In the span of 24 hours this past week, Elon Musk made three very big bets with three very different companies, together showing his penchant to plow ahead despite sizable risks.
Between Wednesday and Thursday evenings, he stripped celebrities, journalists and other high-profile users of their free, legacy verification on Twitter, risking a VIP revolt on the social-media platform. He promised that the electric-car maker Tesla Inc. would chase sales volume at the expense of profitability. And he launched SpaceX’s first of its kind giant space rocket, which exploded on the way to the heavens.
In an era when risk management is a standard part of C-suite calculations, Mr. Musk has made his career and fortune tolerating the kinds of bets that would strike panic in many corporate soldiers.
Yet these new gambles come as the 51-year-old billionaire enters the stage of his entrepreneurial career when big stumbles could end up overshadowing previous triumphs and undoing what he has built.
The electric-vehicle maker Tesla is emphasizing sales volume over profitability.
Photo: HANNIBAL HANSCHKE/REUTERS
Today’s SpaceX, his rocket company, and Tesla, the electric-car maker, grew out of near misses dating back roughly 20 years. Mr. Musk has said many times he initially gave those ventures each a 10% chance of success.
He put his personal fortune into them anyway. In doing so, he weathered failed rocket launches and avoided close calls with bankruptcies. When things have looked most bleak, he has been quick to course-adjust, saying he would rather make the wrong choice than no decision, all while trying to pick up a winning momentum.
“If the odds are probably in your favor, you should make as many decisions as possible within the bounds of what is executable,” Mr. Musk said a few years ago. “This is like being the house in Vegas. Probability is the most powerful force in the universe, which is why the house always wins. Be the house.”
In 2018, for example, when Tesla’s cash was running low and car production was slowed because of a mistake in overautomating his factory, Mr. Musk greenlighted an unprecedented idea to build cars under a tent outside the factory so the company could move faster in remaking its assembly line and churn out the vehicles needed to generate needed revenue. Within the year, Tesla was printing a quarterly profit.
His contrarian takes aren’t always smooth.
Six months into his control of Twitter, Mr. Musk is still finding his way as he tries to remake the social-media company into something much bigger.
SpaceX’s uncrewed Starship spacecraft before its brief mission ended with an explosion Thursday.
Photo: JOE SKIPPER/REUTERS
One part of his plan is to generate more revenue from subscriptions, opening up Twitter’s so-called blue check marks to anyone willing to pay and requiring legacy designees to pony up to keep their verifications—a move that was enforced Thursday when many users began reporting the loss of their status.
The move has pitted him against the Twitterati as he has upended the platform’s social hierarchy. It has placed him on the receiving end of complaints from sports heroes, Hollywood stars and others armed with a tweet button.
Mr. Musk has described the move as democratizing the platform, but it risks alienating power tweeters who have helped make the site interesting to a broader audience. It remains to be seen whether he will end up with more revenue from the gambit, or lose users.
“If most OG blue checks stop tweeting in protest of being asked to pay to create the content that Twitter lives by…Twitter dies,” Nathan Hubbard, a former Twitter executive, warned last month.
At Tesla, the results of Mr. Musk’s recent bet to cut prices to increase demand came into focus when the company reported first-quarter results Wednesday that showed a drop in profit of 24%.
In the midst of concern from investors, he was undeterred, doubling down on a conference call with analysts.
Mr. Musk told them he would be chasing more sales at the expense of profitability in the belief that he can eventually profit more from a large fleet of already-sold cars by eventually activating driverless technology that will generate revenue from software updates.
“Tesla is in a uniquely strong strategic position because we’re the only ones making cars that technically we could sell for zero profit for now and then yield actually tremendous economics in the future through autonomy,” he said.
The strategy is one that runs counter to the tactic most other car companies have taken in recent years of putting a priority on profits over chasing sales crowns. And so far, Tesla hasn’t demonstrated a fully autonomous vehicle to the world, though Mr. Musk has promised for several years it is near completion.
“While possible, it is unclear to us that Tesla is uniquely…poised to capture the self-driving opportunity any time soon and whether its existing fleet will even be able to run” fully self-driving technology, Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Bernstein, told investors in a note.
The risks of launching a rocket into space couldn’t have been more clear than on Thursday morning, when his SpaceX Starship exploded into flames. But for him it was a good day.
Twitter’s move to boost revenue is risking a VIP revolt on the social-media platform.
Photo: amy osborne/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Founded in 2002, the company formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is built on failures that engineers learned from to improve future, reusable rockets. Its first three rockets exploded, nearly sinking the company in its infancy. SpaceX eventually found success with the Falcon 9, which it used on 60 launches last year. The rocket has become crucial to the U.S. space program.
The latest effort was going to be risky, Mr. Musk had already warned. A possible explosion might damage the company’s South Texas launchpad, potentially delaying future launches. Success, the company said, would be measured by what it learned to help advance the giant rocket, which is essential to Mr. Musk’s quest to take people to Mars and crucial to SpaceX’s business of shuttling heavy cargo to outer space.
“My top hope is please, may fate smile upon us, and we clear the launchpad before anything goes wrong. That’s all I’m asking,” Mr. Musk said in the days leading up to the launch.
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When it came time Thursday, Starship managed to do just that, making it 24 miles into the sky before it exploded in what SpaceX called a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.”
Among the accolades that poured in after the launch, Anand Mahindra, the chairman of the Mahindra Group conglomerate, said Mr. Musk’s most important contribution to business would be “his powerful attitude to risk.”
“Most would be terminally daunted by such a ‘failure,’” Mr. Mahindra said on Twitter. “But when you set up each initiative as a learning experiment (and of course, have raised the resources to do so!) you essentially extend the frontiers of knowledge & progress.”
In the seconds after the explosion, a SpaceX video camera caught Mr. Musk as he sat quietly in his command center, where, for the briefest of moments, he flashed a sly grin.
Hours later, he tweeted, “Such a great day in so many ways.”
Write to Tim Higgins at tim.higgins@wsj.com
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