Select Quotes
Prologue: Muse Of Fire
Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad.” Out of this cauldron, Musk developed an aura that made him seem, at times, like an alien, as if his Mars mission were an aspiration to return home and his desire to build humanoid robots were a quest for kinship. – Page 10
Chapter 2: A Mind Of His Own: Pretoria, The 1970S
His parents got called in to see the principal, who told them, “We have reason to believe that Elon is retarded.” – Page 26
“I took people literally when they said something,” he says, “and it was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant.” He had a preference for things that were more precise, such as engineering, physics, and coding. – Page 28
Chapter 4: The Seeker: Pretoria, The 1980S
“I took the blood and body of Christ, which is weird when you’re a kid,” he says. “I said, ‘What the hell is this? Is this a weird metaphor for cannibalism?’ ” Maye decided to let Elon stay home and read on Sunday mornings. – Page 43
The heroes of Asimov’s Foundation series of books develop a plan to send settlers to distant regions of the galaxy to preserve human consciousness in the face of an impending dark age. More than thirty years later, Musk unleashed a random tweet about how these ideas motivated his quest to make humans a space-faring species and to harness artificial intelligence to be at the service of humans: “Foundation Series & Zeroth Law are fundamental to creation of SpaceX.” – Page 44
Chapter 5: Escape Velocity: Leaving South Africa, 1989
Elon went to the library and read a few books on roulette and even wrote a roulette simulation program on his computer. He then tried to convince his father that none of his schemes would work. But Errol believed that he had found a deeper truth about probability and, as he later described it to me, an “almost total solution to what is called randomness.” When I asked him to explain it, he said, “There are no ‘random events’ or ‘chance.’ All events follow the Fibonacci Sequence, like the Mandelbrot Set. I went on to discover the relationship between ‘chance’ and the Fibonacci Sequence. This is the subject for a scientific paper. If I share it, all activities relying on ‘chance’ will be ruined, so I am in doubt as to doing that.” – Page 51
“It made me realize how difficult it is not to be shaped by what we grew up with, even when that’s not what we want.” – Page 52
Chapter 9: Go West: Silicon Valley, 1994–1995
This trend toward closed and sealed devices meant that most techies who came of age in the 1990s gravitated to software more than hardware. – Page 75
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.” – Page 77
Chapter 10: Zip2: Palo Alto, 1995–1999
“I never wanted to be a CEO,” he says, “but I learned that you could not truly be the chief technology or product officer unless you were the CEO.” – Page 85
True product people have a compulsion to sell directly to consumers, without middlemen muddying things up. – Page 87
Chapter 11: Justine: Palo Alto, The 1990S
After dinner, everyone joined in a conga line, then Elon and Justine took the first dance. He put both arms on her waist. She put her arms around his neck. They smiled and kissed. Then, as they danced, he whispered to her a reminder: “I am the alpha in this relationship.” – Page 95
Chapter 12: X.Com: Palo Alto, 1999–2000
Some of his friends were skeptical that an online bank would inspire confidence if given a name that sounded like a porn site. But Musk loved the name X.com. Instead of being too clever, like Zip2, the name was simple, memorable, and easy to type. It also allowed him to have one of the coolest email addresses of the time: e@ x.com. “X” would become his go-to letter for naming things, from companies to kids. – Page 98
Musk developed viral marketing techniques, including bounties for users who signed up friends, and he had a vision of making X.com both a banking service and a social network. – Page 100
“I honed the user interface to get the fewest number of keystrokes to open an account,” he says. Originally there were long forms to fill out, including providing a social security number and home address. “Why do we need that?” Musk kept asking. “Delete!” One important little breakthrough was that customers didn’t need to have user names; their email address served that purpose. – Page 100
“If you want to just be a niche payment system, PayPal is better,” he said. “But if you want to take over the world’s financial system, then X is the better name.” – Page 104
Musk restructured the company so that there was not a separate engineering department. Instead, engineers would team up with product managers. It was a philosophy that he would carry through to Tesla, SpaceX, and then Twitter. Separating the design of a product from its engineering was a recipe for dysfunction. Designers had to feel the immediate pain if something they devised was hard to engineer. – Page 104
Chapter 14: Mars: Spacex, 2001
“How is this a business?” he asked. Later Hoffman would realize that Musk didn’t think that way. “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,” – Page 121
It’s useful to pause for a moment and note how wild it was for a thirty-year-old entrepreneur who had been ousted from two tech startups to decide to build rockets that could go to Mars. What drove him, other than an aversion to vacations and a childlike love of rockets, sci-fi, and A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? To his bemused friends at the time, and consistently in conversations over the ensuing years, he gave three reasons. He found it surprising—and frightening—that technological progress was not inevitable. It could stop. It could even backslide. – Page 121
“It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.” – Page 122
Another motivation was that colonizing other planets would help ensure the survival of human civilization and consciousness in case something happened to our fragile planet. – Page 122
His third motivation was more inspirational. It came from his heritage in a family of adventurers and his decision as a teenager to move to a country that had bred into its essence the spirit of pioneers. “The United States is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration,” he says. “This is a land of adventurers.” That spirit needed to be rekindled in America, he felt, and the best way to do that would be to embark on a mission to colonize Mars. – Page 122
Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt. It also had to be about pursuing great dreams. “That’s what can get us up in the morning.” – Page 123
Faring to other planets would be, Musk believed, one of the significant advances in the story of humanity. “There are only a handful of really big milestones: single-celled life, multicellular life, differentiation of plants and animals, life extending from the oceans to land, mammals, consciousness,” he says. “On that scale, the next important step is obvious: making life multiplanetary.” – Page 123
Chapter 15: Rocket Man: Spacex, 2002
It was fortunate that the meetings went badly. It prodded Musk to think bigger. – Page 129
The arguments about the risk served to strengthen Musk’s resolve. He liked risk. “If you’re trying to convince me this has a high probability of failure, I am already there,” he told Ressi. – Page 130
Its goal, he said in an early presentation, was to launch its first rocket by September 2003 and to send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2010. Thus continued the tradition he had established at PayPal: setting unrealistic timelines that transformed his wild notions from being completely insane to being merely very late. – Page 132
Chapter 17: Revving Up: Spacex, 2002
The football game was forgotten. The rocket was more interesting. – Page 141
Chapter 18: Musk’S Rules For Rocket-Building: Spacex, 2002–2003
This would later become step one in a five-point checklist, dubbed “the algorithm,” that became his oft-repeated mantra when developing products. Whenever one of his engineers cited “a requirement” as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering “The military” or “The legal department” was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. “We would talk about how we were going to qualify an engine or certify a fuel tank, and he would ask, ‘Why do we have to do that?’ – Page 146
All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics. – Page 146
The sense of urgency was good for its own sake. It made his engineers engage in first-principles thinking. – Page 147
Chapter 20: Founders: Tesla, 2003–2004
But Gage wanted to start by building a cheaper, boxier, slower car. That made no sense to Musk. Any initial version of an electric car would be expensive to build, at least $ 70,000 apiece. “Nobody is going to pay anywhere near that for something that looks like crap,” he argued. The way to get a car company started was to build a high-priced car first and later move to a mass-market model. “Gage and Cocconi were sort of madcap inventors,” he laughs. “Common sense was not their strong suit.” For weeks Musk badgered them to build a fancy roadster. “Everyone thinks electric cars suck, but you can show that they don’t,” – Page 163
Chapter 21: The Roadster: Tesla, 2004–2006
By January 2005, the eighteen engineers and mechanics at Tesla had cobbled together by hand what was known as a development mule, a vehicle that could be shown off and tested before being put into production. “To make a mule required a lot of hacking and slashing in order to jam our batteries and the AC Propulsion powertrain into a Lotus Elise,” Musk says. “But at least we had a thing that looked like a real car. – Page 170
Eberhard tried to resist most of Musk’s suggestions, even if they would make the car better, because he knew they would increase costs and cause delays. But Musk argued that the only way to jump-start Tesla was to roll out a roadster that wowed customers. “We only get to release our first car once, so we want it to be as good as it can be,” – Page 172
Chapter 22: Kwaj: Spacex, 2005–2006
“The Air Force and us were such a mismatch,” says Hans Koenigsmann, who was then SpaceX’s chief launch engineer. “They had some requirements that Elon and I laughed about so hard that we would have to catch our breath.” After a moment’s reflection, he adds, “They probably laughed at us the same way.” – Page 185
Chapter 23: Two Strikes: Kwaj, 2006–2007
When Musk gets stressed, he often retreats into the future. – Page 191
The decision to accept the eleventh item on the risk list—to not incorporate slosh baffles—had come back to bite them. “From now on,” Musk said to Koenigsmann, “we are going to have eleven items on our risk list, never just ten.” – Page 196
Chapter 24: The Swat Team: Tesla, 2006–2008
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. – Page 200
The cash-sucking supply chain and the cost of the car would bleed the company of all its money—including the deposits that had been made by customers to reserve a Roadster—before it could even begin selling the car at scale. “It was,” Watkins says, “an oh-shit moment.” – Page 204
Chapter 25: Taking The Wheel: Tesla, 2007–2008
Wanting to be everyone’s friend, he told Marks, leads you to care too much about the emotions of the individual in front of you rather than caring about the success of the whole enterprise—an approach that can lead to a far greater number of people being hurt. – Page 211
Chapter 27: Talulah: 2008
At the end of the visit, he proposed. “I’m really sorry I don’t have a ring,” he said. She suggested they shake hands on it, which they did. “I remember swimming around with him in the rooftop pool, very giddy, talking about how strange it was that we had known each other for about two weeks and were now engaged.” Riley said she felt sure things would work out. “What’s the worst that could happen to us?” she joked. Musk, suddenly in earnest mode, replied, “One of us could die.” Somehow, in the moment, she found that very romantic. – Page 221
Chapter 28: Strike Three: Kwaj, August 3, 2008
He told his team he had money for only three tries. “I believed that if we couldn’t do it in three,” he says, “we deserved to die.” – Page 224
Instead, he told them that there were components for a fourth rocket in the Los Angeles factory. Build it, he said, and transport it to Kwaj as soon as possible. He gave them a deadline that was barely realistic: launch it in six weeks. “He told us to go for it,” says Koenigsmann, “and it blew me away.” A jolt of optimism spread through headquarters. “I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying suntan oil after that,” says Dolly Singh, the human resources director. “Within moments, the energy of the building went from despair and defeat to a massive buzz of determination.” – Page 225
Chapter 29: On The Brink: Tesla And Spacex, 2008
One day his high-spirited soulmate Mark Juncosa walked into his cubicle at SpaceX. “Dude, why don’t you fucking just give up on one of these two things?” he asked. “If SpaceX speaks to your heart, throw Tesla away.” “No,” Musk said, “that would be another notch in the signpost of ‘Electric cars don’t work,’ and we’d never get to sustainable energy.” Nor could he abandon SpaceX. “We might then never be a multiplanetary species.” 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.” – Page 231
Chapter 30: The Fourth Launch: Kwaj, August–September 2008
Bülent Altan ran to the cockpit to try to stop the descent. “Here’s this big Turkish guy screaming at the Air Force pilots, who were the whitest Americans you have ever seen, to go back higher,” – Page 236
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 that 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. – Page 237
Kimbal, standing next to him, started to cry. Falcon 1 had made history as the first privately built rocket to launch from the ground and reach orbit. Musk and his small crew of just five hundred employees (Boeing’s comparable division had fifty thousand) had designed the system from the ground up and done all the construction on its own. Little had been outsourced. And the funding had also been private, largely out of Musk’s pocket. – Page 239
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.” – Page 240
Chapter 32: The Model S: Tesla, 2009
“Shit, he’s launching rockets into space,” von Holzhausen marveled. “Cars are easy compared to this.” – Page 251
“Dave, you don’t realize how bootstrap this organization is,” von Holzhausen told him. “This is like a garage band. – Page 252
They engineered it so that the pack became an element of the car’s structure. It was an example of Musk’s policy that 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. – Page 255
Musk wanted the Model S to have a large touchscreen at the driver’s fingertips. He and von Holzhausen spent hours kicking around ideas for the size, shape, and positioning of the screen. It turned out to be a game-changer for the auto industry. It gave the driver easier control over the lights, temperature, seat positions, suspension levels, and almost everything in the car except opening the glove compartment (which, for some reason, government regulations required have a physical button). It also allowed more fun, including video games, fart sounds for the passenger seat, different horn sounds, and Easter egg jokes hidden in the interfaces. Most importantly, regarding the car as a piece of software rather than just hardware allowed it to be continuously upgraded. – Page 257
Chapter 35: Marrying Talulah: September 2010
Musk did not have many stable and grounded relationships, nor did he have many stable and grounded periods in his life. No doubt those two things were related. Among his few such relationships was the one he had with Riley, and the years he would spend with her—from their meeting in 2008 to their second divorce in 2016—would end up being the longest stretch of relative stability in his life. If he had liked stability more than storm and drama, she would have been perfect for him. – Page 275
Chapter 36: Manufacturing: Tesla, 2010–2013
Oracle founder Larry Ellison joined only two corporate boards, Apple and Tesla, and he became close friends with Jobs and Musk. He said they both had beneficial cases of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “OCD is one of the reasons for their success, because they obsessed on solving a problem until they did,” – Page 277
Chapter 37: Musk And Bezos: Spacex, 2013–2014
Like Musk, he embarked on space endeavors as a missionary rather than a mercenary. – Page 284
Reusable rockets could someday get the cost of taking a person to Mars down to $ 500,000. Most people would not make the trip, he conceded, “but I suspect there are people in this room who would.” – Page 288
Chapter 38: The Falcon Hears The Falconer: Spacex, 2014–2015
The rocket was supposed to rise to about three thousand feet, activate its reentry rockets, hover above a pad, and then land erect. But it didn’t. Shortly after liftoff, one of the three engines malfunctioned and the rocket exploded. After a few moments of silence, Musk reverted to adventure-boy mode. He told the site manager to get the van so they could drive over to the smoldering debris. “You can’t,” the manager said. “Too dangerous.” “We’re going,” Musk said. “If it’s going to explode, we might as well walk through burning debris. How often do you get to do that?” Everyone laughed nervously and followed along. – Page 290
“There is no first-principles reason this can’t work,” – Page 293
Chapter 39: The Talulah Roller Coaster: 2012–2015
Her main job, she told Junod, was keeping Musk from going king-crazy. “You’ve never heard that term?” she asked. “It means that people become king, and then they go crazy.” – Page 299
Chapter 40: Artificial Intelligence: Openai, 2012–2015
Musk argued that unless we built in safeguards, artificial intelligence systems might replace humans, making our species irrelevant or even extinct. Page pushed back. Why would it matter, he asked, if machines someday surpassed humans in intelligence, even consciousness? It would simply be the next stage of evolution. Human consciousness, Musk retorted, was a precious flicker of light in the universe, and we should not let it be extinguished. Page considered that sentimental nonsense. If consciousness could be replicated in a machine, why would that not be just as valuable? Perhaps we might even be able someday to upload our own consciousness into a machine. He accused Musk of being a “specist,” someone who was biased in favor of their own species. – Page 303
“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. – Page 305
Chapter 41: The Launch Of Autopilot: Tesla, 2014–2016
Musk resisted the use of LiDAR and other radar-like instruments, insisting that a self-driving system should use only visual data from cameras. It was a case of first principles: humans drove using only visual data; therefore machines should be able to. It was also an issue of cost. As always, Musk focused not just on the design of a product but also on how it would be manufactured in large numbers. – Page 309
If they wrote stories that dissuaded people from using autonomous driving systems, or regulators from approving them, “then you are killing people.” He paused and then barked, “Next question.” – Page 312
Chapter 42: Solar: Tesla Energy, 2004–2016
Musk says. His instincts had always been just the opposite. He never put much effort into sales and marketing, and instead believed that if you made a great product, the sales would follow. – Page 318
After opening its Nevada battery factory, Tesla had begun making a refrigerator-size battery for the home, called the Powerwall. It could be connected to solar panels, such as those installed by SolarCity. The concept helped Musk avoid the mistake made by many corporate leaders of defining their business too narrowly. “Tesla is not just an automotive company,” he said when the Powerwall was announced in April 2015. “It’s an energy innovation company.” With a solar roof connected to a home battery and to a Tesla in the garage, people could free themselves from dependency on big utilities and oil companies. – Page 319
Chapter 43: The Boring Company: 2016
“Did you ever notice that cities are built in 3-D, but the roads are only built in 2-D?” Musk finally said. McNeill looked puzzled. “You could build roads in 3-D by building tunnels under cities,” – Page 323
“He spent a lot of time giving us lessons about the importance of deleting steps and simplifying,” says Joe Kuhn, a young engineer from Chicago who designed the way vehicles would get through the tunnel. For example, they were drilling a vertical shaft at the beginning of the tunnel to lower in the tunneling machine. “The gopher in my yard doesn’t do that,” Musk said. They ended up redesigning the tunneling machine so that it could simply be aimed nose down and start burrowing into the ground. – Page 325
Chapter 45: Descent Into The Dark: 2017
“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.” – Page 342
Chapter 46: Fremont Factory Hell: Tesla, 2018
“Enjoy year 48 in the simulation!” read the icing on the ice-cream cake that Teller bought. – Page 355
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. – Page 356
The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation. – Page 358
Chapter 47: Open-Loop Warning: 2018
If Musk had been the type of person who could pause and savor success, he would have noticed that he had just brought the world into the era of electric vehicles, commercial space flight, and reusable rockets. – Page 362
Chapter 48: Fallout: 2018
Gelles asked whether things were improving. Yes, for Tesla, Musk said. “But from a personal pain standpoint, the worst is yet to come.” He began to choke up. There were long pauses as he tried to regain his composure. As Gelles later noted, “In all the conversations I’ve had with business leaders over the years, not until Elon Musk got on the phone had an executive revealed such vulnerability.” – Page 372
“Yeah, I’m sometimes a little too optimistic about time frames,” he said. “It’s time you knew that, yeah. But would I be doing this if I wasn’t optimistic? Geez.” The audience applauded. – Page 381
Chapter 49: Grimes: 2018
Every now and then, often at the most complex of times, the Creators of Our Simulation—those rascals who conjure up what we are led to believe is reality—drop in a sparky new element, one that creates chaotic new subplots. And thus into Musk’s life in the spring of 2018, amid the emotional tsunami caused by his breakup with Amber Heard, came a waiflike weaver of sounds, Claire Boucher, known as Grimes, a smart and spellbinding performance artist whose appearance would lead to three new children, on-and-off domesticity, and even a public battle with an unhinged rapper. – Page 383
“The only way I could be in a serious relationship is if the person I’m dating can also listen to an hour of, like, war history before bed,” she says. “Elon and I have gone through so many topics, like ancient Greece and Napoleon and the military strategies of World War One.” – Page 384
She enjoyed his intensity. One evening they went to see the 3D movie Alita: Battle Angel, but they arrived after all the 3D glasses were gone. Musk insisted they stay and watch it anyway, even though it was completely blurry. – Page 387
“If someone has depression or anxiety, we sympathize. But if they have Asperger’s we say he’s an asshole.” – Page 388
“When we hang out, I make sure I’m with the right Elon,” she later explained. “There are guys in that head who don’t like me, and I don’t like them.” – Page 388
Chapter 50: Shanghai: Tesla, 2015–2019
Ren’s big challenge was to find a way to do manufacturing in China. He could either wear down Musk’s resistance and have Tesla form a joint venture, which is what every other car company had done, or he could convince China’s top leaders to change a law that had defined Chinese manufacturing growth for three decades. He discovered that the latter was easier. – Page 393
Chapter 51: Cybertruck: Tesla, 2018–2019
Charles Kuehmann was the VP for materials engineering at both Tesla and SpaceX. One of the advantages that Musk had was that his companies could share engineering knowledge. – Page 398
A steel body could serve as the load-bearing structure of the vehicle, rather than making the chassis play that role. “Let’s make the strength on the outside, make it an exoskeleton, and hang everything else from the inside of it,” Musk suggested. – Page 398
With his hands casually in his pockets, von Holzhausen had the easygoing and loose-limbed manner of a surfer looking for the right wave. Musk, arms akimbo, was coiled like a bear searching for prey. – Page 399
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.” There were a few dissenting voices suggesting that something too futuristic would not sell. After all, this was a pickup truck. “I don’t care if no one buys it,” he said at the end of the session. “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.” – Page 400
Chapter 53: Starship: Spacex, 2018–2019
Musk talked to some of the workers—those actually doing the welding rather than the company’s executives—and asked what they thought was safe. “One of Elon’s rules is ‘Go as close to the source as possible for information,’ – Page 412
The crew had still not made even one dome that would fit perfectly on Starship. Standing in front of one of the tents, he issued a challenge: build a dome by dawn. That was not feasible, he was told, because they didn’t have the equipment to calibrate the precise size. “We are going to make a dome by dawn if it fucking kills us,” he insisted. Slice off the end of the rocket barrel, he ordered, and use that as your fitting tool. They did so, and he stayed up with the team of four engineers and welders until the dome was finished. “We didn’t actually have a dome by dawn,” admits one of the team, Jim Vo. “It took us until about nine a.m.” – Page 414
Chapter 55: Giga Texas: Tesla, 2020–2021
He hated the idea of squandering months being subjected to political pitches and the PowerPoint presentations of consultants. – Page 421
“Precision is not expensive,” he says. “It’s mostly about caring. Do you care to make it precise? Then you can make it precise.” – Page 424
Chapter 56: Family Life: 2020
When X was born, Musk took a picture of Grimes having a C-section and sent it around to friends and family, including her father and brothers. Grimes was understandably horrified and scrambled to get it deleted. “It was Elon’s Asperger’s coming out in full,” she says. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset.” – Page 428
Chapter 57: Full Throttle: Spacex, 2020
At a conference in Utah, he went to a party thrown by SpaceX and, after a couple of drinks, worked up the nerve to corner Gwynne Shotwell. He pulled a crumpled résumé out of his pocket and showed her a picture of the satellite hardware he had worked on. “I can make things happen,” he told her. Shotwell was amused. “Anyone who is brave enough to come up to me with a crumpled-up résumé might be a good candidate,” she said. She invited him to SpaceX for interviews. He was scheduled to see Musk, who was still interviewing every engineer hired, at 3 p.m. As usual, Musk got backed up, and Dontchev was told he would have to come back another day. Instead, Dontchev sat outside Musk’s cubicle for five hours. When he finally got in to see Musk at 8 p.m., Dontchev took the opportunity to unload about how his gung-ho approach wasn’t valued at Boeing. 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. – Page 439
Chapter 58: Bezos Vs. Musk, Round 2: Spacex, 2021
Space was a personal passion for both men, and their competition—like that of the railway barons a century earlier—would serve to push the field forward. – Page 445
Chapter 59: Starship Surge: Spacex, July 2021
When asked by a follower why he didn’t just use landing legs, Musk responded, “Legs would certainly work, but the best part is no part.” – Page 453
Every second counted. “We need to get to Mars before I die,” he said. “There’s no forcing function for getting us to Mars other than us, and sometimes that means me.” – Page 456
“Gwynne definitely cares a lot about people, which I think at the company is an important role for her to fill,” Hughes says. “Elon cares a lot about humanity, but humanity in more of a very macro sense.” – Page 461
Chapter 60: Solar Surge: Summer 2021
Musk decided that he needed to find out from the actual installers what could be done to speed things up. – Page 466
At high noon the next day, it reached 97 degrees in the shade, of which there was none. – Page 468
Chapter 64: Optimus Is Born: Tesla, August 2021
Optimus, he said, would learn to perform tasks without needing line-by-line instructions. Like a human, it would teach itself by observing. – Page 497
Chapter 65: Neuralink: 2017–2020
After they left the meeting, the engineers went through the usual stages of post-Musk distress disorder: baffled, then angry, then anxious. But within a week they got to the stage of being intrigued, because the new approach, they realized, might actually work. When Musk returned to the lab a few weeks later, they showed him a single chip that could handle the processing of data from all the threads and transmit it by Bluetooth to a computer. No connections, no router, no wires. “We thought this was impossible,” one of the engineers said, “but now we’re actually pretty stoked by it.” – Page 503
The Neuralink device recorded which neurons were firing each time he moved the joystick a certain way. Then the joystick was deactivated, and the signals from the monkey’s brain controlled the game. – Page 504
Chapter 66: Vision Only: Tesla, January 2021
The concept of “privacy teams” did not warm his heart. “I am the decision-maker at this company, not the privacy team,” he said. “I don’t even know who they are. They are so private you never know who they are.” – Page 508
Chapter 67: Money: 2021–2022
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. This was an essential insight that Musk had about himself. When things were most dire, he got energized. It was the siege mentality from his South African childhood. – Page 512
Chapter 68: Father Of The Year: 2021
Her maternal impulses were further stoked by Musk’s evangelizing about how important it was for people to have many children. He feared that declining birthrates were a threat to the long-term survival of human consciousness. “People are going to have to revive the idea of having children as a kind of social duty,” he said in a 2014 interview. “Otherwise civilization will just die.” – Page 516
“He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” – Page 517
Musk was listed as the father on the birth certificate, but the children—a boy named Strider Sekhar Sirius and a girl named Azure Astra Alice—were given Zilis’s last name. – Page 518
When Zilis was in the Austin hospital with complications from her pregnancy, so too was the surrogate mother carrying the baby girl that Musk and Grimes had secretly conceived in vitro. 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. – Page 518
At first they called her Sailor Mars, after one of the heroines in the Sailor Moon manga, which features female warriors who protect the solar system from evil. It seemed a fitting though not exactly conventional name for a child who might be destined to go to Mars. By April, they decided they needed to give her a less serious name (yes), because “she’s all sparkly and a lot goofier troll,” Grimes said. They settled on Exa Dark Sideræl, but then in early 2023 toyed with changing her name to Andromeda Synthesis Story Musk. For simplicity’s sake, they mainly just called her Y, or sometimes Why?, with a question mark as part of her name. – Page 519
“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,” – Page 520
Chapter 69: Politics: 2020–2022
His own jokes tended to be filled with smirking references to 69, other sex acts, body fluids, pooping, farts, dope smoking, and topics that would crack up a dorm room of stoned freshmen. – Page 523
“To be clear, I support the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party!” – Page 530
“He doesn’t have hobbies or ways to relax other than video games,” she says, “but he takes those so seriously that it gets very intense.” During one game when they had agreed to be a united front against other tribes, she surprise-attacked him with a flame ball. “It was one of our biggest fights ever,” she remembers. “He took it as this deep betrayal moment.” Grimes protested it was only a video game and not a big deal. “It’s a huge fucking deal,” he told her. He did not speak to her for the rest of the day. – Page 531
“I have this feeling,” Zilis once told Musk, “that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.” – Page 532
Chapter 71: Bill Gates: 2022
he thought that by shorting Tesla he could make money. That way of thinking was alien to Musk. He believed in the mission of moving the world to electric vehicles, and he put all of his available money toward that goal, even when it did not seem like a safe investment. “How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?” he asked me a few days after Gates’s visit. “It’s pure hypocrisy. Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?” Grimes added her own interpretation: “I imagine it’s a little bit of a dick-measuring contest.” – Page 546
Chapter 72: Active Investor: Twitter, January–April 2022
favorite line from the 2000 movie Gladiator: “Are you not entertained? – Page 555
Despite sharing Musk’s libertarian views on free speech, Howery pushed back gently with some sophisticated thoughts, posed as gentle questions. “Should it be like a telephone system, where the words that go in one end come out exactly the same on the other end?” he asked. “Or do you think this is more like a system that is governing the discourse of the world, and maybe there should be some intelligence put into the algorithm that prioritizes and deprioritizes things?” – Page 559
Chapter 74: Hot And Cold: Twitter, April–June 2022
My jaw was really aching from hitting the floor so many times.” – Page 578
“I think there’s a distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of reach,” he said. “Anyone can just go into the middle of Times Square and say anything, even deny the Holocaust. But that doesn’t mean that needs to be promoted to millions of people.” – Page 581
Chapter 75: Father’S Day: June 2022
“We are simultaneously being told that gender differences do not exist and that genders are so profoundly different that irreversible surgery is the only option,” – Page 585
Errol revealed that he had fathered a second child with Jana, a daughter. “The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce,” he said. “If I could have another child I would. I can’t see any reason not to.” – Page 589
She continued to feel warmly toward him, and Musk felt the same about her, though he was afflicted by preferring extreme heat and cold rather than warmth in relationships. – Page 589
Chapter 76: Starbase Shake-Up: Spacex, 2022
“Falcon nine,” said X, pointing in the distance. “No,” his father corrected him. “Starship.” “Ten, nine, eight,” X said. “People say he’s so smart to be able to count backwards,” Musk said. “But I’m not sure he can count forward.” – Page 594
Chapter 77: Optimus Prime: Tesla, 2021–2022
Most workspaces and tools are designed to accommodate the way humans do things, so Musk believed that a robot should approximate human forms in order to operate naturally. – Page 604
At first it seemed sensible to consider making a hand with four fingers, since the pinky didn’t seem necessary. But in addition to looking creepy, that turned out not to be quite as functional. – Page 604
All bad news should be given loudly and often. Good news can be said quietly and once.” – Page 608
Chapter 80: Robotaxi: Tesla, 2022
Self-driving cars, Musk believed, would do more than merely free folks from the drudgery of driving. They would, to a large extent, eliminate the need for people to own cars. – Page 628
Chapter 81: “Let That Sink In”: Twitter, October 26–27, 2022
Twitterland and the Muskverse – Page 636
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. – Page 636
Chapter 82: The Takeover: Twitter, Thursday, October 27, 2022
Twitter, Thursday, October 27, 2022 – Page 641
Chapter 83: The Three Musketeers: Twitter, October 26–30, 2022
“I believe in coming in, and I do,” he said. “But I’m a programmer and can’t be good if I get interrupted every hour. So sometimes I don’t come in. Perhaps hybrid is best.” – Page 653
Chapter 84: Content Moderation: Twitter, October 27–30, 2022
After explaining Twitter’s misgendering policy, and saying that the Babylon Bee refused to delete the offending tweet, Roth said there were three options: keep the Bee banned, get rid of the rule against misgendering, or simply reinstate the Bee arbitrarily without wringing hands about policies and precedents. Spiro, who knew how Musk operated, chose option three. “Why can’t he just do that?” he asked. “Well, he can,” Roth conceded. “He bought the company, and he can make whatever decisions he wants.” But that could cause problems. “What do we do when another user does the same thing and our rules are enforced? You have a consistency problem.” “Okay, then, should we change the policy?” Spiro asked. “You can do that,” Roth answered. “But you should know this is a major culture war issue.” There was a lot of advertiser concern about how Musk was going to handle content moderation. “If the very first thing that he does is remove Twitter’s hateful conduct policy related to misgendering, I don’t believe it will go well.” – Page 664
Chapter 85: Halloween: Twitter, October 2022
He thought of it as a technology company, when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships. – Page 673
Chapter 86: Blue Checks: Twitter, November 2–10, 2022
The moderator asked what advice he would give to someone who wanted to be the next Elon Musk. “I’d be careful what you wish for,” he replied. “I’m not sure how many people would actually like to be me. The amount that I torture myself is next level, frankly.” – Page 687
Chapter 87: All In: Twitter, November 10–18, 2022
“Please let me go with severance and I will leave,” it said. It dawned on them that they could rely on self-selection. – Page 693
Chapter 89: Miracles: Neuralink, November 2022
He walked me through the different muscle-stimulation methods and ventured into a discussion of why he believes that signals in the brain are propagated by the chemical diffusion of charged molecules rather than electromagnetic waves, as conventional theory has it. – Page 709
Chapter 92: Christmas Capers: December 2022
The CEO then told him that some of the floors could not handle more than five hundred pounds of pressure, so rolling a two-thousand-pound server would cause damage. Musk replied that the servers had four wheels, so the pressure at any one point was only five hundred pounds. “The dude is not very good at math,” Musk told the musketeers. – Page 737
Chapter 94: Ai For Humans: X.Ai, 2023
Even the Digital Revolution chugged away for many years in the background, with hobbyists cobbling together personal computers to show off at geeky gatherings such as the Homebrew Computer Club, before people noticed that the world was being fundamentally transformed. But the Artificial Intelligence Revolution was different. – Page 755
The Ides of March – Page 759
In addition, new AI machine-learning systems could ingest information on their own and teach themselves how to generate outputs, even upgrade their own code and capabilities. The term “singularity” was used by the mathematician John von Neumann and the sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge to describe the moment when artificial intelligence could forge ahead on its own at an uncontrollable pace and leave us mere humans behind. – Page 760
Someday, Musk hoped, it would be able to take on even grander and more existential questions. It would be “a maximum truth-seeking AI. It would care about understanding the universe, and that would probably lead it to want to preserve humanity, because we are an interesting part of the universe.” – Page 762
Chapter 95: The Starship Launch: Spacex, April 2023
“We want to bring the public in on everything we’re doing,” he told the team. “Then they will support us. That’s why we live-streamed the Starship launch, even knowing it was likely to explode at some point.” – Page 772
One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also 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 cast as villains can be complex. – Page 772
But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world. – Page 773