Takeaways From Elon Musk's Biography
"I'm not sure how many people would actually like to be me. The amount that I torture myself is next level, frankly".
Elon Musk: By Walter Isaacson
Family Life
It is safe to say that Elon did not have the easiest of upbringings. Growing up in South Africa he consistently witnessed and experienced violence. He engaged in brotherly violence, with his younger brother Kimbal, as well as playground violence with other children that often towered his small, for his age, stature. The most inflicting source of violence came from his father, who showed little sympathy towards Elon, and Kimbal, by spouting a barrage of abuse and torture on the two. However, Elon’s father would intersperse these bouts with spells of fatherly love, which maintained their connection. Elon was attracted back to his father in these brief moments of happiness despite the metronomic aggression he confronted. Elon consistently exhibits a desire for drama, risk and danger; it would become a common theme throughout the rest of his life, and dictate many of his relationships and business endeavours.
For instance, Elon would have romantic relationships with many women. With whom he fathers lots of children. Consequently, he sometimes finds himself in the complicated situation of being intimate with multiple women simultaneously. Many describe Elon’s relationship as chaotic, evidenced by intense arguments that are often displayed during public occasions. It is apparent that Elon, whether from his childhood, is attracted to these fierce courtships.
Likewise, Elon has always maintained disjoint family relationships. Never being able to settle in a single location, even when fathering a considerable number of children. When attempting to develop a family house, the design process made his imagination wander and subsequently no plans for his family home were finalised. Elon persistently occupies a futuristic perspective, where he is concerned about the future of humanity and the progress of technology. He appeals to his long-term imagination during times of stress.
Kimbal’s connection to his brother has experienced peaks and troughs, however, they have consistently supported each other in their respective endeavours. Elon sometimes goes to his brother seeking solace and reinvigorate the strong companionship they developed as sons of a volatile father.
Despite having fractious relationships, Elon still craves company and does not enjoy being alone. Although his time spent with those close to him can be dysfunctional and abrupt due to work-related matters, Elon is reassured by the knowledge that he can surround himself with those close to him. One of his sons, named X, is frequently by his father's side and keeps him company during business calls and onsite meetings. Indeed, X has spent so much time accompanying his father on his work endeavours, that X learned to count backwards from ten before he learned to count from one. Elon experiences immense joy in fathering his children. His insistence on having lots of children is not predicated just on sustaining, and growing, the human population but also on the pleasures of parenthood.
A Terrible Employee
Elon never achieved great success when working for someone. He is autonomous with his ideas and becomes agitated when there is friction in implementing those ideas. Unfortunately for Elon, he would have to work for others, or at least not be the primary leader of a company, in his early career to build up sufficient capital to become independent. His first major success would be Zip2, which he founded with his brother. Despite being the CEO of Zip2, Elon became increasingly frustrated with its branding and its direction of technological development. He had not yet developed an authority that would mitigate unwarranted push-back on his ideas. His passion and drive to achieve his vision ultimately led to his demise as he was forced to step down as CEO by other employees.
With the capital gained from Zip2 Elon was able to found X.com, a company to fulfil his long-term and revolutionary vision of an integrated platform for all of one’s financial needs. Again this vision of Elon's would intervene with short-term business operations and thus instigate intense discussion with the other founders of the company. Without the prominence in the global market that he possesses today, with X.com he was reliant on others to enhance its growth. In particular, it was logical from a business perspective for X.com to merge with another venture named PayPal. PayPal was antithetical to Elon's bold and visionary ideas leading to unstable relationships. Ultimately, this led to Elon's downfall as an active member of X.com/PayPal. He eventually left, not entirely on his terms, X.com to pursue other adventures. Now Elon had sufficient resources to be independent and explore his curiosity in its entirety. That is, he wanted to develop tools for humanity to prosper and save itself from the existential risks it faces. This independence would lead to his next company, SpaceX.
A Hardcore Employer
As an employer and leader, Elon is hardcore. He expects nothing less than a manic work ethic from his employees and consistently operates with a sense of urgency. He governs with a high level of risk and is committed to confronting the most audacious challenges.
His workflow revolves around work surges, that are aimed at inspiring and instilling pressure into his workforces. These periods are essential for Elon's sanity; they are the environments in which he works most effectively and they eliminate any sense of complacency. Some surges are short bursts of intensity, whilst others are prolonged periods of trauma, as Elon himself would describe. A major surge Elon initiated in 2008 was aimed at optimizing the production line at his Tesla factory, to increase manufacturing capacity to five thousand vehicles a week. Starting from a mere thousand vehicles, achieving such a target seemed, and subsequently was a mammoth task. Stowing away any doubt, Elon spent months at the factory walking the lines, identifying points of friction and constantly streamlining the manufacturing process to progress toward the target. He would sleep in the factory to always be aware of the manufacturing problems but also to motivate his employees through the surge. These surges were not just a mechanism to develop products faster and gain revenue, sometimes there were even economic downsides to ordering a surge. For example, in 2021 he ordered a surge to mount the Starship rocket onto its booster despite not having FAA approval for launch. The goal of the surge was to "extrude shit out of the system", and understand which employees were committed and loyal to his vision.
This desire for nothing less than hardcore means that Elon is quick to fire individuals and shake things up when they are not going as he would like. Most notably after he took over Twitter in the first of three rounds of firings he let go of eighty per cent of the staff, with a particular emphasis on removing complacent engineers. Elon only retained the engineers he thought were excellent, trustworthy, and driven. A set of characteristics he would seek to quantifiably justify for each employee.
Due to Elon’s desire to maintain hardcore working environments, he despises remote working. However, this is not the only reason Elon mandates centralised working. Elon enjoys walking the lines at his factories, and the halls of Twitter asking technical questions to his engineers and exploring ideas for development. He cannot do so when everyone works from home. Moreover, he can instil urgency into his employees when they are in the office, and quickly iterate ideas. Elon believes in rapid development, testing and iteration. One of the central incentives Elon had for forming SpaceX was the painstakingly slow process of development he observed in the space industry. Even during the pandemic he never forced employees to stay at home, he and many others decided to continue working in the office. It is only through this energetic style of working that Elon believes progress can be made.
Elon is renowned for setting highly optimistic deadlines. In a similar vein to the work surges, the deadlines rally his employees on a concrete objective. With an approaching deadline, Elon enters into a manic mode and furiously works to meet the deadline. It is at these points, which occur more frequently than not, that interacting with Elon is most unsettling. For Elon, it is addictive, he relishes the pressure and thrives on the chaos. Despite there being initial contempt from his employees when these deadlines are announced, after the fact there is a great sense of pride amongst the employees which makes working for Elon an exciting adventure. One employee was driven to quit one of Elon's organisations after such a tight deadline. He would later beg to rejoin because he was bored in his subsequent employment. One of the audacious deadlines set by Elon was the launch date for the fourth attempt at launching his initial Falcon rocket. With the first three launches failing, the success of SpaceX rested on the success of the fourth launch. Where there had been periods of many months between the previous launches, Elon ordered the fourth to take place just six weeks after the failure of the third. The launch of the fourth rocket was a success. With capital running out and scepticism rising, who knows whether SpaceX would still be around to thrive as it is today if it were not for Elon's optimistic deadline.
During the early development of the Falcon rocket, Elon became increasingly frustrated at the slow progress of its construction. In particular, the top dome of the rocket still had not been fitted when Elon toured the construction facility. Thus he ordered a dome to be built for the rocket in the few days he was there, despite the team working on the problem for months. To show solidarity with the engineers, Elon participated in the construction and worked with them relentlessly through the night to get a dome fitted onto the rocket. It required collective out-of-the-box thinking, and determination, however, when Elon left the facility a few days later the Falcon rocket had a fitted dome.
Elon is a proponent of using few, but meaningful, metrics to run his companies. Optimising for a metric simplifies decision-making as decisions are always made in the interest of optimising the metric. Moreover, when relentlessly optimising for a specific metric, the only limits imposed are the laws of physics. It helps Elon, and his employees, to work from first principles and develop innovative solutions. For example, we have seen how Elon ruthlessly optimised the number of vehicles manufactured per week at his Tesla factories. Another metric that Elon focuses on is one he terms the idiot index. It is calculated as the ratio between the retail price of an object and the cost of the raw materials that make the object. A high idiot index suggests that the manufacturing and design of the object are too complex. Elon firmly believes that everything can be made at an idiot index close to one as the laws of physics do not say otherwise.
Elon has structured his companies such that there exists a small number of managerial layers. Indeed Elon maintains the same hardcore standard for all of his employees and so the notion of managerial levels seems obsolete. Skip-level meetings are when Elon skips a level in the chain of command and interacts with employees with whom he does not interact regularly. It is through these meetings that he gets a sense of the true problems facing his organisation rather than those that are filtered up the chain of command. Elon promotes this integrated culture by requiring that all the engineers have offices on the factory line, such that they are aware of the manufacturing problems that arise on the products they design. Furthermore, it reduces the chances that unnecessary regulations and specifications are introduced questioning them is easier if everyone operates at the same level.
A Risk-taker
Elon is not risk-averse, instead, he seeks risk. On the one hand, Elon is allured to the excitement that is attached to taking a risk. However, more importantly, taking risks allows ideas to be tested quickly and designs to be iterated. Frequently Elon makes bold proposals and implements precarious plans to test the limits and see what is possible. This style of working is particularly prominent in SpaceX as Elon is very frustrated at how space travel has stagnated, perhaps even receded since humans went to the moon. Thus Elon advocates for contracts which reward outcomes and results, which juxtaposes the typical contracts in the space industry that succumb to the burden of processes and bureaucracy. As a result, in the space industry, Elon has developed a volatile reputation as he ignores many of the processes that the industry has become accustomed to as methods to prevent disasters. For example, during transport, a component of the Falcon rocket became cracked which would usually delay the launch due to concerns of subsequent launch failure. However, Elon audaciously began to seal the crack with epoxy and launch the rocket as planned. Similarly, when developing the fuselage for the Starship rocket Elon opted to use four-millimetre stainless steel despite construction workers insisting that around five-millimetre steel would be required. This relentless pursuit of optimising every detail led to failures, however, some risks were successful and in some cases mitigated months of delays and costs. Whereas many operate on the side of caution, especially in the space industry, Elon operates on the side of risk where he notes that if failures do not occur then not enough risk has been taken and not enough lessons have been learned. Elon is firm in his position that for civilisation to develop and prosper we must take risks, otherwise we will become doomed by the challenges we face.
A Decision Maker
When pruning processes for efficiency, Elon is aware that he will have to add back at least ten per cent of the items he deletes, otherwise, he feels he was ruthless enough in his optimisation strategy. Elon's capacity to make snap decisions is one of the reasons he has achieved a lot of success, along with a reckless persona. Elon enjoys having control over processes such that he can optimise them according to his algorithm, and not be at the mercy of others. The algorithm is something Musk developed from his surges at the Tesla factory, and proceeds as follows.
Question every requirement.
Delete any part or process you can.
Simplify and optimize the remaining parts and processes.
Accelerate the cycle time.
Automate.
Elon imposes a lot of authority over his staff by making challenging and unconventional decisions. However, he has the capacity and willingness to change his mind if confronted with irrefutable physical evidence. He is reluctant to change his mind based on hunches, and even more reluctant to change his based on regulations. For example, when manning a surge at Tesla’s solar roof project, he spent time with the installers understanding why the process of installing a solar roof took so long. After much deliberation and pushback from the installers, Elon required that only one nail is to be used clamp down the tiles to speed up the process of installation. The following day the roofs installed with one nail experienced structural failures, incurring more delays than they saved. Without any hesitation, Elon reversed his decision and all subsequent roofs used two nails per tile.
A Humanist
With his desire to expand civilisation on earth and beyond, Elon embodies humanist values.
For example, Elon has had many children and encourages others to do so too. He is deeply concerned about the declining birth rates of many developed nations. For Elon, humans are essential for greater innovation and knowledge generation. More humans will lead to a thriving space-fairing civilisation that can reap the luxuries and resources of the universe. In a similar vein, Elon has poured a lot of effort into the development of artificial intelligence. With concerns about the risks that silicon-based systems pose to human consciousness, Elon feels obliged to work toward developing artificial intelligence to control its negative consequences. Neuralink and the Optimus humanoid robot at Tesla are both projects that aim to integrate humans and machines. A harmonious symbiosis that will accelerate humanity’s capacity to grow by allowing humans to circumvent strenuous labour. Similarly, it will help alleviate the suffering of those who experience neurological trauma that inhibits the functionalities of their body.
Similarly, to encourage sustainable living, Elon has an ambition to transition the world to renewable energy sources by developing effective and reliable infrastructure. Tesla is founded on this principle and uses electric vehicles to fund and propel this cause.
Likewise, Elon is adamant that the human species must become multi-planetary. SpaceX aims to achieve this with its Starship rocket. More broadly, Space X focuses on minimising the cost of sending rockets into space, whether that be through landing and reusing the booster rockets, innovating the technology and materials used to build rockets or shaking up the processes and regulations of space travel.
For Elon, the acquisition of Twitter was also motivated by his humanist vision. He views freedom of speech as a fundamental issue that is plaguing society, and that must be solved for humanity to prosper. His vision for Twitter is a platform for truth and information.
A Rash-intionalist
Elon is rash at making decisions as we have previously discussed. In the context of engineering, this was successful at developing products and advancing the state-of-the-art. However, in the social domain, this has been Elon’s kryptonite. He is quick to tweet out claims that are not fully justified and meander into the realm of conspiracy theories. His tweets are provocative and demonstrate Elon's lack of empathy. The ramifications of his reckless tweeting and spurious comments have frequently spilt over into his other endeavours such as SpaceX and Tesla. These outbursts of rage and misjudged comments can potentially be traced back to his volatile father and the subsequent trauma that Elon experienced.
Returning to engineering problems, Elon is very rational and adopts a first-principles philosophy. A mantra for Elon is that the only rules are those set by the laws of physics. Consequently, Elon consistently makes the point to his employees that every regulation that is to be imposed should be questioned, and a name should be attributed to the individual who crafted the regulation. Otherwise, the regulation is deemed to be stupid and unnecessary and thus should not be considered during the design and manufacturing process.
An Innovator
Elon has never opted for the conventional route. By thinking from first principles, and optimising for specific metrics he often stumbles upon ideas that do not conform to traditional beliefs. For example, the Boring company is an attempt to relieve traffic pressures by using tunnels to filter through vehicles. Similarly, Elon advocated the use of stainless steel for the Cybertruck and Starship over conventional materials such as carbon fibre, to avoid manufacturing issues that were previously perceived as inherent to the development process. Likewise, inspired by the construction of children's toys, the underside of his Tesla vehicles is created as a large single component using injection moulding.
Closing Remarks
Elon is unorthodox in his approach to business and life. Elon has a long-term and futuristic vision and is motivated to confront the existential risks facing humanity. His approach is hardcore and operates from first principles. From an engineering perspective, this has resulted in impactful projects pushing the barriers of technology and expanding the belief of what is possible. However, socially Elon has suffered many fractious relationships and experienced an undulating status in society. His manic temperament has led to audacious deadlines for engineering projects, as well as controversial and ill-formed social performances.
Elon has a deep and complex character resulting in moments of brilliance and contention. However, there is no doubt that his impact on society will be long-lasting.