Is Elon Musk a "human-shaped Ponzi scheme"? —— Also on what an entrepreneur is
For three hundred years, from Cantillon to Knight, and from Schumpeter to Kirzner, the economics community has been arguing ceaselessly about this issue; the management community has given dozens of definitions from multiple dimensions such as functions, traits, and behaviors. As Professor Zhang Weiying said, it is extremely difficult to define entrepreneurship positively. Perhaps a better way is to first figure out "what entrepreneurs are not."
On June 12, 2026, SpaceX went public on the NASDAQ, and its market value exceeded $2.1 trillion on the first day. Elon Musk became the first entrepreneur in human history with a personal net worth of over $1 trillion. On the same day when the market was cheering, Paul Krugman, the winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Economics, published a column article with a straightforward title - "Elon Musk, Human Ponzi Scheme."
Krugman's satire was quite pungent: "Yesterday I took a short trip. First, I took the hyperloop, then I summoned a fully autonomous driving Robotaxi with a brain - machine interface, and I also read the latest briefing on the Mars colony on the way... Well, none of the above actually happened." In his view, Musk's wealth empire is built on a series of promises that have never been fulfilled: the hyperloop is still a long - way off, the fully autonomous driving has been repeatedly delayed, and Mars colonization seems more like a science - fiction novel. Investors keep pouring in money because they believe that "Musk can create the future," and the rising valuation in turn "proves" Musk's genius, forming a self - reinforcing capital cycle - which is exactly the typical feature of a Ponzi scheme.
This article quickly triggered an uproar in public opinion. Supporters believe that Krugman punctured the capital myth, while opponents accused the Nobel laureate of not understanding the business reality. However, few people realize that the essence of this debate is actually a contemporary re - enactment of an ancient proposition: What exactly is an entrepreneur?
After having close contact with some outstanding entrepreneurs and listening to their arduous and legendary entrepreneurial stories, a concise answer emerged in my mind: Entrepreneurs are those who turn the impossible into the possible; entrepreneurship is the will and ability to exhaust all means to achieve this goal.
01
Where Krugman Is Right
To understand this debate, we must first admit that Krugman's judgment is not entirely unfounded. From the perspective of the mainstream economic analysis framework, Musk's business trajectory is indeed full of "Ponzi characteristics."
First of all, when most of his visions were put forward, they were judged by professionals to be technically impossible and economically unfeasible. In 2008, when Musk proposed the concept of reusable rockets, the consensus in the aerospace industry was that it "violated the laws of physics"; on the eve of the mass production of the Tesla Model S in 2012, almost all automotive industry analysts believed that the company would not survive for more than a year; when the Starlink project was announced, communication experts calculated that its cost could never be recovered. At any given time, when using existing data, existing technologies, and existing business models to make inferences, Musk's plans seem like a fantasy.
Secondly, his companies have long relied on external financing to maintain their operations, using new money to support old stories. Tesla didn't achieve stable annual profits until eighteen years after its establishment. During this period, it went through more than a dozen rounds of financing and was on the verge of bankruptcy several times; SpaceX has been in operation for more than twenty years and is still in the red, but it has attracted a huge amount of capital through successive rounds of valuation increases. The "self - fulfilling belief cycle" that Krugman observed does exist: the more people believe, the more capital flows in; the more capital flows in, the more the company can survive until the next milestone; every small step towards achieving a milestone will attract more believers.
Most importantly, there is always a huge gap between his visions and reality. The facts listed by Krugman are basically accurate: by 2025, the hyperloop has not been commercialized, fully autonomous driving has not been popularized, and there is no human colony on Mars. Musk always promises that "it will be realized next year" and then postpones the deadline. If measured by the traditional "promise - fulfillment" evaluation system, Musk is indeed a "repeated promise - breaker."
Measuring entrepreneurs with the yardstick of mainstream economics will always lead to deviations or even misjudgments.
Because mainstream economics studies "the optimal choice under given constraints," while the essential job of entrepreneurs is precisely to change the constraints themselves.
02
An Unresolved Academic Proposition for Three Hundred Years
The word "entrepreneur" comes from French and originally meant "a risk - taking expeditionist."
In the 18th century, the French economist Richard Cantillon first introduced it into economics and defined an entrepreneur as "a person who buys production factors when prices are uncertain and expects to sell them at a higher price." In the following three hundred years, instead of becoming clearer, this concept has given rise to at least a dozen competing definitions.
Knight proposed in "Risk, Uncertainty and Profit" that entrepreneurs are those who bear true uncertainty - risk can be calculated, but uncertainty cannot. Profit is the reward for bearing uncalculable uncertainty.
Schumpeter defined entrepreneurs as innovators in "The Theory of Economic Development" - those who realize new combinations of production factors and break the equilibrium state of the economic cycle through "creative destruction." In Schumpeter's view, ordinary people just operate in a given orbit, while entrepreneurs are the ones who change the orbit.
Kirzner of the Austrian School believes that the core trait of entrepreneurs is alertness - being sensitive to arbitrage opportunities that others in the market turn a blind eye to, and discovering and utilizing market imbalances.
The management field is also full of different opinions. The trait theory believes that entrepreneurs have innate personality traits, such as achievement motivation, risk preference, and an internal - control personality; the behavior theory focuses on the specific behavior patterns of entrepreneurs, such as opportunity recognition, resource integration, and team building; the process theory regards entrepreneurship as a combination of a series of stages, from the generation of ideas to the establishment of new enterprises and then to growth.
Why is it so difficult to define entrepreneurs? Because entrepreneurs are essentially "people outside the normal distribution," statistical outliers. The equilibrium framework, the assumption of rational people, and marginal analysis in mainstream economics essentially study the behavior patterns of "average people"; while entrepreneurs are precisely those who are non - average, deviate from the mean, and break the rules. Using tools for studying the average state to study extreme values will naturally lead to no results.
This is also the profound meaning of Professor Zhang Weiying's "reverse definition": when it is extremely difficult to define positively, first clarifying the boundaries and eliminating misunderstandings can actually get closer to the essence.
03
Zhang Weiying's Reverse Wisdom: What Entrepreneurs Are Not
After nearly forty years of research on entrepreneurs, Professor Zhang Weiying's final conclusion is that the best way to understand entrepreneurship is to first figure out "what entrepreneurship is not." The five reverse propositions he put forward precisely form the coordinate system for us to understand entrepreneurs.
First, It's Not Scientific Decision - Making
The premise of scientific decision - making is complete data, known rules, and a unique answer, while entrepreneurs face the unknown future when making decisions. When Steve Jobs decided to make the iPhone, there was no market research data to support the idea that "consumers need a phone without a keyboard"; when Jensen Huang bet on the CUDA ecosystem, no one knew that large - scale AI models would explode twenty years later. Requiring entrepreneurs to meet the standards of "scientific decision - making" is like looking for fish in a tree.
Second, It's Not Solving Problems under Constraints
The core of management is to "do as much as the money allows," pursuing the optimal solution under given resource, technology, and market constraints; while the logic of entrepreneurs is exactly the opposite - first determine the goal, and then find ways to create resources and change the constraints. Ordinary people see the constraints, while entrepreneurs see the goal; ordinary people work within the boundaries, while entrepreneurs expand the boundaries themselves.
Third, Profit Is Not the Only Goal
Neoclassical economics assumes that enterprises pursue maximum profit, but in reality, almost all great entrepreneurs are not in it for the money itself. Musk founded SpaceX for Mars colonization, Jobs built Apple to "change the world," and Jensen Huang established NVIDIA for "the future of accelerated computing." Profit is a result rather than a goal for them. Those who only focus on profit often cannot become real entrepreneurs.
Fourth, They Don't Completely Obey Investors
Corporate governance theory emphasizes the primacy of shareholder interests, but real entrepreneurs are often "disobedient." Musk has repeatedly insisted on his strategy when Tesla's stock price plummeted and investors strongly opposed it; Jobs was fired from the company he founded because his vision conflicted with the short - term interests of the board of directors. Most investors can only understand the known world and cannot imagine the impossible future.
Fifth, They Are Not "Good Employees"
The standard for a good employee is to obey orders, follow procedures, and complete KPIs. But entrepreneurs are naturally rule - breakers and order - rebuilders. They don't play by the rules, don't follow the routine, and are not satisfied with the established framework. Zhang Weiying put it bluntly: Entrepreneurs are the ones who manipulate others, not those who are manipulated.
They do not submit to the given reality but are committed to changing it; they do not accept the existing impossibility but are committed to turning it into possibility.
04
Our Definition: Those Who Turn the Impossible into the Possible
Based on the above analysis, we can give a concise and powerful definition: Entrepreneurs are those who turn the impossible into the possible.
This definition contains three levels. First, the starting point of an entrepreneur is an "impossible" goal - a goal that is generally judged to be unachievable under the then - existing technological conditions, resource constraints, and market perceptions. Second, the action of an entrepreneur is "change" - through innovation, integration, and perseverance, mobilizing all available and unavailable resources. Finally, the end - point of an entrepreneur is "possibility" - making what was originally impossible actually happen in the world.
Let's use three of the most representative contemporary entrepreneurs to verify this definition.
Steve Jobs
The "Impossible" of Bringing Technology to Humanities
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, the company was only ninety days away from bankruptcy. At that time, the consensus was that the Wintel alliance had already monopolized the personal computer market, and Apple had no chance of making a comeback. But Jobs did not accept this "impossibility."
The first thing he did was not to optimize the product line or cut costs - these are things that professional managers would do. He re - defined "what a computer should be." The iMac broke all the rules of industrial design, giving the cold technological product an emotional temperature with its translucent colored shell; the iPod + iTunes re - defined the music industry, making people willing to pay for digital music in an era of rampant piracy; the iPhone completely revolutionized the mobile phone industry, re - defining mobile computing with a glass screen when everyone thought that "a keyboard was a necessity for a mobile phone."
Jobs' most famous saying is the "reality distortion field" - he could make the people around him believe that those seemingly impossible things could be done. This is not just a catchphrase but the essence of entrepreneurship: first construct a future reality in the mind, and then make the world collapse towards this reality.
Jensen Huang
The "Impossible" of Letting GPUs Define the AI Era
Thirty years ago, NVIDIA was just a small company making gaming graphics cards. No one thought that this company would become the core infrastructure provider in the AI era and the first great company in the world with a market value exceeding $5 trillion.
When NVIDIA invented the GPU in 1999, its only use was to accelerate 3D graphics rendering. But Jensen Huang saw a possibility that others didn't: the parallel computing architecture of the GPU might be used for general - purpose computing. When the CUDA platform was launched in 2006, the entire industry didn't understand - why would a graphics card company develop a programming platform? Analysts thought it was a waste of R & D resources and a distraction from the core business. At that time, "using graphics cards for scientific computing" seemed to be a task with extremely low cost - effectiveness and almost impossible to scale up.
Jensen Huang persisted for a full seventeen years. During these seventeen years, the CUDA ecosystem grew slowly. It was not until the explosion of large - language models that the whole world suddenly realized that the only available infrastructure for AI training was the GPU + CUDA system that NVIDIA had already laid out. The so - called "overnight success" is actually a seventeen - year - long continuous attack on the "impossible."
Jensen Huang often says, "We bet everything on the company." This is the destiny of entrepreneurs: when everyone thinks it's impossible, bet the entire fortune on a future that only they can see.
Elon Musk
The "Impossible" of Letting Humanity Leave the Earth
Musk is the most extreme contemporary footnote to the phrase "turning the impossible into the possible."
When he founded SpaceX in 2002, his goal was to "make humanity a multi - planetary species." The reaction of the aerospace industry was: a young man from the Internet industry wants to build rockets with a private company? It's simply a fantasy. The first three rocket launches all failed. Musk poured his last bit of money into the fourth launch. When it succeeded, he burst into tears - because if it failed one more time, SpaceX would cease to exist.
Reusable rockets, Starship, Starlink... Every project was accompanied by assertions of "impossibility" when it was proposed, and every project has gradually become a reality amidst doubts. Today, Starlink has provided satellite Internet services to more than 70 million users around the world, reusable rockets have reduced the launch cost by an order of magnitude, and although the Starship has experienced repeated failures, each explosion is getting closer to the final success.
Krugman mocked that Musk's promises are always delayed, but he overlooked a key fact: Musk's promised time is always overly optimistic, but the direction he promises will always be realized in the end. He said that fully autonomous driving would be achieved in 2020, but it didn't happen. However, today's assisted - driving capabilities have far exceeded anyone's imagination back then; he said that humans would land on Mars in 2025, but it didn't happen. However, the progress of reusable heavy - lift rockets has exceeded the most optimistic expectations of the aerospace industry.
Entrepreneurs are never precise prophets but firm doers. They may make mistakes in the schedule, but they won't make mistakes in the direction; they may postpone the fulfillment of their promises, but they will never give up on fulfilling them.
05
Exhausting All Means to Achieve the Goal
If "turning the impossible into the possible" is the definition of an entrepreneur, then entrepreneurship is the will and ability to exhaust all means to achieve this goal.
This spirit is first manifested as absolute paranoia about the goal. When ordinary people encounter insurmountable obstacles, they adjust their goals; when entrepreneurs encounter obstacles, they adjust their paths, and the goal never changes. In order to reduce the cost of rockets, Musk went from buying Russian rockets to building his own, from disposable rockets to reusable rockets. He changed countless paths, but the goal of "going to Mars" has never wavered.
Secondly, it is manifested as the creativity of resource integration. Entrepreneurs always work in a state of "resource shortage." If they don't have money, they go for financing; if they don't have technology, they go for acquisition or R & D; if they don't have talent, they go for poaching or training; if they don't have a market, they go for market education and creation. Ordinary people see "I don't have this so I can't do it," while entrepreneurs see "what I need and how I can get it."
Thirdly, it is manifested as extreme tolerance for failure. Turning the impossible into the possible is bound to experience countless failures. Jobs was fired from the company he founded, Jensen Huang experienced the moment when NVIDIA was on the verge of bankruptcy, and