Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

California had just passed a requirement mandating that 10 percent of vehicles by 2003 had to be electric.

Musk also became convinced that solar power, which in 1994 was just taking off, was the best path toward sustainable energy.

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.”

He had never been a captain of a sports team or the leader of a gang of friends, and he lacked an instinct for camaraderie. Like Steve Jobs, he genuinely did not care if he offended or intimidated the people he worked with, as long as he drove them to accomplish feats they thought were impossible.

Garver also had to fight those in Congress who had Boeing facilities in their states and, despite being Republicans, were opposed to private enterprise taking over what they felt should be run by a government bureaucracy.

Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, who had traveled with Musk to Russia seven years earlier, charged, “Essentially the U.S. has decided that they’re not going to be a significant player in human space flight.” They were wrong. Over the next decade, relying mainly on SpaceX, the U.S. would send more astronauts, satellites, and cargo to space than any other country.

Obama decided to travel to Cape Canaveral in April 2010 to make the case that relying on private companies such as SpaceX did not mean that the U.S. was abandoning space exploration.

The televised image was priceless for both Obama and Musk: the young president, who was born the year that John Kennedy pledged America would send a man to the moon, walking alongside the risk-taking entrepreneur, chatting casually as they circled the gleaming Falcon 9. Musk liked Obama. “I thought he was a moderate but also someone willing to force change,”

“I think the best defense against the misuse of AI is to empower as many people as possible to have AI,” he told Wired’s Steven Levy at the time.

Musk says in response that people such as Straubel and McNeill were too reluctant to fire people.

“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.”

When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.

If Musk’s goal had been to create a profitable rocket company, he could have allowed himself to collect his winnings and relax after surviving 2018. His reusable workhorse Falcon 9 had become the world’s most efficient and reliable rocket, and he had developed his own communications satellites that would eventually produce a gusher of revenue.

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.

Musk began with his lecture on collegiality. “I want to be super clear,” he began. “You are not the friend of the engineers. You are the judge. If you’re popular among the engineers, this is bad. If you don’t step on toes, I will fire you. Is that clear?”

give people hardcore feedback, mostly accurate, and I try not to do it in a way that’s ad hominem,”

“I try to criticize the action, not the person. We all make mistakes. What matters is whether a person has a good feedback loop, can seek criticism from others, and can improve. Physics does not care about hurt feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right.”

The afterparty was held at Ian Schrager’s downtown hot spot, the Public Hotel, which had been closed for COVID but reopened just for the event.

Fifty years earlier, America had sent men to the moon. But since then, there had been no progress. Just the reverse. The Space Shuttle could only do low-Earth orbit, and after it was retired, America couldn’t even do that anymore. “Technology does not automatically progress,” Musk said. “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”

He admitted there was a reasonable chance that it would not work, but it was better to try and fail rather than analyze the issue for months.

“Let’s change the rigged tax code so the Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else,” Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted at the end of 2021. Musk shot back, “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.”

“Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.”

An hour before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it used a massive malware attack to disable the routers of the American satellite company Viasat that provided communications and internet to the country. The command system of the Ukrainian military was crippled, making it almost impossible to mount a defense.

Every day that week, Musk held regular meetings with the Starlink engineers. Unlike every other company and even parts of the U.S. military, they were able to find ways to defeat Russian jamming.

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

“If China gets to the moon before we do again, it will be a Sputnik moment,”

All bad news should be given loudly and often. Good news can be said quietly and once.”

“Product managers who don’t know anything about coding keep ordering up features they don’t know how to create,” James said. “Like cavalry generals who don’t know how to ride a horse.”

On social media, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.

“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,”

“I’m not Trump’s fan. He’s disruptive. He’s the world’s champion of bullshit.”

That’s when Musk started pushing the idea of using Neuralink to enable paralyzed people to actually use their limbs again. A chip in the brain could send signals to the relevant muscles, bypassing any spinal-cord blockage or neurological malfunction.

For example, Twitter put Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya on the Trends blacklist, which meant that the visibility of his tweets was curtailed. He had organized a declaration by some scientists arguing that lockdowns and school closures would be more harmful than helpful, a controversial view that turned out to have some validity.

Tesla’s engineers manually wrote and updated hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ code to apply these rules to complex situations.

It’s like the way humans learn to speak and drive and play chess and eat spaghetti and do almost everything else; we might be given a set of rules to follow, but mainly we pick up the skills by observing how other people do them. It was the approach to machine learning envisioned by Alan Turing in his 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”

“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.”

Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat. “We don’t want to design to eliminate every risk,” he said. “Otherwise, we will never get anywhere.”

One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones.

Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.