Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Edward Niedermeyer, who had written a critical book on Tesla titled Ludicrous, unleashed a thread of tweets. “Improvements to common driver assistance systems is moving the industry toward more radar, and even more novel modalities like LiDAR and thermal imaging,” he wrote. “Tesla, in a marked contrast, is moving backwards.”

But there’s something else I’ve found this year. It’s that 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.

Because the surrogate mother was having a troubled pregnancy, Grimes was staying with her. She was unaware that Zilis was in a nearby room, or that she was pregnant by Musk. Perhaps it is no surprise that Musk decided to fly west that Thanksgiving weekend to deal with the simpler issues of rocket engineering.

Optimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to optimize each one. “Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in life,” Musk says. “If we let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.”

Then he and Grimes went back to their hotel, where he unwound by immersing himself in a new video game, Elden Ring, which he had downloaded onto his laptop.

“Do you want to go through all that pain?” Farooq asked. “You slept on the factory floor for Tesla, doubled down for SpaceX. Do you really want to take all this on again?” Musk did one of his very long pauses. “Yes, I actually would,” he finally said. “I wouldn’t mind.”

He also was having broader doubts about taking on such a messy challenge. “I’ve got a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew,” he admitted. “I think I just need to think about Twitter less. Even this conversation right now is not time well spent.”

SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell felt the same about Patel, who had overseen the building of the facilities. “Sam works his ass off,” she said, “but he doesn’t know how to give Elon bad news. Sam and Bill are chickens.”

“We are going to go through the first-principles algorithm every night, questioning requirements and deleting,” he said. “That’s what we did to unfuck the bullshit that was Raptor.”

flown in from Los Angeles to help manage the personnel shake-up; a no-nonsense morning person, she commented that it was past her bedtime.

X likewise was unfazed, even when Grimes rushed him back to the house to bathe. “I feel like he’s developing a higher than average tolerance for danger,” Musk said. Showing only the tiniest bit of self-awareness, he added, “His tolerance for danger is almost problematic, honestly.”

Every week he went over the most recent timetables and expressed, often rather strongly, his dissatisfaction. “Pretend we are a startup about to run out of money,” he said at one of these sessions. “Faster. Faster! Please mark anytime a date has slipped. All bad news should be given loudly and often. Good news can be said quietly and once.”

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.”

Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase “psychological safety.” It made him recoil. He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was “hardcore.” Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, flower-smelling, work-life balance, and days of “mental rest” were not his thing. Let that sink in.

James and Andrew became addicted to the strategy game Polytopia. “My ex-girlfriend hated me for it,” Andrew says. “Maybe that’s why she’s my ex-girlfriend.”

Henry Kissinger once quoted an aide saying that the Watergate scandal had happened “because some damn fool went into the Oval Office and did what Nixon told him to do.” Those around Musk knew how to ride out his periods of demon mode. Roth later described the encounter in a conversation with Birchall. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Birchall told him. “That happens with Elon. You need to just ignore it and don’t do what he says. Then later on, go back to him after he has processed the inputs.”

“Remote work is no longer allowed,” Musk declared. “Starting tomorrow, everyone is required to be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week.”

“Have you called somebody at Apple?” he asked. “Just call Apple and tell them to give you the data you need.” Roth was taken aback. If a midlevel employee like himself called Apple and asked them to change their policies on information privacy, they would, as he put it, “tell me to go fuck myself.”

“My firstborn child died in my arms,” Musk tweeted. “I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”

Earlier that week, she had stood in front of her sales organization and told them why they should opt in with the “yes” button to be part of the new, demanding Twitter. Now she would have to look some of those same people in the eye, the ones who had said yes, and tell them they were fired.

“Hi, As a result of the recent code review exercise, it has been determined that your code is not satisfactory, and we regret to inform you that your employment with Twitter will be terminated effective immediately.”

Twitter had gone from being among the most nurturing workplaces, replete with free artisanal meals and yoga studios and paid rest days and concern for “psychological safety,” to the other extreme. He did it not only for cost reasons. He preferred a scrappy, hard-driven environment where rabid warriors felt psychological danger rather than comfort.

It was not a discussion destined to have a happy conclusion.

“The giant elephant in the room was that he was acting like a fucking idiot,” Kimbal says.

The two Twitter managers looked to see if he was serious. Steve Davis and Omead Afshar were also at the table. They had seen him like this many times before, and they knew that he might be.

argue about it. One Christmas tradition that Kimbal and Christiana had was to ask everyone to reflect on a question. This year it was “What regrets do you have?” “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.”

“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.”

Zilis made coffee and then put his in the microwave to get it superhot so he wouldn’t chug it too fast.

“It’s worth keeping in mind as you go through all the tribulations that the thing you’re working on is the coolest fucking thing on Earth. By a lot. What’s the second coolest? This is far cooler than whatever is the second coolest.”

“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.”

He had declared beforehand that he would consider the experimental launch a success if the rocket cleared the pad, rose high enough to blow up out of sight, and provided a lot of useful new information and data. It accomplished those goals. Nevertheless, it had exploded. Most of the public would consider it a flaming failure. And for a moment, as he stared at the monitor, Musk seemed subdued.

“Nicely done guys,” he said. “Success. Our goal was to get clear of the pad and explode out of sight, and we did. There’s too much that can go wrong to get to orbit the first time. This is an awesome day.”