud of negative sentiment.

. . .

Beyond launching 149 satellites into space so far, Rocket Lab also sent NASA’s CAPSTONE spacecraft on its way to the moon’s orbit in June. A month earlier, it caught an Electron booster in midair with a helicopter—a key step toward making the rocket reusable.

For the full commentary, see:

Jon Sindreu. “Rocket Lab Is Science, Not Fiction.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Aug. 10, 2022): B12.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date August 9, 2022, and has the title “Rocket Lab Is Already Science, Not Fiction.”)

Musk’s Private Starlink Infrastructure “Played a Crucial Role” in Saving Ukraine

(p. A6) KYIV, Ukraine—Elon Musk backtracked on his complaints over the cost of funding Starlink internet terminals in Ukraine and said his company would continue to pay for them, as explosions rocked the Russian-held city of Donetsk in eastern Ukraine on Sunday [Oct. 16, 2022].

Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, pledged to continue funding the Starlink service for Ukraine just a day after he said SpaceX couldn’t finance the service indefinitely on its own.

“The hell with it,” Mr. Musk tweeted on Saturday. “Even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”

The 20,000 Starlink terminals estimated to be in operation across Ukraine have played a crucial role in maintaining the country’s communications during the war and are deployed at hundreds of Ukrainian military outposts where they allow commanders to call in artillery strikes or coordinate operations in areas where cell service is jammed by Russia.

For the full story, see:

Matthew Luxmoore. “Musk Says SpaceX to Cover Starlink Costs in Ukraine.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Oct. 17, 2022): A6.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 16, 2022, and has the title “Elon Musk Says SpaceX Will Continue to Cover Starlink Costs in Ukraine.”)

Musk Says World Needs More Oil, Gas, and Nuclear Power

(p. A8) Tesla Inc. TSLA 3.60%▲ boss Elon Musk told European energy leaders that the world needs more oil and natural gas and should continue operating nuclear power plants while investing heavily in renewable energy sources.

“I think we actually need more oil and gas, not less, but simultaneously moving as fast as we can to a sustainable energy economy,” Mr. Musk, Tesla’s chief executive and largest shareholder, told a conference in Stavanger, Norway.

Mr. Musk said work on developing battery-storage technology is key to making the most of investments in wind, solar and geothermal energy. “I’m also pronuclear,” Mr. Musk said.

“We should really keep going with the nuclear plants. I know this may be an unpopular view in some quarters. But I think if you have a well-designed nuclear power plant, you should not shut it down, especially right now,” he said.

For the full story see:

Jenny Strasburg. “Musk Says the World Needs More Oil, Gas.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Aug. 30, 2022): A8.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Aug. 29, 2022, and has the title “Elon Musk Says World Needs More Oil and Gas.”)

The “Intellect” and “Bravado” Behind the Success of Thiel, Musk, and the “PayPal Mafia”

(p. C7) Next week marks the 20th anniversary of PayPal becoming a publicly traded company. The IPO valued the online payments processor at nearly $1 billion—an eye-opening sum at the time. Back in the day, technology firms marked such occasions with glitzy celebrations. PayPal took a different path. Its youthful employees gathered in the parking lot of their Palo Alto, Calif., office building, where the company’s enigmatic chief executive, Peter Thiel, performed a keg stand and then played 10 simultaneous games of speed chess, winning nine of them.

Jimmy Soni tells that story and many others in “The Founders,” a gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible. His richly reported narrative includes corporate intrigue, workplace hijinks, breakthrough innovation and first-class nerdiness.

. . .

Julie Anderson, one of X.com’s early employees, dropped the company’s California-based telephone customer-service provider and relaunched the service in Nebraska. Why there? Because many of her relatives lived there.

. . .

Confirming a cliché, staffers do spend all night at the office—sometimes sleeping under their desks, though not always. “There’s this massive value that you harness when you’re doing an all-nighter,” says Mr. Levchin, “when you’ve gone for presumably seven or eight hours of work, and you’re really getting up to a point when something’s about to be born—and then you go for eight more hours! And instead of stopping to go to sleep and letting these ideas dissipate, you actually focus on the findings you’ve made in the last few hours, and you just go crazy and do some more of that.”

. . .

Why did PayPal thrive when others—eMoneyMail, PayPlace, c2it—failed? One key was limiting the losses from fraud. If the company had taken a traditional approach, observes a member of the fraud-analytics team, it “would have hired people who had been building logistic regression models for banks for twenty years but never innovated.” Instead it turned to young, open-minded engineers who devised unorthodox methods.

. . .

. . . “The Founders” makes crystal-clear that PayPal’s human capital—a potent cocktail of intellect, bravado and competitiveness, complemented by the occasional keg stand—laid the foundation for success.

For the full review, see:

Matthew Rees. “Making the Future Click.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 12, 2022): C7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date February 11, 2022, and has the title “‘The Founders’ Review: Making the Future Click.”)

The book under review is:

Soni, Jimmy. The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2022.

Elon Musk Is a “Free Speech Absolutist”

(p. A1) Twitter Inc. accepted Elon Musk’s bid to take over the company and go private, a deal that would give the world’s richest person control over the social-media network where he is also among its most influential users.

. . .

On Monday [April 15, 2022], a day after The Wall Street Journal first reported that a deal was close, Mr. Musk tweeted to indicate that he wants the platform to be a destination for wide-ranging discourse and disagreement.

. . .

(p. A6) Mr. Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” said in a recent interview at a TED conference that he sees Twitter as the “de facto town square.”

For the full story, see:

Cara Lombardo, Meghan Bobrowsky and Georgia Wells. “Musk Strikes Deal to Buy Twitter.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 26, 2022): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 25, 2022, and has the title “Twitter Accepts Elon Musk’s Offer to Buy Company in $44 Billion Deal.”)

Some Texas Firms Resisted the Trend to Enter the Debate on the Texas Bill on the Integrity of Voting

On April 1, 2021, the Texas Senate passed Senate Bill 7 on “Election Integrity.”

(p. B6) . . . , Texas is an important state for big business, with companies and their employees drawn in part by tax incentives and the promise of affordable real estate. Several Silicon Valley companies have moved to Texas or expanded their presence there in recent years.

Apple plans to open a $1 billion campus in Austin next year, and produces some of its high-end computers at a plant in the area.

In December [2020], Hewlett Packard Enterprise announced that it would move its headquarters from California to the Houston area, while the software company Oracle said it would take its headquarters to Austin. And last month, Elon Musk issued a plea on Twitter for engineers to move to Texas and take jobs at SpaceX, his aerospace company.

Mr. Musk’s other companies, Tesla and the Boring Company, have also expanded their presences in the state in recent months.

None of those companies have so far voiced opposition to the Texas legislation. And at least for now, there is little indication that the growing outcry from big business is changing Republicans’ priorities.

For the full story, see:

David Gelles and Andrew Ross Sorkin. “Big Law Joins Fight To Protect Voting Rights.” The New York Times (Tuesday, April 13, 2021): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 12, 2021, and has the title “Defying Republicans, Big Companies Keep the Focus on Voting Rights.”)

Stewart Brand Read Rand and Koestler, and Inspired Steve Jobs

At the end of Steve Jobs’s famous commencement address at Stanford, he quoted Stewart Brand’s famous advice at the end of his Last Whole Earth Catalog: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

(p. A15) When I first met Stewart Brand at an upscale ideas festival, I expected to engage with an aging beatnik or hippie, the tree-hugging, whale-saving environmentalist I associated with the “Whole Earth Catalog”—that ’60s-era collectanea of books, resources, tools, technologies and assorted products that became the bible of a techno-utopia DIY movement focused on self-sufficiency, education and ecology. But I found Mr. Brand more like Elon Musk than Timothy Leary, and was astonished to witness him make the best argument I’d ever heard for including nuclear power in plans to replace fossil fuels.

. . .

Although many contemporaries dropped acid for the pure experience, Mr. Brand said he took LSD (and other psychedelics) because he hoped they would accentuate his appreciation of beauty, especially that found in the photographic skills he was developing. For him psychedelics were a tool of creativity: “When you design a tool,” he wrote in 1971, “the best you can do is fashion a prototype and hand it over to the local evolutionary system: ‘Here, try this.’ ”

His model was Arthur Koestler’s “bisociation,” the blending of unrelated concepts into something new. Mr. Brand’s ability to discern unlikely complements, along with the organizational skills he’d honed in the military, helped bring numerous projects to fruition: His imagination had him bounce from one to the next; his pragmatic propensities put them into effect. Decades after the “Whole Earth Catalog” project, for example, Mr. Brand published “Whole Earth Discipline,” which proposed integrating nuclear power, geoengineering, genetic engineering, wildlife restoration, species protection and other environmental technologies aimed at creating a sustainable future for life on Earth. He’s a solutions guy, not a New Age guru—his ability to convene like-minded innovators has resulted in the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), the Global Business Network for futurists and business leaders, the Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore, a project to bring back extinct species like passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths.

As for Mr. Brand’s politics, he’s off the spectrum, mostly identifying as a small-l libertarian (he read Ayn Rand at Stanford), committed to bottom-up democracy, with an aversion to orthodoxy of any sort, which means he must adapt when the marginal becomes the mainstream, as in his shift from environmentalism to conservationism, from organic foods to GMOs, and from anti- to pro-nuclear power.

For the full review, see:

Michael Shermer’. “BOOKSHELF; A Man In Whole.” The Wall Street Journal Tuesday, March 29, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 28, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Whole Earth’ Review: A Man in Whole.”)

The book under review is:

Markoff, John. Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. New York: Penguin Press, 2022.