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Elon Musk

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Elon Musk

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To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude? —Elon Musk, Saturday Night Live, May 8, 2021 The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. —Steve Jobs

“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes,” Barack Obama wrote in his memoirs, “and I suppose that may explain my particular malady.”

“He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment. “I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers,” says Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who is the mother of three of his other children. “I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain.” Musk agrees. “Adversity shaped me,” he says. “My pain threshold became very high.”

While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view.

“Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.”

was born for a storm, and a calm does not suit me,” Andrew Jackson once said. Likewise with Musk. He developed a siege mentality that included an attraction, sometimes a craving, for storm and drama, both at work and in the romantic relationships he struggled and failed to maintain. He thrived on crises, deadlines, and wild surges of work. When he faced tortuous challenges, the strain would often keep him awake at night and make him vomit. But it also energized him. “He is a drama magnet,” says Kimbal. “That’s his compulsion, the theme of his life.”

“Ever since I was a kid, if I start to think about something hard, then all of my sensory systems turn off,” he says. “I can’t see or hear or anything. I’m using my brain to compute, not for incoming information.”

‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say. ‘I don’t want to be alone.’ ”

“It’s a big theme for him to never have his decisions guided by fear,” Peter recalls. “That was definitely present even when he was a child.”

“I would see shades of these horrible stories Elon told me surface in his own behavior,” says Justine, Elon’s first wife. “It made me realize how difficult it is not to be shaped by what we grew up with, even when that’s not what we want.”

He had conceived by then a life vision that he would repeat like a mantra. “I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,” he says. “I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.”

Some of the best innovations come from combining two previous innovations. The idea that Elon and Kimbal had in early 1995, just as the web was starting to grow exponentially, was simple: put a searchable directory of businesses online and combine it with map software that would give users directions to them.

Elon was moved aside to chief technology officer. At first, he thought the change would suit him; he could focus on building the product. But he learned a lesson. “I never wanted to be a CEO,” he says, “but I learned that you could not truly be the chief technology or product officer unless you were the CEO.”

True product people have a compulsion to sell directly to consumers, without middlemen muddying things up. Musk was that way. He became frustrated by Zip2’s strategy of relegating itself to being an unbranded vendor to the newspaper industry. “We wound up beholden to the papers,” Musk says. He wanted to buy the domain name “city.com” and become a consumer destination again, competing with Yahoo and AOL.

He had not yet sold Zip2, so they lived in his Palo Alto apartment with two housemates and a dachshund that wasn’t housebroken named Bowie, after David.

“What I didn’t appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially,” he says. “That’s what makes him a force of nature.”

“It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.”

Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt. It also had to be about pursuing great dreams. “That’s what can get us up in the morning.”

“One of Elon’s greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven.”

Musk began gathering rocket engineers for meetings at a hotel near the Los Angeles airport. “My initial thought was not to create a rocket company, but rather to have a philanthropic mission that would inspire the public and lead to more NASA funding.”

It was fortunate that the meetings went badly. It prodded Musk to think bigger. Rather than merely using a secondhand rocket to put a demonstration greenhouse on Mars, he would conceive a venture that was far more audacious, one of the most audacious of our times: privately building rockets that could launch satellites and then humans into orbit and eventually send them to Mars and beyond. “I was pretty mad, and when I get mad I try to reframe the problem.”

If humanity was going to get to Mars, the technology of rockets must radically improve. And relying on used rockets, especially old ones from Russia, was not going to push the technology forward. So on the flight home, he pulled out his computer and started making spreadsheets that detailed all of the materials and costs for building a midsize rocket. Cantrell and Griffin, sitting in the row behind him, ordered drinks and laughed. “What the fuck do you think that idiot-savant is doing up there?” Griffin asked Cantrell. Musk turned around and gave them an answer. “Hey, guys,” he said, showing them the spreadsheet, “I think we can build this rocket ourselves.” When Cantrell looked at the numbers, he said to himself, “I’ll be damned—that’s why he’s been borrowing all my books.” Then he asked the flight attendant for another drink.

Musk incorporated Space Exploration Technologies in May 2002. At first he called the company by its initials, SET. A few months later, he highlighted his favorite letter by moving to a more memorable moniker, SpaceX. Its goal, he said in an early presentation, was to launch its first rocket by September 2003 and to send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2010. Thus continued the tradition he had established at PayPal: setting unrealistic timelines that transformed his wild notions from being completely insane to being merely very late.

In laying out the factory, Musk followed his philosophy that the design, engineering, and manufacturing teams would all be clustered together. “The people on the assembly line should be able to immediately collar a designer or engineer and say, ‘Why the fuck did you make it this way?’ ” he explained to Mueller. “If your hand is on a stove and it gets hot, you pull it right off, but if it’s someone else’s hand on the stove, it will take you longer to do something.”

“If you set an aggressive schedule that people think they might be able to make, they will try to put out extra effort,” he says. “But if you give them a schedule that’s physically impossible, engineers aren’t stupid. You’ve demoralized them. It’s Elon’s biggest weakness.” Steve Jobs did something similar. His colleagues called it his reality-distortion field. He set unrealistic deadlines, and when people balked, he would stare at them without blinking and say, “Don’t be afraid, you can do it.” Although the practice demoralized people, they ended up accomplishing things that other companies couldn’t. “Even though we failed to meet most schedules or cost targets that Elon laid out, we still beat all of our peers,” Mueller admits. “We developed the lowest-cost, most awesome rockets in history, and we would end up feeling pretty good about it, even if Dad wasn’t always happy with us.”

Musk took an iterative approach to design. Rockets and engines would be quickly prototyped, tested, blown up, revised, and tried again, until finally something worked. Move fast, blow things up, repeat. “It’s not how well you avoid problems,” Mueller says. “It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.”

“Elon believes that every situation is salvageable. That taught us a lot. And it actually was fun.” It also saved SpaceX months in getting its initial rocket tested.

A pattern was set: try new ideas and be willing to blow things up. The residents in the area got used to explosions. The cows, however, did not. Like pioneers circling the wagons, they would run in a circle protecting the young calves in the center when a big bang happened. The engineers at McGregor set up what they called a “cow cam” so they could watch.

What struck Tarpenning was that Musk focused on the importance of the mission rather than the potential of the business: “He clearly had already come to the conclusion that to have a sustainable future we had to electrify cars.”

Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process, and every specification needs to have a name attached. He can be quick to personalize blame when something goes wrong.

He learned one very big lesson from these ventures: “It’s not the product that leads to success. It’s the ability to make the product efficiently. It’s about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, how do you design the factory?” It was a guiding principle that Musk would make his own.

“Michael Marks would not fire anyone,” Musk says. “I would tell him, Michael, you can’t tell people they have to get their shit together, and then when they don’t get their shit together nothing happens to them.”

The successful launch saved the future of entrepreneurial space endeavors. “Like Roger Bannister besting the four-minute mile, SpaceX made people recalibrate their sense of limitation when it came to getting to space,” wrote the author Ashlee Vance.

Oracle founder Larry Ellison joined only two corporate boards, Apple and Tesla, and he became close friends with Jobs and Musk. He said they both had beneficial cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “OCD is one of the reasons for their success, because they obsessed on solving a problem until they did,” he says. What set them apart is that Musk, unlike Jobs, applied that obsession not just to the design of a product but also to the underlying science, engineering, and manufacturing. “Steve just had to get the conception and software right, but the manufacturing was outsourced,” Ellison says. “Elon took on the manufacturing, the materials, the huge factories.” Jobs loved to walk through Apple’s design studio on a daily basis, but he never visited his factories in China. Musk, in contrast, spent more time walking assembly lines than he did walking around the design studio. “The brain strain of designing the car is tiny compared to the brain strain of designing the factory,” he says.

Von Holzhausen and his deputy Dave Morris, who accompanied him to Fremont, would sometimes walk the factory’s assembly lines until two in the morning. It was an interesting experience for a designer. “It taught me how all the things you create on the drawing board have an effect at the other end, on the assembly line,” von Holzhausen says. Musk joined them two or three nights a week. His focus was on root causes. What in the design was to blame for a production-line problem?

almost every encounter, he maniacally hammered home the message: “A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single-planet civilization and being a multiplanet one.”

“The danger comes when artificial intelligence is decoupled from human will.”

One goal that Musk and Altman discussed at length, which would become a hot topic in 2023 after OpenAI launched a chatbot called ChatGPT, was known as “AI alignment.” It aims to make sure that AI systems are aligned with human goals and values, just as Isaac Asimov set forth rules to prevent the robots in his novels from harming humanity. Think of the computer Hal that runs amok and battles its human creators in 2001: A Space Odyssey. What guardrails and kill switches can we humans put on AI systems so that they remain aligned with our interests, and who among us should get to determine what those interests are? One way to assure AI alignment, Musk felt, was to tie the bots closely to humans. They should be an extension of the will of individuals, rather than systems that could go rogue and develop their own goals and intentions. That would become one of the rationales for Neuralink, the company he would found to create chips that could connect human brains directly to computers.

Musk’s interest in artificial intelligence would lead him to launch an array of related projects. These include Neuralink, which aims to plant microchips in human brains; Optimus, a humanlike robot; and Dojo, a supercomputer that can use millions of videos to train an artificial neural network to simulate a human brain. It also spurred him to become obsessed with pushing to make Tesla cars self-driving. At first these endeavors were rather independent, but eventually Musk would tie them all together, along with a new chatbot company he founded called X.AI, to pursue the goal of artificial general intelligence. Musk’s determination to develop artificial intelligence capabilities at his own companies caused a break with OpenAI in 2018. He tried to convince Altman that OpenAI, which he thought was falling behind Google, should be folded into Tesla. The OpenAI team rejected that idea, and Altman stepped in as president of the lab, starting a for-profit arm that was able to raise equity funding.

His instincts had always been just the opposite. He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow.

After more than five minutes, Teller went to retrieve him. When Musk returned, he explained to Strauss, “I just broke up with my girlfriend. I was really in love, and it hurt bad.” Later in the interview, he unloaded about his father, but without mentioning the child Errol had just had with Jana. “He was such a terrible human being,” Musk said, starting to cry. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil. He will plan evil. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” In his profile, Strauss noted that Musk would not go into specifics. “There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can’t bring himself to utter the words.”

“Step one should be to question the requirements,” he says. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.”

Ever since the development of assembly lines in the early 1900s, most factories have been designed in two steps. First, the line is set up with workers doing specific tasks at each station. Then, when the kinks are worked out, robots and other machines are gradually introduced to take over some of the work. Musk did the reverse. In his vision for a modern “alien dreadnought” factory, he began by automating every task possible. “We had this enormously automated production line that used tons of robots,” says Straubel. “There was one problem. It didn’t work.”

The experience became a lesson that would become part of Musk’s production algorithm. Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation.

At 1:53 a.m. on Sunday, July 1, a black Model 3 was disgorged from the factory with a paper banner across its windshield reading “5000th.” When Musk received a photograph of it on his iPhone, he sent a message to all Tesla workers: “We did it!!… Created entirely new solutions that were thought impossible. Intense in tents. Whatever. It worked…. I think we just became a real car company.”

“I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Musk says. “But I think it’s helpful to say it to an annoying degree.” It had five commandments: 1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. 2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. 4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. 5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.

The algorithm was sometimes accompanied by a few corollaries, among them: All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise, they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword. Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus. That needs to be avoided. It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong. Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do. Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers. When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.

Musk is usually not sentimental about people leaving. He likes fresh blood. He is more concerned with a phenomenon he calls “phoning in rich,” meaning people who have worked at the company for a long time and, because they have enough money and vacation homes, no longer hunger to stay all night on the factory floor. But in the case of Straubel, Musk felt a personal affection as well as professional trust. “I was a little surprised at Elon’s reluctance to have me leave,” says Straubel.

Car components needed to be that way. “Precision is not expensive,” he says. “It’s mostly about caring. Do you care to make it precise? Then you can make it precise.”

Physics does not care about hurt feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right.”

Grimes later expressed her feelings in a song she was working on, “Player of Games,” a fitting title on many levels for the ultimate strategy gamer: If I loved him any less I’d make him stay But he has to be the best Player of games…. I’m in love with the greatest gamer But he’ll always love the game More than he loves me Sail away To the cold expanse of space Even love Couldn’t keep you in your place.

“If you make this thing fast, you can find out fast. And then you can fix it fast.” He eventually succeeded in converting most of the parts into stainless steel.

Some of the most important technology leaps in the digital age involved advances in the way that humans and machines communicate with each other, known as “human-computer interfaces.”

Musk’s lofty goals are usually accompanied by practical business models. He had developed Starlink satellites, for example, as a way to fund SpaceX’s mission to Mars. Likewise, he planned for Neuralink brain chips to be used to help people with neurological problems, such as ALS, interact with computers. “If we can find good commercial uses to fund Neuralink,” he says, “then in a few decades we will get to our ultimate goal of protecting us against evil AI by tightly coupling the human world to our digital machinery.”

The question of whether to use radar in its Autopilot system for self-driving cars—rather than relying solely on visual data from cameras—remained a contentious one at Tesla. It also became a case study of Musk’s style of decision-making: oscillating between bold, stubborn, reckless, visionary, guided by the first principles of physics, but at times surprisingly flexible.

We spoke for more than two hours, much of it about the mental and physical scars he still had in 2021: From 2007 onwards, until maybe last year, it’s been nonstop pain. There’s a gun to your head, make Tesla work, pull a rabbit out of your hat, then pull another rabbit out of the hat. A stream of rabbits flying through the air. If the next rabbit does not come out, you’re dead. It takes a toll. You can’t be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you. But there’s something else I’ve found this year. It’s that fighting to survive keeps you going for quite a while. When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated every day.

“traceroute woke_mind_virus” It was a rather obscure tweet by Musk in December 2021, but it reflected the shift that was underway in his politics. “Traceroute” is a networking command to determine the path to the source server of some information. Musk had taken up the cause of battling what he considered to be the excesses of political correctness and the woke culture of progressive social-justice activists. When I asked him why, he responded, “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.”

The upshot was that the value of the four companies he had initially funded and built were: Tesla: 100 billion The Boring Company: 1 billion

Musk says. “He can tell people they are fucking up and their idea sucks, but do it in a way that doesn’t make them mad. He’s my Mark Antony.”

“Faster. Faster! Please mark anytime a date has slipped. All bad news should be given loudly and often. Good news can be said quietly and once.”

Steel had an interesting insight about Musk. When most clients are given three or four options, they will ask which one the banker recommends. Musk, instead, asked detailed questions about each option but did not solicit a recommendation. He liked to make his own decision.

Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase “psychological safety.” It made him recoil. He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was “hardcore.” Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, flower-smelling, work-life balance, and days of “mental rest” were not his thing. Let that sink in.

When James, Andrew, and Ross described how their layoff lists were progressing, Ben was not afraid to speak his mind. “In my experience, individuals are important, but the teams are also important,” he said. “Instead of just singling out good coders, I think it would be useful to find the teams that work really well together.” Dhaval processed this information and agreed. “Me and James and the people on our Autopilot team are always sitting together, and the ideas flow real fast, and what we do as a team is better than what any one of us could do,” he said. Andrew noted that was why Musk favored in-person rather than remote work. Again, Ben was willing to disagree. “I believe in coming in, and I do,” he said. “But I’m a programmer and can’t be good if I get interrupted every hour. So sometimes I don’t come in. Perhaps hybrid is best.”

“I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated,” he told me at the end of that painful second week at Twitter.

Why was Musk doing this? “He believes that a small group of really great generalist engineers can outperform a regular group a hundred times larger,” Ross said. “Like a small battalion of marines that is really tight can do amazing things. And I think he wants to rip the Band-Aid off. He doesn’t want to drag this out.”

One Christmas tradition that Kimbal and Christiana had was to ask everyone to reflect on a question. This year it was “What regrets do you have?” “My main regret,” Elon answered, “is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.”

As for Saxon, who is autistic, he again showed his wisdom. At one point the family was discussing how they needed to use pseudonyms when they went to a restaurant. “Oh, yes,” he said. “If anyone finds out I’m Elon Musk’s son, they are going to be mad at me because he’s ruining Twitter.”

Machine-learning systems generally need a goal or metric that guides them as they train themselves. Musk, who liked to manage by decreeing what metrics should be paramount, gave them their lodestar: the number of miles that cars with Tesla Full Self-Driving were able to travel without a human intervening. “I want the latest data on miles per intervention to be the starting slide at each of our meetings,” he decreed. “If we’re training AI, what do we optimize? The answer is higher miles between interventions.” He told them to make it like a video game where they could see their score every day. “Video games without a score are boring, so it will be motivating to watch each day as the miles per intervention increases.”

He processed in silence for two minutes, and when he emerged from his trance, he was philosophical. “This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”

Like the decision to forgo slosh baffles on the early version of the Falcon 1, taking these risks turned out to be a mistake. It’s unlikely that NASA or Boeing, with their stay-safe approach, would have made those decisions. But Musk believed in a fail-fast approach to building rockets. Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat. “We don’t want to design to eliminate every risk,” he said. “Otherwise, we will never get anywhere.”

Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an asshole? The answer is no, of course not. One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth. As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex. Even the best people, he wrote, are “molded out of faults.”

“I’ve shot myself in the foot so often I ought to buy some Kevlar boots,” he joked. Perhaps, he ruminated, Twitter should have an impulse-control delay button.

It was a pleasing concept: an impulse-control button that could defuse Musk’s tweets as well as all of his dark impulsive actions and demon-mode eruptions that leave rubble in his wake. But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.

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