America must embrace the Electric Age, or fall behind

Elon Musk is America’s China.

That sounds like a silly thing to say, but what it means is that what the entire economy of China is set up to do — scale up high-tech manufacturing businesses — is something that only one man in America knows how to do. Only Elon has built China-like manufacturing businesses in America, and he has done it twice now — SpaceX and Tesla. When something like that happens twice, it wasn’t a coincidence.

Just to give you an example of how important this is, note that without SpaceX, China would be leaving America in the dust when it comes to space launches. But with SpaceX, it’s America leaving China in the dust:

One implication of this is that America needs to make it a lot easier to set up and scale a manufacturing business, so that our entire high-tech manufacturing sector isn’t dependent on one slightly kooky right-wing billionaire. But that’s a topic for another post.

A second implication is that if we want to know about the future of physical technology, we should listen to Elon Musk. In fact, Elon has a great track record of seeing and entering manufacturing industries that China zeroes in on later:

This is a good list, but it omits the most important items. The three industries that Elon zeroed in on very early, which made him much of his fortune — and which China has subsequently gone all-in on — are batteries, electric vehicles, and solar power. In fact, he still thinks these technologies are some of the most important in the world. In a recent interview, Elon said:

It seems like China listens to everything I say, and does it basically— or they’re just doing it independently. I don’t know, but they certainly have a massive battery pack output, they’re making a vast number of electric cars, and [a] vast amount of solar…
These are all the things I said we should do here [in America].

Elon didn’t go for batteries, EVs, and solar power because he was a climate-obsessed liberal; he correctly understood that there was a revolution underway in the technologies that humans use to produce, store, transport, and harness energy. He knew that whoever mastered that technological revolution would attain a dominant position in a bunch of different, seemingly unrelated industries.