This week we saw what seemed like science fiction as SpaceX’s Starship rocket took off and then was successfully “caught” back on the launchpad. The video rightly echoed across the internet all week. But within a few days Tesla’s “Full Self Driving” software came under investigation after multiple failures and at least one death. Musk has been promising a real self-driving experience for years, but nowadays, the Tesla experience is worse than some of Ford’s new models. And that is the Musk paradox: innovation and exaggeration.
There are numerous other examples. In Tesla, he built the first major US car company to IPO in more than 50 years, but there were some nasty lawsuits with the original founders, and from a revenue perspective, he’s run Twitter into the ground.
With Starlink, the World finally has reliable internet service across the globe but this week’s Tesla event included Optimus robots that were actually controlled by humans, a fact only revealed later.
We should not be surprised that business leaders both succeed and fail, nor that they have personal failings. Thomas Edison is another similar example. However, they should also expect the same scrutiny as the rest of us, regardless of past success. They’re human, after all.
Sterling Road invests in idea stage and pre-seed B2B startups based in the US, Canada and UK.
