Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

A maniacal sense of urgency is our operat...

The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything el...

Her basic insight on Musk was that he was wired differently than others. “Asperger’s makes you a very difficult person,” she says. “He’s not good at reading the room. His emotional comprehension is just very different from the average human.” 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.”

During the 2018 emotional turmoil at Tesla, she tried to coax him to relax. “Everything doesn’t need to suck,” she told him one night. “You don’t need to feel stoked about everything all the time.” But she also understood, in ways that others did not, that his restlessness was a driver of his success. So, too, was his demon mode, though that took her a little longer to appreciate. “Demon mode causes a lot of chaos,” she says, “but it also gets shit done.”

Afterward, he took Grimes for a spin in the prototype to Nobu restaurant, where the valet parkers just stared at it without touching. On the way out, pursued by paparazzi, he drove over a pylon in the parking lot with a “No Left Turn” sign and turned left.

By the end of the design process, Juncosa had turned a rat’s nest into what was now a simple flat satellite. It had the potential to be an order of magnitude cheaper.

By May 2019, the design of the simplified Starlink was complete and the Falcon 9 rocket began launching them into orbit. 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.

When he met with his executive team in the conference room at SpaceX a few days later, they argued that a rocket of stainless steel would likely be heavier than one built of carbon fiber or the aluminum-lithium alloy used for the Falcon 9. Musk’s instincts said otherwise. “Run the numbers,” he told the team. “Run the numbers.” When they did so, they determined that steel could, in fact, turn out to be lighter in the conditions that Starship would face. At very cold temperatures, the strength of stainless steel increases by 50 percent, which meant it would be stronger when holding the supercooled liquid oxygen fuel.

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.

Now that Musk had sold all his homes and was living in rented quarters in Texas, he also began to disdain Bezos for his lavish multi-mansion lifestyle. “In some ways, I’m trying to goad him into spending more time at Blue Origin so they make more progress,” Musk says. “He should spend more time at Blue Origin and less time in the hot tub.”

Musk believed that innovation was driven by setting clear metrics, such as cost per ton lifted into orbit or average number of miles driven on Autopilot without human intervention. For Starlink, he surprised Juncosa by asking how many photons were collected by the solar arrays of the satellite versus how many they could usefully shoot down to Earth.

“Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable,” he said. “It would have happened without me. But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.” Fifty years earlier, America had sent men to the moon. But since then, there had been no progress. Just the reverse. The Space Shuttle could only do low-Earth orbit, and after it was retired, America couldn’t even do that anymore. “Technology does not automatically progress,” Musk said. “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”

The biggest change Musk wrought was to put the design engineers in charge of production, like he had done for a while at Tesla. “I created separate design and production groups a long time ago, and that was a bullshit mistake,” he said at one of the first meetings that McKenzie led. “You are responsible for the production process. You can’t hand it off to someone else. If the design is expensive to produce, you change the design.” McKenzie and his engineering team moved their seventy-five desks to be next to the assembly lines.

The ultimate human-machine interface, Musk realized, would be a device that connected our computers directly to our brains, such as a chip inside our skull that could send our brain signals to a computer and receive signals back. That could allow information to flow back and forth up to a million times faster. “Then you could have true human-machine symbiosis,” he says. In other words, it would assure that humans and machines would work together as partners. To make this happen, he founded, in late 2016, a company that he dubbed Neuralink, which would implant small chips into the brain and allow humans to mind-meld with computers.

Then I pressed him on the question that Farooq and other friends had asked: Wouldn’t all this be extremely difficult, time-consuming, and controversial, thus harming his missions at Tesla and SpaceX? “I don’t think from a cognitive standpoint it’s nearly as hard as SpaceX or Tesla,” he said. “It’s not like getting to Mars. It’s not as hard as changing the entire industrial base of Earth to sustainable energy.”

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.”

He spoke in a low monotone punctuated by bouts of almost manic laughter. The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was leveling off, because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially, like Moore’s Law on steroids. At some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.

The talk then turned to the topic of risk. The dozen or so regulatory agencies that had to approve the flight test did not share Musk’s love of it. The engineers briefed him on all the safety reviews and requirements they had endured. “Getting the license was existentially soul-sucking,” Juncosa said. Shana Diez and Jake McKenzie provided details. “My fucking brain is hurting,” Musk said, holding his head. “I’m trying to figure out how we get humanity to Mars with all this bullshit.”

“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.”