What Elon Musk's X-rated outburst tells us about business world: Bird Lovegod

The human factor is typically the problem, personal issues, emotions and identities are compressed in the pressure cooker reactor of the workspace and the resultant fission emits energy to get things done and radiation deleterious to survival. And that’s just the founders.

Add some employees and it’s a wonder anything sustainable ever gets built. Usually of course, it doesn’t, and the enterprise fizzles out or even explodes.

Stability is probably the most underrated attribute in business. If you have stability of the founders, you’ll probably get stability of the employees and as a result you’ll probably find some sort of stable company being formed and scaled.

Unfortunately, founders are not typically stable characters, they’re more likely to be somewhat volatile, passionate, and obsessive, and these are both their strengths and weaknesses.

This is why financial funders look so closely at the founders, the actual people, and their relationships with each other. Do they amplify each other's craziness, or do they snap together to form a stable compound? And if so, is it inert, volatile, or explosive?

And what happens when it’s compressed because the pressure of business can be immense. Once a business is rolling it’s a machine that burns money at one end and is potentially capable of creating a greater amount of money at the other.

This almost defies the laws of thermodynamics, more energy must come out than goes in, and this is only possible by adding value to the system in the form of creativity of some description. And this absolute requirement and demand for the correct creative input is the source of all joy and frustration and desperation.

There’s always a solution, always a creative answer, but can it be found, or generated, or invented? It must be. Money buys time, it is fuel for the machine. And if you're funding the machine yourself it's either a grave or an oil well it's digging. It can be harrowing.

It’s such an intense thing to try to create a system that does this, that actually works. It’s like inventing a new chemical compound. And the terrible thing is of course the more money you have being burned by the system the more money has to be generated and the more pressure increases. It’s vital to be as small as possible until the machine is successfully outputting. It’s actually quite frightening, or it would be, if the founders were not so confident in their knowledge and ability. Or at least appear to be.

This is the position Elon is in this Xmas. He must create the answer to make the machine work. And X is a huge and destabilized machine, itself a sounding board of social, political and humanitarian volatility.

Stability. As we watch the news, I think it’s fair to conclude that stability is not trending right now. Nothing is stable, not politics, not the climate, not human civilization itself. And instability generates more instability, which is the flywheel we seem to be on.

Bird Lovegod is a Christian commentator and business consultant