Do yourself a favor and go follow Elon Musk on Twitter. Unless you work in one of his companies' PR departments. Then definitely don't. Because you'll likely want to ruin what's great about it. Last night he went on a full-scale comedy routine about Catherine the Great and…ahem...horses. It was a confusing and amazing Twitter debut.
God bless the PayPal Mafia. Not only have they given us a bevy of interesting companies that have reinvented everything from solar panels to electric cars to space ships to how friends connect to how we find jobs to how we consume videos online. It's also created countless millionaires, thousands of jobs in one of the bleakest periods in American economic history and billions in market value.
But the less talked about value add of the PayPal mafia? Larger-than-life moguls. Uber-contrarian Peter Thiel makes news nearly every time he opens his mouth. Max Levchin almost had his foot cut off fleeing Chernobyl. And Elon Musk makes rockets and has a laugh like a James Bond villain. And now he Tweets about Catherine the Great romancing horses.
I miss the Valley's golden age of weird moguls. I know that's a little petty, because Silicon Valley is ultimately about creating jobs, building products and creating shareholder value, and there's something to be said for boring, responsible, predictable CEOs and founders.
But if we wanted bland-glad-handing men in suits who never say anything that could offend anyone but also has no substance, we'd go to DC. If we wanted plastic perfection, we'd work in Hollywood. If we wanted slick, suited masters of the finance universe we'd work on Wall Street. The reason we're all in Silicon Valley is because we like pirates and individuals, and all-too-often PR departments white-wash that out of entrepreneurs and then wonder why they don't get more press. (Ignore for the moment that Elon actually lives in LA-- I'm describing industries here, not actual towns.)
In fact, there's a bizarre inverse relationship between how interesting a company is to the press and how boring the founder's public image is.
There are a few exceptions: Apple and Steve Jobs are both fascinating figures, ditto Amazon and Jeff Bezos, and-- love 'em or hate 'em-- Andrew Mason is as interesting as Groupon. But think about the consumer companies we tend to fixate on like Facebook, Twitter, Quora and even eBay and Yahoo from the first wave of the Web. They've usually got pretty shy founders who work all the time, live modestly and don't make waves if they can help it. (This is why people like Ben Mezrich and Aaron Sorkin need to make things up about them to sell movie tickets.)
Now take a look at the golden age of enterprise software. It was hard to make readers care about a seemingly-boring company like Sun Microsystems that made servers, or Oracle which made database software, or customer relationship management software. And yet Scott McNealy, Larry Ellison and Marc Benioff were each larger-than-life, trash-talking, sparring, headline-generating machines that no PR person could tame in their hey-days. I covered enterprise software for BusinessWeek and those personalities were the only thing that helped me get stories in the magazine.
Elon's can't-be-tamed-nature got me in trouble once when I was interviewing him for TechTicker and he called Randall Stross of the New York Times a "huge douchebag." I-- GOD FORBID!-- laughed at it, because it was unexpected and hilarious and his PR person standing a few feet away almost collapsed. The New York press totally freaked out and went after me about it. It was pretty ugly at the time. But that interview still makes me laugh. I'll take scandal over boring any day.
