Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

Nov 11, 2023

There has been no man who has changed the world more than Elon Musk in the last half century. His whimsical and childish nature coupled with a knack for scrappy and effective problem solving has enabled him to go higher than anyone dreamed was possible. I have to admire his ability to engage with his employees on the front lines and bring engineers and designers together -- if business was ever "war," you would want Musk to lead. (With Ukraine happening, he may be closer to a general than real US officers). His aspergers (which allow him to detach himself from the emotions) + his maniacally mission-driven approach to starting new companies allows him to not trip over the same short-sightedness which afflicts even the best of entrepreneurs. On the other hand, Musk's short-temper and hobby of using Twitter/X have drawn him into billions of dollars worth of unnecessary drama and fines. Despite it all, Elon is a man who lives for the high variance situations and gets a depressed with "peace," hence his famous surges and the increasingly many billion dollar companies that pop up under his name.

While I don't think Walter Isaacson's book compares to Robert Caro's biographies, the book was well written and heavily researched. When the subject of your book is still alive, there is a question about how you must frame them. In Elon's case, I believe his life story of starting from virtually nothing and engineering his way into greatness deserves genuine praise. I'd go as far as to say Elon Musk is the single most important citizen within the US today (even at 50, he is the present value of his discounted future expeditions and cash flows).

P.S: Shoutout to Isaac for getting me this special book.

Notes:

Musks grandparents were adventurers. His propensity for risk seemed almost genetic
Errrol, his father, was psychologically manipulative
Elon led a lot of sci-fi
- The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein
- Robots and Empire and Foundation by Isaac Asimov
  - Zeroth law: "a robot may not harm humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm"
Kimbal and Elon reached out to Peter Nicholson at Scotiabank (Executive in charge of strategic planning) "after reading newspapers and reaching out to the people they found most interesting." "They discussed philosophy and physics and the nature of the universe" and got an internship, which gave Musk "a healthy disrespect and the audacity to eventually start what became PayPal."
Zip2 took 4 yrs to get off the ground, at which point Musk became worth $22,005,000 by 27. He was removed from the company by the board by VCs and professional management.
- "I haven't spent all my winnings. I'm going to put almost all of it back to a new game."
- Justine: "Unlike other ambitious people,, he never talked about making money. He assumed that he would either be wealthy or broke, but nothing in between. What interested him were the problems he wanted to solve."
- Elon: "That's the difference between you and me. I just assume that there will be nannies."
Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill's in order to make it work financially. That's what makes him a force of nature - Reid Hoffman
Motivations
- Frightening that tech progress was not inevitable
- Colonizing other planets would help ensure the survival of human civilization and consciousness in case something happened to our fragile planet
- Life cannot be merely about solving problems. It also had to be about pursuing dreams
- One of Elon's greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven - Max Levchin
Elon Equation: Mad!! --> Hustle to try and win the game --> IF WIN --> WIN; IF LOSE --> reframe
- I was pretty mad, and when i get mad I try to reframe the problem -- after the Russian trip to acq rockets didn't work out.
First Principles
- "Idiot Index": how much more costly was a finished product than the cost of its basic materials. If high idiot index, cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing techniques
- We're going to be doing dumb things, but let's just not do dumb things on a large scale
Rocket Man
- Lots of $ (millions from prev ventures)
- Rockets had high "idiot index" -- 50x cost
- Advances in microprocessors
- Mars Society Network
  - Helped him source initial engineers for SpaceX
Tom Mueller -- head of propulsion @SpaceX
- if you're unwilling top invest in a company, he felt, you shouldn't qualify as a founder
- Mueller had Musk put two years' worth of compensation into escrow
The people on the assembly line should be able to immediately collar a designer or engineer and say 'Why the fuck did you make it this way.?' If your hand is on a stove and it gets hot, you will pull it right off, but if it's someone else's hand on the stove, it will take you longer to do something"
Rules for Rocket Building -- The Algorithm
- Challenged prices that aerospace suppliers charged for components
- All requirements treated as recommendations. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics
- Produce in-house when possible
  - After a few yrs, SpaceX made up to 70& of components
- Many followup rabbit holes of "why" and "who" --- commanded it be done down to the name of a person who made the requirement
  - "The Military" or "The Legal department" wasn't good enough
- Maniacal sense of urgency
  - Sometimes Musk's insane schedules produced the impossible, sometimes they didn't. I learned never to tell him no. Just say you're going to try, then later explain why if it doesn't work out.
- It's not how well you avoid problems. It's how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.
- When trying to buy a site Musk said: Stop saying how good all this is, You're making it more expensive"
- Improvise. Every situation is salvageable
  - One night lightning struck a test stand, knocking out the pressurization system for a fuel tank. That led to a bulge and rip in open of the tank's membranes. In a normal aerospace company, that would have meant replacing the tanks, which would take months. "Nah, just fix it," Musk said. "Go up there with some hammers and just pound it back out, weld it, and we'll keep going."
  - Gambles can also fail. But, do not be afraid to try offbeat fixes. Try new ideas and be willing to blow things up
Gwynne Shotwell
- She can treat him almost like a peer but still show deference, never forgetting that he's the founder and boss
- Adept w/ dealing w Aspergers
- Salvaged what got singed and tend to the wounded. Her engineering background allowed her follow along but she was the people person for SpaceX
- 40 and w/ 2 kids when she joined as 7th employee
Elon sued NASA --> cost-plus contracts replaced by outcomes-based fixed pricing to reward results
- Hurt Boeing and Lockheed Martin, who stymied innovation
- Allowed SpaceX to control how its rockets were built
The way to get a car company started was to build a high-priced car first and later move to a mass-market model
Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning planned to use induction motor. Musk led initial financing w $6.4M and became chair of the board
- 5 founders: Straubel CTO; Wright as COO; Tarpenning as President; Eberhard as CEO; Musk as Chair of Board
- Eberhard had a falling out with Wright and convinced Musk to fire him --> Musk became more involved and gave him doubts about Eberhard
Antonio Gracias & Tim Watkins were the SWAT team for Tesla
- Gracias: I realize that if you invest in a company, you should spend all your time on the shop floor
- Eberhard wasn't being for real about the numbers. Musk: We screwed the pooch six ways to Sunday
- Musk tried to find many CEOs but eventually took it up himself. "I can't have two of us driving"
Their brutal honesty could be unnerving, often offensive. It could constrict rather than encourage honesty dialogue. But it was also effective, at times, in creating what Jobs called a team of A Players who didn't want to be around fuzzy thinkers.
3 failed launch attempts for SpaceX's Falcon. Gave team a 6 week deadline for the 4th launch
- Talulah's parents said they would remortgage their house and try to help. Musk said no.
  - Raised emergency funding from network of fam & friends... and founders fund ($20M)
Musk's decision to reverse his orders on quality controls taught Buzza two things: Musk could pivot when situations changed, and he was willing to take more risk than anyone.
After the $1.6B NSA, Musk changed his password to "ilovenasa"
Alan Salzman from Vantage-Point Capital wanted Tesla to become a supplier of battery packs to other car companies liken Chrysler
Daimler invested in Tesla after German exec's traveling to the US were amazed
Straubel: You just have to learn how to deal with is demands. Figure out what the goal is, and keep giving information. That's how he gets the best outcomes.
- He likes to challenge the messenger
They engineered the (7200 cell) battery pack so that it became an element of the car's structure
- Principle that Jobs and Ive left at Apple: design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect the looks of a product to its engineering
Bezos and Musk rivarly went back and forth. Lawsuits, patents, launching men into orbit (or "suborbit")
OpenAI was founded after Musk and Larry Page disagreed about AI's role and how to maintain it. Musk's investment in Demis Hassabis/DeepMind had been through a Founders Fund meetup; he used it to keep track of the progress of AI. When Google acq it, he decided to become a funder in Open AI. Eventually split bc he wanted to acquire OpenAI for Tesla
- Wanted to tie bots to humans to create alignment, became eventual way Neuralink (microchips in human brains); Optimus (humanlike robot); Dojo (supercomputer using millions of videos to train an AI neural network in your brain)
Acq SolarCity from his cousins via Tesla. Lawsuit problems; was never the right business for him. But Tesla's mission was "energy focused" so it worked out
- Came at personal cost of relationship with Peter and Lyndon Rive
By trying to be nice to people, 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.
Always wait until the end of a designing a process---after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts---before you introduce automation
Episode with short-sellers defined how Musk views business --- David Einhorn / Jim Chanos
- Musk ordered enough parts & materials to make 5000 cars when it was only producing 2000 --> if they didn't, cash flow problems would make Tesla flunk
- Short sellers gave false info and organized a ground/air force to get lots of information
- Musk made the opposite bet; created boldest pay package in American history w/ potential to pay out $100B if he was able to increase the value to $650B, which was thought to be impossible
Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor. "At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we're going to alter them later. But if I don't make decisions, we die."
- Camped out on a tent in the Fremont surge
Open-Loop Warning: when an object, such as a bullet as opposed to a guided missile, has no feedback mechanism to provide it guidance.
- Whenever our friends become open-loop, meaning 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
Many erratic episodes: Saudi $420/share / Vernon Unsworth Thai diver twitter / Joe Rogan show smoking weed
Robin Ren, Musk's lab partner from Penn who spent time in China after physics olympiad, helped Tesla roll out in China and get around joint-venture mandates
Cybertruck
- I don't do focus groups
  - The future doesn't know itself
- We're not doing a traditional boring truck. We can always do that later. I want to build something that's cool. Like, don't resist me.
- Stainless steel... like SpaceX rockets
Starlink... to fund getting to mars
- Aspirational mission w/ practical business plan
- On a visit to Cornell in 2004, Musk sent a note to some engineering professors inviting them to bring one or two of their favorite students to lunch --> Mark Juncosa
  - Always be recruiting top talent... and tbh, best if it starts from the top down. People will work way harder if they're trying to impress the founder than if they got recruited by the HR team.. and have much more respect
- Culled a bunch of parts to make satellites lighter and making satellite/computer an integrated component
Starship
- Made his engineers build the dome by dawn. Huge scramble, but it got built by 9 am. Gave general directions Slice off the end of the rocket barrel, he ordered, and use that as your fitting tool
Musk always used mission-first rhetoric
- Can't get to Mars if the bugs eat us first -- on Florida SpaceX base
- SpaceX 1337 engine is the last major critical breakthrough needed to get humanity to Mars.
- I'm just trying to get people to Mars, and enable freedom of information with Starlink, accelerate sustainable technology with Tesla, and free people from the drudgery of driving
- same for Twitter (free speech), Tesla (electric powered cars)
Autopilot surge / Autonomy Day, April 2019
- He had to divorce himself from reality tin order to get out of shitty situation when he thought disaster was imminent
- Crisis mode Elon --> clean the house and fire people
Giga Texas
- 2x as much floor space as Fremont and 50% more than Pentagon
- Biggest factory in the world by floor area
- Gigapress
  - Created world's largest casting machine which can spit out a mold in 80 seconds... used to contain more than 100 parts
  - Precision is not expensive. It's mostly about caring. Do you care to make it precise? Then you can make it precise
  - Inspiration from tay manufacturers who used a single mold for the underbody of a toy car
    - They have to produce things very quickly and cheaply without flaws, and manufacture them all by Christmas, or there will be sad faces
    - a little model car had inspired him to make real cars using big casting presses
Musk took a picture of Grimes having a C-section. "It was Elon's Asperger's coming out in full. He was just clueless about why I'd be upset."
I think possessions kind of weigh you down and they're an attack vector"
FAA investigation when they didn't approve Musk's launch... Musk thought they were incompetent
Entertainment stuff that seems cool to look into
- Polytopia
- Cobra Kai
- Karate Kid
- Demolition Man (1993)
- Sid Myers Civ
- Warcraft: Orcs and Humans
To a financial analyst: 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?
I 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."
He's willing to throw his entire being at his mission., and that's what he expects in return,. That has a good and a bad side. You definitely realize that you're a tool being used to achieve this larger objective, and that's great. But sometimes, tools get worn down and he feels he can just replace that tool. He thinks that when people want to prioritize their comfort and leisure they should leave.
One way to reassure him is to parrot back what he said. "He wants to know you've listened. SO I learned to repeat his feedback. If he says the walls should be yellow, I will say, 'I hear you, this is not successful, we're going to paint the walls yellow.'
Need fear and love to be a leader. Both.
Elon cares a lot about humanity, but humanity in more of a very macro sense
SolarCity
- Everyone on an installation tea, even the engineers and managers, had to spend time drilling and hammering and sweating with the other workers
- If you don't end up having to restore 10% of the parts you deleted, then you didn't delete enough
Technology does not automatically progress. It requires human agency. Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable . It would have happened without me, but becoming a space-fairing civilization is not inevitable
Churned out Raptor engines like they were cars on an assembly line
Single largest tax bill in history of $11B
Fighting to survive keeps you going for quite a while. When you are no longer in survive-or-die mode, it's not that easy to get motivated everyday.
Believes having children is a social duty... sperm donor to Shivon while having kids w/ grimes via surrogate at the same time
Tweet: take the red pill
- Against woke and PC culture. believed it was destroying humor.
- Believed California is the land of litigation, regulation, and taxation
- UAW failed to unionize Fremont plan... partly due to illegal actions. Thank god.
Felt govt shouldn't be in the business of building electric charging stations.. naturally
Starlink, tesla powerwalls, and megapacks during Ukraine
- By July there were 15k starlink satellites and SpaceX had contributed ~$80M
- SpaceX didn't wish for Starlink to be used for offensive military purposes
- Shotwell felt SpaceX should stop subsidizing Ukraine... arrange for a $145M Pentagon agreement. Elon turned it down after negative media perception
- --> Starshield. Starlink specifically designed for military use
- No other country or company had been able to land orbital rockets safely and reuse them
Musk didn't love gates bc Gates shorted Tesla. Mission vs P&L
- How can someone say there are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most? It's pure hypocrisy. Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?
Gladiator: Are you not entertained. Is that not why you are here?
Musk on Agarwal (former CEO Twitter): He was a really nice guy but that was the problem
Pretend we are a startup about to run out of money. 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.
Optimus:
- Humanoid robot to work on the Mars colony
- Believes it will help make Tesla a trillion $ revenue company
- Believes it will --> UBI and no poverty
When most clients are given three or four options, they will ask which one the banker recommends. Musk, instead, asked detailed questions about each option but did not solicit a reccomendation. He liked to make his own decision.
He had a core belief that you could not separate engineering from product design
30k burnt hair perfumes sold out in one week for $100 a piece -- on The Boring Company website
When you're at Tesla, you're afraid to go anywhere else, because you will become so bored
"Psychological safety" made Musk recoil. Considered it as the opposite of urgency and progress.He preferred "hardcore." Vacations, flower-smelling, work-life balance, and days of 'mental rest' were not his thing
Musk forced a fast close on Twitter --> fired Agarwal and other exec's "for cause" before their stock options could vest
- Agarwal tried to resign but they beat him. Ruthless tactic
3 round layoff bloodbath at twitter
Henry Kissinger once quoted an aide saying that the Watergate scandal had happened b"because some damn fool went into the Oval Office and do what Nixon told him to do."
- That happens with Elon. You just need to ignore it and don't do what he says. Then later on, go back to him after he has processed inputs.
He has constructed for himself a moral and ethical universe that is focused on the delivery of those big goals . I think that makes it hard to villianize him.
It was in his nature to love the drama, the urgency, and the sense that he was a wartime general who could rally his troops into battle mode.
Belief that Twitter, should be, at its core, a software engineering company, led by people with a feel for coding, rather than a media and consumer-product company, led by people with a feel for human relationship and desires.
Believes small group of generalist engineers >. Prefers navy seal teams than large ones.
Iterate fast, take risks, be brutal, accept some flameouts, then try again
The Tim Cook vs Elon Musk interact ion demonstrates two extremely different personalities. Worth thinking how you can tap into either side for different purposes
Neuralink
- Getting someone in a wheelchair to walk again, people will get it right away. It's a gut-punch idea, a fucking bold thing. And a good thing.
Twitter Files w/ independent journalists that didn't skew easily to be labelled
- Essentially shadow banning
Moved all the Twitter Sacramento datasets in a very very scrappy way
Did Twitter create a handful of new enemies that would never buy Teslas?
Dhaval Shroff leading AI @Tesla
- Musk had massive datasets with Tesla and Twitter
- Made the work like a video game for the engineers . Measured miles per intervention and had a gong near the desk everytime they successfully solved a problem causing intervention
- Rules based system vs neural network of best drivers
6 companies: Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X.AI