Musk strikes a pose at the China-made Model 3 delivery ceremony at the company's Gigafactory in Shanghai on Jan 7. — Bloomberg
SAN FRANCISCO: Elon Musk, who turns 50 later this month, is many things: entrepreneur, financier, the chief executive officer of both Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, a crypto influencer, celebrity, spreader of memes, father to six boys, recent host of Saturday Night Live and Technoking.
Musk has made an impact on language, as many of his phrases will endure for decades to come. Musk, a voracious reader with a wide-ranging vocabulary, has invented countless words: Gigafactory, Supercharger and Hyperloop all come to mind. They have become part of the common lexicon with astonishing speed.
Through sheer force of will and repetition, the words and phrases that Musk has either devised outright or championed became part of Tesla’s corporate culture. Before long the vast ecosystem of Tesla fans, customers, suppliers and Wall Street analysts and journalists adopted them. The same can be said for SpaceX, whose names for autonomous “drone ships” are references to the Scottish author Iain Banks.
Musk’s vast interests are spread across multiple industries — automotive, aerospace, neuroscience, infrastructure — and no other business titan today uses language as effectively as he does.
Close watchers of Tesla are familiar with Musk’s favourite catchphrases: order of magnitude, force majeure, the machine that builds the machine. It’s common to see them on the Tesla earnings bingo cards that get shared around before nearly every earnings call. The cards are made by fans, investors and critics of the company alike, and spread on Reddit forums and Twitter.
But it’s the names of the company’s existing and future products that have really caught on — and caught fire with the imagination.
Tesla isn’t just making an electric truck: it’s making a Cybertruck. Don’t really understand what’s Cyber about it? It doesn’t matter: you know what it looks like.
Many of the words speak to the sheer scale of Musk’s ambitions, which are always far grander than people realise initially. A battery factory isn’t just a battery factory, it’s a Gigafactory. (Giga comes from the Greek word “gigas,” or giant.)
A fast charging station for Tesla’s electric cars isn’t just a charging station, it’s a Supercharger. (Tesla has more than 25,000, giving them the largest network in the world.)
The battery packs that Tesla sells to utilities that promise “massive energy storage?” Megapacks.
There are no signs of him stopping. At Tesla’s “Battery Day” in September 2020, Musk talked about reaching “Terawatt-hour” scale battery production. “Tera is the new Giga,” Musk said on stage.
It has now reached the point where every battery factory — even those being made by competitors — is called a gigafactory, regardless of its physical size or planned output.
“Nissan in advanced talks to build battery gigafactory in UK,” reported the Financial Times. “Stellantis discussing conditions with Rome to build gigafactory in Italy,” said Reuters.
As Oscar Wilde famously said: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”
