Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

The first Teslas began rolling out of the factory in October 2019. Within two years, China would be making more than half of Tesla’s vehicles.

The decision to use stainless steel for the Cybertruck had a major implication for the engineering of the vehicle. A steel body could serve as the load-bearing structure of the vehicle, rather than making the chassis play that role.

“I don’t care if no one buys it,” he said at the end of the session. “We’re not doing a traditional boring truck. We can always do that later. I want to build something that’s cool. Like, don’t resist me.”

“Sending this tweet through space via Starlink satellite,” he wrote. He was now able to tweet on an internet that he owned.

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.

She had the standing to get away with such a challenge. “Once I gave Elon the context, he agreed we couldn’t do what he wanted,” she says. One problem Musk had was that most people around him were afraid to do that.

The art is early dorm room, including posters of Amazing Stories magazine covers. On the coffee table is volume three of Winston Churchill’s history of World War II, the Onion’s Our Dumb Century, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series,

“Would you rather live in Tulsa or Austin?” When Afshar, with all due respect to Tulsa, gave the answer Musk expected, he texted back, “Okay, great. We’ll do it in Austin and you should run it.” A similar process led to the choice of Berlin for a European Gigafactory. It and Austin would get built in less than two years and join Fremont and Shanghai as the pillars of Tesla’s car production.

With ten million square feet of factory floor, Giga Texas, as it was dubbed, would have twice as much floor space as Fremont and 50 percent more than the Pentagon. By some measures, Afshar said, it could be the biggest factory in the world by floor area, once some planned mezzanines were added.

But the entire underbody of the car had been die cast as one piece of metal. At a meeting of his team that day, Musk pulled out the toy and put it on the white conference room table. “Why can’t we do that?” he asked.

When NASA had awarded SpaceX the contract to build a rocket that would take astronauts to the Space Station, it had, on the same day in 2014, given a competing contract, with 40 percent more funding, to Boeing. By the time SpaceX succeeded in 2020, Boeing had not even been able to get an unmanned test flight to dock with the station.

“If Boeing doesn’t change,” he said, “you’re going to lose out on the top talent.” The VP replied that Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.” Dontchev quit.

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.

“We need to get the engineers who designed this system to come out here and see how hard it is to install,” he said angrily. Then he erupted. “I want to see the engineers out here installing it themselves. Not just doing it for five minutes. Up on roofs for days, for fucking days!”

He ordered that, in the future, everyone on an installation team, even the engineers and managers, had to spend time drilling and hammering and sweating with the other workers.

“I’ve got twenty years of experience in the roof business,” Tony answered. “But how many solar roofs have you installed?” Tony explained he was an engineer and had not actually been on a roof doing the installation. “Then you don’t fucking know what you’re fucking talking about,”

“Thank you for trying,” Musk finally said. “But this isn’t cutting it.” It took Dow a while to realize that Musk was firing him. “It was just the most bizarre, weird firing you could imagine,” Dow later says. “I had so much history with him,

His romances often involved an unhealthy dose of mutual meanness, and the one with Grimes was no exception. Sometimes he would seem to thrive on the tension, demanding that Grimes do such things as shame him for being fat.

“I noticed that I learned more unique lessons from Elon per minute than any other human I’ve met,” she says. “It would be dumb to not spend some of your life with such a person.”

in October 2021, Tesla became the sixth company in U.S. history to be worth more than $1 trillion. Its market value was greater than its five biggest rivals—Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, and GM—combined.

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. Musk was angered by the public attacks on him for being a billionaire,

he exercised options that he had been granted in 2012 and were due to expire, which caused him to pay the largest single tax bill in history: $11 billion, enough to fund the entire budget of his antagonists at the Securities and Exchange Commission for five years.

“If you opened your eyes for 2 seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year. Don’t spend it all at once… oh wait you did already.”

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.

Grimes and Zilis connected to opposite facets of Musk’s personality. Grimes is feisty in a fun but also fiery way, often getting into fights with Musk and sharing his attraction to tumult. Zilis, on the contrary, says, “In six years, Elon and I have never, never gotten in a fight, never argued.” That’s a claim that few can make. They talk to each other in a low-key, intellectual way.

“People are going to have to revive the idea of having children as a kind of social duty,” he said in a 2014 interview. “Otherwise civilization will just die.”

“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.”

His disdain for Biden grew in August 2021 when the president held an event at the White House to celebrate electric vehicles. The heads of GM, Ford, and Chrysler, along with the leader of the United Auto Workers union, were invited, but not Musk, even though Tesla sold far more electric cars in the U.S. than all other companies combined.

“We called them Polytopia Life Lessons.” Among them: Empathy is not an asset.

Play life like a game. “I have this feeling,” Zilis once told Musk, “that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”

“I cannot overstate the importance of the role Starlink has played in keeping the communications of the Ukrainian government from being taken out by the Russians.”

Although he had readily supported Ukraine, his foreign policy instincts were those of a realist and student of European military history. He believed that it was reckless for Ukraine to launch an attack on Crimea,

So he reaffirmed a secret policy that he had implemented, which the Ukrainians did not know about, to disable coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast.

Shotwell also felt strongly that SpaceX should stop subsidizing the Ukrainian military operation. Providing humanitarian help was fine, but private companies should not be financing a foreign country’s war.

“The Pentagon had a $145 million check ready to hand to me, literally. Then Elon succumbed to the bullshit on Twitter and to the haters at the Pentagon who leaked the story.”

“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?” he asked me a few days after Gates’s visit. “It’s pure hypocrisy. Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?” Grimes added her own interpretation: “I imagine it’s a little bit of a dick-measuring contest.”

“We want to prevent a world in which people split off into their own echo chambers on social media, like going to Parler or Truth Social,” he said. “We want to have one place where people with different viewpoints can interact. That would be a good thing for civilization.” It was a noble sentiment, but he would end up undermining that important mission with statements and tweets that ended up chasing off progressives and mainstream media types to other social networks.

there were two other reasons, I think, that Musk wanted to own Twitter. The first was a simple one. It was fun,

second, I believe there was a psychological, personal yearning. Twitter was the ultimate playground.

“Sorry, who is sending this message?” Musk texted back. When Bankman-Fried apologized and introduced himself, Musk replied curtly, “You’re welcome to roll.”

Musk says. Bankman-Fried began talking rapidly, all about himself. “He was talking like he was on speed or Adderall, a mile a minute,” Musk says. “I thought he was supposed to be asking me questions about the deal, but he kept telling me the things he was doing. And I was thinking, ‘Dude, calm down.’ ” The feeling was mutual; Bankman-Fried thought Musk seemed nuts.

“How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?” It was a joke. But with Musk, it was sometimes hard to tell, even for his kids. Maybe even for himself. They were aghast. He reassured them that he was just kidding.

He asked Segal to explain the process the company used to determine the number of fake accounts. The Twitter executives suspected that Musk was laying the ground for revising or backing out of his purchase offer, so they were cautious about answering. “They said they didn’t know the precise answer,” Musk said right afterward. “I was like, ‘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. With the Twitter execs, he unleashed a barrage.

It was one of the few times I witnessed Musk being unsure of himself. Over the next five months, through the close of the deal in October, he would at times express great excitement about the chance to turn Twitter into an “everything app,” featuring financial services and great content, while helping to save democracy in the process. At other times, he would get coldly angry, threaten to sue the Twitter board and management, and insist that he wanted to call the whole deal off.

That’s when Grimes discovered that Zilis, whom she considered a friend, had given birth to twins with Musk. When she confronted Musk, he simply said Zilis had the right to do what she wanted. Grimes was outraged.

Errol’s letter was startling on so many levels, most notably his racism. But one other aspect would have an unsettling resonance later that year: how conspiratorial he had become. He had gone down the alt-right rabbit holes

Death by suicide does not worry me, but it should worry you. The truth is too well known. You will be ruined, make no mistake, and people will know who you really are, or have become.” He blamed Elon’s attitude on the “National Socialist, cruel, self-serving and cowardly maternal family background,” adding, “Has the wickedness that was the Haldeman’s prevailed?”

When most clients are given three or four options, they will ask which one the banker recommends. Musk, instead, asked detailed questions about each option but did not solicit a recommendation. He liked to make his own decision.

There was also a more emotional obstacle. Twitter’s executives and board members insisted that any renegotiated deal must protect them from future lawsuits from Musk. “We are never going to give them a legal release,” Musk said. “We will hunt every single one of them till the day they die.”