Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

he didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked. He was not hardwired to have empathy. Or, to put it in less technical terms, he could be an asshole.

“Entrepreneurs are actually not risk takers,”

“They’re risk mitigators. They don’t thrive on risk, they never seek to amplify it, instead they try to figure out the controllable variables and minimize their risk.” But not Musk. “He was into amplifying

“I tend to do things very intensely,”

“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

Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt. It also had to be about pursuing great dreams. “That’s what can get us up in the morning.”

“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.” There

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

She attributes his emotional repression to the defense mechanisms he developed during childhood. “He shuts down emotions when in dark places,” she

Elon seemed to be in a trance, but he was also very needy, in a complex way.

rocket components were subject to hundreds of specifications and requirements mandated by the military and NASA. 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.

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

erected in weeks for rocket engines that had not yet been built. “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.

In a normal aerospace company, that would have meant replacing the tanks, which would take months. “Nah, just fix it,” Musk said. “Go up there with some hammers and just pound it back out, weld it, and we’ll keep going.”

Musk does not naturally partner with people, either personally or professionally. At Zip2 and PayPal, he showed he could inspire, frighten, and sometime bully colleagues. But collegiality was not part of his skill set and deference not in his nature. He does not like to share power.

Direct, sharp-spoken, and bold, she prides herself on being “mouthy” without crossing the line into disrespect, and she has the pleasant confidence of the high-school basketball player and cheerleading captain she once was. Her easygoing assertiveness allows her to speak honestly to Musk without rankling him and to push back against his excesses while not nannying him. She can treat him almost like a peer but still show deference, never forgetting that he’s the founder and boss.

Asperger’s can make a person seem to lack empathy. “Elon is not an ass, and yet sometimes he will say things that are very assholey,” she says. “He just doesn’t think about the personal impact of what he’s saying. He just wants to fulfill the mission.” She

Musk focused on the importance of the mission rather than the potential of the business:

Both were hard-driving, high-strung, detail-oriented engineers who could be brutally dismissive of those they considered fools. The

Although

Musk’s modifications may have made the car more beautiful, but they also burned through the company’s cash. In addition, he repeatedly pushed Eberhard to hire more people

The problem was the satellite was so heavy that it had to be launched near the equator, where the faster rotation of the Earth’s surface would provide the extra thrust that was needed.

“He could be a bully and brutal.”

when it comes to running companies where the mission is more important than individual sensitivities? “He’s somewhere on the spectrum, so I think he honestly doesn’t have any connection with people at all,” Marks says.

“That’s just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” he said at a couple of meetings. That was a line that Steve Jobs used often. So did Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Their brutal honesty could be unnerving, even offensive. It could constrict rather than encourage honest dialogue. But it was also effective, at times, in creating what Jobs called a team of A players who didn’t want to be around fuzzy thinkers.

Marks was too accomplished and proud to put up with Musk’s behavior.

“I’ve come to put him in the same category as Steve Jobs, which is that some people are just assholes, but they accomplish so much that I just have to sit back and say, ‘That seems to be a package.’ ”

“Maybe if the price the world pays for this kind of accomplishment is a real asshole doing it, well, it’s probably a price worth paying.

into an amused grin, and he would make some oddball jokes. “He’s strong-willed and powerful, like a bear,” Justine told Esquire’s Tom Junod. “He can be playful and funny and romp around with you, but in the end you’re still dealing with a bear.”

person,” she said. “It involves feeling. You feel the other person.” He conceded that was important in relationships, but he suggested that his brain wiring was an advantage in running a high-performance company.

“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.”

“My cortisol levels, my stress hormones, the adrenaline, they were just so high that it was hard for me to feel happy,” he says. “There was a sense of relief, like being spared from death, but no joy. I was way too stressed for that.”

as did the other investors on the call. Musk broke down in tears. “Had it gone the other way, Tesla would have been dead,”

Fisker, who considered himself an artist, told Musk why he didn’t want to make some of them. “I don’t care what you want,” Musk replied at one point. “I’m ordering you to do these things.” Fisker recalls Musk’s chaotic intensity with a tone of weary amusement. “I’m not really a Musk type of guy,” he says. “I’m pretty laid back.” After nine months, Musk canceled his contract.

design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect the looks of a product to its engineering. “In

a rocket with nine of the original Merlin engines. Thus was born the Falcon 9, a rocket that would become the workhorse of SpaceX for more than a decade. At

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. A SpaceX engineer was able to modify a latch used in a bathroom stall and create a locking mechanism that cost $30.

When an engineer came to Musk’s cubicle and told him that the air-cooling system for the payload bay of the Falcon 9 would cost more than $3 million, he shouted over to Gwynne Shotwell in her adjacent cubicle to ask what an air-conditioning system for a house cost. About $6,000, she said. So the SpaceX team bought some commerci...

“Senior industry and government officials took pleasure deriding SpaceX and Elon,”

were, with a Silicon Valley disrupter mentality and lack of deference toward the traditional industry.”

that if you told him the risks and showed him the engineering data, he would make a quick assessment and let the responsibility shift from your shoulders to his.”

was also a vindication of SpaceX. Less than eight years from its founding, and two years from facing bankruptcy, it was now the most successful private rocket company in the world.

“He can be very cold, but he feels things in a very pure way, with a depth that most people don’t get.”

When he’s happy, this childlike inner self can manifest in a manic way. “When we went to the cinema, he would get so caught up with a silly movie that he would stare in rapture at the screen with his mouth slightly open laughing, then he would actually end up on the floor rolling around, holding his belly.”

Hearing the phrases that Errol had used in berating Elon shocked her, not only because they were brutal but because she had heard Elon use some of the same phrases when he was angry.

“It taught me how all the things you create on the drawing board have an effect at the other end, on the assembly line,”

One of Musk’s favorite words—and concepts—was “hardcore.” He used it to describe the workplace culture he wanted when he founded Zip2, and he would use it almost thirty years later when he upended the nurturing culture at Twitter. As the Model S production line ramped up, he spelled out his creed in a 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.” The validation

“It drives like a sports car, eager and agile and instantly responsive. But it’s also as smoothly effortless as a Rolls-Royce, can carry almost as much stuff as a Chevy Equinox, and is more efficient than a Toyota Prius. Oh, and it’ll sashay up to the valet at a luxury hotel like a supermodel working a Paris catwalk.”

To prod Panasonic, Musk and Straubel came up with a charade. At a site near Reno, Nevada, they set up lights and sent in bulldozers to start preparing for construction. Then Straubel invited his counterpart at Panasonic to join him on a viewing platform to watch the work. The message was clear: Tesla was forging ahead with the factory. Did Panasonic want to be left behind?