Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Empathy did not come naturally, and he had neither the desire nor the instinct to be ingratiating.

“Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes,”

“He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view.

“Elon wants risk for its own sake,” says Peter Thiel, who became his partner in the early days of PayPal. “He seems to enjoy it, indeed at times be addicted to it.”

“But if I had run Apple, we may never have made the Macintosh.”

He had conceived by then a life vision that he would repeat like a mantra. “I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,” he says. “I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.”

For the second time in three years, Musk had been pushed out of a company. He was a visionary who didn’t play well with others.

“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 nature.”

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.”

He learned one very big lesson from these ventures: “It’s not the product that leads to success. It’s the ability to make the product efficiently.

Marks still wrestles with whether Musk’s brain wiring—his ingrained personality and what he calls his Asperger’s—can explain or even excuse some of his behavior.

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.

“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.”

“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.

SpaceX was not only privatizing space; it was upending its cost structure.

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

Jobs loved to walk through Apple’s design studio on a daily basis, but he never visited his factories in China. Musk, in contrast, spent more time walking assembly lines than he did walking around the design studio.

Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart.”

It was a logical stance, but it ignored the emotional reality that a person killed by an Autopilot system would provoke a lot more horror than a hundred deaths caused by driver error. The first

He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow.

“As the saying goes, if you’re going through hell, just keep going.”

“Step one should be to question the requirements,” he says. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.”

Although there was an esprit de corps among Musk’s posse, he could be cold and rough on others.

“By trying to be nice to the people,” Musk says, “you’re actually not being nice to the dozens of other people who are doing their jobs well and will get hurt if I don’t fix the problem spots.”

Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation.

Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later.

mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.

Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do.

The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.

who likes to meander through minefields with his guests,

Musk’s goofy mode is the flip side of his demon mode. When he is in the darkest of places, he often cycles between anger and cackling laughter.

“phoning in rich,” meaning people who have worked at the company for a long time and, because they have enough money and vacation homes, no longer hunger to stay all night on the factory floor.

“Yeah, I’m sometimes a little too optimistic about time frames,” he said. “It’s time you knew that, yeah. But would I be doing this if I wasn’t optimistic? Geez.”

Every now and then, often at the most complex of times, the Creators of Our Simulation—those rascals who conjure up what we are led to believe is reality—drop in a sparky new element, one that creates chaotic new subplots.

“I want the future to look like the future.”

So Musk combined, as he often did, an aspirational mission with a practical business plan.

“I was too chicken to propose that, but Elon made us try it.”

“Stainless steel and I should go get a room somewhere,” he joked to his team.

Humble does not begin to describe its status as the primary residence of a billionaire.

He hated the idea of squandering months being subjected to political pitches and the PowerPoint presentations of consultants.

“Precision is not expensive,” he says. “It’s mostly about caring. Do you care to make it precise? Then you can make it precise.”

“It was Elon’s Asperger’s coming out in full,” she says. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset.”

“I’ve made many overtures,” he says, “but she doesn’t want to spend time with me.”

“I think possessions kind of weigh you down and they’re an attack vector,” he said. “In recent years ‘billionaire’ has become pejorative, like that’s a bad thing.

By the time SpaceX succeeded in 2020, Boeing had not even been able to get an unmanned test flight to dock with the station.

Unless he maintained a maniacal sense of urgency, he worried, SpaceX could end up flabby and slow, like Boeing.

“Elon cares a lot about humanity, but humanity in more of a very macro sense.”

“I won’t make a lot of eye contact with the cast tonight, but don’t worry, I’m pretty good at running ‘human’ in emulation mode.”