Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Even though he was neither political nor gregarious, he ran for student assembly. One of his campaign pledges poked fun at those who sought student office in order to polish their résumés. The final promise of his campaign platform was “If this position ever appears on my résumé, to stand on [my] head and eat 50 copies of the offending document in a public place.” Fortunately, he lost, which saved him from falling in with the student-government types, a world for which he was temperamentally unsuited.

he came to a realization: he had a fanatic love of video games and the skills to make money creating them, but that was not the best way to spend his life. “I wanted to have more impact,” he says.

Errol Musk, not yet estranged from his sons, visited from South Africa and gave them $28,000 plus a beat-up car he bought for $500. Their mother, Maye, came from Toronto more often, bringing food and clothes. She gave them $10,000 and let them use her credit card because they had not been approved for one.

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.”

From the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager, contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance. At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations, and he expected others to do the same. His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges. The Zip2 team won second place in a national Quake competition.

He was toughest on Kimbal. “I love, love, love my brother very much, but working with him was hard,” Kimbal says. Their disagreements often led to rolling-on-the-office-floor fights.

“Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal,” Elon says. “It was part of the culture.” They had no private offices, just cubicles, so everyone had to watch. In one of their worst fights, they wrestled to the floor and Elon seemed ready to punch Kimbal in the face, so Kimbal bit his hand and tore off a hunk of flesh.

January 1999, less than four years after Elon and Kimbal launched Zip2, Proudian called them into his office and told them that Compaq Computer, which was seeking to juice up its AltaVista search engine, had offered $307 million in cash. The brothers had split their 12 percent ownership stake 60–40, so Elon at age twenty-seven walked away with $22 million

His new wealth allowed his desires and impulses to be subject to fewer restraints, which was not always a pretty sight. But his earnest, mission-driven intensity remained intact.

Her name was Justine Wilson, though when he first met her at Queen’s University she was still using her more prosaic given name, Jennifer. Like Musk, she had been a bookworm as a kid, though her taste ran to dark fantasy novels rather than sci-fi. She had been raised in a small river town northeast of Toronto and fancied that she would become a writer.

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 loved the name X.com. Instead of being too clever, like Zip2, the name was simple, memorable, and easy to type. It also allowed him to have one of the coolest email addresses of the time: e@x.com. “X” would become his go-to letter for naming things, from companies to kids.

Potential Paypal name ended up being Twitter name

Musk responded with a very self-aware email. “I am by nature obsessive-compulsive,” he wrote Fricker. “What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way. God knows why… it’s probably rooted in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit.”

Musk and Michael Moritz went to New York to see if they could recruit Rudy Giuliani, who was just ending his tenure as mayor, to be a political fixer and guide them through the policy intricacies of being a bank. But as soon as they walked into his office, they knew it would not work.

Musk restructured the company so that there was not a separate engineering department. Instead, engineers would team up with product managers. It was a philosophy that he would carry through to Tesla, SpaceX, and then Twitter. Separating the design of a product from its engineering was a recipe for dysfunction.

Designers had to feel the immediate pain if something they devised was hard to engineer. He also had a corollary that worked well for rockets but less so for Twitter: engineers rather than the product managers should lead the team.

“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

Although a street fighter, Musk had an unexpected ability to be realistic in defeat.

What struck his colleagues at PayPal, in addition to his relentless and rough personal style, was his willingness, even desire, to take risks.

“Entrepreneurs are actually not risk takers,” says Roelof Botha. “They’re risk mitigators.

Risk addiction can be useful when it comes to driving people to do what seems impossible.

He sat on the curb looking sad and asked Levchin, “Why did you turn on me?” “I honestly believed it was the right thing to do,” Levchin replied. “You were completely wrong, the company was about to die, and I felt I had no other choice.” Musk nodded. A few months later, they had dinner in Palo Alto. “Life’s too short,” Musk told him. “Let’s move on.”

“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.”

Musk remained in intensive care for ten days, and he did not fully recover for five months. He took two lessons from his near-death experience: “Vacations will kill you. Also, South Africa. That place is still trying to destroy me.”

found it surprising—and frightening—that technological progress was not inevitable. It could stop. It could even backslide. America had gone to the moon. But then came the grounding of the Shuttle missions and an end to progress.

“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.”

“There are only a handful of really big milestones: single-celled life, multicellular life, differentiation of plants and animals, life extending from the oceans to land, mammals, consciousness,” he says. “On that scale, the next important step is obvious: making life multiplanetary.”

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.

It was three weeks before Musk could bear to go home and see what had once been his son’s room.

First son died to SIDS

Musk processed his grief silently. Navaid Farooq, his friend from Queen’s University, flew to Los Angeles and stayed with him right after he returned home. “Justine and I tried to draw him into conversations about what happened, but he did not want to talk about it,” Farooq says. Instead, they watched movies and played video games.

Justine, on the contrary, was very open about her emotions. “He wasn’t very comfortable with me expressing my feelings over Nevada’s death,” she says. “He told me I was being emotionally manipulative, wearing my heart on my sleeve.” She attributes his emotional repression to the defense mechanisms he developed during childhood. “He shuts down emotions when in dark places,” she says. “I think it’s a survival thing with him.”

Elon seemed to be in a trance, but he was also very needy, in a complex way. He was uncomfortable having his blustery father see him in such a vulnerable state, but he also did not want him to leave. He ended up urging his father and his new family to stay in Los Angeles. “I don’t want you to go back,” he said. “I will buy you a house here.”

Kimbal was appalled. “No, no, no, this is a bad idea,” he told Elon. “You’re forgetting that he’s a dark human. Do not do this, do not do this to yourself.” But the harder he tried to talk his brother out of it, the sadder Elon got. Years later, Kimbal wrestled with what yearnings were motivating his brother. “Watching his own son die, I think that that was what drove him to want his father near him,”

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?’ ”

After a few years, SpaceX was making in-house 70 percent of the components of its rockets.

All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.

Sometimes Musk’s insane schedules produced the impossible, sometimes they didn’t. “I learned never to tell him no,” Mueller says. “Just say you’re going to try, then later explain why if it doesn’t work out.”

“A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle,” he repeatedly declared. The sense of urgency was good for its own sake. It made his engineers engage in first-principles thinking.

“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.

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.”

Thus began a buddy movie in which a platoon of die-hard rocket engineers, led by Mueller and Buzza with occasional visits by Musk, ignited engines and set off explosions, which they dubbed “rapid unscheduled disassemblies,” in a hardscrabble patch of concrete and rattlesnakes in the Texas desert.

“People like Elon with Asperger’s don’t take social cues and don’t naturally think about the impact of what they say on other people,” she says. “Elon understands personalities very well, but as a study, not as an emotion.”

Like many of Musk’s revisions, it was both correct and costly.

Over the years, Musk was able to use techniques learned at SpaceX and apply them to Tesla, and vice versa.

Musk’s modifications may have made the car more beautiful, but they also burned through the company’s cash.

He would occasionally appear at conferences and sit still for magazine profiles, but he felt more comfortable spouting off on Twitter or holding court on a podcast. A master of memes, he had a clever instinct about how to garner free publicity by courting controversy and jousting on social media,

he could brood for years about slights.

“Why is Elon doing these interviews?” she asked Eberhard one day when they were riding in a car. “You’re the CEO.” “He wants to do them,” Eberhard replied, “and I don’t want to be arguing with him.”

Musk also propelled himself toward celebrity by giving a tour of the SpaceX factory to the actor Robert Downey Jr. and director Jon Favreau, who were making the superhero movie Iron Man. Musk became a model for the title character Tony Stark,