Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Musk gave the specs: the robot should be about five-foot-eight, with an elfish and androgenous look so it “doesn’t feel like it could or would want to hurt you.”

Kovac, who had not yet mastered the art of deflecting Musk’s blasts, walked back to his office and quit, throwing plans for that evening’s presentation into disarray. Lars Moravy and Pete Bannon, his more seasoned and battle-hardened supervisors, stopped him

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.

There was no law of physics—no basic principle—that prevented all of the functionality from being on one device.

The result was that Musk’s payout from the 2018 compensation deal was around $56 billion and his net worth at the start of 2022 increased to $304 billion.

He had sold all of his houses because he believed that he should not be criticized if he kept his wealth deployed in his companies rather than spending it on his lifestyle. But he continued to be criticized because, by taking no salary and leaving his money invested in the company, he did not reap any capital gains and paid little tax. In

From 2007 onwards, until maybe last year, it’s been nonstop pain. There’s a gun to your head, make Tesla work, pull a rabbit out of your hat, then pull another rabbit out of the hat. A stream of rabbits flying through the air. If the next rabbit

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.

feared that declining birthrates were a threat to the long-term survival of human consciousness.

“He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” Zilis says. When she decided that she was ready, he suggested that he be the sperm donor so that the kids would be genetically his. The idea appealed to her. “If the choice is between an anonymous sperm donor or doing it with the person you admire most in the world, for me that was a pretty fucking easy decision,” she says. “I can’t possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children.” There was another upside: “It seemed like something that would make him very happy.”

“I’m just trying to get people to Mars, and enable freedom of information with Starlink, accelerate sustainable technology with Tesla, and free people from the drudgery of driving,”

Much of the time, he claimed to be a centrist moderate, albeit one with a libertarian streak born of his natural resistance to regulations and rules. He

I support the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party!”

Empathy is not an asset.

The command system of the Ukrainian military was crippled, making it almost impossible to mount a defense. Top Ukrainian officials frantically appealed to Musk for

He believed that it was reckless for Ukraine to launch an attack on Crimea, which Russia had annexed in 2014. The Russian ambassador had warned him, in a conversation a few weeks earlier, that attacking Crimea would be a red line and could lead to a nuclear response.

SpaceX did not wish Starlink to be used for offensive military purposes. He

Providing humanitarian help was fine, but private companies should not be financing a foreign country’s war.

“How am I in this war?”

“Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.”

“How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?”

Gates was truly puzzled about why Musk was upset that he shorted the stock. And Musk was just as puzzled that Gates could find it puzzling.

I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.

Musk had founded SpaceX, he liked to say, to increase the chances for the survival of human consciousness by making us a multiplanetary species. The grand rationale for Tesla and SolarCity was to lead the way to a sustainable energy future. Optimus and Neuralink were launched to create human-machine interfaces that would protect us from evil artificial intelligence.

Partly it involved free speech.

For democracy to survive, it was important, he felt, to purge Twitter’s woke culture and root out its biases, so people had the perception that it was an open space for all opinions.

Not only did these fake accounts pollute the service; they were not monetizable.

‘What do you mean? You don’t know?’ The whole exchange was so preposterous that if it was in that Silicon Valley sitcom, you’d think this is just too ridiculous. My jaw was really aching from hitting the floor so many times.”

When annoyed, Musk often challenges people with very specific questions.

At Tesla, he fired people for not knowing such details.

think there’s a distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of reach,”

“Anyone can just go into the middle of Times Square and say anything, even deny the Holocaust. But that doesn’t mean that needs to be promoted to millions of people.”

“It’s full-on communism, and a general sentiment that if you’re rich, you’re evil,” he said.

“We are simultaneously being told that gender differences do not exist and that genders are so profoundly different that irreversible surgery is the only option,” he

“Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” he tweeted. “A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far.”

how that country can be more innovative. “The answer I give is to challenge authority.”

“We are going to go through the first-principles algorithm every night, questioning requirements and deleting,”

“I did it because I forgot to put on sunscreen and didn’t want to get burned.” But

It was best just to close the deal on the original terms, $54.20 a share, $44 billion in total. By that point Musk had even regained some of his enthusiasm about taking over the company. “Arguably, I should just pay full price, because these people running Twitter are such blockheads and idiots,” he told me in late September. “Its stock was seventy last year with such a ship of fools. The potential is so great. There are so many things I could fix.” He agreed to an official closing of the deal in October.

Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase “psychological safety.” It made him recoil. He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was “hardcore.” Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, flower-smelling, work-life balance, and days of “mental rest” were not his thing.

“Kanye’s belief in himself and his incredible tenacity got him to where he is today,” Musk said in Time in 2015. “He fought for his place in the cultural pantheon with a purpose. He’s not afraid of being judged or ridiculed in the process.”

lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

Use of the N-word went up 500 percent in the twelve hours after Musk took control.

Unfettered free speech, the new team quickly discovered, had a downside.

Musk had begun to realize that creating a good venue for advertisers conflicted with his plans to open the aperture to more raucous free speech.

it could be a cesspool of falsehoods and weaponized disinformation that people (including Musk) spread in impulsive and reckless ways.

He thought of it as a technology company, when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships.

made an outline of what he wanted to say, and at 5:30 texted Musk saying, “I’m available to talk.”

“People want me to say I hate him, but it’s much more complicated, which, I suppose, is what makes him interesting.

“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,”