Elon Musk’s Mastery of the Pivot: Building Empires Through Adaptation
There are plenty of potholes on the roads of business as you climb the winding mountain of success.
Innovating, iterating, and focusing on what is working best seems to be the best way to climb.
With PayPal: “Initially the thought with PayPal was to create a conglomeration of financial services. So that you have one place where all of your financial services needs would be seamlessly integrated and work smoothly…
And then we had a little feature which is email payments.
And whenever we’d show the system off to someone. We’d show the hard part, which was the conglomeration of financial services. Which was quite difficult to put together. And nobody was interested…
Then we’d show email payments, which was actually quite easy, and everybody was interested.
So I think it’s important to take feedback from your environment. You know because you want to be as closed loop as possible.
So we focused on email payments and really trying to make that work. And that’s what really got things to take off.
But if we had not responded to what people said then we probably would not have been successful.
So it’s important to look for things like that and focus on them when you see them, and correct your prior assumptions.”
Adaptability is key.
Modifying the names of brands is one powerful way to adapt for the better as a business.
Elon has adapted the name of the school he created for his children from Ad Astra to Astra Nova for example. And now the name of the school is Synthesis.
Elon’s company Neuralink was originally called Neuralace.
The mission of Tesla was recently changed with a post on X from “Sustainable Abundance” to “Amazing Abundance.”
Constant adaptation and innovation is why Tesla vehicles do not have model years. This way Tesla can roll out new features rapidly, and consistently, rather than waiting for the next model year to implement improvements.
Elon’s companies are always adapting. Always innovating.
And it’s paying off. With each innovation Tesla increases their technology superiority in the auto industry.