This is a bit of a nerdy blog post. Or as we say in the UK, I am being an anorack. But I’ll declare that I am a fan of Elon Musk, of Tesla, and a media skeptic (all will become clear). I also believe that we are living in an age of transparency, and not enough people understand the implications of this.
It might just be that you’re the CEO of Yahoo and you think you can put false information on your CV (your name would be Mark Thompson – read his story here). Or you might be a journalist who literally just made up stories for the New York Times (that would make you Jayson Blair). Or you could be any number of politicians who say one thing one day and another thing the next (that might also make you a Fox News commentator). Whatever the issue, in the age of transparency you’re less and less likely to get away with it.
So now to Elon Musk. He is a South African who went to the same school as my brother did (Pretoria Boys High). He made a fortune as one of the founders of PayPal, and has since used his money to do some really cool “boys own” type stuff. He’s the first private individual to successfully launch a space rocket. He’s also started a really cool car company, Tesla, aiming to create high performance electric sports vehicles. He seems to be succeeding.
But the entrenched motor media and car journalists don’t like it, and enjoy trying to discredit him and trash his cars. But Elon is fighting back. His cars have all sorts of logging systems in them, and he ensured they were turned on recently when he gave one of them to a journalist to do a road test. It appears as if this journalist has just flat-out lied about the road test he did – and Elon can prove it.
The latest episode in the story is well reported here – if anything I’ve said so far interests you, I am sure you’ll love reading the whole story.
The lessons: data rules; nerds rule the world now; transparency wins; electric cars are coming; Elon Musk is the man. But mainly: Transparency wins! Be transparent: in your life and your company. You have been warned.