This Business Insider story, quoting from Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson, reads like the mainstream media hit piece I expect the biography to be. From its its description on Amazon.com:
When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.
His father’s impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.
Now consider the timing of the server move. The servers were moved from Sacramento to Portland at the end of December 2022, and the Desantis campaign launch on Twitter Spaces which ran into problems was at the end of May 2023, a full five months later. Now, Musk is quoted by Isaacson as saying the “whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake”. OK, let’s assume the quote is correct, in context, and the shutdown was indeed a mistake. But were the problems encountered five months later due to the decision to move the servers, or with the way Musk and team accomplished the move, transferring the servers during Christmas week and completing the integration in January? Nowhere is that asserted in the hit piece, you’ll note. Nor is there any description of how the problems were due to the 700 server racks being in Portland rather than Sacramento.
Isaacson wrote that Musk’s Sacramento incident was “an example of his recklessness, his impatience with pushback, and the way he intimidated people.”
He added that the billionaire has “a good track record of knowing when to ignore naysayers. But not a perfect one.”
Perhaps in some fantasy world which Isaacson conjures in his office in the History department of Tulane University, self-made African-American billionaires who have single-handedly reinvented two technologically moribund manufacturing industries should have a “perfect record” knowing when to ignore naysayers, rather than an instinct for risk-taking and willingness to correct course based upon results in the real world.
Prior to Autodesk’s Initial Public Offering (IPO) of stock in June 1985, we had a crisis getting AutoCAD Version 2.1 shipped before the end of of the last quarter to be reported in the prospectus, which closed at the end of April 1985 (due to Autodesk’s small business style January fiscal year, this is designated “1986Q1” in the financial results). When the product was finally cleared by Quality Assurance, we needed all hands on board to get the backed-up orders for the product shipped before the end of the quarter so we could book the revenue into that quarter. (Orders would pile up until shipment of a new version because dealers would defer waiting for its release.)
In a crazy all-nighter before the last day of the quarter, we had as many people as could fit in the manufacturing operation copying discs, packing boxes, printing shipping and billing documents, and stacking them for pick-up. This included three members of the board of directors (Dan Drake, Greg Lutz, and me), with Greg dashing off to fix a bug which QA, who were also working overnight, had found at the last minute. We pulled it off, and the next day the UPS truck pulled out packed with boxes of AutoCAD 2.1. This is the kind of thing start-up companies that still think like start-up companies do, and nobody thought of it as exceptional at the time—you just do what you have to do when you need to do it.
And like Elon Musk, in retrospect, we regretted that crazy night. AutoCAD 2.1 was one of the buggiest releases we ever shipped, and was followed by 2.11, 2.12, and 2.13, until it finally settled down until we shipped 2.5 in June 1986. But if we hadn’t shipped 2.1 before the end of the quarter, we’d have had a “disappointing” quarter (not a loss, or down compared to the same quarter the previous year, but just down from the previous quarter), and that could have blown up the IPO or whacked the price we and the underwriters were hoping to get for it. So, at further distance, I consider we did the right thing.
