Elon's Mandate of Heaven
A short look into how Elon captured the hearts and minds of millions of engineers.
Howdy friends! I hope you’re having a beautiful week!
Welcome back to the Infinite Playground. It’s been a minute! I’d apologize, but fortunately, I don’t owe you a consistent schedule, just good ideas. I have a lot of shorter posts as drafts. Working through the backlog this week. Expect more posts soon.
This week: What I learned from watching ~40 hours of early Elon Musk speeches.
I finished Isaacson's biography of Elon a week ago. It's a great book. If you're an engineer who fell in love with Elon's visions in college like I did, read it. It'll remind you that he's still the Engineer GOAT despite the past five years of PR shenanigans.
The book led me to reflect on what I found so inspiring about SpaceX and Telsa when I was an undergrad. Elon isn't a master storyteller or public speaker, but I can recite the missions of his companies with a gun to my head. What made those ideas so powerful? What made them so inspiring?
I went back to when he founded both companies - SpaceX in 2002, and Tesla in 2003 - to see how these stories started and evolved. I watched ~40 hours (2x speed) of early Elon interviews, talks, and speeches from this time to figure out his approach. What did he do that so deeply resonated with me and every engineer I went to school with?
I assumed that these stories evolved into what they are today and what I first heard in 2013. I was wrong. The stories Elon tells today are functionally the same stories he told two decades ago.
SpaceX and Tesla’s stories have the same playbook:
Claim the Mandate of Heaven
Declare a single function for progress
Show violently fast progress
Claim the Mandate of Heaven
The Mandate of Heaven is a Chinese term used to legitimize rulers of the ancient Chinese empires or kingdoms. You gain the Mandate of Heaven by being a virtuous ruler, worthy of the throne. It parallels the “Divine Right of Kings” that ancient Western rulers used to explain where their right to rule came from.
The Mandate of Heaven has an interesting quality. If you rise to a King or Emperor, you’re said to have the Mandate of Heaven, because it is only by Heaven’s blessing that you could achieve that goal. In this sense, the Mandate is bestowed on a ruler who is moral, just, and virtuous. In reality, it’s taken. Whoever acquires the throne has the Mandate. If you lose it to someone else, they have the Mandate now, not you. Whoever occupies the throne last has the Mandate. The victors write history.
The Mandate of Heaven is claimed. You declare that you have it and then you make that a reality through action. Through successful action, you prove that you’re worthy. If you succeed, you have had it all along. If you don’t, you never had it, or you lost it.
The Mandate is a function of belief in a leader. I can believe that a leader has the Mandate before he is King. If he becomes King, I was right all along. If I didn’t believe, but he became King, then I was wrong. He clearly has the Mandate.
Why does this work? Let’s bring our focus back from Ancient China to modern startups.
Sam Altman has a blog post from 2020 where he shares the idea that "it's often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one."
Hard startups need more funding, more time, and more tech prowess. They operate in more complex environments. But if they work, they can be extremely valuable. That value is going to be easier to defend, and the difficulty of the problem will attract ambitious talent.
He says there is no recruiting message as powerful as "the world needs this, it won't happen any time soon if we don't do it, and we are much less likely to succeed if you don't join our team."
That recruiting message appeals to the Mandate. “We are doing this thing that the world needs. The world needs us. The world needs you to join us.” It has the same tone as “God chose me to be King. I’m on a quest to make my rule a reality. You should follow me.”
The same function of belief applies. If you believe the company’s vision, but they haven’t made progress, you won’t follow. But if they’re making a lot of progress, you might start to believe they have the Mandate.
This Mandate telling appeals directly to the human addiction to the hero’s journey. We love a good underdog story. We love underdog stories even more when there are many claims to the Mandate, but we know our guy was the best guy all along.
Mandates don’t have to be divinely inspired, but they have to make larger-than-life claims. There has to be an aspect to them where those claiming the Mandate are bending reality in a new direction. That is why belief is required. If they’re correct, the world will be a different place than it will be today.
SpaceX’s mandate: We need to be exploring space. Space exploration will push the boundaries of science and technology and inspire generations of future engineers. Through space exploration, we’ll become multi-planetary and secure humanity’s place among the stars. SpaceX will make space exploration a reality with breakthroughs in rocket technology.
Tesla’s mandate: The world’s economy runs on an unsustainable fuel source. We need to transition to renewable energy. Tesla will lead the charge of renewable energy adoption by innovating on electric vehicles and solar cells that will decrease our dependency on fossil fuels. Through innovations in EV technology, Tesla will proliferate renewable energy technology into every sector.
These Mandates are larger than Elon. They’re larger than the companies. The Mandates don’t say anything about profits or strategy. They’re missions. This is a critical aspect of Mandates. They are focused on the ideal of a new world, not profit or anything mortal.
When you claim the Mandate, you’re channeling a dream.
But how do you break that dream down into a strategy?
Functions for Progress
Elon’s second trick is an act of meme creation.
A meme isn’t a simple gif or joke on Twitter. There is an actual theory of memes called memetics.
A meme is a unit for carrying an idea. It’s sticky. It’s easy to share with others. Great memes have a quality that they change your perspective in a way that is hard to go back from. Throughout the rest of this, when I say meme, think of “sticky idea”.
Science and math tend to congregate around memes. It’s common to find very complicated math proofs to explain a concept before discovering a more elegant version. Once the elegant version is discovered, it’s hard to see the older, more complicated proofs as anything but unnecessary complexity. The elegant proof is a meme that alters your perspective of how to frame and approach a problem.
The same is true for theories of science. Before we understood radiation and special relativity, we thought there was a "luminiferous aether" that filled all of space to act as a medium for light waves to travel. But a few scientific unlocks later, the meme of “aether” died and we could never see the world the same way again.
The long arc of ideas bends towards elegance and simplicity. Like the hero’s journey, our minds are addicted to the simple solutions to problems once we find them. We have a compulsion to share them and believe them when they’re found.
A great, simple, and elegant meme is how Elon plants a seed for winning you over.
The Mandate of Heaven was a syringe for this meme. It was merely packaging. A bright light to catch your attention.
For SpaceX, the meme is “Make rockets cheaper.”
Why haven’t we gone back to the moon and kept the dream of space exploration alive? It’s expensive. Why aren’t companies maintaining space stations or mining asteroids? It’s cost-prohibitive. What drives that cost? Launches are expensive and infrequent. If launches were cheaper and more common, the increased supply would incite demand. Why aren’t launches cheaper? Because rockets are expensive. Build cheaper rockets. Increase supply. Decrease price. Increase demand. More demand, more space innovation. Cheaper rockets → more space innovation. Mandate fulfilled.
Tesla’s meme is “Make EVs appealing, then affordable.”
No one will buy electric cars because they’re expensive, ugly and they have poor performance. Make a sports car that is expensive, appealing, and outperforms. Use that to leverage down into cheaper cars. Cheaper cars will lead to more market share. Sexy EVs → less fossil fuel dependance. Mandate fulfilled.
Both of these approaches are obvious when you see them, and it’s hard to justify another solution. Pair that with the dream of the Mandate they’re packaged inside, and you start nodding along.
The beautiful thing about these memes is that they are the entire company strategy boiled down into a sentence. Elon has found a reasonable corporate strategy to fulfill his Mandate. It’s not a dream anymore, it’s a quest with a simple continuous objective.
You hear the Mandate and you may not buy in. “That’s a nice dream, but that problem is insanely complex. How the hell are you going to go to space or start a car company in America of all places?”.
Then the meme hits. The meme is like a funnel. It takes any rejection it touches and replies with the same thing. Over and over. “America can’t innovate in space, we’ve defunded NASA too much” → “That’s because the way we build rockets is too expensive.” “We can’t go to Mars, it’ll cost trillions of dollars to maintain that colony” → “Not if you could get the cost down by making space travel cheaper.”
You don’t need logic. You have a meme. It just helps the meme has some logic to it.
Once the meme sticks in your mind, you’ve started to believe. Where Elon shines is making the meme undeniable.
Violent Progress
Where all of this came together for me was around the 10th hour of SpaceX videos.
To set the scene, Elon was presenting at an aerospace conference. It’s early 2008, before their first successful launch. Some time before the speech they failed their third launch from a small base in Malaysia. The future of the company is uncertain.
Elon gets up and explains SpaceX’s mission. Paraphrasing: “Every major technology sector has seen massive amounts of innovation except for space. Why? The industry is not built to deliver projects under budget and under time. We’re building simple, cost-effective rockets. We’ll start with cargo - satellites, resupply missions, etc. Eventually, we’ll get to human passengers, then interplanetary flight.”
It’s important to note he’s just saying this like it’s the most mundane thing in the world to him. He’s not a showman. He’s just stating a fact - “Space innovation has faltered because of costs. I’m fixing that. Once I fix that, here’s what we can do.” He’s claiming the Mandate of Heaven. He’s planting the seed for the meme.
Next, he doesn’t even have a real presentation. Instead, he has slide after slide of the badass videos and pictures of everything SpaceX is doing. He’s showing rocket tests. Launches. Launch sites. Satellites they’re carrying as cargo. He’s showing the factory and all the innovations they’re working on. He’s not selling, he’s showing.
He’s showing progress.
This is the final left hook.
Capability.
It doesn’t matter that he’s failed to put a rocket into space yet. It doesn’t matter that objectively he’s burned tens of millions of dollars and is on the brink of complete failure.
It doesn’t matter, because he hasn’t lost yet. He has the Mandate. He has the meme. And he’s actually fucking out there doing the thing. He’s made an insane amount of undeniable progress on an insane problem. You’re not always going to win when fighting insane problems. Setbacks are expected. Setbacks are allowed.
He’s proving the meme. And proving the meme strengthens his claim to the Mandate.
Your mind starts to ask: “If he’s made it this far, how far will he go?”
Different people will need different levels of progress to believe. Some will never believe. That’s the nature of humanity.
A young Tyler sitting in an engineering lecture hall didn’t need much. He looked at the projector and saw a man put a massive rocket into orbit and he felt that Elon’s dream was possible.
Recent Elon
As a short aside, I think many of Elon’s fumbles over the past five years may be vindicated in the long run. But they’re easier to call blunders because the Mandates are weaker. What is the meme of NeuralLink? Of the Boring Company? Of buying Twitter? That they’re possible?
Starlink is a better Mandate and meme. Global internet access anywhere. How? Low earth orbit satellite swarm enabled by SpaceX’s lower cost.
Carveouts
I’ve been on a Herzog dive lately. Highly recommend Grizzly Man and Burden of Dreams.
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon was mediocre, but Waterloo was great. Waterloo tells the story of Napoleon starting with his exile to Elba and his return. In the end, it reenacts the battle of Waterloo in Ukraine, using thousands of real actors marching in formation in costume. No CGI, just guys being dudes in a field playing war.