Isaacson-Elon Musk

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& Elon Musk

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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. “It’s not your job to make people on your team love you,” he said at a SpaceX executive session years later. “In fact, that’s counterproductive.” — location: 845

True product people have a compulsion to sell directly to consumers, without middlemen muddying things up. Musk was that way. He became frustrated by Zip2’s strategy of relegating itself to being an unbranded vendor to the newspaper industry. — location: 854

“He assumed that he would be either wealthy or broke, but nothing in between. What interested him were the problems he wanted to solve.” — location: 904

I don’t think you can be in a relationship with Elon and not argue.” — location: 924

“He was just so adamant and furious that I didn’t know what I was talking about, that I was stupid and crazy,” she says. “It was like the things he told me his father said to him.” — location: 927

His concept for X.com was grand. It would be a one-stop everything-store for all financial needs: banking, digital purchases, checking, credit cards, investments, and loans. Transactions would be handled instantly, with no waiting for payments to clear. His insight was that money is simply an entry into a database, and he wanted to devise a way that all transactions were securely recorded in real time. “If you fix all the reasons why a consumer would take money out of the system,” he says, “then it will be the place where all the money is, and that would make it a multitrillion-dollar company.” — location: 955

One of Musk’s management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it. He did that in the fall of 1999 by announcing, in what one engineer called “a dick move,” that X.com would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend. In the weeks leading up to that, Musk prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in a nervous and nervous-making frenzy, and slept under his desk most nights. One of the engineers who went home at 2 a.m. Thanksgiving morning got a call from Musk at 11 a.m. asking him to come back in because another engineer had worked all night and was “not running on full thrusters anymore.” Such behavior produced drama and resentments, but also success. When the product went live that weekend, all the employees marched to a nearby ATM, where Musk inserted an X.com debit card. Cash whirred out and the team celebrated. — location: 971

Musk was drawn to the fight with the intensity of a video-gamer. Thiel, on the contrary, liked to coolly calculate and mitigate risk. It soon became clear to both of them that the network effect—whichever company got bigger first would then grow even faster—meant that only one would survive. So it made sense to merge rather than turning the competition into a game of Mortal Kombat. — location: 996

“This is just an opening,” he told Levchin. “You just have to be patient with a guy like Elon.” — location: 1005

“There’s irony in everything he does,” says Levchin. “He operates on an irony setting that goes up to eleven but never goes below four.” One of Musk’s powers was to entice other people into his irony circle so they could share an inside joke. “He turns on his irony flamethrower and creates this sense of exclusive Elon Club membership.” — location: 1062

I think a huge part of the way he motivates people are these displays of sharpness, which people just don’t expect from him, because they mistake him for a bullshitter or goofball.” — location: 1074

Hoffman knew Musk’s wiles. “He has reality-warp powers where people get sucked into his vision,” he says. — location: 1109

“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.” — location: 1132

Levchin was at a friend’s bachelor pad hanging out with Musk. Some people were playing a high-stakes game of Texas Hold ’Em. Although Musk was not a card player, he pulled up to the table. “There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating odds,” Levchin says. “Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose. Then he would buy more chips and double down. Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won. Then he said, ‘Right, fine, I’m done.’ ” It would be a theme in his life: avoid taking chips off the table; keep risking them. — location: 1139

“That’s what Twitter could become,” he said. “If you combine a social network with a payments platform, you could create what I wanted X.com to be.” — location: 1158

“Vacations will kill you. Also, South Africa. That place is still trying to destroy me.” — location: 1184

“What I didn’t appreciate is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to backfill in order to make it work financially,” he says. “That’s what makes him a force of nature.” — location: 1222

Salzman says. “When you have one person with inordinate control, and that person is under a lot of stress, that’s a dicey situation.” — location: 2555

Musk can be forgiving, as he showed by his reconciliation with his PayPal partners. But there are a few people who cause him to go ballistic, almost irrationally so. Martin Eberhart is one. And Alan Salzman became another. Musk thought he was intentionally trying to push Tesla into bankruptcy. “He is such a douche,” Musk says. “When I say he is a douchebag, that is descriptive, not pejorative.” — location: 2559

“That is really no good,” von Holzhausen declared. “I can make you something great.” Musk started laughing. “Yes, let’s do it,” he said, hiring von Holzhausen on the spot. They would end up becoming a team, like Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, one of the few calming and nondramatic relationships Musk would have, professionally and personally. — location: 2629

“If he’s this hardcore about rockets and he wants to do cars,” Morris thought, “then I want to do this.” — location: 2642

Figure out what his goal is, and keep giving him information. That’s how he gets the best outcomes.” — location: 2663

“Elon is a hypercompetitive guy, and challenging him means that a meeting can go to hell.” — location: 2670

Peter Rawlinson, a genteel Englishman who had worked on car bodies for Lotus and Land Rover. — location: 2672

the designers sketching the shape of the car should work hand in glove with the engineers who were determining how the car would be built. “At other places I worked,” von Holzhausen says, “there was this throw-it-over-the-fence mentality, where a designer would have an idea and then send it to an engineer, who sat in a different building or in a different country.” Musk put the engineers and designers in the same room. “The vision was that we would create designers who thought like engineers and engineers who thought like designers,” von Holzhausen says. This followed the principle that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had instilled at Apple: design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect the looks of a product to its engineering. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs once explained. “Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers.” — location: 2674

Musk had a resistance to regulations. He did not like to play by other people’s rules. — location: 2692

“I have a good neural net when it comes to assessing with just a few questions a person’s ability to perform,” Musk says. — location: 2728

Musk also saved money by questioning requirements. When he asked his team why it would cost $2 million to build a pair of cranes to lift the Falcon 9, he was shown all the safety regulations imposed by the Air Force. Most were obsolete, and Mosdell was able to convince the military to revise them. The cranes ended up costing $300,000. Decades of cost-plus contracts had made aerospace flabby. A valve in a rocket would cost thirty times more than a similar valve in a car, so Musk constantly pressed his team to source components from non-aerospace companies. The latches used by NASA in the Space Station cost $1,500 each. A SpaceX engineer was able to modify a latch used in a bathroom stall and create a locking mechanism that cost $30. When an engineer came to Musk’s cubicle and told him that the air-cooling system for the payload bay of the Falcon 9 would cost more than $3 million, he shouted over to Gwynne Shotwell in her adjacent cubicle to ask what an air-conditioning system for a house cost. About $6,000, she said. So the SpaceX team bought some commercial air-conditioning units and modified their pumps so they could work atop the rocket. — location: 2732

“Senior industry and government officials took pleasure deriding SpaceX and Elon,” Garver says. “It didn’t help that Elon was younger and richer than they were, with a Silicon Valley disrupter mentality and lack of deference toward the traditional industry.” — location: 2757

“The important thing with Elon,” he says, “is that if you told him the risks and showed him the engineering data, he would make a quick assessment and let the responsibility shift from your shoulders to his.” — location: 2796

One of Musk’s favorite words—and concepts—was “hardcore.” He used it to describe the workplace culture he wanted when he founded Zip2, and he would use it almost thirty years later when he upended the nurturing culture at Twitter. As the Model S production line ramped up, 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.” — location: 2921

“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. — location: 3202

success in the field of artificial intelligence would come from having access to huge amounts of real-world data that the bots could learn from. — location: 3210

he would later come to realize, was Twitter, which by 2023 was processing 500 million posts per day from humans. — location: 3213

Musk’s interest in artificial intelligence would lead him to launch an array of related projects. These include Neuralink, which aims to plant microchips in human brains; Optimus, a humanlike robot; and Dojo, a supercomputer that can use millions of videos to train an artificial neural network to simulate a human brain. It also spurred him to become obsessed with pushing to make Tesla cars self-driving. — location: 3220

“Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe the real problem is getting carried away for what I sign up for.” — location: 3547

But it didn’t happen. His way of dealing with his mental problems, he says when I ask, “is just take the pain and make sure you really care about what you’re doing.” — location: 3552

In times of emotional darkness, Musk throws himself into his work, maniacally. — location: 3572

Musk decided he had to move himself, literally, to the factory floors and lead an all-in surge. It was a tactic—personally surging into the breach 24/7 with an all-hands-on-deck cadre of fellow fanatics—that came to define the maniacal intensity that he demanded at his companies. — location: 3577

“Step one should be to question the requirements,” he says. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.” — location: 3606

“When Elon gets upset, he lashes out, often at junior people,” says Jon McNeill. “Gage’s story was fairly typical of his behavior where he just couldn’t really process his frustration in a productive way.” — location: 3621

“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.” — location: 3627

Musk flipped from being an apostle of automation to a new mission he pursued with similar zeal: find any part of the line where there was a holdup and see if de-automation would make it go faster. — location: 3640

Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation. — location: 3644

Why do we have four bolts there? Who set that specification? Can we do it with two? Try it. — location: 3694

“Go or stay?” he would ask Nick Kalayjian, his vice president for engineering, or others. If the answer was “go,” the piece would be marked with an orange X, and workers would tear it off the line. “Soon he was laughing, like with childlike humor,” Kalayjian says. — location: 3738

Humans are underrated.” — location: 3741

“Get one of those permits and start building a huge tent,” he told Guillen. “We’ll have to pay a fine later.” That afternoon, Tesla workers began clearing away the rubble that covered an old parking lot behind the factory. There was not time to pave over the cracked concrete, so they simply paved a long strip and began erecting a tent around it. One of Musk’s ace facilities builders, Rodney Westmoreland, flew in to coordinate the construction, and Teller rounded up some ice-cream trucks to hand out treats to those working in the hot sun. In two weeks, they were able to complete a tented facility that was 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide, big enough to accommodate a makeshift assembly line. Instead of robots, there were humans at each station. One problem was that they did not have a conveyor belt to move the unfinished cars through the tent. All they had was an old system for moving parts, but it was not powerful enough to move car bodies. “So we put it on a slight slope, and gravity meant it had enough power to move the cars at the right speed,” Musk says. At just after 4 p.m. on June 16, just three weeks after Musk came up with the idea, the new assembly line was rolling Model 3 sedans out of the makeshift tent. Neal Boudette of the New York Times had come to Fremont to report on Musk in action, and he was able to see the tent going up in the parking lot. “If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible,” Musk told him, “then unconventional thinking is necessary.” — location: 3752

Holy shit

  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 have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn’t delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or a process that should not exist. 4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. 5. 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. — location: 3786

managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. — location: 3798

Comradery is dangerous. It makes it hard for people to challenge each other’s work. There is a tendency to not want to throw a colleague under the bus. That needs to be avoided. — location: 3800

Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do. — location: 3803

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 else is a recommendation. — location: 3804

The engineers who stayed, he said, had to meet three criteria. They had to be excellent, trustworthy, and driven. — location: 7487

From: Elon Musk Subj: A Fork in the Road Date: Nov. 16, 2022 Going forward, to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0 and succeed in an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hardcore. This will mean working long hours at high intensity…. If you are sure that you want to be part of the new Twitter, please click yes on the link below. Anyone who has not done so by 5pm ET tomorrow (Thursday) will receive three months of severance. — location: 7518

Musk relished risk. He wanted to see how fast a car could drive, what happened when you floored it, how close to the sun you could fly. James and Ross were “shitting bricks,” they said, but Musk seemed gleeful. — location: 7572

“I’m not Trump’s fan. He’s disruptive. He’s the world’s champion of bullshit.” — location: 7576

he wants to rip the Band-Aid off. He doesn’t want to drag this out.” — location: 7592

the teams at Twitter would be led by engineers like themselves rather than designers and product managers. It was a subtle shift. It reflected his 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 relationships and desires. — location: 7601

When the dust settled, about 75 percent of the Twitter workforce had been cut. There were just under eight thousand employees when Musk took over on October 27. By mid-December, there were just over two thousand. — location: 7608

He preferred a scrappy, hard-driven environment where rabid warriors felt psychological danger rather than comfort. — location: 7612

Musk’s method, as it had been since the Falcon 1 rocket, was to iterate fast, take risks, be brutal, accept some flameouts, then try again. “We were changing the engines while the plane was spiraling out of control,” he says of Twitter. “It’s a miracle we survived.” — location: 7623

In some ways, Musk was like Steve Jobs, a brilliant but abrasive taskmaster with a reality-distortion field who could drive his employees crazy but also drive them to do things they thought were impossible. He could be confrontational, with both colleagues and competitors. Tim Cook, who took over Apple in 2011, was different. He was calm, coolly disciplined, and disarmingly polite. Although he could be steely when warranted, he avoided unnecessary confrontations. Whereas Jobs and Musk seemed drawn to drama, Cook had an instinct for defusing it. He had a steady moral compass. — location: 7631