The one about Elon Musk
Does tech beat strategy?
Friends,
I hope that all is well with you and yours, and that this e-mail finds you on a boat with shoddy connection, in the tropics, three months after I sent it.
Today, we dig into the thoughts of Elon Musk and answer an increasingly important question: does tech beat strategy? Along the way, we touch upon such topics as creative destruction, disruptive technology, market timing, military strategy, and zombies.
Also, as ever, some personal notes and the market vitals, featuring the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Dallas Cowboys, new gins, Apple eavesdropping, Meta’s new content moderation policy, OpenAI’s rising costs, Microsoft’s capex, and artificial intelligence news out of China.
Now accepting keynotes for 25Q2-25Q4
Every year for the last decade or so, I have created three main presentation decks. For 2025, however, I have (for the first time) added a fourth due to popular demand. They are:
What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do: How to turn change into a competitive advantage. (Based on the new book by the same name.)
Leadership in a Time of Change: How to steer an organization through a sea of uncertainty.
Resilient Retail: How to build a profitable retail business in the modern marketplace. (Based on the 2025 follow-up to the highly praised 2022 white paper The Gravity of e-Commerce.)
Artificial Intelligence Beyond the Fantasy: How to establish the real-world relevance of a new technology.
If you want to book me for your event, corporate speaking slot, or workshop, merely send me an email. To make sure I am available, please do so at your earliest convenience; my availability is limited and the schedule tends to fill up fast. More information may be found here.
An important note for new premium subscribers
Over the last month, Strategy in Praxis has hit a number of milestones in terms of subscribers. In particular, there has been a strong influx of premium users, which is flattering beyond words (and immensely appreciated).
However, a few of you who are paying have been unable to access Strategy in Polemy (a.k.a. The Castlin Manifesto). It goes without saying that this is unacceptable. The culprit was a Wordpress bug that emerged over Christmas and, due to the holidays, took me a couple of days to become aware of. Without boring everyone with the details, the TL;DR of it is that it completely messes up hyperlinks.
I have sorted out the issue, but suspect that a few of you had to deal with the problem when it was live. Thus, if you recently became a premium subscriber and were unable to obtain the manifesto, please send me an email and I will make sure you get it post-haste.
A couple of updates before we go-go
One of the points that we keep making in this space is that cultures emerge from actions taken, not per design or words spoken. This was on full display during the last week of the NFL’s regular season.
In Tampa Bay (the team that yours truly happens to support), the Buccaneers chose to throw the ball to its star wide receiver, Mike Evans, on the final play of the game just so that he could again finish with over 1,000 yards on the season and get his performance based bonus. That is to say, they could have elected to take a knee, win a pivotal game, and save $3M. Instead, they actively worked to get him what he needed. They even created a video about the moment.
Meanwhile in Dallas, the Cowboys pulled its third string quarterback, Cooper Rush, who had been starting every game since week 9, just to save $250K. Owner Jerry Jones said after the game that Rush “did earn some pretty serious incentives this year” (another $250k). Or to put it differently, be happy to get what we give.
Want to guess if players and agents are taking notice?
Regarding last week’s, eh, call for gins, I ended up ordering Canaima, a small batch gin from Venezuela that makes use of the unique botanicals of the Amazon rainforest, and Bareksten, a botanical gin the ingredients of which are primarily sourced from the Norwegian forests. Both are award-winning, but that is almost all that they have in common. Reviews to come.
I have also, per Lee Grunnell’s recommendation, added Boatyard double gin to my list. It will most certainly headline my next order.
Moving on to the markets.
The market vitals
Do you remember how we all believed that our iPhones were listening to our conversations, but were constantly told they were not? Well, it turns out that they were. Kind of anyway.
Last week, Apple agreed to settle a proposed class action lawsuit that claimed Siri violated user privacy. The sum was, relatively speaking, not exactly vast; $95M may sound like a hefty sack of change, but only equates to “up to” $20 per class member. Given that the lawyers involved will take about a third of the total sum, one can likely expect the average compensation to be on the low end of the scale.
The claimants argued that the firm had recorded people who unintentionally had activated Siri (i.e., without using the “Hey, Siri” phrase to wake it), and that they were subsequently targeted by ads that related to their conversations. Apple, on their end, denied any wrongdoing, saying they settled to “avoid additional litigation”. Which side you choose to believe is up to you.
The lawsuits have really begun to ramp up of late for Tim Cook & Co. Over the past twelve months alone, Apple has had to pay out in a $500M lawsuit that claimed it deliberately slowed down iPhones in the US, agreed to pay $490M in a class action led by Norfolk County Council in the UK, and has had to face a class action spearheaded by consumer group Which? that accuses the company of manipulating the market through its iCloud service.
Not a great look for the company that business book writers once thought could do no wrong.
The Fed seems to have decided that the future is “uncertain”. Apparently the word, or some form of it, was mentioned twelve times in the latest meeting minutes. The biggest hurdle remains the lack of progress on inflation, particularly in the light of Trump’s fiscal policies. As a result, rate cuts are likely to be fewer and father between in 2025.
Meta has announced it will get rid of fact checkers. Instead, it will employ “crowdsourced community content notes”. The move is awfully similar to that made by Twitter/X a while back and, well, the results have not exactly been stellar. Though I am confident that investors will not care one iota, the implications for mis- and/or disinformation are obvious.
Not a whole lot of interesting news from the world of AI this week, except that costs keep increasing from already altitude sickness inducing heights.
OpenAi recently admitted that it is losing money on its $200-a-month subscription deals for ChatGPT Pro; user demands are racking up costs that, quite simply, are not covered by the fee. Analysts hold that its search queries may be as much as ten times the cost of the equivalent Google search.
Meanwhile, Microsoft announced that it plans to spend $80B on AI data centers alone in 2025.
Admittedly, there are some interesting news stories coming out of China, particularly relating to Deepseek, that, if true. could signal that the technology is starting to shift ever so slightly and slowly from exigent to exposed in the 4E model. In short, the company claimed its latest model was able to achieve similar results as GPT4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 on a much smaller training data set, which obviously would cut cost significantly.
Moving on.
The one about Elon Musk
Does technological superiority beat strategy?
A few days ago, Yanko Kotliarsky asked the opinion of yours truly and Roger Martin on a few soundbites from Elon Musk. As it turned out, the billionaire oddball had been on a podcast called “Hardcore History” and said, among other things, the following:
"If there's an overwhelming technology advantage, that side wins - even if outnumbered or outmaneuvered. Historically, wars focused on strategy and tactics because tech evolved slowly. But with a massive tech leap - like lasers from space - Julius Caesar, Napoleon, or anyone else would lose instantly. A technology discontinuity changes everything."
Technology, in other words, would be the latest in a low row of things that supposedly eats strategy for breakfast.
Despite (or perhaps because of) the spectacularly infantile example, the quote instantly found popularity with the usual crowd. Falling over each other to worship at the altar of Musk, they vehemently agreed. “Elon, our eternal hero” one user replied. “Why the USA always wins”, another added. “Wow, very true”, someone else chipped in. “With Musk's technology, not even the best strategist from the past could avoid a crushing defeat.” On it went.
But does he actually have a point?