Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

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

At big aerospace companies, engineers followed these religiously. Musk did the opposite: he made his engineers question all specifications. This would later become step one in a five-point checklist, dubbed “the algorithm,” that became his oft-repeated mantra when developing products. Whenever one of his engineers cited “a requirement” as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering “The military” or “The legal department” was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. “We would talk about how we were going to qualify an engine or certify a fuel tank, and he would ask, ‘Why do we have to do that?’ ” says Tim Buzza, a refugee from Boeing who would become

cut in half and then cut it in half again,” he said. Musk looked at him coldly and told him to stay behind after the meeting. When they were alone, he asked Mueller whether he wanted to remain in charge of engines. When Mueller said he did, Musk replied, “Then when I ask for something, you fucking give it to me.”

“The strong will and emotional distance that makes him difficult as a husband,” Justine concedes, “may be reasons for his success in running a business.” Elon would get annoyed when Justine pushed him to try psychotherapy. She had started going to a therapist after Nevada’s death and developed a deep interest in the field. It led her, she says, to the insight that Elon’s rough childhood and his brain wiring allowed him to shut down emotions. Intimacy was hard. “When you’re from a dysfunctional background or have a brain wired like his,” she says,

“intensity takes the place of intimacy.”

Falcon 1 had made history as the first privately built rocket to launch from the ground and reach orbit. Musk and his small crew of just five hundred employees (Boeing’s comparable division had fifty thousand) had designed the system from the ground up and done all the construction on its own. Little had been outsourced. And the funding had also been private, largely out of Musk’s pocket. SpaceX had contracts to perform missions for NASA and other clients, but they would get paid only if and when they succeeded. There were no subsidies or cost-plus contracts. “That was frigging awesome,” Musk yelled as he walked onto the factory floor. He did a little

“People thought they put down a deposit, not an unsecured loan to fund the company. Morally, it was wrong.” Musk was able to get outside counsel to provide an opinion that it was legal. Salzman also was repelled by Musk’s behavior: “He was tough on people and needlessly insensitive. That was just part of his DNA. It didn’t sit well with me.” On one unofficial board call with Kimbal listening in, Salzman tried to lay the ground for removing Musk as CEO. “I was furious at what these evil fools were trying to do to Elon,” Kimbal says. “I started yelling, ‘No way, no way, you’re not doing this. You guys are fools.’ ” Antonio Gracias was also on the call. “Nope, we’ve got Elon’s back,” he said. Kimbal called his brother, who was able to block a board vote. He was in such a trancelike focus that he didn’t even get angry.

Model S, Musk hired Peter Rawlinson, a genteel Englishman who had worked on car bodies for Lotus and Land Rover. Together they came up with a way to do more than merely place the battery pack under the floor of the car. They engineered it so that the pack became an element of the car’s structure.

“The vision was that we would create designers who thought like engineers and engineers who thought like designers,” von Holzhausen says.

quintessential email to employees, titled “Ultra hardcore.” It read, “Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before. Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart.”

In 2000, after making Amazon the world’s dominant online retailer, Bezos quietly launched a company called Blue Origin, named after the pale blue planet where humans originated. Like Musk, he focused on the idea of building reusable rockets.

Kimbal says. “They’re beautiful, no question, but they have a very dark side and Elon knows that they’re toxic.” So why does he do it? When I ask Elon, he lets out his large laugh. “Because I’m just a fool for love,” he says. “I am often a fool, but especially for love.”

Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor. “At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”

robot was set to 20 percent of its maximum speed and that the default settings instructed the arm to turn the bolt backward twice before spinning it forward to tighten. “Factory settings are always idiotic,” he said. So he quickly rewrote the code to delete the backward turns. Then he set the speed to 100 percent capacity. That started to strip the threads, so he dialed it back to 70 percent. It worked fine and cut the time it took to bolt the cars to the skids by more than half.

Tesla’s injury rate was 30 percent higher than the rest of the industry.

Musk took responsibility for the over-automation. He even announced it publicly. “Excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake,” he tweeted. “To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.”

Musk likes military history, especially the tales of warplane development. At a meeting at the Fremont factory on May 22, he recounted a story about World War II. When the government needed to rush the making of bombers, it set up production lines in the parking lots of the aerospace companies in California. He discussed the idea

with Jerome Guillen, whom he would soon promote to being Tesla’s president of automotive, and they decided that they could do something similar. There was a provision in the Fremont zoning code for something called “a temporary vehicle repair facility.” It was intended to allow gas stations to set up tents where they could change tires or mufflers. But the regulations did not specify a maximum size. “Get one of those permits and start building a huge tent,” he told Guillen. “We’ll have to pay a fine later.” That afternoon, Tesla workers began clearing away the rubble that

covered an old parking lot behind the factory. There was not time to pave over the cracked concrete, so they simply paved a long strip and began erecting a tent around it. One of Musk’s ace facilities builders, Rodney Westmoreland, flew in to coordinate the construction, and Teller rounded up some ice-cream trucks to hand out treats to those working in the hot sun. In two weeks, they were able to complete a tented facility that was 1,000 feet long and 15...

At just after 4 p.m. on June 16, just three weeks after Musk came up with the idea, the new assembly line was rolling Model 3 sedans out of the makeshift tent. Neal

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.

If Musk had been the type of person who could pause and savor success, he would have noticed that he had just brought the world into the era of electric vehicles, commercial space flight, and reusable rockets. Each was a big deal.

“If someone has depression or anxiety, we sympathize. But if they have Asperger’s we say he’s an asshole.”

The Starship system would have a first-stage booster and a second-stage spacecraft that together stacked to be 390 feet high, 50 percent taller than

And someday it would be able to carry a hundred passengers to Mars. Even as he was wrestling with the Nevada and Fremont Tesla factories, Musk found time each week to look at the renderings of the type of amenities and accommodations that Starship would have for passengers on a nine-month trip to Mars.

“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. Shifting his weight from one leg to the other, he was doing a passable job of making his awkwardness charming.

Musk decided to go on the diet drug Ozempic and follow an intermittent fasting diet, eating only one meal per day. That meal, in his case, was a late breakfast, and his version of the diet allowed him to gorge as he pleased for that. At 11 a.m. on Wednesday, he went to the Palo Alto Creamery, a retro-hip diner, and ordered a bacon-cheese barbecue burger with sweet potato fries and an Oreo and a cookie-dough ice-cream milkshake. X helped by eating some of the fries.

We are all in on autonomy Self-driving cars, Musk believed, would do more than merely free folks from the drudgery of driving. They would, to a large extent, eliminate the need for people to own cars. The future would belong to the Robotaxi: a driverless vehicle that would appear when you summoned it, take you to your destination, then ride off to the next passenger. Some might be owned by individuals, but most would be owned by fleet companies or Tesla itself.

Most notably, this meant reversing Twitter’s policy, announced by Jack Dorsey early in the pandemic and reaffirmed by Parag Agrawal in 2022, that employees could work at home forever. “Remote work is no longer allowed,” Musk declared. “Starting tomorrow, everyone is required to be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week.”

For a moment I was struck by the oddness of the scene. We were sitting on a suburban patio by a tranquil backyard swimming pool on a sunny spring day, with two bright-eyed twins learning to toddle, as Musk somberly speculated about the window of opportunity for building a sustainable human colony on Mars before an AI apocalypse destroyed Earthly civilization. It made me recall the words of Sam Teller on his second day working for Musk, when he attended a SpaceX board meeting: “They’re sitting around seriously discussing plans to build a city on Mars and what people will wear there, and everyone’s just acting like this is a totally normal conversation.”

“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.”