MUSK, MARKETS AND THE EXPORT TEST

I have just finished Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk and came away with mixed emotions — awe at what one man has achieved in a lifetime and some horror at the person he appears to have had to become to achieve it.

 Musk is only a few months older than me. That makes the reading uncomfortable.

 Isaacson portrays a man of extraordinary imagination, risk tolerance and focus, but also one who can be abrasive, insensitive and brutally demanding. Employees, friends and even family can become collateral damage to the mission.

 No candidate for beatification here.

 Isaacson, who also wrote the excellent biography of Steve Jobs, has a rare ability to get behind the caricature served up by the media and ferret out what drives his subjects. Yet despite the book running to hundreds of pages, I finished it feeling he had only scratched the surface of Musk’s complicated personality and even more audacious vision.

 Tesla was the announcement

 SpaceX can only be described in superlatives. Reusable rockets have changed the economics of going into space.

 But for me Tesla is what announced Musk to the world as a bona fide genius.

 Starting a new automobile company is close to madness. Cars require huge amounts of capital, complicated supply chains, technology, distribution networks and consumer trust.

 Tesla did not merely survive.

 It made electric cars desirable and forced virtually every major car manufacturer to rethink its future. Then it pushed into batteries, software and autonomous driving. I cannot wait to own a genuinely self-driving car — Tesla or otherwise.

 And then came the ultimate capitalist validation: the market.

 Investors valued Tesla above several of the world’s largest traditional car manufacturers combined.

 You can argue they are wrong. You can argue Tesla is overvalued.

 But they are putting their own money behind that judgement.

 For us free-market adherents, that is the holy grail.

 Yes, government helped

 Tesla’s rise was not a pure free-market fairy tale.

 It benefited from government support, including a $465 million US government loan, which it repaid early. America also protects its industries; Chinese EVs face punitive tariffs in the US market.

 So yes, protectionism and state support are part of the story.

 But there is an important distinction.

 At its best, state support helps a company become strong enough to compete globally. It does not permanently shield it from competition...

 You can provide finance, infrastructure, research support and even temporary protection.

 But eventually the company must leave the nursery and fight.

 The export market is brutal.

 That brutality is useful.

 Then came BYD

 Some will say it is unfair to compare Uganda’s Kiira Motors with Tesla.

 I think the opposite.

 Who exactly are we supposed to compare it with?

 When Kiira sells a bus in Nairobi, Lagos, Dar es Salaam or Johannesburg, the buyer will not lower his expectations because Uganda is a developing country.

 He will compare price, reliability, range, financing, technology and after-sales service against every available alternative.

 And increasingly that means China.

 In fact Tesla may now be the kinder comparison. BYD sold more fully electric vehicles than Tesla in 2025 and is also a major global electric-bus manufacturer.

 That is the market Kiira Motors is entering.

 Like it or not, Tesla and BYD are the competition.

 The import-substitution trap

 This is also why I have always been suspicious of import substitution.

 There is nothing wrong with producing at home what we currently import. The problem starts when import substitution becomes a policy for protecting companies from competition rather than preparing them for it...

 Then the incentives turn upside down.

 Instead of becoming more efficient, the company learns to lobby government. Instead of improving its product, it seeks tariffs, tax breaks, procurement preferences and protection from foreign competitors.

 That is how cronies are created.

 And once protected firms are guaranteed a market, innovation suffers. Why improve quality or lower prices when the customer has nowhere else to go?

 The taxpayer becomes a double loser.

First, billions of shillings can disappear into enterprises that never become commercially viable.

Then the same taxpayer, now acting as a consumer, pays again through higher prices, poorer quality or inferior services because competition has been suppressed...

Export-led growth imposes a much healthier discipline.

The Kenyan, Nigerian or South African buyer does not care who your minister is. He does not care how patriotic your industrial policy sounds.

He wants value.

 

Politicians love inputs

This brings us back to Kiira Motors.

Politicians love inputs.

We allocated billions. We built a factory. We installed a production line. We trained engineers. We made a bus.

Cut ribbon. Take photographs. Mission accomplished.

Except business does not work like that.

The private sector is judged by outputs and outcomes because the market is an unforgiving auditor.

How many buses did you make? How many did you sell? At what margin? Did customers return? Can you export? Can you finance the next production cycle from revenues rather than another government appropriation?

The issue is not whether Ugandans can build buses.

 Obviously we can.

 The issue is whether we can build buses that strangers will buy with their own money.

 That is a completely different test.

 If Kiira can sell hundreds and eventually thousands of buses across Africa against BYD and other manufacturers, government should back it enthusiastically.

 But if after hundreds of billions of shillings we are still mainly celebrating factories, prototypes and government procurement, we should ask whether that capital might produce higher returns elsewhere.

 Musk’s story reinforced something very simple.

 Capitalism does not care about good intentions.

 Eventually somebody who does not have to buy your product must reach into his pocket and pay for it.

Tesla passed that test.

BYD has passed it on an even larger scale.

Kiira Motors must too.