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The book explores an issue that would become central to Musk’s life: Will artificial intelligence develop in ways that benefit and protect humanity, or will machines develop intentions of their own and become a threat to humans?
“Most PhDs are irrelevant. The number that actually move the needle is almost none.”
Hoffman knew Musk’s wiles. “He has reality-warp powers where people get sucked into his vision,” he says. Nevertheless, he decided to meet Musk for lunch.
When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.”
Later Hoffman would realize that Musk didn’t think that way. “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.”
“People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves,” he would say in a TED Talk a few years later. “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.”
As Max Levchin drily puts it, “One of Elon’s greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven.”
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.
When Musk decided he wanted to start his own rocket company, his friends did what true friends do in such a situation: they staged an intervention.
We’ve got to give this a shot, or we’re stuck on Earth forever.”
It was a rather grandiose mandate-from-heaven assessment of how indispensable he was to the progress of humankind. But like many of Musk’s most laughable assertions, it contained a kernel of truth.
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Musk insisted on setting unrealistic deadlines even when they weren’t necessary, such as when he ordered test stands to be erected in weeks for rocket engines that had not yet been built.
An important element in launching a new product, as Steve Jobs had shown with his dramatic announcement events, is creating a buzz that transforms it into an object of desire.
“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.
“No,” Musk said, “that would be another notch in the signpost of ‘Electric cars don’t work,’ and we’d never get to sustainable energy.” Nor could he abandon SpaceX. “We might then never be a multiplanetary species.”
The launch went perfectly. Musk, who joined his jubilant team at an all-night party on Cocoa Beach pier, called it “a vindication of what the president has proposed.” It was also a vindication of SpaceX. Less than eight years from its founding, and two years from facing bankruptcy, it was now the most successful private rocket company in the world.
That evening, Musk flew west to the Fremont factory, where he made a pithy toast. “Fuck oil,” he said. Tesla was almost dead at the end of 2008. Now, just eighteen months later, it had become America’s hottest new company.
Human consciousness, Musk retorted, was a precious flicker of light in the universe, and we should not let it be extinguished. Page considered that sentimental nonsense. If consciousness could be replicated in a machine, why would that not be just as valuable? Perhaps we might even be able someday to upload our own consciousness into a machine.
The best way to prevent a problem was to ensure that AI remained tightly aligned and partnered with humans. “The danger comes when artificial intelligence is decoupled from human will.”
The whole clan, Peter says, followed the same maxim: “Risk is a type of fuel.”
He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow.
“If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible,” Musk told him, “then unconventional thinking is necessary.”
When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.
The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.
“Demon mode causes a lot of chaos,” she says, “but it also gets shit done.”
When some designers pushed him to at least do some market testing, Musk replied, “I don’t do focus groups.”
There was also an unexpected surprise when von Holzhausen tried to show the toughness of the truck. He swung at the body with a sledgehammer, which didn’t make a dent. Then he threw a metal ball at one of the “armor glass” windows, to show it wouldn’t break. To his surprise, it cracked. “Oh my fucking God!” Musk said. “Well, maybe that was a little too hard.”
Getting to Mars would cost serious money. So Musk combined, as he often did, an aspirational mission with a practical business plan.
When Musk described what he was doing at SpaceX, Juncosa thought, “Man, this guy is crazy as hell, and I think he’s going to lose all his money, but he seems super smart and motivated and I like his style.” When Musk offered him a job, he accepted immediately.
When they became operational four months later, Musk was at his south Texas house and went on Twitter. “Sending this tweet through space via Starlink satellite,” he wrote. He was now able to tweet on an internet that he owned.
But his goal was not merely to be a space entrepreneur. It was to get humanity to Mars. And that could not be done on a Falcon 9 or its beefed-up sibling, the Falcon Heavy. Falcons can fly only so high. “I could have made a lot of money, but I could not have made life multiplanetary,” he says.
“Precision is not expensive,” he says. “It’s mostly about caring. Do you care to make it precise? Then you can make it precise.”
That summer, he made a presentation to a VP at Boeing about how SpaceX was enabling the younger engineers to innovate. “If Boeing doesn’t change,” he said, “you’re going to lose out on the top talent.” The VP replied that Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.” Dontchev quit.
Musk’s push to move faster, take more risks, break rules, and question requirements allowed him to accomplish big feats, such as sending humans into orbit, mass-marketing electric vehicles, and getting homeowners off the electric grid. It also meant that he did things—ignoring SEC requirements, defying California COVID restrictions—that got him in trouble.
“It was all very subtle,” says Koenigsmann. “That’s typical Elon. A decision to take a risk signaled by a nod of the head.”
Bezos and Musk were alike in some respects. They both disrupted industries through passion, innovation, and force of will. They were both abrupt with employees, quick to call things stupid, and enraged by doubters and naysayers. And they both focused on envisioning the future rather than pursuing short-term profits. When asked if he even knew how to spell “profit,” Bezos answered, “P-r-o-p-h-e-t.” But when it came to drilling down on the engineering, they were different. Bezos was methodical. His motto was gradatim ferociter, or “Step by step, ferociously.” Musk’s instinct was to push and
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Physics does not care about hurt feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right.”
“Elon cares a lot about humanity, but humanity in more of a very macro sense.”
“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?” Musk grinned sheepishly as he delivered his opening monologue as the guest host of Saturday Night Live.
Later, when I asked why he had not opted for the lower altitude, Isaacman said, “If we’re going to go to the moon again, and we’re going to go to Mars, we’ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone.”
“Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable,” he said. “It would have happened without me. But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.”
He admitted there was a reasonable chance that it would not work, but it was better to try and fail rather than analyze the issue for months. “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.
For his part, Gates was far more gracious. Later that year, he was at a dinner in Washington, DC, where people were criticizing Musk. “You can feel whatever you want about Elon’s behavior,” Gates said, “but there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science and innovation than he has.”
Musk had shown little interest in philanthropy over the years. He felt that the good he could do for humanity was best accomplished by keeping his money deployed in his companies that pursued energy sustainability, space exploration, and artificial intelligence safety.
“We want to have one place where people with different viewpoints can interact. That would be a good thing for civilization.” It was a noble sentiment, but he would end up undermining that important mission with statements and tweets that ended up chasing off progressives and mainstream media types to other social networks.
We have to strike this balance of allowing people to say what they want to say, but also making people comfortable.”
Musk asked the NASA guests whether they had children, and their responses prompted him to give his thoughts once again on how declining birthrates are a threat to the future of human consciousness.
“There have to be things that inspire you, that move your heart,” Musk said in his speech. “Being a space-faring civilization, making science fiction not fiction, is one of those.”
There was another thing that Emanuel did not understand. Musk wanted to run Twitter himself, just as he was doing with Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, and Neuralink.
