Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

The CEO then told him that some of the floors could not handle more than five hundred pounds of pressure, so rolling a two-thousand-pound server would cause damage. Musk replied that the servers had four wheels, so the pressure at any one point was only five hundred pounds. “The dude is not very good at math,” Musk told the musketeers.

“My main regret,” Elon answered, “is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.”

For the next two months, Twitter was destabilized. The lack of servers caused meltdowns, including when Musk hosted a Twitter Spaces for presidential candidate Ron DeSantis. “In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake,” Musk would admit in March 2023. “I was told we had redundancy across our data centers. What I wasn’t told was that we had seventy thousand hard-coded references to Sacramento. And there’s still shit that’s broken because of it.”

Musk unleashed a barrage of attacks on OpenAI and Altman. “OpenAI was created as an open-source (which is why I named it ‘Open’ AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft,” he said. “I’m still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated $100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn’t everyone do it?” He called AI “the most powerful tool that mankind has ever created,” and then lamented that it was “now in the hands of a ruthless corporate monopoly.”

“He’s a jerk,” Altman told Kara Swisher. “He has a style that is not a style that I’d want to have for myself. But I think he does really care, and he is feeling very stressed about what the future’s going to look like for humanity.”

Twitter had rather loosely permitted other companies to make use of this data stream. In January, Musk convened a series of late-night meetings in his Twitter conference room to work out ways to charge for it. “It’s a monetization opportunity,” he told the engineers. It was also a way to restrict Google and Microsoft from using this data to improve their AI chatbots.

The third goal that Musk gave the team was even grander. His overriding mission had always been to assure that AI developed in a way that helped guarantee that human consciousness endured. That was best achieved, he thought, by creating a form of artificial general intelligence that could “reason” and “think” and pursue “truth” as its guiding principle.

Someday, Musk hoped, it would be able to take on even grander and more existential questions. It would be “a maximum truth-seeking AI. It would care about understanding the universe, and that would probably lead it to want to preserve humanity, because we are an interesting part of the universe.”

“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.”

Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an asshole? The answer is no, of course not. One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth. As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex. Even the best people, he wrote, are “molded out of faults.”