Here are my some highlights, categorized by LLMs:
Childhood and early life
Questioning Authority
Musk’s early skepticism of religious teachings
When Musk was young, his mother started taking him to Sunday school at the local Anglican Church, where she was a teacher. It did not go well. She would tell her class stories from the Bible, and he would question them. “What do you mean, the waters parted?” he asked. “That’s not possible.” When she told the story of Jesus feeding the crowd with loaves and fishes, he countered that things cannot materialize out of nothing. Having been baptized, he was expected to take communion, but he began questioning that as well. “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.
Educational Goals
Musk’s motivation for studying both physics and business
He decided to major in physics because, like his father, he was drawn to engineering. The essence of being an engineer, he felt, was to address any problem by drilling down to the most fundamental tenets of physics. He also decided to pursue a joint degree in business. “I was concerned that if I didn’t study business, I would be forced to work for someone who did,” he says. “My goal was to engineer products by having a feel for the physics and never have to work for a boss with a business degree.”
Early Interest in Sustainable Energy
Musk’s senior paper on solar power
Musk also became convinced that solar power, which in 1994 was just taking off, was the best path toward sustainable energy. His senior paper was titled “The Importance of Being Solar.” He was motivated not just by the dangers of climate change but also by the fact that fossil fuel reserves would start to dwindle. “Society will soon have no option but to focus on renewable power sources,” he wrote. His final page showed a “power station of the future,” involving a satellite with mirrors that would concentrate sunlight onto solar panels and send the resulting electricity back to Earth via a microwave beam. The professor gave him a grade of 98, saying it was a “very interesting and well written paper, except the last figure that comes out of the blue.”
Life Vision
Musk’s early focus on impactful areas
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.” In the summer of 1995, it became clear to him that the first of these, the internet, was not going to wait for him to finish graduate school. The web had just been opened up for commercial use, and that August the browser startup Netscape went public, soaring within a day to a market value of $2.9 billion.
Psychological Impact
The lasting effects of Musk’s childhood experiences
When he felt dinged up, cornered, bullied, either online or in person, it took him back to a place that was super painful, where he was dissed by his father and bullied by his classmates. But now he could own the playground.
Management style and work ethic
Demanding Work Environment
Musk’s expectations for himself and his employees
From the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager, contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance. At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations, and he expected others to do the same. His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges. The Zip2 team won second place in a national Quake competition. They would have come in first, he says, but one of them crashed his computer by pushing it too hard.
Self-Awareness
Musk’s acknowledgment of his obsessive nature
Musk responded with a very self-aware email. “I am by nature obsessive-compulsive,” he wrote Fricker. “What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way. God knows why… it’s probably rooted in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit.”
Extreme Deadlines
Musk’s tactic of setting unrealistic deadlines
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.
Engineering-Centric Structure
Musk’s approach to organizational structure
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. He also had a corollary that worked well for rockets but less so for Twitter: engineers rather than the product managers should lead the team.
Questioning Requirements
Musk’s approach to challenging established norms
One reason was that rocket components were subject to hundreds of specifications and requirements mandated by the military and NASA. At big aerospace companies, engineers followed these religiously. Musk did the opposite: he made his engineers question all specifications. 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.
The Algorithm
Musk’s five-step approach to problem-solving
At any given production meeting, whether at Tesla or SpaceX, there is a nontrivial chance that Musk will intone, like a mantra, what he calls “the algorithm.” It was shaped by the lessons he learned during the production hell surges at the Nevada and Fremont factories. His executives sometimes move their lips and mouth the words, like they would chant the liturgy along with their priest. “I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Musk says. “But I think it’s helpful to say it to an annoying degree.” **It had five commandments:
- 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.
Management Principles
Additional guidelines for Musk’s management approach
The algorithm was sometimes accompanied by a few corollaries, among them:
- All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20% of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs doing installations. Otherwise, they are like a cavalry leader who can’t ride a horse or a general who can’t use a sword.
- 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.
- It’s OK to be wrong. Just don’t be confident and wrong.
- Never ask your troops to do something you’re not willing to do.
- Whenever there are problems to solve, don’t just meet with your managers. Do a skip level, where you meet with the level right below your managers.
- 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.
Tesla
Tesla’s Founding
Musk’s role in Tesla’s early days
The pieces thus came together for what would become the world’s most valuable and transformative automobile company: Eberhard as CEO, Tarpenning as president, Straubel as chief technology officer, Wright as chief operating officer, and Musk as the chair of the board and primary funder. Years later, after many bitter disputes and a lawsuit, they agreed that all five of them would be called cofounders.
Vertical Integration
Musk’s strategy for Tesla’s manufacturing
One of the most important decisions that Elon Musk made about Tesla—the defining imprint that led to its success and its impact on the auto industry—was that it should make its own key components, rather than piecing together a car with hundreds of components from independent suppliers. Tesla would control its own destiny—and quality and costs and supply chain—by being vertically integrated. Creating a good car was important. Even more important was creating the manufacturing processes and factories that could mass-produce them, from the battery cells to the body.
The Machine That Builds the Machine
Musk’s focus on manufacturing processes
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.
Government Loans
Clarification on Tesla’s funding
Over the years, one criticism of Tesla has been that the company was “bailed out” or “subsidized” by the government in 2009. In fact, Tesla did not get money from the Treasury Department’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), commonly known as “the bailout.” Under that program, the government lent $18.4 billion to General Motors and Chrysler as they went through bankruptcy restructuring. Tesla did not apply for any TARP or stimulus package money. What Tesla did get in June 2009 was $465 million in interest-bearing loans from a Department of Energy program. The Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program lent money to companies to make electric or fuel-efficient cars. Ford, Nissan, and Fisker Automotive also got loans.
Domestic Manufacturing
Tesla’s approach to manufacturing in contrast to industry trends
Beginning with the theology of globalization in the 1980s, and relentlessly driven by cost-cutting CEOs and their activist investors, American companies shut down domestic factories and offshored manufacturing. The trend accelerated in the early 2000s, when Tesla was getting started. Between 2000 and 2010, the U.S. lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs. By sending their factories abroad, American companies saved labor costs, but they lost the daily feel for ways to improve their products. Musk bucked this trend, largely because he wanted to have tight control of the manufacturing process. He believed that designing the factory to build a car—“the machine that builds the machine”—was as important as designing the car itself. Tesla’s design-manufacturing feedback loop gave it a competitive advantage, allowing it to innovate on a daily basis.
Becoming the World’s Richest Person
Tesla’s stock price surge and Musk’s wealth
Tesla’s stock price, which had been knocked down to $25 when COVID began to spread in early 2020, rebounded ten-fold by the beginning of 2021. On January 7 it hit $260. That day Musk became the richest person in the world, with $190 billion, vaulting him past Jeff Bezos. Under the extraordinary compensation bet he had made with his Tesla board in February 2018, amid Tesla’s worst production problems, he got no guaranteed salary. Instead, his compensation would depend on hitting very aggressive revenue, profit, and market value targets, which included Tesla’s market valuation increasing ten-fold to $650 billion. News articles at the time predicted that most targets would be impossible to achieve. But in October 2021, Tesla became the sixth company in U.S. history to be worth more than $1 trillion. Its market value was greater than its five biggest rivals—Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, and GM—combined. And in April 2022, it reported a profit of $5 billion on revenue of $19 billion, an 81 percent increase from the year before. The result was that Musk’s payout from the 2018 compensation deal was around $56 billion and his net worth at the start of 2022 increased to $304 billion.
The Toll of Success
Musk’s reflection on the challenges of running Tesla
From 2007 onwards, until maybe last year, it’s been nonstop pain. There’s a gun to your head, make Tesla work, pull a rabbit out of your hat, then pull another rabbit out of the hat. A stream of rabbits flying through the air. If the next rabbit does not come out, you’re dead. It takes a toll. You can’t be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you. But there’s something else I’ve found this year. 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.
SpaceX
Vision for Space Exploration
Musk’s motivation behind founding SpaceX
Musk had founded SpaceX, he liked to say, to increase the chances for the survival of human consciousness by making us a multiplanetary species.
Questioning Requirements
Musk’s approach to challenging aerospace industry norms
One reason was that rocket components were subject to hundreds of specifications and requirements mandated by the military and NASA. At big aerospace companies, engineers followed these religiously. Musk did the opposite: he made his engineers question all specifications. 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?’ " says Tim Buzza, a refugee from Boeing who would become SpaceX’s vice president of launch and testing. “And we would say, ‘There is a military specification that says it’s a requirement.’ And he’d reply, ‘Who wrote that? Why does it make sense?’ " All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.
Twitter as a Playground
Musk’s perspective on Twitter’s appeal
Twitter is an ideal—almost too ideal—playground for Musk. It rewards players who are impulsive, irreverent, and unfiltered, like a flamethrower for the thumbs. It has many of the attributes of a school yard, including taunting and bullying. But in the case of Twitter, the clever kids win followers rather than get pushed down the concrete steps. And if you’re the richest and cleverest of all, you can even decide, unlike back when you were a kid, to become king of the school yard.
Concern for Free Speech
Musk’s motivation for acquiring Twitter
By early 2022, a new ingredient had been added to this combustible cauldron: Musk’s swelling concern with the dangers of the “woke-mind virus” that he believed was infecting America. He disdained Donald Trump, but he felt it was absurd to ban permanently a former president, and he became increasingly riled up by complaints from those on the Right who were being suppressed on Twitter. “He saw the direction Twitter was heading, which was that if you were on the wrong end of the spectrum you were censored,” says Birchall.
Vision for Twitter
Musk’s plans for Twitter’s future
Musk had already formulated the business case for why he was seeking to buy Twitter. He believed that he could quintuple Twitter’s revenue to $26 billion by 2028, even as he reduced its reliance on advertising from 90 percent of the revenue to 45 percent. The new revenue would come from user subscriptions and data licensing. He also projected revenue from enabling users to make payments, including small ones for newspaper articles and other content through Twitter, like they could on WeChat.
Culture Clash
The contrast between Twitter’s and Musk’s workplace philosophies
The issue was not merely the facilities. Between Twitterland and the Muskverse was a radical divergence in outlook that reflected two different mindsets about the American workplace. Twitter prided itself on being a friendly place where coddling was considered a virtue. “We were definitely very high-empathy, very caring about inclusion and diversity; everyone needs to feel safe here,” says Leslie Berland, who was chief marketing and people officer until she was fired by Musk. The company had instituted a permanent work-from-home option and allowed a mental “day of rest” each month. One of the commonly used buzzwords at the company was “psychological safety.” 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. Let that sink in.
Content Moderation Challenges
The difficulties faced in managing free speech on Twitter
Twitter was being inundated with racist and anti-Semitic posts. Musk had declared his opposition to censorship, and now swarms of trolls and provocateurs were testing the limits. Use of the N-word went up 500 percent in the twelve hours after Musk took control. Unfettered free speech, the new team quickly discovered, had a downside.
Twitter Blue Verification
The challenges of implementing a paid verification system
When Twitter Blue began rolling out on the morning of Wednesday, November 9, the impersonation problem was as bad as Musk and Roth had feared. There was a tsunami of fake accounts with blue checks pretending to be famous politicians and, worse yet, big advertisers. One purporting to be the drugmaker Eli Lilly tweeted, “We are excited to announce insulin is free now.” The company’s stock price fell more than 4 percent in an hour. A Coca-Cola impersonator said, “If this gets 1000 retweets we will put cocaine back in Coca-Cola.” (It did, but Coke didn’t.) A Nintendo impostor showed Mario flipping the bird. Nor was Tesla spared. “Our cars do not respect school zone speed limits. Fuck them kids,” read one tweet from a blue-checked account purporting to be Tesla. Another tweeted, “BREAKING: A second Tesla has hit the World Trade Center.”
The Twitter Files
Revelations about Twitter’s previous content moderation practices
Taibbi’s initial thirty-seven-tweet thread showed how Twitter had set up special systems for politicians, the FBI, and intelligence agencies to provide input on what tweets should be considered for deletion. Most notably, Taibbi included messages from 2020, when Yoel Roth and others at Twitter debated whether to block links to a New York Post story about what was purported to be (correctly, as it turned out) a laptop abandoned by Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The messages showed many of them scrambling to find rationales for banning mention of the story, such as claiming that it violated policies against using hacked material or might be part of a Russian disinformation plot. Those were flimsy covers for censoring a story, and both Roth and Jack Dorsey would later concede that doing so was a mistake.
Journalist Suspensions
Musk’s controversial decision to suspend journalists
Worse yet, especially from the vantage of making the site a haven for free speech, Musk arbitrarily suspended a handful of journalists who wrote about what he had done to @elonjet. His ostensible reason was that their stories had linked to the @elonjet account and were thus also doxing him, but in fact @elonjet was no longer available and the links simply led to a page that said “Account suspended.” It thus seemed that Musk had acted partly out of pique, retaliating against journalists whose stories had been critical of him. These included Ryan Mac of the New York Times, Drew Harwell and Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post, and at least eight others.
@elonjet Account Suspension
Musk’s decision to suspend an account tracking his private jet
Then, after the incident involving X, Musk made the unilateral decision to suspend @elonjet altogether. He justified it by saying that Twitter now had a policy against doxing people’s location.
Artificial Intelligence
AI Projects
Musk’s various ventures in AI and related technologies
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. At first these endeavors were rather independent, but eventually Musk would tie them all together, along with a new chatbot company he founded called X.AI, to pursue the goal of artificial general intelligence.
AI Safety Concerns
Musk’s motivations for AI development
Optimus and Neuralink were launched to create human-machine interfaces that would protect us from evil artificial intelligence.
Philanthropy and worldview
Views on Philanthropy
Musk’s skepticism towards traditional philanthropy
At the end of the tour, the conversation turned to philanthropy. Musk expressed his view that most of it was “bullshit.” There was only a twenty-cent impact for every dollar put in, he estimated. He could do more good for climate change by investing in Tesla.
Conflict with Bill Gates
Disagreement over Tesla stock shorting
The dispute reflected different mindsets. When I asked Gates why he had shorted Tesla, he explained that he had calculated that the supply of electric cars would get ahead of demand, causing prices to fall. I nodded but still had the same question: Why had he shorted the stock? Gates looked at me as if I had not understood what he just explained and then replied as if the answer was obvious: 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?”
Mission-Driven Approach
Musk’s focus on impactful ventures
Musk had founded SpaceX, he liked to say, to increase the chances for the survival of human consciousness by making us a multiplanetary species. The grand rationale for Tesla and SolarCity was to lead the way to a sustainable energy future. Optimus and Neuralink were launched to create human-machine interfaces that would protect us from evil artificial intelligence.
Twitter’s Role in Civilization
Musk’s perspective on Twitter’s importance
“At first I thought it didn’t fit into my primary large missions,” he told me in April. “But I’ve come to believe it can be part of the mission of preserving civilization, buying our society more time to become multiplanetary.” How so? Partly it involved free speech. “There seems to be more and more group-think in the media, toeing the line, so if you weren’t in step, you’re just going to be ostracized or your voice will be shut off.” For democracy to survive, it was important, he felt, to purge Twitter’s woke culture and root out its biases, so people had the perception that it was an open space for all opinions.