I believe Elon Musk’s superpower is urgency.
His dreams, such as landing on Mars and having a civilisation powered by renewable energy, are arguably shared by many other people, but the difference is that he is deeply committed to making it happen NOW.
That’s why he thinks he can get man to Mars and can do it in a time frame that allows him to blow away the competition.
His urgency creates a creative edge and causes his famously mad work ethic.
Tony Robbins says urgency is a result of creating the vision of a compelling future. Elon Musk has this technique nailed.
This old article calculated that Elon on average achieves in 1 year what it takes most people to do several years. In the article, it also focuses on his desire to build things that have an order of magnitude better performance (for example, increasing the speed of the Boring Company’s tunnel boring machines by 14x compared to the standard speed).
However, now some shareholders and analysts are sarcastically referring to his several delays and missed deadlines at Tesla as “Elon Time”.
Part of this is caused by his dedication to redesigning everything from first principles, even down to the details of the production line and the bespoke software tools used at Tesla.
People are speculating whether he can turn things around before Tesla runs out of the ability to continually raise capital. I think that his relentless dedication to urgency will win out.