The Chaotic-Neutral "Messiah"
The New Elon Musk Biography
“We are not shooting for the moon. We are shooting for Mars. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle," said Elon Musk.
“Elon was sitting in the Starbase conference room in Boca Chica in early September 2021, sporting a stark fade haircut that looked like it was done by a soon-to-be-executed barber of a North Korean leader. 'I cut it myself,' he told the engineers.”
When people have financial success, they tend to become increasingly risk averse. That risk aversion makes rational sense, because they do have more to lose than they did before getting rich. Companies usually behave the same way: large corporations—many of which took big risks early on—bring in "professional" CEOs to avoid mistakes and company death.
Ten million miles away from those risk-avoidant professional CEOs, at the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, sits Elon Musk. "This is how civilizations decline," he tells his interviewer. "They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. When you've had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks."
Index
Sobering the Extremes
Bad Elon
The “Messiah” Complex
The Degenerate Risk Junkie
Conclusion: The Role of Luck
Sobering the Extremes
"It's 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 casts as villains can be complex. Even the best people, he wrote, are 'molded out of faults.'" - Walter Isaacson
Casting public figures as either "all good" or "all bad" has been an overly-popular trend in recent years, so a 615-page biography helps to add nuance. Walter Isaacson, whose biographical subjects include Jennifer Doudna (of CRISPR fame) and Einstein, was plugged into Elon Musk's world for two years, and his new Musk biography brilliantly portrays both Elon's genius and profound viciousness towards others. (We all have our obsessive compulsions, and mine happens to be spilling excessive ink on Isaacson's books. I just can't help myself.)
Elon Musk is polarizing for a number of reasons. First, he's a billionaire—the world's richest person while the Tesla stock price soars—and people do not like billionaires (though the persistent myth that Elon was born to wealthy parents, à la Trump, is actually untrue). Elon is also irreverent and childish on Twitter/X, the platform that was full of outrage before he purchased it. Incredibly, running multiple $100-billion-plus companies is apparently his least polarizing aspect.
I began Isaacson's biography as a shameless fan of Elon and the companies he's built. I ended the book feeling much more critical of Elon the person—the topic of today—yet just as excited as I was before for SpaceX, Tesla, and his other ventures. SpaceX and Tesla continue to prove cynics wrong and provide concrete hope for the future, and concrete hope for the future is my goal for Future of Tuesday.
Isaacson forces the hardcore hero-worshippers to confront Elon's extreme emotional and personal weaknesses. Yet, he also forces the Musk haters to confront the fact that without Elon, there would likely be no electric-car revolution underway and no private spaceflight (which should save taxpayers billions and open the frontier of Mars). Even the Ukrainian military could have immediately folded against Russia without SpaceX's Starlink internet.
The book depicts Musk's genius, brutality, and everything in between, and the nuance that Isaacson provides will make this a timeless biography for decades to come.
Bad Elon
"If you were my employee, I would fire you." - Elon Musk, to his then-wife, Justine
Elon's brain is hard-wired for outlier intelligence, yet no other genius on Earth possesses his concoction of traits: he’s a risk addict, maniacal workaholic, sociopathic businessman, complete asshole, and earnest believer in his own messianic role for humankind. Musk is unique.
The Good Elon—who we'll mostly cover in part two next week—is less complicated than Bad Elon is. Good Elon is an inspired leader who genuinely cares about the future of living beings, and he works himself around the clock to put his money where his mouth is. At the macro level, Elon might be the least selfish billionaire alive, as he's willing to sacrifice everything in his life (reputation, family, friendships, health, and happiness) to solve pressing problems.
That big-picture unselfishness of Good Elon is what makes him so fascinating—and what makes the book's nuance so necessary—because at the individual level, Bad Elon comes across as the least pleasant CEO on Earth.
Isaacson mostly avoids injecting his own judgments and instead weaves together all of the disturbing scenes, interviews, dialogue, and childhood context into the book's narrative to force the reader to confront Elon's troubles.
For instance, Elon once fired his long-time assistant without the slightest hint of emotional misgivings. He sees even the most ardently motivated, loyal employees as replaceable chess pawns. Says Brian Dow, a former eager-beaver leader of the solar roof team at Tesla: "[My firing] was just the most bizarre, weird firing you could imagine. I had so much history with him, and deep down Elon knows that I have something special... But he thought I was losing my edge, even though I had missed my birthday with my family to be up on the roof with him."
Complementing the emotional detachment towards loyal employees are his occasional flashes of vindictiveness. After Twitter's head of content moderation, Yoel Roth, resigned, crazy Musk worshippers online (falsely) accused Roth of being a pedophile. Roth had to sell his home after Anti-Semitic and homophobic threats made him feel unsafe. Elon made no attempt to stop the Twitter bullying, and even fed into it.
Elon’s brutality and lack of empathy appear sociopathic. (As his brother Kimbal says, "Elon knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business.”) Regardless of how armchair quarterbacks choose to diagnose him, Elon’s issues are clearly rooted in both nature and nurture.
On the nature front, Elon's father, Errol, is an unhinged bully-conspirator who impregnated his own step-daughter twice. Whenever Elon leans into conspiracies (which he not infrequently does), it's impossible not to recognize the genetics at play.
Elon openly describes himself as having Asperger's (which is no longer considered separate from the Autism Spectrum). It's not accurate or fair to blame Elon's sociopathic tendencies on Asperger's, because a notable percentage of SpaceX and Tesla engineers are surely on the Autism spectrum, and few—if any—of them would display Elon's callousness if they were CEO.
Elon's moods fluctuate wildly. Isaacson describes the sudden onsets of crisis-mode Elon as "storms," which can often last for days and leave trails of emotional debris in their wake. Jon McNeill, then Tesla president, once directly asked Elon if he was bipolar. Musk said, "Probably yes."
Nurture also shaped Bad Elon’s behavior. Errol, his father, would berate young Elon for literally hours at a time. Elon's first wife, Justine, was rightly appalled when Elon would call her a "moron" or "idiot," and readers learn the root of that behavior: "When I spent some time with Errol, I realized that's where [Elon] had gotten the vocabulary," says Justine.
School was no escape from psychological damage. Elon was bullied severely as a kid, and at one point he was nearly beaten to death. As a coping mechanism, he learned to shut off emotions entirely, and even to seek out pain. Writes Isaacson, "[Elon's] 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."
He’s admittedly never processed his emotional trauma, which explains the "demon-mode” episodes, the "storms," and the fear of sitting still.
What makes his ruthlessness so confounding, however, is that it's not really coming from a place of ego, but rather a place of pure, robotic coldness.
"Robot" isn't a fair label, though. He's remarkably self-aware in a way that actual robots, like Mark Zuckerberg, don’t seem to be. “My main regret 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," says Elon.
Regardless of the role that ego, nature, and nurture play, Elon can be a cruel boss and person. So why do people work for him?
The “Messiah” Complex
"Elon cares a lot about humanity, but humanity in more of a very macro sense." - Lucas Hughes, of SpaceX
Above all, Good Elon and Bad Elon are inseparable. The same detachment that harms people enables him to take wild, optimistic risks with his companies. Those rare shots at building a better future excite people.
Says Phil Duan, a young engineer from Wuhan, "I worked for months without a day off and got so tired that I quit Tesla right after Autonomy Day. I was burned out. But after nine months, I was bored, so I called my boss and begged him to let me come back. I decided I'd rather be burned out than bored."
Elon sees himself as critical to the survival of human consciousness to an extent that can only be called a "messiah complex." Reid Hoffman, PayPal guy and founder of LinkedIn, says, “[Elon] is amazingly successful at getting people to march across a desert.” (And we all know another book where people march across a desert…)
Elon's own messianic comments appear interspersed throughout the biography. They are incredibly entertaining:
We need to get to Mars before I die. There's no forcing function for getting us to Mars other than us, and sometimes that means me.
The SpaceX 1337 engine is the last major critical breakthrough needed to get humanity to Mars!!! No words are enough to capture how important this [engine that he just realized needed to exist] is for the future of civilization.
When Elon was told an engine test would take ten days: That's too long. This is critical for all of human destiny. It's hard to change destiny. You can't just do it from 9 to 5.
When Elon was faced with a random rocket production issue: Are we on a trajectory to get to Mars before civilization crumbles?
On Tesla's future Robotaxi: This will be a historically mega-revolutionary product. It will transform everything. This is a product that makes Tesla a ten-trillion company. People will be talking about this moment in a hundred years.
You can see why someone who genuinely believes he has humanity's weight on his shoulders would also believe (rightly or wrongly) that he does not have time to worry about other people's feelings.
A Degenerate Risk Junkie
"Silicon Valley wisdom would be that [SpaceX and Tesla] were both incredibly crazy bets. But if two crazy companies work that everyone thought couldn't possibly work, then you say to yourself, 'I think Elon understands somethings about risk that everybody else doesn't.'" - Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder
Let's return to the opening scene of the post, where Elon Musk is standing (probably hunching over in sleep deprivation) ten million miles away from the "risk aversion" end of the spectrum. Here’s a brief summary of the junkie who lusts for risk:
In 1995, Elon enrolled in a Stanford PhD program to study battery-making equipment, but immediately he requested a deferral, fearing he'd miss out on the internet revolution. The Stanford professor over the program correctly predicted Elon would never come back. Instead of Stanford, Elon started an online version of Yellow Pages called Zip2 with his brother, Kimbal.
Most of us would have a mental breakdown if we dropped out of a Stanford PhD program to start a website (remember, there was basically no proof that websites could monetize in 1995). We'd fear judgment from our friends and families (who would, in fact, be judging us) and feel like we squandered all of the hard work that it took to get to Stanford.
In 1999, the brothers sell Zip2, raising Elon's bank account from "$5,000 to $22,005,000." He bought a McLaren and spent the rest trying to create an online financial system called x.com. (Online banks in 1999 seemed preposterous, too.) Elon’s team merges with their rivals down the street at PayPal. PayPal sells to eBay just in time to avoid the bursting Dotcom bubble and Elon walks away with $250 million.
If I suddenly had $250 million, I'd probably spend at least six months rubbing sunscreen on my tummy in the Caribbean, and then lead a low-stress life in which I try to be outside and get involved with charities or something. What would you do?
Would you fly to Russia and try to negotiate for decommissioned rockets so that you could "fly humans to Mars and make us a multi-planetary species?" You wouldn’t? Then you must not be Elon Musk.
Anyway, Elon invested his whole fortune in his new company, SpaceX, and then in Tesla. (He had to litigate to became an official Tesla co-founder. Just get the audiobook, damnit.) By 2008, unsurprisingly, Elon was completely insolvent. Tesla couldn't make payroll and he went into personal debt, borrowing from anyone who could front him cash as the Global Recession deepened.
If your family thought you were crazy for dropping out of Stanford, what would they think after you lost $250M trying to fly people to Mars and build electric cars?
In 2008, SpaceX needed to prove it could launch a payload to Space for it to earn contracts and undercut the bloated Spaceflight market—and just to survive as a company. The first three launches of the Falcon 1, SpaceX's first rocket, had exploded before getting into orbit. Elon had previously announced that SpaceX had enough runway to prove viability within those three launches, but he now barely scraped together enough funding for a fourth flight. He went deeper into personal debt. Miraculously, the fourth flight was a success, and Tesla narrowly survived as well after an investment from the makers of Smart cars.
Remember, he had the option to retire with ten million dollars, then hundreds of millions. The gut-wrenching stress that followed him was entirely the result of his messianic masochism.
Over the next decade, Tesla was endlessly on "death watch" and became the most shorted stock in history. It survived to become a trillion-dollar company, and SpaceX is thriving, even though Musk now wastes his time also running the artist formerly known as Twitter.
Elon Musk does not approach risk the same way that normal people do. Tesla and SpaceX could have easily failed on hundreds of occasions, at which point Musk would be back to zero. He was the beneficiary of some luck, but how much? Is Elon Musk merely the poster boy for survivorship bias?
Conclusion: Cultivating Luck
"You will lose. It will hurt the first 50 times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion." - Elon Musk
No matter the size of his chip stack, Elon pushes his poker chips into the middle of the table and goes all in. Every time. The success rate will not be 100 percent—as we very well may witness with his $44 billion purchase of Twitter. (For what it's worth, after suing to try to renege on his impulsive purchase, Elon said Twitter is worth less than half of what he paid for it.)
The writer Nassim Taleb has asserted that the more extreme an outlier is, the more luck should be credited, and I normally agree with Taleb's statement. However, I think that Elon is playing a different game.
Elon's combination of engineering brilliance, emotional detachment, fearlessness, and insane work ethic is so uncommon that I legitimately believe that with enough attempts, he'd become a billionaire in most simulations (even if he didn't end up as the world's richest man).
Although SpaceX and Tesla would likely fail if we replayed 2008 again, Elon would have kept starting over, trying wildly ambitious ideas until he struck gold.
Yes, he had to get extremely lucky for this exact outcome to occur, but Elon's process of going all in every time is eventually bound to produce some extreme positive outcomes, assuming he avoids incarceration or death (a non-trivial assumption).
His lust for risk is so aggressive that colossal failures are a near certainty, yet past failures won't scare him out of starting over and over and over until he (literally) drops dead on Mars. As Elon told 60 Minutes in 2012, "I never give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated."
Nobody else alive is wired exactly like Elon Musk. Thank God.
In addition to his appetite for risk, the other Elon trait that I have been fixated on for years is how he problem solves by thinking through "first principles" of physics.
In lieu of further Elon-gating this post, I will share a few fascinating anecdotes about that problem solving next week, because if you set aside his unnecessary cruelty, there are valuable lessons that readers of Future of Tuesday should enjoy. After that, I will put myself in a straight jacket and write about subjects besides Mr. Musk, the father of X, Y, and Tau!