I hear this question often, and if you’re a parent, you’ve probably Googled it several times yourself.
In my 30 years of professional experience, I’ve worked as an auditor, investor, tax preparer and financial consultant — and I’ve witnessed the impact of financial literacy (or lack thereof) on countless adults of all ages.
Teaching your children about money doesn’t have to be complicated. You either put in the effort and time, or you don’t. And if you do, it’s best to start sooner rather than later. (According to a 2013 Cambridge University study, children are already able to grasp basic money concepts at age three, and by age seven, their money habits are already set.)
How we teach our kids about money
My wife and I have two kids, both under 14. Like most parents, we don’t want them to suffer from financial anxiety when they’re older. Nor do we want them to be in debt and have to eat into our retirement savings.
The same way we want them to understand the importance of telling the truth or saying “please” and “thank you,” we also want them to understand the importance of money: What it’s worth, why it’s important and how to practice smart habits that lead to success.
In order to do that, we keep things fun and simple:
1. We play “Let’s Go Shopping”
I’ve found that my kids are more engaged in the learning process when it’s experimental or gamified. “Let’s Go Shopping” was a game we played when they were in preschool.
After my wife and I priced the items, we had one child do the shopping while the other handled checkout. We stood by to facilitate and answer questions. But eventually, they became skilled enough to play on their own.
Stimulating the shopping experience sharpened their math and budgeting skills. It also helped them feel more comfortable talking to one another about money.
2. We play “How Much Does It Cost?”
A game that we continue to play is “How Much Does It Cost?” (It’s basically our family’s version of “The Price Is Right.”)
At the dinner table, we all take turns presenting arbitrarily selected items for sale, along with multiple choice answers for their approximate prices.
A few examples:
Water bottle: $0.50, $2.50 or $6?
Movie ticket: $4, $10 or $40?
Monthly phone bill: $12, $100 or $400?
New (basic) car: $5,000, $35,000 or $500,000?
Games like this help them understand the relative values of various products and services.
3. We don’t freely give them money
One of the biggest mistakes I see parents making is offering unlimited funds to their children for non-essentials.
Our kids started getting a weekly allowance when they turned six. We’d give them $6 per week and increased the amount by $1 each year they got older. They could earn more if they did something good that week, like offer to help someone or ace a math test.
Of course, there are no set rules as to how much you should give your children; it mostly depends on your financial means and what you expect them to be financially responsible for.
The consequences of giving your children unlimited funds for discretionary spending (especially after they’ve used up their entire allowance) aren’t realized by most parents until much later.
Children of parents who do this may develop the habit of relying on additional funding sources that can be quite costly, such as debt in the form of high-interest credit cards.
4. We guide them through the budgeting process
The easiest way to teach your kids about budgeting is to budget together.
When my kids get invited to a birthday party, for example, I give them a reasonable budget and help them shop for a gift that stays within their price lane. (My wife and I prefer to do this on Amazon because it’s an easy way to teach them how to comparison shop.)
5. We show them how to put their money to work
When my oldest daughter saved up enough money, we relocated her cash from a piggy bank to a local bank.
“Congratulations! You’re putting your money to work,” I said.
Even though the process makes complete sense to you, it might be too abstract for some children. That’s why it’s important to explain — in layman’s terms — how their money is earning more money (passive income) and how that additional money will continue to generate even more money (compounding).
These are concepts and skills that will serve them for life.
6. We encourage them to do good with their money
My wife and I make it a point to donate to charity or a nonprofit organization every once in a while. It sets a good example for our kids and discourages behaviors of selfishness and greed.
When our kids have saved up enough money, we review a list of charitable organizations together (Charity Watch is a good place to start) and have them pick one that supports a mission they value.
This is a great way to teach them about sharing, kindness and how money — whether it’s $1 or $10 — can be used to help others.
The authors Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung are part of a movement called Fire that encourages people to save intensively to retire early
Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung, authors of Quit Like a Millionaire, retired at 31 and 32, respectively
Photograph: Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung
Growing up in poverty in rural China, where her family collectively lived on as little as $0.44 a day, Kristy Shen learned to make decisions based on pragmatism rather than passion from a young age.
On her first ever trip to a toy shop aged eight, after her family moved to Canada, she declined the offer of a teddy bear in favour of a cheaper one and requested that her father send the remainder of the money to their family in China. As a teenager, she chose to be a computer engineer, ignoring her dream to be a writer, based on a formula she devised to rank the best value university courses based on tuition fees versus future pay. And as an adult, any domestic disagreements with her husband, Bryce Leung, are generally won or lost based on who makes the best mathematical case.
But when, in 2012, Leung told her that in three years’ time their savings had the potential to hit C$1m (US$760,000) and they could retire in their early 30s, she was convinced the facts in front of her were incorrect. “My reaction was like, ‘No, this is wrong, your math is wrong, there’s something wrong here,’” she says. “I didn’t believe that was possible at all.”
In the end, of course, the most logical argument won. Three years later, Shen, then 31, and Leung, then 32, retired.
They are part of the growing Fire (financial independence retire early) movement that encourages workers to save intensively to enable them to stop working for money far earlier than is commonly done.
Today, at the grand old age of 36 and 37, respectively, Shen and Leung are reveling in their “retirement” (to use the term on two people so pulsating with youth seems disingenuous).
Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung during their travels. Photograph: Kristy Shen and Bryce Leung, author of How to Quit Like a Millionaire
Since leaving their old jobs – they both worked as computer engineers – they have travelled the world almost constantly – spending time in countries including Japan, the UK, Portugal and Thailand – started a successful blog, Millennial Revolution, teaching others how to retire early too, and co-written two books. The first was a children’s book, Little Miss Evil. The second, Quit Like a Millionaire, a memoir-cum-how-to guide came out this month and presents financial independence as a route to happiness and is refreshingly dismissive of home ownership as an investment.
To begin with, their friends and families were skeptical, expecting them to return penniless after a year. But travelling cost them less than spending a year at home in Toronto, and their investment portfolio has grown since they left their old lives behind, so they now have more money than they started with. Some people, says Shen, see what they’re doing as “invalidating” because it challenges the status quo. “It really makes people question their lives and they don’t like that because it’s scary.”
Their journey to Fire started fairly conventionally – they were saving for a deposit to buy a house. But the more they saved, the more house prices went up and the less sure about getting on the property ladder they became. By 2012, after seven years of saving, they had C$500,000, but Leung started looking for other solutions. After coming across early Fire bloggers like Mr Money Mustache, he says: “I realised based on what they were doing and where we were that we could either be in debt for the next 25 years or retired in about three.”
Using an adapted version of the “4% rule” – a principle borrowed from the traditional retirement world – they calculated their basic living expenses, C$40,000, and multiplied it by 25 to come to C$1m, the amount they would need to retire. In a total of nine years they managed to accrue around four-fifths of that in savings, plus a further C$200,000 through low-risk investments.
But their saving lifestyle wasn’t exactly frugal. They continued to spend money on holidays and even allowed for treats. Cuts were focused on three key areas: transportation, housing and food. They avoided eating out, only used public transport and car share services and lived away from downtown to save on rent. Tracking their spending helped to identify areas that they could cut back – including drinking habits. “At one point at the beginning, he was spending $400 just on beer,” says Shen, laughing. “I was like, ‘Do you realise this is how much we used to pay for rent at uni a month?’”
Now that they’re retired, they believe their savings, invested in low-cost index ETFs (exchange-traded funds), will keep them going for the foreseeable future. In case of disasters, including a 1929-style crash, they have three backup plans.
“We are probably some of the most pessimistic people you’ll ever meet,” says Leung, by way of explanation. “And we’re only doing this because we’ve created all these safety nets that will catch us.”
During her early childhood in Taiping, a village in Sichuan province, Shen says she learnt the scarcity mindset early on. “If you ever run out, the government is not here to help you, there’s never going to be any safety net to catch you. So my parents had instilled it in my head that money is the most important thing in the world.” As a student her father, who before she was born spent 10 years imprisoned in a labour camp, was able to visit Canada. Shen and her mother followed two years later.
Despite earning comparatively little money as a student and dishwasher, her parents sent money to China to support the rest of the family. Her early experiences in China gave Shen perspective on poverty, she says. “Basically, if you have four walls and you have your parents and you have food, you are wealthy.”
It’s a position of privilege to not be money-driven, she says. “Anybody that says ‘oh yeah, it’s only money’, ‘money comes and goes’, ‘it’s not about the money’, it’s like, you’ve never been poor.” If it hadn’t been for her childhood experiences, Shen doesn’t think she would be doing early retirement now. “I would’ve just thought just do something I love to do … I wouldn’t have thought put in the hard work now and get the gain later.”
Since retiring she is so much happier – at one point, her job made her so miserable she was on anxiety and depression medication – so much so that she wants to show others how to do it, too. She sees Fire as a remedy: “It’s almost like you see people get sick, you know what it feels like and it sucks to be sick and you want to give them the medication to help them feel better.”
Leung, meanwhile, says he was recently diagnosed as “obnoxiously happy” by a doctor. He is so convinced by the power of Fire that he thinks it could even have political ramifications. “[Donald] Trump’s rise to power was caused by economic fear, Brexit was caused by economic fear … If everybody was FI [financially independent], Trump wouldn’t have got elected.”
So would they ever go back to their old jobs? Shen giggles drily. “I don’t think I would be very useful as an employee any more.” She has, she says, become too open-minded to obediently follow instruction. “Once you’ve been out of the matrix, you can’t go back into the matrix,” she says soberly. “You’ve already seen too much.”
There are as many investment strategies as there are investment opportunities. Some are good; many are terrible. Here’s the one that I lean on the most when I’m looking for low risk and above average returns.
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“The whole secret of investment is to find places where it’s safe and wise to non-diversify. It’s just that simple.”
— Charlie Munger
Goal: An investment algorithm to lean on hard when it is available. Low-risk, long-duration, above-average returns.
There are many paths to investment heaven (and we’ve written on the topic before). The diversity of working approaches demonstrates that. However, fundamentally, any useful approach must do three things:
It must work in all conceivable financial environments.
It must be within the “circle of competence” and “circle of interestingness” of its user.
It must meet the moral criteria of its user.
I believe the system below satisfies the first criterion, and allows for all three.
A 7–Element Algorithm for Equity Investing
Everyone Wins Successful businesses have indefinitely sustainable business systems: owners, employees, customers, suppliers, all content.
Ballast for the Storm Look for a sustainable balance sheet, given the capricious nature of the world. Past bad events do not predict future bad events. Sometimes inefficient balance sheets allow companies to survive by positioning them for all environments, not just optimizing for one.
Different and Hard to Match Candidates must occupy a structurally profitable, indefinitely sustainable business niche, allowing for the truism that all moats are subject to being crossed eventually. There must be an element of mystery.
Operational Soundness Reliable execution of the “blocking and tackling” of operations is a must. Getting this wrong always costs big, and can ruin a good niche.
A Few Simple Variables Allowing for the difficulty of predicting the future, candidates should have just a few reasonably predictable economic variables that will dominate their outcomes. In the words of Warren Buffett, “There are all kinds of businesses where we have no idea what they’ll earn this year, let alone any future year.” Look for boring investments, sexy is usually complicated and full of competition. Look for what’s staying the same.
Long Runway You should be able to foresee an indefinite period of growth ahead, through some combination of market creation, market penetration, and pricing power.
Priced Attractively Stock should be priced so that stock returns >= business returns, always including a margin for error in forward-looking estimates.
Seemingly missing is the concept of “good management,” but I consider this redundant in light of the first four elements. Any business meeting those criteria is being managed properly, and any investment going 7/7 has a very low probability of failure.
Notice that the word indefinite is used several times. This does not mean the same thing as infinite. There are no infinities in the business world. Indefinite means “as far out as can presently be seen.”
Caution: what psychologists call the “representativeness heuristic” puts us at risk of over-fitting to this or any algorithm. Always be on guard. In the words of Richard Feynman, “Never fool yourself, and remember that you are the easiest person to fool.”
In a way, our modern understanding of extinction starts with the elephant.
It was while studying fossilized teeth of two different elephant ancestors, the mammoth and the mastodon, that scientists first became aware of the fact that species could die out and become forever extinct. In 1796, French naturalist George Cuviercompared mastodon and mammoth tooth fossils to the teeth of modern African and Asian elephants, positing that the teeth belonged to species that were “lost” in the past. This was a bold, new revelation—one that stood in stark contrast to attitudes of the time. The massive consumption of ivory in the 1800s was unprecedented; with delicate fans, billiard balls, hair combs and ivory veneer piano keys being made of the tusks elephants use as tools for eating, drinking and breathing.
In a Connecticut newspaper, published the same year as Cuvier’s hypothesis, one observer wrote:
The Elephant is the largest, the strongest, the most sagacious, and the longest-lived of all brute creation. The species is numerous, does not decrease, and is dispersed over all of the southern parts of Asia and Africa.
Elephants were indeed seen as innumerous. By 1850, American manufacturers were killing the animals in droves. A billiard ball company boasted it had brought down 1,140 elephants.
But at the same time, the burgeoning American conservation movement was gaining momentum. One champion, President Teddy Roosevelt, designated five national parks during his eight years as commander-in-chief. In February 1909, Roosevelt convened the North American Conservation Conference, the first ever international meeting on conservation policy.
Dubbed the “conservation president,” despite his reputation as an avid hunter, Roosevelt “embodied the dilemma of how to both use and preserve nature,” advances a new exhibition “Elephants and Us: Considering Extinction,” now on view in the Albert H. Small Documents Gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
If fact in March 1909, just one month after the conservation conference, Roosevelt led a Smithsonian Institution expedition to Kenya, killing 512 animals, including eight elephants, as part of an effort to bring taxonomic specimens to a new Smithsonian museum, known today as the National Museum of Natural History, which opened its doors June 20, 1911. The practice of displaying taxonomy in museums to help the public understand the need to preserve these species was just taking shape.
Ernst Moore, a Connecticut ivory trader, poses among Arab and Indian merchants and African caravan tusk porters in Zanzibar around 1900. (Pratt, Read Corporation Records, Archives Center, NMAH)
By the 1950s, nearly 250 elephants were killed every day. In 1973, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was signed. The international agreement was made to regulate wildlife trade in order to ensure the survival of a species. By 1978, African elephants would be protected under CITES, however, it would later be found that the legislation was inadequately protecting the now endangered species.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the African Elephant Conservation Act into law, banning the importation into the U.S. of all elephant ivory, with the exception of hunting trophies. Within the first days of the law’s implementation, under President George H.W. Bush in 1989, more than a dozen countries followed suit, introducing similar bans.
The document—and many other historic goods and artifacts that represent the history of elephant conservation and ivory consumption—are on now view in the show.
“This exhibition places the human-elephant relationship in the context of American history,” says the show’s curator Carlene Stephens. “Within a timespan of about 150 years, Americans transitioned from being mass consumers of ivory goods to enacting legal measures aimed at supporting elephant conservation. Yet these recent efforts may not be enough to counter centuries of consuming ivory.”
In the last century, the African elephant population has decreased by almost 90 percent, with an estimated 415,000 remaining as of 2016. They are considered vulnerable under the IUCN’s Red List.
The worldwide demand for ivory goods, however, remains high, and efforts to stop poaching and protect elephants continue. The illegal ivory trade is bolstered, in part, by the very thing meant to protect it because it is still legal to sell ivory if it can be shown that an item preceded the African Elephant Conservation Act. It is no simple task to discern manufacturing dates, however. Still, conservationists and world leaders are sending a clear message: there is zero tolerance for harvesting these creatures for their tusks.
In 2013, 2015 and 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service crushed tons of ivory goods seized from tourists, illegal traders and smugglers. Their intent was to devalue black market ivory. The practice drew criticism from museum curators who remain concerned about preserving the cultural heritage of indigenous artisans, who have been carving ivory for centuries. In 2015, two museum curators including one from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art were asked to examine confiscated ivory and found two intricately carved African side flutes among the loot. One they suspected was the handiwork of a specific Nigerian tribe. In a 2015 interview with Smithsonianmag.com senior curator Bryna Freyer compared the experience to deciphering the puzzle of cultural history to a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle.
“When this stuff is lost, we lose a chance at better understanding the people who made the object,” she said. “You think OK, we’ll get rid of [these pieces]. It’s not going to make a difference, because there are 498 other pieces. But you never know which is the piece that’s going to really help you understand.”
Illegal ivory trade is just one adversary in the modern fight for elephant preservation. But habitat destruction, poaching and climate change all threaten the charismatic megafauna’s survival, even at a time when scientists are still working to understand their natural history and biology. In some places, elephants are dying faster than they can reproduce; an African elephant’s gestation period is almost two years long.
That’s one reason why researchers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo are closely studying elephant reproduction. In an effort to think about elephant preservation in a new way, they are essentially asking: How do we make more elephants? As well as, how do we keep the ones we have?
The forward-looking research is highlighted in the new exhibition with the display of enrichment toys used at the Zoo to keep the elephants active. In previous work, they found that stress is a major reason for failed breeding in captive populations. One way to lessen their stress is to engage them in activities that stimulate their minds and ultimately, keep them happy.
So, yes, our understanding of extinction may have begun with elephants and their ancestors, but as we fight to save this species, they are powering our understanding of conservation success.
As the decade has gone on, the occurrence of Elon Musk events has increased, and a brief glance back at the timeline shows this isn’t just a psychological phenomenon: Elon really is Elonning more often.
Cast your memory back, if you will, to the reaches of Very Recent History. At the beginning of this decade, Tesla had just one car: the Roadster. SpaceX had not yet secured a commercial crew contract for NASA. Neuralink, the company attempting to create commercialized brain-machine interfaces, didn’t yet exist, nor did the Boring Company, Musk’s tunneling concern.
Back then, Musk was still best known for getting fired from PayPal. And while Tesla had built the Roadster in 2008, wowing car nerds with its acceleration, it was still a niche product. Plus, both SpaceX and Tesla nearly went bankrupt in 2008. So while it’s possible Musk was saying as much weird shit as he would say later on, he didn’t have the same kind of spotlight on him; the stakes were lower.
Then, in 2010, three significant Elon events occurred, which would set the stage for more to follow: in June, SpaceX launched the first version of the Falcon 9, and Tesla went public. In October, Tesla took occupancy of the former NUMMI factory in Fremont, California.
From here, the pace of Elon-related activity would only accelerate. Some of this was inevitable: SpaceX and Tesla were taking on new business challenges, launching new products (literally, in SpaceX’s case), and becoming more popular. That meant Musk’s pronouncements took on a new weight and received more media coverage. It also meant that Musk was trotting himself out more often: because Tesla doesn’t advertise, promoting the brand meant Musk had to serve as a celebrity hypeman.
SpaceX
After the initial 2010 launch of the Falcon 9, SpaceX became the first private company to dock at the International Space Station in May 2012. The Dragon spacecraft went on to be a major way that NASA delivered supplies to the ISS. By April 2015, SpaceX had flown seven missions to the space station. In 2014, NASA deepened its relationship with SpaceX, contracting the company to develop a version of its Dragon capsule for people.
Things began shifting in 2015. In December, SpaceX landed its first rocket. Before this, there’d been some skepticism about Musk’s idea of a reusable rocket as a possibility at all — and some skepticism still exists about whether it’s a reasonable cost-cutting measure. (Refurbishing a rocket is expensive.) But after this initial landing, SpaceX so routinely landed its first stages that people began to take them for granted. In December 2017, SpaceX launched and landed its first reused rocket. In 2018, SpaceX flew the first Falcon Heavy, sending Musk’s Tesla Roadster into orbit.
The launches did not go entirely smoothly. In June 2015, a Falcon 9 exploded a few minutes after launch when a strut failed in the rocket’s upper stage liquid oxygen tank. The second rocket blew up during fueling in September 2016 — and this time, there was a whiff of scandal, as sabotage was considered among the reasons for the explosion. This explosion was ultimately chalked up to a problem with the helium tanks, carbon fiber composites, and solid oxygen. The two explosions delayed SpaceX’s other planned launches as the company investigated to determine their causes. There was a third explosion in 2017, but this one didn’t slow the slate of flights since it was just an engine on a test stand. A fourth explosion happened in April 2019 when a test version of the Crew Dragon — the SpaceX vehicle meant for people — blew apart. Leaky valve, propellant, boom.
As SpaceX was flexing, the rocket launch market began to change. The commercial market for launching satellites into geostationary orbit was “very soft” in 2017 and 2018, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said. That threw a wrench into SpaceX’s plans. In financial documents dating from 2015, which were obtained by The Wall Street Journal, SpaceX had projected more than 40 launches; there were actually 20. In 2019, SpaceX had estimated 52 launches — one every week — and there were, in fact, 12, with two more scheduled before the end of the year.
The slowing market for commercial satellites — and the smaller number of rockets needed to launch them — meant that SpaceX needed to retool its plans. Now, since SpaceX is a private company and doesn’t have to make its planning public, I can only speculate about what that entailed.
It may be why SpaceX dipped its toe into space tourism. In 2018, Musk announced that Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire and founder of Zozotown, Japan’s largest online clothing retailer, will be the first private customer to ride around the Moon on the company’s future ship, which was rebranded from the Interplanetary Transport System to Starship. But betting on the billionaire might not be such a good idea since he tweeted in May that he was broke. SoftBank’s Yahoo Japan has since acquired Maezawa’s Zozo, an online fashion retailer, for $3.7 billion. So, presumably, the trip is still on.
SpaceX launched 60 of those satellites in May, and some of them have failed; a second launch in November sent up 60 more. The 2015 SpaceX financial estimates The Wall Street Journal got ahold of projected the Starlink business would dwarf the rocket launch business — and now, as a result of the slowed pace of launches, Starlink seems like a make-or-break business for SpaceX. (Again, this is all guesswork; it’s sort of hard to figure out what’s going on financially with a privately traded company.) In any event, in October, Musk tweeted that he was going to send a tweet using the Starlink system. “Whoa, it worked!!” he wrote.
If Starlink is successful, then the 2020s will truly be a new era for SpaceX: it will be a consumer business.
Tesla
Tesla’s initial public offering was in June 2010; the company raised $226.1 million during the first IPO of an American carmaker since Ford went public in 1956. Tesla badly needed the cash. The company had teetered on the edge of bankruptcy during the 2008 financial crisis. It had only one car, the Roadster, and it had never made a profit. This would all change over the course of a decade, and thanks to the ready availability of information on publicly traded companies, Tesla’s travails would prove easier to track than SpaceX’s.
For better and sometimes worse, this decade was the decade of the Tesla factory in Fremont, California. Every Tesla car built this decade came from Fremont. Without that plant, it seems unlikely Tesla would have been able to begin its deliveries of the Model S (in November 2012), the Model X (September 2015), or the Model 3 (July 2017).
Then there was the matter of the Model 3. At its unveiling in March 2016, Musk said the Model 3 would be his affordable, mass-market electric car: the base model would cost $35,000. A week after Tesla started taking orders, the company said 350,000 people had reserved the cars.
That raised some manufacturing questions since the Fremont factory had delivered fewer than 51,000 cars total in 2015. Part of Musk’s initial plans for making the Model 3 involved turning the factory into an “alien dreadnaught,” a machine to build cars, he said in a 2016 earnings call. This did not turn out as planned. In 2018, Musk admitted that Tesla relied too much on robots to build the Model 3s, which is why there were manufacturing delays leading up to the car’s introduction in July 2017.
But even after the Model 3 began production, there were bottlenecks. The Fremont factory was bursting at the seams. The catch-all for this, of course, was “production hell.” So Musk… built a tent in 2018. And that tent became another assembly line.
The Fremont plant was also where workers complained about their conditions. According to reporting from The Guardian, ambulances had been called more than 100 times to the Fremont factory between 2014 and 2017 for fainting spells, dizziness, seizures, abnormal breathing, and chest pains. “Hundreds more were called for injuries and other medical issues,” the report said. Another report from 2017 showed that Tesla workers were injured at a rate of double the injury average. Workers in the tent in 2019 said they were pressured to take shortcuts to hit production goals.
Worker unrest meant the possibility of a union arose; unions are common in car manufacturing, after all. A Tesla employee, Jose Moran, wrote a 2017 Medium post complaining at length about working conditions and saying that’s why he thought Tesla should unionize. At first, Musk claimed Moran was an employee of the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America (UAW), rather than Tesla. By 2018, the National Labor Relations Board was involved, reviewing Musk’s tweets (“Why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing?” he tweeted in May 2018), among other evidence. In September 2019, Tesla and Musk were found to have violated labor law.
Even as Fremont was the primary Tesla site, Musk’s manufacturing ambitions led to several new factories. The unfinished Gigafactory 1 opened in Nevada in July 2016; it was 14 percent complete at the time. The August 2016 acquisition of SolarCity would give Tesla what would later be known as Gigafactory 2. In January 2019, Tesla broke ground for the Shanghai Gigafactory; by October, Tesla claimed it was ready for production. A fourth Gigafactory is planned for Berlin.
The Gigafactories have also given rise to some controversy. In 2018, Business Insider reported that batteries at the Gigafactory were getting scrapped (or reworked) at a rate of 40 percent. The man who was blamed for the leak was an assembly line worker named Martin Tripp, and Musk characterized him as engaging in “extensive and damaging sabotage” in an email to staff, Bloomberg reported. Litigation between Tripp and Tesla is ongoing. A former security manager named Sean Gouthro alleges in a whistleblower report with the Securities and Exchange Commission that Tesla behaved unethically in its search for the leaker. Tesla maintains it terminated Gouthro for poor performance.
Then there’s Gigafactory 2. New York (the state, not the city) spent $958.6 million on the factory and wrote that down to about $75 million — though that figure doesn’t capture the plant’s economic value to the surrounding area, The Buffalo News reported. Some workers there have said they found the work environment hostile.
Of course, the 2016 SolarCity acquisition was more than just a factory; it was a new line of business and possibly a conflict of interest. (The shareholder lawsuits are still out there, and they allege SolarCity was going broke before the acquisition, and “conflicted fiduciaries” negotiated an inflated price on SolarCity shares. Tesla and Musk have denied these claims.) SolarCity’s founders are Lyndon and Peter Rive, Musk’s cousins. Musk was chairman of both companies when Tesla bought SolarCity; he was also SolarCity’s largest shareholder.
At the time, SolarCity was the biggest player in residential energy. Since then, it’s been passed by Sunrun and Vivint Solar, Marketwatch reported in June. Maybe that was because most of Tesla’s resources were being sucked up by Model 3 production, as Musk said in a deposition. (Tesla has said that the number of batteries supplied by Panasonic is a “fundamental constraint.”) Maybe people got tired of waiting for the Solar Roof, a product announced by Musk at the same time as the acquisition — which still hasn’t seriously surfaced as a consumer product three years later. It is perhaps also worth mentioning the hair-raising litigation from Walmart — now dropped — about a series of solar panel fires.
Energy storage and solar panels may be a Tesla business we see grow over the course of the next decade or so. After building the largest battery in the world — in Australia — to help buttress the electric grid, Tesla may soon be building an even bigger one in California. The company has also introduced a new industrial storage pack. In California, several energy companies have been cutting power to avoid wildfires, and those blackouts are unlikely to stop anytime soon. That may provide an opportunity for Tesla’s consumer energy business as well.
At times, the pressure from Tesla appeared to be getting the better of Musk. The most significant stress period occurred in August 2018. On August 7th, Musk tweeted: “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” By August 24th, Musk had abandoned this plan. Then, a month later, the SEC sued him over the “funding secured” tweet: “In truth and in fact, Musk had not even discussed, much less confirmed, key deal terms, including price, with any potential funding source,” prosecutors wrote in the complaint. Two days later, the suit was settled: Musk would step down as chairman of Tesla, and both he and Tesla would pay $20 million fines. Also, there was a provision about tweeting, which got relitigated this year because Musk will never log off.
In any event, Tesla carved out its first back-to-back quarterly profits in the last two quarters of 2018. In the second quarter of 2019, Tesla made and delivered the most cars in its history, though the company still posted a loss for the quarter. It made its first profit in 2019 during its third quarter. One consistent theme throughout Tesla’s existence has been skeptics who’ve said the business doesn’t seem sustainable. Despite the naysaying and some close calls, Tesla is still in the ring. With the Model Y (a compact SUV) and Cybertruck coming in the next decade, Tesla has the opportunity to prove naysayers wrong — or undergo another production hell. Strap yourself in because, whatever happens, it’s likely to be a fascinating ride.
Other businesses
Musk launched two new ventures this decade: Neuralink, a company for brain-machine interfaces, and the Boring Company, a tunnel-boring venture. The two companies appear to have much less day-to-day attention from Musk. At his Twitter defamation trial in December 2019, Musk described Tesla and SpaceX as occupying 95 percent of his time. Still, both ventures are worth mentioning at least in part because they seem to expand Musk’s science fiction-influenced worldview.
Neuralink was founded in 2016, about a decade after the first clinical report of a person using a brain-machine interface to move a cursor on a screen. Neuralink was publicly unveiled in 2017, and Musk gave more details on the company’s ambitions: to give people who are disabled a way to command computers as a compensatory aid, allow for telepathic communication, and graft human thought onto AI systems.
Well, Musk usually dreams big.
In 2019, we got some more details on the design of the Neuralink technology: flexible threads to be embedded in the brain. Also, a monkey has used the technology to “control a computer with its brain,” Musk announced, to the surprise of his team. The company is still in early stages, and biotechnology usually takes more than a decade from initial research to sale on the market, with lots of studies in between to help characterize the technology.
The Boring Company is moving faster, probably because it doesn’t require brain surgery. In January 2017, Musk tweeted about Los Angeles traffic “driving me nuts.” He said he had a new venture in mind: the Boring Company.
In 2019, Chicago got a new mayor, and, suddenly, the Boring Company project was placed on the back burner. But Las Vegas, which is no stranger to quixotic transit projects, stepped into the breach: the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority entered into a $48.6 million contract with the Boring Company to build a “people mover.” That project broke ground in November 2019, and it’s expected to be completed by CES 2021.
Elon himself
Musk’s Twitter account exists in an ongoing state of epistemic uncertainty. Sometimes he tweets things that seem like jokes and aren’t — a lot of these things pertain directly to the Boring Company, which seems to be something of a catch-all for Musk’s whimsy — and sometimes he really is just joking. (I don’t think he’s going to build a volcano lair.)
There are, however, some more general things that Musk was up to during the 2010s, of which, the most significant were his involvement with OpenAI and the hyperloop.
The hyperloop was first revealed to the public in 2012, with more details following a year later. Musk said publicly that he had “no plans” to build his design, but that didn’t stop a lot of other people from forming hyperloop companies. The basic plans called for “pods” traveling at 800 miles per hour to send people quickly from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Musk did build a test track that’s about a mile long outside his SpaceX headquarters, and in 2015, he began hosting a pod-racing competition for students. These events seem to be largely hack-a-thons, which may also serve as recruiting pools for engineering talent. Next year, Musk says, the test track will have a curve. And an actual hyperloop may eventually be built in India.
There is also the matter of artificial intelligence. While many AI experts have come to believe that artificial intelligence is likely to be limited, Musk has warned about hyper-intelligent, human-hating AI: “we are summoning the demon,” he said in 2014. (As of 2018, he’s still anxious about it.) So Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, which is meant to build friendly AI. The foundation initially raised about $1 billion from various tech companies and executives, including Musk. In February 2018, Musk stepped down from the foundation since there might be some conflicts between his attempts at Tesla to build self-driving cars and OpenAI’s work, but he said he will remain a donor. The CEO remains Sam Altman who was formerly the president of Y Combinator.
If this all seems a little far-fetched, there may be an explanation: “There’s a billion to one chance we’re living in base reality,” Musk said onstage in 2016. Musk has apparently done a great deal of thought about the possibility that we’re all living in a simulation, and “my brother and I agreed that we would ban such conversations if we were ever in a hot tub.” The notion of a “base reality” may be a reference to a 2003 hypothesis put forward by philosopher Nick Bostrom, though it appears a bit more certain than Bostrom’s line of thought. It is a view echoed by some computer scientists, though the most effective rebuttal I’ve seen is, essentially, “well, so what if we are? This is a distinction without a difference.”
Musk also poured $2 million into a satire company, Thud. In March 2018, Musk announced the venture on Twitter with some former Onion staffers on board who said at the time, “We can confirm that we have learned nothing from prevailing trends in media and are launching a brand-new comedy project.” By December 2018, however, Musk told the group that no further funding would come from him; the group then had six months to launch and figure out a monetization strategy before the money ran out. Ambitious projects, like DNA Friend, a 23andMe satire, were quickly rushed out the door. Thud was shuttered in May.
In somewhat less amusing news, Musk also stood trial for defamation in December 2019. The suit was brought by Vernon Unsworth who helped rescue a soccer team and their coach who’d been trapped in a cave in Thailand. Musk had also attempted to assist with the rescue, by building a “minisub,” with the notion that it could be used to ferry the children from the cave. In an interview with CNN, Unsworth said the tube was a “PR stunt” with “absolutely no chance of working” and that Musk could “stick his submarine where it hurts.” (Musk’s lawyers would later pressure Unsworth to apologize for some of the comments he made in this interview during the suit.) Musk then called him a “pedo guy” on Twitter.
There’s probably some stuff I’ve missed here, but that’s just because there’s so much stuff. It does seem, looking back, that the pace began to accelerate around 2015. One question I get most often about Musk — from friends, family members, neighbors, and my editors — is “Okay, but is this dude for real?” Well, the rockets are real, the cars are real, the Not-A-Flamethrower is real, and so is the tunnel starting in the SpaceX parking lot. The lawsuits are varying degrees of real. The timelines Musk gives himself on the products he makes are almost always wishful thinking, and not all of his ideas work in reality.
The rise of the social media influencer as a new form of celebrity in the 2010s seems to have suited Musk. He’s leaned heavily on YouTubers and, like many other influencers before him, engaged in a popular crossover event. He has a devoted army of fans, just like Taylor Swift or PewDiePie. Like most influencers, he seems to enjoy spectacle. And also like most influencers, he’s used social media — and his own celebrity — as a valuable form of marketing. That’s especially important for Tesla (which has arguably become the car brand for YouTubers) since Tesla doesn’t engage in paid advertisements. Sure, some Elon activity is decidedly spontaneous, but even that works in favor of the marketing since it makes his fans feel closer to him. I mean, how many big-deal CEOs besides Musk tweet about Rick and Morty, or engage with random followers? To borrow a turn of phrase from Jay Z: Elon Musk isn’t just a businessman; he’s a business, man.
Musk seems unlikely to stop Elonning anytime soon. We do not yet have the technology to predict cycles of Elon activity, thus allowing us to forecast heavy Elon seasons. I sincerely hope someone is working on this, but, until then, I suppose we’d all better keep an eye on his Twitter account: he appears more often there than anywhere else.
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