My Amazon Review of Walter Isaacson's "Elon Musk"

 

                                             Rocket Man

 

Every aerospace executive and board member should read Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk. Starting from scratch Musk has built America’s leading rocket and space communications company by ignoring the hidebound bureaucratic rules of the major aerospace companies delivering rockets at one tenth the cost of his bloated competitors. Musk’s rules are:

1.      Doubt every requirement.

2.     Question every cost?

3.     Act with a sense of urgency.

4.     Learn by failing.

5.     Improvise.

 

The other secret that Musk applied to Tesla as well as SpaceX is that he integrated design, engineering, and manufacturing so that each of those entities can learn from the others. Thus, engineers and designers are able to make improvements in manufacturing as issues arise. Steve Jobs at Apple integrated design and engineering, but outsourced manufacturing to China.

 

Rising from an unhappy childhood in South Africa, Musk became a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to become part of the famed “PayPal Mafia.” He used his PayPal success to fund Tesla and SpaceX and the rest is history.

 

Musk’s genius has the ability to inspire loyalty, at least for a time, of a host brilliant people who built his empire. However, empathy is not his middle name, and, in many ways, he seems to be a very cruel person. He is one of those people who professes to love humanity, but really doesn’t like people as individuals.

 

Isaacson discusses Musk’s chaotic personal life. Three marriages, 11 children two of whom by sperm donation. Isaacson doesn’t explain why so many of Musk’s children were conceived by in vitro fertilization.

 

Then, of course there is Twitter, now called X after his favorite letter. His adventure at Twitter seems to be one giant ego trip where he promised to free that social media site from it “wokeness.” To say the staff of Twitter was woke, would be an understatement. He wanted to encourage free expression, yet under his rule Twitter has become a cesspool of hate.

I had my own run in with twitter. Despite all of Musk’s talk of a new openness I was banned for using the term “circular firing squad” to characterize Hunter Biden bringing his father into his legal thicket. Something is really wrong with X and from press accounts is seems to be getting worse by the day.

 

Despite being hagiographic at times, Isaacson brings to life one of our leading entrepreneurs who is bringing us into new electric and space ages.

For the full Amazon URL see: Rocket Man (amazon.com)

My Review* of Chris Miller's "Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology"

 Chips: The New Oil

 

Tufts professor Chris Miller makes a strong case that computer chips have become to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th century in terms of global politics. Computer chips are now ubiquitous and have uncountable applications in industry, consumer products and military hardware. We found that out when pandemic related supply shortages shut down production in a host of industries.

 

Miller plows over old ground with his discussion of the invention of the transistor at Bell Labs in 1947 to the co-invention of the integrated circuit in 1956 by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Bob Noyce who would go on to lead Intel. He then goes on to discuss the “traitorous eight” who bail out of Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968 to for what was to become the Intel behemoth. They all wanted to get rich.

 

The government plays a major role in supporting the industry. The need to reduce the weight of the Minuteman missile sent the Pentagon scurrying to buy integrated circuits from Texas Instruments. As the Cold War heats up more and more integrated circuits find their way into military hardware. I remember in 1967 when I was working for Litton Industries, I first noticed integrated circuits appearing in airborne guidance and control systems.

 

Not mentioned in the book, Texas Instruments benefited from the Kennedy/Johnson White Houses sending defense contracts to Texas and New England. Silicon Valley in California was left out in the cold, but more than compensated by going after the lucrative civilian market. 

 

To me most interesting was the role of Texas Instruments engineer Morris Chang who invented chip production processes. When he was passed over to be president of the company he moves to Taiwan and is instrumental in establishing Taiwan Semiconductor, now the largest manufacturer of chips in the world. Who knows what would have become of Texas Instruments if he became its president.

 

It is Morris Chang who makes Taiwan a semiconductor powerhouse and that is the reason why most of the world’s chips are made there today. Being located 100 miles from China is not exactly the safest place in world to manufacture this critical commodity. It is for this reason there now is a move to diversify production to other sources including the huge U.S. government subsidies now being funneled into the domestic chip industry.

 

Because both the Russians and the Chinese understand how critical computer chips they established their own industries. The Russians did what they do best which was to copy the west, but with the technology advancing so quickly that became a failing strategy. China, on the other hand, is making a huge investment in their own chip industry to wean their economy’s dependence on western made chips and equipment. In case of the latter there was a story today where Chinese spies obtained secrets from ASML, the Dutch monopoly supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment. Their machines are essential in the manufacture of chips and cost $100 million apiece.

 

The saddest part of the book is Miller recounting the decline of Intel. It seems the bean counters took over from the engineers. In 2008 Intel turned down Steve Jobs’ offer to them to make chips for the I-Phone ceding the market to Qualcomm. Thus, Intel was nowhere in communication chips and it is being rapidly displaced in the server market by graphics processing chips being made by NVIDIA and AMD.

 

Miller’s book reads like a fast-paced business thriller. There are great anecdotes and reader will learn much about what will shape geopolitics this decade and beyond.

*-Amazon has yet to post this review. The review was just posted 2:23MST at            Chips: The New Oil (amazon.com) 

 

My Amazon Review of J. Bradford DeLong's "Slouching Toward Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century"

The Long Twentieth Century 

U.C. Berkeley economics professor and former Clinton treasury official Brad DeLong has written a narrative economic history of the long twentieth century which he argues began in 1870 and ended in 2010 with the great financial crisis. It was during this time that economic growth exploded and humanity, for the most part, escaped the Malthusian trap. Along with rising living standards the long twentieth century brought with it industrial strength destruction and environmental degradation. He attributes this to the rise of the giant corporation, the industrial research laboratory and globalization. However this book differs from Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” (Shulmaven: My Amazon Review of Robert J. Gordon's "The Rise and Fall of American Growth") in that DeLong covers far more than technological developments.

 

DeLong frames his argument over the differences between the views of Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi. DeLong characterizes Hayek as believing “the market giveth and the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market” and Polanyi’s view that the market is made for man, not the other way around. A long time ago I had an economics professor who would open each class by invoking the blessing of the market and he was a liberal Democrat.  DeLong’s utopia represents a merger between Hayek and Polanyi that ends up with a social democratic version of Keynesian economics.  What he is vague about is that when he discusses the notion of Polanyian rights, which amount to the belief that citizens are entitled to a host of economic benefits, earned and unearned with no real limiting factors. DeLong is a fan the European entitlement state, but he fails to mention that most of the entitlements are funded by regressive payroll and value added taxes that would be a very rough sale in America.

 

Where the book is good, he has excellent vignettes on the lives of real people who were making history such as Nikola Tesla and Leon Trotsky. He also goes into the horrors of “really existing socialism” in both its Russian and Chinese forms. In that sense DeLong is a true social democrat. He is also very good in discussing how the 1970’s inflation undid the Keynesian consensus and led to the neo-liberal order which then collapses as deregulated financial markets were consumed by a fire of their own making.

 

What DeLong leaves out is that much scientific progress came outside of the organized industrial laboratories. He gives no credit to governmental and university labs, and he leaves out the garage work of Bill Hewlett and David Packard, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs. These folks were tinkerers in the tradition of the early Thomas Edison. Further for some reason he leaves out of his discussion the role of the oil industry whose products fueled the mobility of his long twentieth century. Without the oil industry little of what he discussed would have occurred.

 

DeLong has written an excellent narrative history of our era; just take his politics with a few grains of salt.

For the full Amazon URL see: The Long Twentieth Century (amazon.com)