realized that he could have handled some of the situations with employees better. âI had never really run a team of any sort before,â Musk said. âIâd never been a sports captain or a captain of anything or managed a single person. I had to think, Okay, what are the things that affect how a team functions. The first obvious assumption would be that other people will behave like you. But thatâs not true. Even if they would like to behave like you, they donât necessarily have all the assumptions or information that you have in your mind. So, if I know a certain set of things, and I talk to a replica of myself but only communicate half the information, you canât expect that the replica would come to the same conclusion. You have to put yourself in a position where you say, âWell, how would this sound to them, knowing what they know?ââ
Employees at Zip2 would go home at night, come back, and find that Musk had changed their work without talking to them, and Muskâs confrontational style did more harm than good. âYeah, we had some very good software engineers at Zip2, but I mean, I could code way better than them. And Iâd just go in and fix their fucking code,â Musk said. âI would be frustrated waiting for their stuff, so Iâm going to go and fix your code and now it runs five times faster, you idiot. There was one guy who wrote a quantum mechanics equation, a quantum probability on the board, and he got it wrong. Iâm like, âHow can you write that?â Then I corrected it for him. He hated me after that. Eventually, I realized, Okay, I might have fixed that thing but now Iâve madethe person unproductive. It just wasnât a good way to go about things.â
Musk, the dot-com striver, had been both lucky and good. He had a decent idea, turned it into a real service, and came out of the dot-com tumult with cash in his pockets, which was better than what many of his compatriots could say. The process had been painful. Musk had yearned to be a leader, but the people around him struggled to see how Musk as the CEO could work. As far as Musk was concerned, they were all wrong, and he set out to prove his point with what would end up being even more dramatic results.
5
PAYPAL MAFIA BOSS
T HE SALE OF ZIP2 INFUSED ELON MUSK WITH A NEW BRAND OF CONFIDENCE. Much like the video-game characters he adored, Musk had leveled up. He had solved Silicon Valley and become what everyone at the time wanted to beâa dot-com millionaire. His next venture would need to live up to his rapidly inflating ambition. This left Musk searching for an industry that had tons of money and inefficiencies that he and the Internet could exploit. Musk began thinking back to his time as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia. His big takeaway from that job, that bankers are rich and dumb, now had the feel of a massive opportunity.
During his time working for the head of strategy at the bank in the early 1990s, Musk had been asked to take a look at the companyâs third-world debt portfolio. This pool of money went by the depressing name of âless-developed country debt,â and Bank of Nova Scotia had billions of dollars of it. Countries throughout South America and elsewhere had defaulted in the years prior, forcing the bank to write down some of its debt value. Muskâsboss wanted him to dig into the bankâs holdings as a learning experiment and try to determine how much the debt was actually worth.
While pursuing this project, Musk stumbled upon what seemed like an obvious business opportunity. The United States had tried to help reduce the debt burden of a number of developing countries through so-called Brady bonds, in which the U.S. government basically backstopped the debt of countries like Brazil and Argentina. Musk noticed an arbitrage play. âI calculated the backstop value, and it was something like fifty cents on the dollar, while the
Employees at Zip2 would go home at night, come back, and find that Musk had changed their work without talking to them, and Muskâs confrontational style did more harm than good. âYeah, we had some very good software engineers at Zip2, but I mean, I could code way better than them. And Iâd just go in and fix their fucking code,â Musk said. âI would be frustrated waiting for their stuff, so Iâm going to go and fix your code and now it runs five times faster, you idiot. There was one guy who wrote a quantum mechanics equation, a quantum probability on the board, and he got it wrong. Iâm like, âHow can you write that?â Then I corrected it for him. He hated me after that. Eventually, I realized, Okay, I might have fixed that thing but now Iâve madethe person unproductive. It just wasnât a good way to go about things.â
Musk, the dot-com striver, had been both lucky and good. He had a decent idea, turned it into a real service, and came out of the dot-com tumult with cash in his pockets, which was better than what many of his compatriots could say. The process had been painful. Musk had yearned to be a leader, but the people around him struggled to see how Musk as the CEO could work. As far as Musk was concerned, they were all wrong, and he set out to prove his point with what would end up being even more dramatic results.
5
PAYPAL MAFIA BOSS
T HE SALE OF ZIP2 INFUSED ELON MUSK WITH A NEW BRAND OF CONFIDENCE. Much like the video-game characters he adored, Musk had leveled up. He had solved Silicon Valley and become what everyone at the time wanted to beâa dot-com millionaire. His next venture would need to live up to his rapidly inflating ambition. This left Musk searching for an industry that had tons of money and inefficiencies that he and the Internet could exploit. Musk began thinking back to his time as an intern at the Bank of Nova Scotia. His big takeaway from that job, that bankers are rich and dumb, now had the feel of a massive opportunity.
During his time working for the head of strategy at the bank in the early 1990s, Musk had been asked to take a look at the companyâs third-world debt portfolio. This pool of money went by the depressing name of âless-developed country debt,â and Bank of Nova Scotia had billions of dollars of it. Countries throughout South America and elsewhere had defaulted in the years prior, forcing the bank to write down some of its debt value. Muskâsboss wanted him to dig into the bankâs holdings as a learning experiment and try to determine how much the debt was actually worth.
While pursuing this project, Musk stumbled upon what seemed like an obvious business opportunity. The United States had tried to help reduce the debt burden of a number of developing countries through so-called Brady bonds, in which the U.S. government basically backstopped the debt of countries like Brazil and Argentina. Musk noticed an arbitrage play. âI calculated the backstop value, and it was something like fifty cents on the dollar, while the
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