I.
On a pleasant Sunday evening in August 2008 three hundred scientists gathered to watch their handiwork leave earth.
Their handiwork was a 70-foot rocket called Falcon 1. It stood tall on Omelek Island, a solitary spot of rock roughly 2,500 miles southwest of Honolulu. The 7.9-acre island that had formerly operated as the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site now served as launch pad for a private company called SpaceX. The scientists, a colorful mob of T-shirts and polos, gazed at the island and at their missile from across the world, in a white-walled workshop at 1 Rocket Road in Hawthorne, California.
Falcon 1 was to be the first nongovernment spacecraft to orbit the planet. If the day’s launch went as planned, the name of the company, printed in dark, futuristic letters on Falcon 1’s side, would be etched into record books and documentaries alongside Sputnik and Apollo. It would be a historic victory for the new space age.
That is, if it didn’t fall dead into the ocean like the first two Falcons.
Sixteen months had passed since the previous Falcon 1 hadn’t quite made it to orbit. After liftoff, the first stage (or bottom half) of the rocket successfully separated, falling to earth to allow the second stage (the rest of the rocket) to shoot into orbit. But the second stage engine unexpectedly shut off after seven and a half minutes. SpaceX engineers diagnosed the trouble and spent the next year working around the clock to perfect and polish every rivet. Now they milled about in the high-ceilinged corporate command room, abuzz with excitement. This could be it. As they waited beneath the giant screens broadcasting their rocket’s video feed from 4,955 miles away, the man behind their mission stepped into the mission control trailer at the back of the room.
Elon Musk. The dark-haired South African entered, wearing his usual outfit—fitted T-shirt and jeans—and took command. The oft-mythologized billionaire—after whom Robert Downey Jr. modeled his character, Tony Stark, in the Iron Man films—was at the time simply a millionaire and perhaps not even that. Into SpaceX he’d plunged his personal fortune, which over six years had been whittled down to a stump.
A few years ago, Musk had disclosed that he had enough money to attempt three rocket launches. He regretted saying it. Now, after two unsuccessful attempts to reach orbit, the eyes of his 300 exhausted employees, many of whom had worked 80-hour weeks during the summer, stared at the Falcon 1 video feed. And so did thousands of spectators around the globe.
ELON MUSK GREW UP in Pretoria, South Africa, in a family of five whose patriarch left when the kids were young. The young Elon preferred books to sports, and he was always making things. Around age ten, he ran out of books, so he read the encyclopedia, “out of desperation,” he says. At age twelve, he programmed a space-battle video game and sold it. At sixteen, he tried to open a video arcade, but he couldn’t get government permission to use the location he’d picked. He kept reading books.
By age 31 he was living in California and had sold two successful companies. The second, the online payments company PayPal, made him $165 million.
When a friend asked him what he wanted to do next, Musk remarked that he’d always been interested in space. “I didn’t think there was anything I could do as an individual. But,” he told Wired magazine in 2012, “it seemed clear that we would send people to Mars.” That excited him. It would be an important step for humanity—he was convinced. However, when he checked NASA’s website, he found no Mars mission.
It turned out that in a 1989 study, NASA had estimated a half-trillion-dollar price tag on a manned trip to Mars. Since then, politicians wouldn’t touch the idea.
Musk was piqued. He had built two businesses in an industry ruled by Moore’s law, the principle that says technology gets exponentially cheaper and more powerful over time. Space flight ought to be getting easier, he thought. Perhaps he could use his Internet money and expertise to nudge the industry forward.
So he bought some books.*
In the six ensuing years, Musk became one of the world’s foremost experts on rocketry. He hunted down mavericks like aerospace consultant Jim Cantrell, who helped him put together an Ocean’s Eleven–like team of rocket scientists. “I thought he was a lunatic,” Cantrell recalls. But Musk’s plan was too tempting to turn down.
Cantrell took the gig. And they started building spaceships.
WHEN SPACEX LAUNCHED IN 2002, NASA employed about 18,000 people and many more contractors. About 400,000 people had contributed to the Apollo program, according to author Catherine Thimmesh, who years later tallied up all the spacesuit seamstresses and propulsion engineers and software experts involved.
Musk’s vision was to do with a tiny team what NASA wouldn’t with its tens of thousands: “To make life multiplanetary,” he said, as often as he had occasion to talk about it. To ensure the continuation of “human consciousness.”
There was a problem, however. Space is expensive.
“If I were asked what were the ten most important tasks that need to be accomplished to enable a vibrant, expansive future in space for humanity, I would put lowering the cost of getting to space for all ten,” says Clark Lindsey, researcher and managing editor of NewSpace Watch.
Since the 1950s government-funded rocketry had focused on performance—getting the most stuff into orbit as possible—with very little effort to reduce cost. The average Space Shuttle mission, for example, cost over $1 billion, all told. Every time. As such, NASA had effectively abandoned the idea of manned flight to Mars, suggesting that maybe in the late 2030s it might—possibly, almost, perhaps, hopefully, our-fingers-are-crossed, but-don’t-hold-us-to-it—think about it.
SpaceX’s goal of getting to Mars would mean necessarily reducing the cost per kilogram of stuff launched into space from thousands of dollars to tens of dollars.
Early on SpaceX discovered that most aerospace contractors sold parts at sky-high, gouge-the-government prices. A lot of R&D goes into the development of the various components used in rocket engines, so companies like Lockheed and Boeing charged a premium for them, even though the parts themselves didn’t cost much to make—sort of like drugmakers do with medication. Musk figured a first-class noticer could build those components himself—a generic acetaminophen to Boeing’s Tylenol—and perhaps even improve upon them.
Musk built a factory designed to input aluminum and spit out rocket parts. Rather than paying NASA prices for engine nozzles and manifolds and heat shields, SpaceX manufactured its own at a fraction of the cost. The happy side-benefit of this was greater control over inventory, as aerospace delivery times for parts from manufacturers were notoriously bad.
Next, Musk sought simplification. He reduced complexity by making the various stages of his rocket the same diameter, with the same engines. Whereas most rockets used fuel tanks of diminishing fatness (the Shuttle, for example, had two small boosters and one big booster, which required different tools, parts, and procedures to build and maintain), Falcon’s two stages could be built with the same jigs and tooling, the same electronics, and the same engineers.
The strategy lowered costs, says Musk, “by at least a factor of two, and perhaps as much as three or four compared to similar vehicles elsewhere. This came despite the conventional wisdom in the space industry, academia, etc., that rocket costs couldn’t be reduced by more than a few percent.”
That’s great, except the Falcon had already failed twice. So much for cost savings. Before he could go to Mars, Musk had to prove he could put something into space at all.
AS MUSK’S THIRD AND final rocket’s engines warmed up half a world away on Omelek Island, an electric feeling filled the cavernous room at SpaceX headquarters. The gathered scientists stared at the screens, “like a couple hundred people against the world,” remembers SpaceX head of talent Dolly Singh. Inside Falcon 1’s belly rested a payload of three small satellites and the ashes of actor James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty in the original Star Trek series. And the last pennies of Elon Musk’s fortune.
As Musk watched the countdown in his command trailer at the back of the building, his bank account hovering near zero and 300 of his friends’ six years of sacrifice having led up to this one moment, his heart must have raced.
This has to work.
II.
At first, nobody seemed to take SpaceX seriously. This was an Internet millionaire playing with his money. That’s what the insular, good ol’ boys club of rocket contractors told everyone. And Musk wasn’t the first newbie in history to think he could take on space. “There’s a long list of people who’ve tried to do this,” Cantrell says. “Nobody succeeds. Ever.”
Musk realized that in order to gain support for his big vision, he would himself have to step into the public spotlight. In other words, he had to get people to believe. So the geek brushed up on speaking skills and started talking big. This-is-the-future-of-mankind big. He did television appearances and magazine interviews. He told the world he was going to die on Mars.
Musk isn’t the first in history to use over-the-top demonstration to create buzz, and therefore harnessable momentum. Pop star Lady Gaga gained unprecedented support for her music and mission to “foster a more accepting society” through the stir generated by her outrageous costumes and music videos. Being hoisted into the 2011 Grammy Awards inside a giant egg, then hatching on stage wasn’t eccentricism, it was brilliant marketing. Twenty-four million albums later, it’s clear such artistic brinkmanship worked. Energy-drink maker Red Bull spurred enormous word-of-mouth when it sent daredevil Felix Baumgartner to the edge of space in a balloon, then recorded his supersonic freefall. His skydive broke the record for first human body to break the speed of sound, and the highest freefall distance (127,852 feet). Creating your own wave and then catching it is as old as ancient Greece: Alexander III rallied the Macedonians with his hyperbolic quest to reach the “ends of the world and the Great Outer Sea,” conquering the entire Persian Empire along the way.
Of course, such spotlight-snatching only produces real momentum if there’s substance behind it. Gaga’s music was catchy and fresh. Red Bull had spent years publishing a backlog of high-octane sports content (and selling a popular beverage); the attention from Baumgartner’s jump just solidified the company’s reputation in the action-sports world. Alexander earned himself the title “Great” through his ingenious military tactics, without which his quest would have never worked.
President John F. Kennedy described the opportunity inherent in high-profile swings like these when he declared in September 1962 that the United States would put a man on the moon. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
And that, at last, brings us to our final smartcut.
III.
Inside the bowels of the SpaceX factory, a kid named Kosta Grammatis, one of the youngest avionics systems engineers in the company, sat tinkering with a tiny satellite for the year leading up to the third Falcon 1 launch. It was called K-SAT. It was basically a modem. With it, Grammatis’s team hoped to use preexisting satellite networks to control SpaceX spacecraft. Essentially, hooking in to an existing platform that could save the company time and money.
After nearly failing out of high school and college, Grammatis had hacked the ladder to his position at SpaceX on the back of what he called “an epically large project,” wherein he sent balloons and sensors up into the atmosphere to sniff for pesticide residue. He did it by shunning his classes (there was no physics program at the college he managed to get into) and reading a lot of articles on the Internet. He was a smart kid, a practitioner of David Heinemeier Hansson’s selective slacking, and, it turns out, good at engineering.
But designing minisatellites wasn’t big enough for Grammatis. After leaving SpaceX in 2009, he would go on to create a bionic eye that Time magazine would name one of the “world’s best inventions.” Even then, he wanted to do something bigger.
“A lot of people start companies and say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna make a billion dollars,’ and that’s fine,” Grammatis told me. “I’m gonna connect the entire human race to the internet.”
In 2010 only 2 billion of earth’s 7 billion people had Internet access. “The Internet taught me nearly everything I know,” Grammatis wrote in a personal manifesto. “It is the modern-day equivalent of the library of Alexandria, except it’s much harder to burn to the ground. It is indispensible for realizing human rights, combating inequality, accelerating development, and quickening the pace of human progress.” He theorized that information access would be the fastest route to world peace.
With that grandiose mission, he launched AHumanRight.org, a nonprofit. In its first two years, his team successfully convinced a telecom company to move an undersea fiber-optic cable to provide Internet access to 4,000 people on the island of Saint Helena and raised thousands of dollars toward the mission of buying a satellite from a troubled company and repositioning it over Africa to provide free Internet. The fund-raiser gained enough publicity to prove that people cared about the cause, and by 2014 Grammatis and his team had rallied the United Nations and various other organizations to help distribute satellite tablet computers—the world’s first—to the world’s largest refugee camp, in Dadaab, Kenya. Free Internet access would be provided by satellite owners he’d worked with in his “Buy This Satellite” campaign.
If you think “I’m gonna connect the entire human race to the Internet” sounds crazy, you’re right. When you realize that he may have already done it for half a million people before age 30, Grammatis’s story becomes a mini case study of the smartcut that makes Elon Musk world class.
It’s called “10x Thinking.”
10x Thinking is the art of the extremely big swing. To use a baseball analogy: instead of trying to get on base—or even aiming for a home run—it’s trying to hit the ball into the next town.
No amount of weight lifting or swing practice will get you there. Such a goal requires you to think radically different.
The apostle of 10x Thinking is a man with perhaps the coolest name ever: Astro Teller. Teller is the goatee-and-ponytailed head of a rather secret Google laboratory in California called Google[x]. He holds a PhD in artificial intelligence.
Teller’s job is to dream big. 10x big. Google’s founders have endowed him with an engineer-filled building and a mandate to blow their minds. His team has built self-driving cars, augmented reality glasses, and WiFi balloons meant to roam the stratosphere. He’s hired some brilliant minds onto his team, but that’s not the secret of their success.
The secret sounds a bit crazy. Says Teller, “It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.”
Hmm. Math would seem to suggest otherwise. Let’s let the man named Astro explain himself:
“The way of going about trying to make something new or better often tends to polarize into one of two styles,” Teller says. “One is the low-variance, no surprises version of improvement. The production model, if you will. You tend to get ‘10 percent,’ in order of magnitude, kind of improvements.”
“In order to get really big improvements, you usually have to start over in one or more ways. You have to break some of the basic assumptions and, of course, you can’t know ahead of time. It’s by definition counterintuitive.”
Incremental progress, he says, depends on working harder. More resources, more effort. 10x progress is built on bravery and creativity instead. Working smarter.
In other words, 10x goals force you to come up with smartcuts.
“I joke that this is a moon-shot factory,” Teller says, of Google[x]. “Our belief is that if you can get people to let go of their fear, and to be more intellectually open, intellectually honest, more dispassionate about being creative, trying new things, and then being honest about what the results are instead of having all these other issues cloud their judgment, you can get to radically better solutions in honestly about the same amount of time, about the same amount of resources, as making the 10-percent improvement.”
Elon Musk calls this “getting to first principles.” In the 1800s 10 percent style thinking for faster personal transportation translated into trying to breed stronger horses. First principles would suggest instead thinking about the physics of forward movement, then building up from there, leveraging the latest technology—like the internal combustion engine.
Most “innovation” inside industries and companies today focuses on making faster horses, not automobiles. That’s why so many of us fall victim to the innovator’s dilemma, wherein competitors usurp while we think we’re being innovative.
First principles force us to let go of paradigms. “You can trade in a ton of effort in exchange for just the right perspective,” Teller says. He uses the analogy of trying to shoot an arrow through an orchard. “You could shoot an awful lot of arrows trying to get all the way through the orchard. But the really, the best thing to do would be to move around until you got the trees lined up. That process of not spending all of your time shooting the arrows, but trying to reframe the problem . . . is really about bravery, about creativity.”
But wait, are we just building a case for 10x-style swings based on the word of billionaire-funded crazy people?
Academic research actually shows that we’re less likely to perform at our peak potential when we’re reaching for low-hanging fruit. That’s in part because there’s more competition at the bottom of the tree than at the top. And competition in large numbers doesn’t just decrease general odds of winning. It creates underperformance.
In 2009 behavioral psychologists Stephen M. Garcia and Avishalom Tor showed that merely knowing there are more competitors in a competition decreases our performance. Not relative to a group, but in absolute terms.
They call this the N-Effect. To prove it, Garcia and Tor had students take competitive tests, some with only ten people taking the test, others with 100. Over and over, they changed the variables of the experiment: the students took the test in the same room or they took them alone, but they knew others were taking it too. Without fail, the students competing in smaller clusters scored higher. At a certain point, adding more competitors dampened the effect (if you’re competing against a thousand kids or ten thousand, it doesn’t make much of a difference), but with few competitors, students pushed themselves harder, without even realizing it.
The N-Effect has been confirmed in other settings as well, such as standardized tests like the SAT and ACT. And while it’s more difficult to conduct controlled experiments for it in business, businesspeople will tell you that the presence of one or two serious rivals is incredibly motivating. When the rivals number in the thousands, it’s a different type of game.
Of course, some people are completely able to block social comparison out. But in general, humans are good at seeking the easy path and are deeply affected by our social surroundings at a subconscious level. The “high-hanging fruit” approach, the big swing, is more technically challenging than going after low-hanging fruit, but the diminished number of competitors in the upper branches (not to mention the necessary expertise of those that make it that high) provides fuel for 10x Thinking, and brings out our potential.
Perhaps more interesting, however, is the business research on companies that aim high philosophically. Executive Jim Stengel, formerly global marketing head of Procter & Gamble, teamed up with research firm Millward Brown in the 2000s to collect a decade’s worth of data on the market performance of major brands that orient themselves around a noble purpose or ideal.
What he found was more dramatic than he expected. Brands with lofty purposes beyond making profits wildly outperformed the S&P 500. From 2001 to 2011, an investment in the 50 most idealistic brands—the ones opting for the high-hanging purpose and not just low-hanging profits—would have been 400 percent more profitable than shares of an S&P index fund.
Why is this? The simple explanation is that human nature makes us surprisingly willing to support big ideals and big swings. That means more customers, more investors, and more word-of-mouth for the dreamers.
So there’s evidence both in business and academia to support 10x Thinking. But not every big dream gains followers or comes true. Just because you’re righteous doesn’t mean people will support you. You have to motivate them. You have to tell provocative stories.
This explains brands like Red Bull and Whole Foods that manage to convey their values so loudly; they tell good stories. This explains Gaga, Alexander, and other revolutionary types; they tell fantastic stories. This explains the furor of support that coalesced around Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the American civil rights movement. King stood up against the backdrop of decades of freedom fighting and painted a picture that people could believe in.
That’s how we got civil rights. And that’s how we got to the moon. King and Kennedy weren’t simply cowboys, riding off toward some impossible goal. These were smart people, working and preaching desperately hard for what they believed in. People who realized that striving toward a massive goal and rallying people around a rethinking of life’s rules and expectations and conventions were actually easier than working for small change.
“We need a movement,” Kosta says, to make 10x happen. “You need to get a critical mass of people who give a fuck.”
Or, as Musk likes to say, “The first step is to establish that something is possible; then probability will occur.”
With 10x Thinking, Elon Musk had built a space company. Like JFK, Musk believed that the fact that it was hard was why it was going to work.
The countdown clock marched down to T minus 10 seconds. An idling cloud of white smoke wafted from the base of the rocket.
9. Kosta’s precious K-SAT sat snug, inside Falcon 1’s belly, as the verbal countdown began.
8 . . .
7 . . .
6. The palms beside the launch pad stirred in the South Pacific breeze.
5 . . .
4 . . .
3. The engine sequence began.
2. Exhaust billowed from beneath the rocket.
1 . . .
Ignition.
Orange flame enveloped the launch pad, as it hissed from the rocket. For two seconds, Falcon sat motionless. Then, slowly, the 61,000-lb missile eased itself off the pad, fire gushing from its base. It roared into the air. The SpaceX team cheered. Fourteen kilometers it climbed, reaching a speed of 450 meters per second. Two and a half minutes later, Falcon was ready to drop its first stage engine and blast its second stage into orbit—right on schedule. With a click, the rocket separated in two and the discarded first stage tube fell away.
And the video feed cut out.
IV.
The thing about giant swings is they come with increased odds of failure. Babe Ruth swung big and smashed every home run record in baseball. He also held the record for strikeouts.
Falcon 1 crashed into itself. When the first stage fell away from the rocket, a tiny bit of fuel remained in its tank. Suddenly, the engine kicked in again. The depleted piece of rocket rear-ended the second stage, sending it, like its predecessors, into the Pacific Ocean.
The SpaceX team on the factory floor didn’t know this yet. But they knew something was wrong. For several minutes, the black screens stayed black. Mission Control’s trailer door remained shut. The members of the press who watched on site murmured.
As the minutes crept by, the emotional state among the SpaceX crew went from jittery to depressed. The ticking clock confirmed the worst. Years of work suddenly weighed down on the team, many of whom had worked through physical and mental exhaustion since the beginning of the company. “It felt like a funeral,” Singh recalls. “It was like a patient on the operating table that dies in front of your eyes.”
Finally, the trailer door opened. Out came Musk. He marched past the press, without acknowledgement, and faced his 300 colleagues.
The man who friends describe as “100 brains inside one head,” who “ummed” and “ahhed” and bobbed when giving impromptu speeches, spoke clearly and resolutely.
We knew this was going to be hard, he said. It’s rocket science. Few countries had even made it this far—and many had tried.
Then the surprise: this third launch would not be SpaceX’s last.
Squaring his shoulders before his audience, Musk announced that Falcon 1 had some secret insurance. That month, he said, he had arranged for an investment from his old colleagues at PayPal that would get SpaceX two more rockets. They would learn what had happened tonight and they would use that knowledge to make a better rocket. And they would use that better rocket to make even better rockets. And those rockets would one day take man to Mars.
“For my part,” he said, “I will never give up. And I mean never.”
In an instant, the dark mood flipped. The crew went from despair to excitement. From loss to resolve. They cheered, some with tears in their eyes. Musk had turned the failure into feedback.
“Elon walked out with a set of [defibrillator] paddles and was like, ‘Don’t die on me yet!’” Singh says. “He galvanized people in their lowest of lows.”
“He just simply doesn’t believe in failure,” Cantrell adds. “And that makes this guy special.”
It was an easy fix. A launch failure typically took NASA or others six months to figure out what happened, three months to get a new rocket out on the launch pad, and another two or three to get it certified for flight. With it’s vertically integrated factory and startup spirit, SpaceX found the problem and put the next Falcon 1 on the launchpad in five weeks.
And on September 28, 2008, it flew perfectly.*
As the first privately developed spacecraft orbited the earth for the first time in history, the triumphant SpaceX team celebrated at their favorite dive bar in nearby El Segundo. The next day, they’d be working on a bigger rocket.
Musk’s big story got scientists and investors to believe. The Falcon 1 victory got NASA to believe. In December 2008 Musk signed a $1.6 billion contract to use his rockets to start shipping supplies to the International Space Station.
In rapid succession, SpaceX parlayed the Falcon 1 for a nine-engine Falcon 9, that could carry 21,000 pounds of payload and achieve orbit even if two engines failed. Falcon 9 flawlessly flew seven times by December 2013, carrying dozens of commercial satellites at a cost of $54 million per flight—5 percent of the cost of a Space Shuttle mission.
Funding was no longer going to be a problem.
“Generally speaking, if you’re gonna make something ten percent better than the way things currently are, you better be great in sales and marketing, because you’re gonna have to talk people into changing their behavior for a very marginal increase in value,” explains Astro Teller. “If, on the other hand, you make something ten times better for a large number of people—you really produce huge amounts of new value—the money’s gonna come find you. Because it would be hard not to make money if you’re really adding that much value.”
This is exactly what’s happened to SpaceX. As the rockets flew into space, so flew satellite orders into Musk’s office. In focusing on the big vision, SpaceX built something with which it would be hard not to make money.
Falcon 9 paved the way to the even larger Falcon Heavy, and carried the Dragon capsule, which became the first private spacecraft to dock with the International Space Station. By then, SpaceX had the most powerful—and least expensive—spaceships in the world. As of this writing, the company has nearly 4,000 employees and is on course to make more rocket engines per year than the rest of the world combined. Falcon 9 Heavy is the most powerful aeronautic vehicle in this solar system. It can put a city bus in its cargo bay and launch it into space.
But what if SpaceX could do 10x better?
Evolutionary thinking would suggest trying to coax more thrust out of SpaceX’s rockets. Revolutionary 10x Thinking might ask a more fundamental question, such as, “Why continue to make rockets that only work once?” (Or, as Musk is fond of asking, “Would America have been colonized if they had to burn the ships when they got there?”)
Hence the Grasshopper, SpaceX’s newest rocket at the time of this writing. Grasshopper is a self-landing rocket, with PICA heat shields capable of hundreds of atmospheric reentries. It launches, does its thing, and then returns, gently lowering itself back on the landing pad.
SpaceX is on its way to not just 10x, but potentially 100x decrease in the cost of getting to space.
Suddenly, Mars doesn’t seem so crazy.
People are generally willing to support other people’s small dreams with kind words. But we’re willing to invest lives and money into huge dreams. The bigger the potential, the more people are willing to back it. That’s why Musk was able to win over investors at the last moment when Falcon 1 needed one more shot; they saw the enormous potential upside and they believed in his story.
Big causes attract big believers, big investors, big capital, big-name advisers, and big talent. They force us to rethink convention and hack the ladder of success. To engage with masters and to leverage waves and platforms and superconnectors. To swing and to simplify, to quickly turn failure into feedback. To become not just bigger, but truly better.
And they remind us, once again, that together we can achieve the implausible.