Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

A lot was hitting him that week. He was scheduled to give depositions in the Delaware court case seeking to force him to close the Twitter deal, an SEC investigation, and a lawsuit challenging his Tesla compensation. He was also worried about controversies over the use of Starlink satellites in Ukraine, difficulties in reducing Tesla’s supply-chain dependence on China, a Falcon 9 launch of four astronauts (including one Russian woman cosmonaut) to the International Space Station, a West Coast launch the same day of a Falcon 9 carrying fifty-two Starlink satellites, and sundry personal issues regarding children, girlfriends, and former wives.

Afterward, thirty of the engineers gathered around Musk for a pep talk. “Humanoid robots will uncork the economy to quasi-infinite levels,” he said. “Robot workers would solve the problem of lack of population growth,” Drew Baglino added. “Yes, but people should still have kids,” Musk replied. “We want human consciousness to survive.”

“I worked for months without a day off and got so tired that I quit Tesla right after Autonomy Day,” he said. “I was burned out. But after nine months, I was bored, so I called my boss and begged him to let me come back. I decided I’d rather be burned out than bored.”

Tim Zaman, who led the artificial intelligence infrastructure team, had a similar story. From northern Holland, he joined Tesla in 2019. “When you’re at Tesla, you’re afraid to go anywhere else, because you will become so bored.”

Even Musk looked relieved. “Our goal is to make a useful humanoid robot as quickly as possible,” he told the audience. Eventually, he promised, there would be millions of them. “This means a future of abundance, a future where there is no poverty. We can afford to have a universal basic income we give people. It really is a fundamental transformation of civilization.”

Musk just shook his head. The future would not get here fast enough unless they forced it.

As the Robotaxi discussions showed, Musk could be fiercely stubborn. He had a reality-distorting willfulness and a readiness to run roughshod over naysayers. This steeliness may have been one of the superpowers that produced his successes, along with his flameouts.

Twitter prided itself on being a friendly place where coddling was considered a virtue. “We were definitely very high-empathy, very caring about inclusion and diversity; everyone needs to feel safe here,” says Leslie Berland, who was chief marketing and people officer until she was fired by Musk. The company had instituted a permanent work-from-home option and allowed a mental “day of rest” each month. One of the commonly used buzzwords at the company was “psychological safety.” Care was taken not to discomfort.

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.

We are headed to recession, and revenue is below cost, so we have to find ways to bring in more money or reduce costs.”

Alex Spiro, the lawyer, also urged caution. He felt that some jobs at Twitter did not require genius computer skills. “I don’t understand why every single person that works at a social media company has to have one-sixty IQ and work twenty hours a day,” he argued. Some people need to be good at selling, others need the emotional skills of good managers, and some are merely uploading user videos and don’t have to be superstars. Plus, cutting to the bone risked having the system fail if anyone got sick or fed up.

Musk did not agree. He wanted deep cuts not only for financial reasons but also because he wanted a hardcore, fanatic work culture. He was willing, indeed eager to take risks and fly without a net.

Musk reluctantly agreed to delay the mass firings until November 3. They were announced that night in an unsigned email: “In an effort to place Twitter on a healthy path, we will go through the difficult process of reducing our global work force.” About half of the company’s employees worldwide, and close to 90 percent of some infrastructure teams, were let go, their access to company computers and email immediately switched off. He also fired most of the human resources managers. And that was just round one in what would be a three-round bloodbath.

He had been waving the banner of free speech, but he was learning that his views were too simplistic. On social media, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes. Disinformation was a problem, as were crypto scams, fraud, and hate speech. There was also a financial problem: jittery advertisers did not want their brands to be in a toxic-speech cesspool.

Musk has an intuitive feel for engineering issues, but his neural nets have trouble when dealing with human feelings, which is what made his Twitter purchase such a problem. He thought of it as a technology company, when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships.

On one of the Zoom calls, some of the advertisers could be seen folding their arms or signing off. “What the fuck?” one of them muttered. Twitter was supposed to be a billion-dollar business, not an extension of Elon Musk’s flaws and quirks.

During the ceremony, he was singled out by General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “What he symbolizes,” Milley said, “is the combination of the civil and military cooperation and teamwork that makes the United States the most powerful country in space.”

Henry Kissinger once quoted an aide saying that the Watergate scandal had happened “because some damn fool went into the Oval Office and did what Nixon told him to do.” Those around Musk knew how to ride out his periods of demon mode.

Roth’s feelings toward Musk were complex. Most of their interactions had been good. “He was reasonable, funny, engaging, and would talk about his vision in a way that was a bit bullshit but mainly something you could totally be inspired by,” Roth says. But then there were the times when Musk showed an authoritarian, mean, dark streak. “He was the bad Elon, and that’s the one I couldn’t take.” “People want me to say I hate him, but it’s much more complicated, which, I suppose, is what makes him interesting. He’s a bit of an idealist, right? He has a set of grand visions, whether it’s multiplanetary humanity or renewable energy and even free speech. And he has constructed for himself a moral and ethical universe that is focused on the delivery of those big goals. I think that makes it hard to villainize him.”

“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.

When the poll closed the next day, more than 15 million users had voted. The tally was close: 51.8 percent to 48.2 percent in favor of reinstating Trump. “The people have spoken,” Musk declared. “Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” I asked him right afterward whether he had a sense in advance of how the poll would turn out. No, he said. And if it had gone the other way, would he have kept Trump banned? Yes. “I’m not Trump’s fan. He’s disruptive. He’s the world’s champion of bullshit.”

In the future, he told them, the teams at Twitter would be led by engineers like themselves rather than designers and product managers. It was a subtle shift. It reflected his belief that Twitter should be, at its core, a software engineering company, led by people with a feel for coding, rather than a media and consumer-product company, led by people with a feel for human relationships and desires.

Musk had wrought one of the greatest shifts in corporate culture ever. Twitter had gone from being among the most nurturing workplaces, replete with free artisanal meals and yoga studios and paid rest days and concern for “psychological safety,” to the other extreme. He did it not only for cost reasons. He preferred a scrappy, hard-driven environment where rabid warriors felt psychological danger rather than comfort.

It was not always a pretty sight. Musk’s method, as it had been since the Falcon 1 rocket, was to iterate fast, take risks, be brutal, accept some flameouts, then try again. “We were changing the engines while the plane was spiraling out of control,” he says of Twitter. “It’s a miracle we survived.”

SpaceX and Tesla were successful because Musk relentlessly pushed his teams to be scrappier, more nimble, and to launch fire-drill surges that extruded all obstacles.

For a decade, Musk had been worried about the danger that artificial intelligence could someday run amok—develop a mind of its own, so to speak—and threaten humanity. When Google cofounder Larry Page dismissed his concerns, calling him a “specist” for favoring the human species over other forms of intelligence, it destroyed their friendship.

“He’s a jerk,” Altman told Kara Swisher. “He has a style that is not a style that I’d want to have for myself. But I think he does really care, and he is feeling very stressed about what the future’s going to look like for humanity.”

I calculated that would mean he would be running six companies: Tesla, SpaceX and its Starlink unit, Twitter, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X.AI. That was three times as many as Steve Jobs (Apple, Pixar) at his peak.

“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.”

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.”

His life had long been an admixture of historically transforming achievements along with wild flameouts, broken promises, and arrogant impulses. Both his accomplishments and his failures were epic.

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.”

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.