Stockton Rush was the CEO of a privately held business that employed less than 50 people. He certainly had delusions of grandeur, and fancied himself a cross between Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. His net worth was about $25 million. He wasn’t a billionaire and it wasn’t his plan to murder-suicide ocean explorers.
He was a “quirky genius” who fell too much in love with his own ideas and tuned out any uncomfortable facts about his engineering. He fell for Musk’s self-serving hype and saw his unusual approach as a model to follow. Musk’s companies will either buck him off or get eaten alive by companies that know how to quality control. But the myth and the legend around Musk hypnotizes so many engineer-entrepreneurs into thinking that he – and they – know something the entire rest of their industry doesn’t.
The damage Musk does isn’t just directly to his own companies. He gives a lot of people out there the wrong idea about how to do business. He’s exceptional because he’s an exception. Results not typical. It reverberates not just to CEOs but engineers who see themselves as temporarily frustrated CEOs. No matter how smart you are or think you are, you aren’t smarter than the entire remainder of your profession combined. If they tell you not to use expired fiberglass to make a submarine you listen. Or you don’t drag people who don’t understand the science into accepting the risk alongside you.