接上文：
《经济学人》精读46：How Elon Musk does it （part 1)
《经济学人》精读47：How Elon Musk does it （part 2)
A Series Of Unlikely Explanations
While Mr Straubel struggles in hell, Tesla burns money as the Falcon Heavy burns kerosene. Barclays, a bank, reckons that Tesla will consume $4.2bn this year. With just $3.4bn in cash at the end of 2017 Mr Musk will almost certainly need another injection of funds by the middle of the year—and maybe more later. Mr Osborne of Cowen reckons Tesla’s capital expenditures will amount to $20bn-$25bn between 2017 and 2020. Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates, a prominent short-seller who predicted the collapse of Enron, recently denounced Tesla’s history of missing deadlines and targets as meaning that “the equity is worthless.”
As yet, though, the shareholders do not seem to agree. Tesla’s stock price has held fairly steady; people might even buy more, if offered. They invest because, as a SpaceX insider puts it: “They believe in Elon.” When he says, as he did on February 7th, “If we can send a roadster to the asteroid belt we can solve Model 3 production,” many happily accept the non sequitur.
kerosene: a type of oil that is burned as a fuel
non sequitur: an irrelevant, often humourous comment to a preceding topic or statement
投资者信任的就是Elon，如果我们能把一辆车送到太空轨道上，我们可以解决Modle 3的产能问题！
His power to inspire is not limited to the public and his investors. It attracts bright people to his companies, where they work with a passion which matches his own (and may well feel his temper all the same). Mr Straubel insists that “the mission really matters—that’s why we’re working so hard.” Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s chief operating officer, says Mr Musk’s extreme goals for SpaceX are “incredibly invigorating” and help her recruit the very best prospects: “We rarely lose a candidate.” Outside observers agree. Vinod Khosla, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, says“Elon’s mission is motivating so many people. This is common at small social enterprises, but very rare at scale.”
But Mr Musk’s companies rely on more than just his ideas and allure. Two other attributes stand out: his approach to risk and his embrace of complexity.
Mr Musk 不仅仅激励了投资者，还把优秀的人才带到了公司，招人的过程中从来没失手，招进来的人都撸起袖子和他一起为了梦想，为了激情而工作，还特别合拍...
当然了，仅仅靠个人的想法和人格魅力也不行，还有两个重要的因素：他拥抱风险危机和复杂的环境！
His way with risk is unlike that of his Silicon Valley peers, according to Amy Wilkinson of Stanford. She says entrepreneurs rarely take big risks on another venture after they have scored a stonking success. The few that become serial entrepreneurs typically stay within the same industry.
Mr Musk, having sold his first company, Zip2, to Compaq for $341m in 1999, ploughed the gains straight into X.com, an online bank that later become PayPal. Within 18 months of selling that to eBay for $1.5bn he had invested almost all his gains in Tesla and SpaceX. He takes on more risk with each new round of financing.
A risk-taking boss does not mean a cavalier company. Ms Shotwell points to a dichotomy in attitudes to risk at SpaceX. It is in many ways a very unified operation. Most of the managers and engineers have desks in the manufacturing facility, in among production experts and line workers. People circulate easily, trying out new ideas and learning from colleagues who, in a more traditional structure, they might never meet.But the designers and engineers are encouraged to be mavericks, whereas the operations and manufacturing teams are most definitely not. A former senior executive says that Mr Musk takes the risks he thinks he has to, but does not run extra ones just to cut corners. Another insider describes him as “a risktaker for himself, but a risk mitigator for everyone around him”.
plough or plow: to dig into or break up with a plow, 犁
Mr Musk 199年卖掉了第一个公司Zip2，把利润全部投入到paypal，然后又卖掉了paypal，全部投入Space X和特斯拉，每次都承担巨大的风险
cavalier: having or showing no concern for something taht is important or serious
Looked at like that, his risk-taking may fit with his greater purpose; a gamble, perhaps a self-sacrifice, undertaken as part of his urge to fend off catastrophe. His faith in technological progress is, unusually for Silicon Valley, explicitly tinged with darkness: he is a paranoid optimist. Thus Tesla offers amazing air filters on the basis that they will help passengers “survive a military grade bio attack”.
As befits a paranoid optimist, his broad hopes for the future are also tied up with fears. Some, such as climate catastrophe, are fairly widespread, some are more unusual—the need for civilisation to be backed up to another planet, just in case. He has been one of the loudest voices warning Silicon Valley and the world of the threats posed by out-of-control artificial intelligence (AI) and has set up a not-for-profit outfit devoted to lessening it.
paranoid optimist: 偏执的乐观主义者
他对未来乐观的同时又带着对未来的恐惧，近年来的气候灾难让他想把人类移民到另外一个星球，同时他也在警告世界，AI的发展有点难于控制了
Mr Musk’s second defining characteristic is the willing embrace of complexity. “Complexity will happen inside or outside the organisation,” says Antonio Gracias of Valor, a venture capitalist who sits on the boards of both Tesla and SpaceX. “Elon’s view is that if you have it inside, you can manage it better…and can build faster, cheaper and to higher specifications.” His approach echoes that of Andy Grove, a legendary former boss of Intel whose investments in integrated chipmaking turned the firm into a global powerhouse. It eliminates the “margin stacking” enjoyed by layers of suppliers and allows a continuous improvement of what the companies offer.Understanding all the linkages and dependencies in such a system is a huge challenge; so far, Mr Musk has met it.
This systems thinking can be strategic; you can see it in the way SolarCity has provided more in-house demand for the gigafactory, or in SpaceX’s plans to use its launch capability to create a vast new constellation of satellites. But it figures in the smallest decisions as well as the biggest. Spurning the received opinion that micromanagement is a bad trait in bosses, Mr Musk prides himself on being a “nano-manager”. “Unlike other CEOs he’ll really walk through the technology with you,” says a veteran engineer at one of his firms. Mr Gracias says he is the best zoom-in manager he has seen: “Elon can be at the macro, see everything that’s highly disruptive, and then can zoom all the way down to the micro, down to the door handle.”
Mr Musk是那种可以和你一路讨论技术的CEO，他可以拔高到很高的高度，看到所有存在风险危机的地方，也可以细致到和你导论车门把手！
真的非常难得，所有的人都对Elon 有超级高的评价，从投资者到员工，再到对手等等！
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Results
Lexile®Measure: 1100L - 1200L
Mean Sentence Length: 16.43
Mean Log Word Frequency: 3.19
Word Count: 953
这篇文章的蓝思值是在1100-1200L， 第三部分测出来的结果是比前面两个简单~
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