Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

“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.”

This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. “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.”

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.”

Despite all of their partying, he understood that Musk was fundamentally alienated and withdrawn, like an observer from a different planet trying to learn the motions of sociability. “I wish Elon knew how to be a little happier,” he says.

Elon bought a 1967 Jaguar E-type. As a kid in South Africa, he had seen a picture of the car in a book on the best convertibles ever made, and he had vowed to buy one if he ever struck it rich. “It was the most beautiful car you could imagine,” he says, “but it broke down at least once a week.”

When the other engineers went home, Musk would sometimes take the code they were working on and rewrite it. With his weak empathy gene, he didn’t realize or care that correcting someone publicly—or, as he put it, “fixing their fucking stupid code”—was not a path to endearment. He had never been a captain of a sports team or the leader of a gang of friends, and he lacked an instinct for camaraderie. Like Steve Jobs, he genuinely did not care if he offended or intimidated the people he worked with, as long as he drove them to accomplish feats they thought were impossible. “It’s not your job to make people on your team love you,” he said at a SpaceX executive session years later. “In fact, that’s counterproductive.”

One day they were with a friend in a McDonald’s and started fighting loudly. “My friend was mortified, but Elon and I were used to having big arguments in public. There is a combative element to him. I don’t think you can be in a relationship with Elon and not argue.”

Musk now had the choice he had described to CNN: living like a multimillionaire or leaving his chips on the table to fund a new enterprise. The balance he struck was to invest $12 million in X.com, leaving about $4 million after taxes to spend on himself.

Because he held a controlling interest, Musk prevailed and Fricker quit, along with most of the employees.

He’s done it before

“One by one, we all said, ‘Shit, he’s right,’ ” Levchin recalls. “Elon will say crazy stuff, but every once in a while, he’ll surprise you by knowing way more than you do about your own specialty. I think a huge part of the way he motivates people are these displays of sharpness, which people just don’t expect from him, because they mistake him for a bullshitter or goofball.”

But eventually I realized that it was good I got couped. Otherwise I’d still be slaving away at PayPal.” Then he paused for a few moments and let out a little laugh. “Of course, if I had stayed, PayPal would be a trillion-dollar company.”

he returned to the topic of what his grand vision for X.com had been. “That’s what Twitter could become,” he said. “If you combine a social network with a payments platform, you could create what I wanted X.com to be.”

“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.”

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

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.”

The arguments about the risk served to strengthen Musk’s resolve. He liked risk. “If you’re trying to convince me this has a high probability of failure, I am already there,” he told Ressi. “The likeliest outcome is that I will lose all my money. But what’s the alternative? That there be no progress in space exploration? We’ve got to give this a shot, or we’re stuck on Earth forever.”

Decades of cost-plus contracts had made aerospace flabby. A valve in a rocket would cost thirty times more than a similar valve in a car, so Musk constantly pressed his team to source components from non-aerospace companies. The latches used by NASA in the Space Station cost $1,500 each.

By sending their factories abroad, American companies saved labor costs, but they lost the daily feel for ways to improve their products. Musk bucked this trend, largely because he wanted to have tight control of the manufacturing process. He believed that designing the factory to build a car—“the machine that builds the machine”—was as important as designing the car itself. Tesla’s design-manufacturing feedback loop gave it a competitive advantage, allowing it to innovate on a daily basis.

Startups need this

Her main job, she told Junod, was keeping Musk from going king-crazy. “You’ve never heard that term?” she asked. “It means that people become king, and then they go crazy.”

At a meeting that Friday morning, he asked how long it would take to begin digging a tunnel in the lot next to the Hyperloop experiment tube. About two weeks, he was told. “Get started today,” he ordered. “I want as big of a hole as we can by Sunday.” His assistant Elissa Butterfield scrambled to get Tesla workers to move their cars out of the lot, and within three hours the two tunneling machines Davis had bought were digging away. By Sunday, there was a gaping fifty-foot-wide hole leading down to the beginning of a tunnel.

She next saw him when they were in line to walk the red carpet at New York’s Metropolitan Museum gala in May 2016. Heard, then thirty, was on the brink of an explosive divorce from Johnny Depp. She and Musk talked at the dinner and then the afterparty. Reeling from her relationship with Depp, she felt that Musk was a breath of fresh air.

the most prominent short-seller, Jim Chanos, publicly declared that Tesla stock was basically worthless. Around that time, Musk made the opposite bet. The Tesla board granted him the boldest pay package in American history, one that would pay him nothing if the stock price did not rise dramatically but that had the potential to pay out $100 billion or more if the company achieved an extraordinarily aggressive set of targets, including a leap in the production numbers, revenue, and stock price.

Kimbal believed that Musk’s turmoil was partly triggered by his continuing anguish, after almost a year, over his breakup with Amber Heard. “I definitely think that 2018 tailspin was not just Tesla related,” Kimbal says. “It was a result of him just being in awful grief around Amber.”

Every now and then, often at the most complex of times, the Creators of Our Simulation—those rascals who conjure up what we are led to believe is reality—drop in a sparky new element, one that creates chaotic new subplots.

After they met again through the Roko’s basilisk exchange on Twitter, Musk invited her to fly up to Fremont to visit his factory, his idea of a good date.

People should keep his psychological makeup in mind when judging him, she argues. “If someone has depression or anxiety, we sympathize. But if they have Asperger’s we say he’s an asshole.”

“I don’t care if no one buys it,” he said at the end of the session. “We’re not doing a traditional boring truck. We can always do that later. I want to build something that’s cool. Like, don’t resist me.”

team to come together, work twenty-four-seven,

When Juncosa took over at Starlink, he threw away the existing design and started back at a first-principles level, questioning every requirement based on fundamental physics.

Musk knew the answer. “No. It’s just steel. It’s about two hundred bucks. You have very badly failed. If you don’t improve, your resignation will be accepted. This meeting is over. Done.”

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.”

There was no law of physics—no basic principle—that prevented all of the functionality from being on one device. When the engineers tried to explain the need for the router, Musk’s face turned stony. “Delete,” he said. “Delete, delete, delete.” After they left the meeting, the engineers went through the usual stages of post-Musk distress disorder: baffled, then angry, then anxious. But within a week they got to the stage of being intrigued, because the new approach, they realized, might actually work.

In November 2021, he conducted a Twitter poll to see if he should sell some Tesla stock in order to realize some of the capital gains and pay tax on it. There were 3.5 million votes, with 58 percent voting yes. As he already was planning to do, he exercised options that he had been granted in 2012 and were due to expire, which caused him to pay the largest single tax bill in history: $11 billion, enough to fund the entire budget of his antagonists at the Securities and Exchange Commission for five years.

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.

What should have been the good times were unnerving for him. It prompted him to launch surges, stir up dramas, throw himself into battles he could have bypassed, and bite off new endeavors.

Zilis, by her own choice, decided not to get married. But she had “the motherhood bug super hard,” she says. Her maternal impulses were further stoked by Musk’s evangelizing about how important it was for people to have many children. He feared that declining birthrates were a threat to the long-term survival of human consciousness. “People are going to have to revive the idea of having children as a kind of social duty,” he said in a 2014 interview. “Otherwise civilization will just die.”

Their twins were conceived by in vitro fertilization.

“Elon always says we need to figure out what the question is before we can know the answers to the universe,” Grimes explains, referring to what he learned from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

In 2021, he became obsessed with a new multiplayer strategy game on his iPhone, Polytopia. In it, players choose to be one of sixteen characters, known as tribes, and compete to develop technologies, corner resources, and wage battles in order to build an empire. He became so good he was able to beat the game’s Swedish developer, Felix Ekenstam. What did his passion for the game say about him? “I am just wired for war, basically,” he answers.

Throughout the evening and into the night, he personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he reaffirmed a secret policy that he had implemented, which the Ukrainians did not know about, to disable coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.

Musk’s period of unnerving calm in early 2022 coincided, fatefully, with a moment when he suddenly had a lot of cash in his pocket. His stock sales had left him with about $10 billion. “I didn’t want to just leave it in the bank,” he says, “so I asked myself what product I liked, and that was an easy question. It was Twitter.” In January, he confidentially told his personal manager Jared Birchall to start buying shares.

“It’s true that if they see the general out on the battlefield, the troops are going to be motivated. Wherever Napoleon was, that’s where his armies would do best.

In the second-floor conference facilities, which Musk commandeered as his base camp, there were long wooden tables filled with earthy snacks and five types of water, including bottles from Norway and cans of Liquid Death. “I drink tap water,” Musk said when offered one. It was an ominous opening scene. One could smell a culture clash brewing, as if a hardscrabble cowboy had walked into a Starbucks.

“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.

Tony Haile, a British director of product who had been a cofounder of a startup that tried to sell subscriptions to an online news bundle, asked about getting users to pay for journalism. Musk said he liked the idea of having easy small payments a user could make to watch video or read a story. “We want to build a way to have media makers get paid for their work,” he said. He had privately come to the conclusion that Twitter’s biggest competitor was going to be Substack, the online platform that journalists and others were using to publish content and get paid by users.

In addition to extracting vengeance and saving some money, there was a gamesmanship that was driving Musk. The surprise finale would be dramatic, like a well-timed strike in Polytopia

Twitter Blue would serve many purposes. First, it would cut back on troll farms and bot armies, because only one verified account would be permitted on any one credit card and phone.

“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.