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“Ever since I was a kid, if I start to think about something hard, then all of my sensory systems turn off,” he says. “I can’t see or hear or anything. I’m using my brain to compute, not for incoming information.”
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide,” he says, “helped me out of my existential depression, and I soon realized it was amazingly funny in all sorts of subtle ways.”
He later told the Queen’s alumni magazine that the most important thing he learned during his two years there was “how to work collaboratively with smart people and make use of the Socratic method to achieve commonality of purpose,” a skill, like those of industrial relations, that future colleagues would notice had been only partly honed.
He and Farooq were playing the strategy board game Diplomacy with friends in their dorm, and one of the players was allying himself with another against Musk.
When Kimbal moved to Canada and joined Elon as a student at Queen’s, the brothers developed a routine. They would read the newspaper and pick out the person they found most interesting. Elon was not one of those eager-beaver types who liked to attract and charm mentors, so the more gregarious Kimbal took the lead in cold-calling the person.
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.”
At one point Musk responded with a very self-aware email. “I am by nature obsessive-compulsive,” he wrote Fricker. “What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way. God knows why… it’s probably rooted in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit.”
He had read Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma, and tried to convince Hoffman that the staid banking industry could be disrupted.
“Entrepreneurs are actually not risk takers,” says Roelof Botha. “They’re risk mitigators. They don’t thrive on risk, they never seek to amplify it, instead they try to figure out the controllable variables and minimize their risk.” But not Musk. “He was into amplifying risk and burning the boats so we could never retreat from it.” To Botha, Musk’s McLaren crash was like a metaphor: floor it and see how fast it goes.
“I was pretty mad, and when I get mad I try to reframe the problem.”
“We’re going to be doing dumb things, but let’s just not do dumb things on a large scale,”
“He shuts down emotions when in dark places,” she says. “I think it’s a survival thing with him.”
When Mueller was working on the Merlin engines, he presented an aggressive schedule for completing one of the versions. It wasn’t aggressive enough for Musk. “How the fuck can it take so long?” he asked. “This is stupid. Cut it in half.”
When they were alone, he asked Mueller whether he wanted to remain in charge of engines. When Mueller said he did, Musk replied, “Then when I ask for something, you fucking give it to me.”
The sense of urgency was good for its own sake. It made his engineers engage in first-principles thinking. But
Musk took an iterative approach to design. Rockets and engines would be quickly prototyped, tested, blown up, revised, and tried again, until finally something worked. Move fast, blow things up, repeat. “It’s not how well you avoid problems,” Mueller says. “It’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.”
Shotwell has a special insight that helps her when dealing with Musk. Her husband has the autism-spectrum disorder commonly called Asperger’s. “People like Elon with Asperger’s don’t take social cues and don’t naturally think about the impact of what they say on other people,” she says. “Elon understands personalities very well, but as a study, not as an emotion.”
When Antonio Gracias was twelve years old, he asked for some Apple Computer for Christmas. Not the computer itself; he already had an early Apple II. He wanted the company’s stock.
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. It’s about building the machine that builds the machine. In other words, how do you design the factory?” It was a guiding principle that Musk would make his own.
There are certain people who occupy a demon’s corner of Musk’s headspace. They trigger him, turn him dark, and rouse a cold anger. His father is number one. But somewhat oddly, Martin Eberhard, who is hardly a household name, is second.
Carl Hoffman, a Wired reporter who had watched the failure of the second launch with Musk, reached him to ask how he maintained his optimism. “Optimism, pessimism, fuck that,” Musk answered. “We’re going to make it happen. As God is my bloody witness, I’m hell-bent on making it work.”
The more people pressed him to choose, the more he resisted. “For me emotionally, this was like, you got two kids and you’re running out of food,” he says. “You can give half to each kid, in which case they might both die, or give all the food to one kid and increase the chance that at least one kid survives. I couldn’t bring myself to decide that one was going to die, so I decided I had to give my all to save both.”
Musk’s decision to reverse his orders about quality controls taught Buzza two things: Musk could pivot when situations changed, and he was willing to take more risk than anyone. “This is something that we had to learn, which was that Elon would make a statement, but then time would go on and he would realize, ‘Oh no, actually we can do it this other way,’ ” Buzza says.
Despite his stony appearance, Musk’s stomach had been wrenched during the launch, almost to the point of throwing up. Even after the success, he had trouble feeling joy. “My cortisol levels, my stress hormones, the adrenaline, they were just so high that it was hard for me to feel happy,” he says. “There was a sense of relief, like being spared from death, but no joy. I was way too stressed for that.”
Obama canceled NASA’s Constellation program after his science advisor and budget director said that it was “over budget, behind schedule, off course, and unexecutable.”
“OCD is one of the reasons for their success, because they obsessed on solving a problem until they did,”
he spelled out his creed in a quintessential email to employees, titled “Ultra hardcore.” It read, “Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before. Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart.”
In times of emotional darkness, Musk throws himself into his work, maniacally.
“At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later,” he said. “But if I don’t make decisions, we die.”
At any given production meeting, whether at Tesla or SpaceX, there is a nontrivial chance that Musk will intone, like a mantra, what he calls “the algorithm.”
1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from “the legal department” or “the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me. Then make the requirements less dumb. 2. Delete any part or process you can. You may
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Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.
All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise, they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword.
When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.
A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.
The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything el...
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“Whenever our friends become open-loop, meaning that they don’t have iterative feedback and don’t seem to care about the outcomes, we take it upon ourselves to let each other know,” Kimbal says. So after the pedo-tweet situation escalated, Kimbal said to his brother, “Okay, open-loop warning.” It was a phrase he would use four years later when Musk was dealing with his purchase of Twitter.
“Demon mode causes a lot of chaos,” she says, “but it also gets shit done.”
His son Saxon, who is autistic, had recently asked an offbeat question that resonated: “Why doesn’t the future look like the future?” Musk would quote Saxon’s question repeatedly. As he said to the design team that Friday, “I want the future to look like the future.”
Its satellites were too big, expensive, and difficult to manufacture. In order to reach a profitable scale, they would have to be made at one-tenth the cost and ten times faster. But the Starlink team did not seem to feel much urgency, a cardinal sin for Musk.
When he didn’t get the answers he wanted, Musk decided to find out for himself. He went into hardcore, all-in mode.
When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.
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.
But when it came to drilling down on the engineering, they were different. Bezos was methodical. His motto was gradatim ferociter, or “Step by step, ferociously.” Musk’s instinct was to push and surge and drive people toward insane deadlines, even if it meant taking risks.
Musk had deployed what he called the “idiot index.” That was the ratio of the total cost of a component to the cost of its raw materials. Something with a high idiot index—say, a component that cost $1,000 when the aluminum that composed it cost only $100—was likely to have a design that was too complex or a manufacturing process that was too inefficient. As Musk put it, “If the ratio is high, you’re an idiot.”
“You better be fucking sure in the future you know these things off the top of your head,” Musk said. “If you ever come into a meeting and do not know what are the idiot parts, then your resignation will be accepted immediately.” He spoke in a monotone and showed no emotion. “How can you fucking not know what the best and worst parts are?”
“Okay, great,” replied Musk, who respected people willing to take risks. “I think that’s fair, as long he’s fully informed.”
“If we’re going to go to the moon again, and we’re going to go to Mars, we’ve got to get a little outside our comfort zone.”
If we don’t end up adding back some parts later, we haven’t deleted enough.”
After all the arguments were aired, Musk paused for about forty seconds. “I’m pulling the plug,” he finally said. “Delete radar.” Guillen continued to push back, and Musk got coldly angry. “If you won’t remove it,” he said, “I will get someone else who will.”
