Elon Musk and the Machine That Goes Ping
Ever wondered how Elon Musk went from a 'Machine That Goes Ping' to becoming one of the world's most influential entrepreneurs?
Althought "How does Elon Musk make his money?" is the most frequent query on musk, the more intriguing question is how did Elon Musk get his first investors?
How did Musk Motivate His Investors? Zip2 and Ping!
Before Elon Musk became the famous entrepreneur he is today, he co-founded a company called Zip2 in the late 1990s. Zip2 was a city guide software for newspapers, and it played a role in helping people find businesses and services in their local area. During this early stage of his career, Musk and his team were working out of a small office in Palo Alto, California. They had very limited resources and a tight budget. According to Musk, they had a computer server that was essentially a stack of computer casings with blinking lights, but it didn't have much functionality. To make it sound more impressive and high-tech, they decided to call it the "The Machine That Goes Ping," which was a reference to a famous Monty Python sketch.
Python--as in Monty and not the coding language--is a virulent meta-text in the genesis issue of the Elon Musk comic book and it charms me quite a bit. As a fan of Python and machines that go ping, and a frequent befriender of the neurodiverse computer savant in college and grad school, this is both familiar and amusing. He sounds like someone I would have hung out with in college for sure, and while I share with some others concern for Elon Musks outsized power and influence, I can't help but like him as an individual. Maybe because I am neurodiverse and have spent a lot of time around other neurodiverse people at work and in my own social and family spheres to appreciate that he is in some way my people. My tribe. While I can see some problems here--big ones---I have to call out I'm not being a polyanna here and can actual admire the whim and wit the machine that goes ping displayed in his quest to secure investors.
The Machine that Goes Ping is a Metaphor.
The thing about The Machine that Goes Ping is that it tells us a lot about Musk and the silicon valley VC-fever driven culture that produced him. Elon has mentioned this story in interviews to highlight the humble beginnings of his entrepreneurial journey and the resourcefulness he and his team had to employ to get their startup off the ground. It's usually delivered and received as a reminder that even some of the most successful entrepreneurs started with very little but were driven by their vision and determination to succeed.
But it's also a reminder of how basic inequity drives a lot of dysfunctional and potentially dangerous behaviors. There are those that have all the wealth and those that don't. ome of us will be allowed to climb up into the ranks of the haves but only by virtue of some bizarre combination of Hunger Games and Squid Game. In this light, taking an empty box and making it go "Ping" and "boop, boop," doesn't suggest humble beginnings. It suggests something that smells of threatricality and tastes a little bit like fraud.
The Odds Are Sometimes in Your Favor : But Not Often
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In Elon's case, he lived up to they hype he set for himself but not without a lot of starts and stops and mulligans and bailouts. A lot of it funded by tax dollars. Elon is very touchy about being portrayed as privileged emerald mine owner and with good reason. His economic reality was that he had to struggle and strive from nothing to get to where he was. He did have some safety nets that others do not. And he kind of looks like what the Founder mythos looks like. Male, white, driven, and crazy enough to take huge hyperbolic risks that payout over the long haul. His lack of empathy and more callous behaviors are given a pass because it is, as Isaacson wrote quoting one of Elon's beneficiaries, part of the package. This is in Elon's case. Huge risks, lack of empathy, but huge payouts for a few from a lot of federal money. Which Elon paid back. This isn't saying that Elon is an emperor buck naked in the Valley. This is saying that this model sometimes works as a law of odds. Most of the time it doesn't. With economically catastrophic consequences, waste, human fall out, and in some cases, as in biotech, death.
Remember the part of Python that Musk forgot. The woman on the table. I will explain that at the end. Just remember that in the original sketch, if you don't already know it well, there is a woman in pain on the operating table in the scene.
Those of us in tech who have had boots on the ground and dirt under the fingernails---or in our case I guess more accurate to say poor posture, carpal tunnel, and bleary eyes-- all know cases where this fake it 'til you make it, project future state as current state, and the machines that go ping becomes the only way forward. The bells, the whistles, the predictions, the forecasts, and the promises that Founders make in an effort to have people throw easy money at them quick to save them from bootstrapping hell.
This mythos sadly trickles down into every stage of the software development life cycle even on the lowest rung on the food chain, the enterprise software developer. The red-headed step child of software development. When we think of software development we think of sexy start up consumer facing disruption. The large majority of us work in much more humble capacities. But the same thing happens there. Persuading stakeholders we know how to help when we really don't, doing demos of klugy prototypes that are being held together with tape and a fair amount of spit, demoing features that have no backend and no plan for how that backend can be built. It goes on. If you tell me you haven't seen this you probably aren't telling the entire truth, or you have had a limited experience in an unusually productive and integrity-driven software development culture. They do exist. They just aren't the norm.
The point is accepting that this theatricality-cum-fraud is necessary has reached a point of moral hazard because with each innovation leap forward the stakes become higher. There is a huge distance between every day fudging and klugy solutioning and Theraons. Showing someone a prototype of a data portal that is really garbage in garbage out (GIGO) and pretending that it is producing meaningful, actionable business intelligence is not on the same scale as Theranos using an illusory machine forecasting a fairy-tale capability on actual live patients and killing them. Some might say its a yawning chasm, which is essentially what her judge and jury implied with her jail sentence punishing her for a species of what just about every start-up does to some degree.
Yes, I think any rational person must concede that the distance between faking it till you make it and what happened at Theranos is significant. But that distance is an incline that slants toward Theranos, greased with the anxiety of a ruling class that finds itself continually destabilized by Knowledge Capital.
The Machine that Goes Ping happens when Knowledge Capital is forced to parlay with the people who hold material capital. It becomes a joke between those in the know about those with the money and how unearned their privilege and power actually is. So it feels justifying and satisfying in a lot of ways to think of smart folks tricking manor lords into giving them more money. It sits well with contemporary ideas about class warfare.
With this in mind I can understand--and I hope you can too--my begrudging affection for the metaphor for the Machine that Goes Ping and Elon's inside joke. But: I told you to remember that there was a woman on the table? The brilliant joke in The Meaning of Life is not the machine that goes ping and how easy it is is to full bureuacrats. The satire is a lot sharper than that. Michael Palin as the rather obtuse but sunny stakeholder who visits his top surgeons to see their technical prowess is ignoring something. The surgeons he visits are trying to deliver a baby from a woman who is in agony. The human female body writhes in child birthing pain as the dumb administrator coos about the machine that goes ping and the magnet that goes RAWR. The surgeons--the tech developers and users of the emerging technology--are 100% focused on the administrator's delight and how they can so easily fool him.
All while the alleged beneficiary of the technology is callously ignored as she writhes in pain on the table.
Elon was so clever to adopt this strategy and even more clever to see that the dynamic between the surgeons and the administrator was a precise analog for the Innovator--VC relationship. And the Pythonesque ploy worked.
Although the true satire was missed.
Some of us...some of us are still thinking about the woman on the table. Most of us in the globe are the woman on the table.
And what are we going to do about that?
Founder @ Singular XQ | Performance Anthropology
1yWho else loves Monty Python?