TrendMacro conversation with Elon Musk's biographer Walter Isaacson

Musk had a brutal childhood, raised in South Africa by an engineer father who was abusive and unstable. Now Musk is the world's preeminent engineer -- and the world's richest man -- and he lives out many dimensions of his father's instability. This has the advantage of allowing him to question norms and conventional wisdom, transforming industry after industry by taking seemingly foolhardy risks, and ruthlessly driving his teams to achievements they thought were impossible. He is driven by big visions -- such as making the human race "multiplanetary" by colonizing Mars, and keeping the world safe from the existential threat of general artificial intelligence by creating brain-machine interfaces. Then he backfills his visions with after-the-fact business plans to make them economically sustainable. He excels in exploiting unanticipated advantages in his businesses, such as the billions of real-time driving videos generated by the world Tesla fleet as the "training" set for a neural-net approach to autonomous self-driving that will outperform rules-based alternatives. He is more than a gambler and a bully, though. His managerial "algorithm" is a practical roadmap to continuous improvement and innovation that any business could learn from.