Name: ‘He’s Addicted to Risk’: Elon Musk’s Biographer on the Tesla CEO
Uploaded: 2023-09-11T22:50:00Z
Duration: 10 min 29 s
Description: In a new biography about Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson shares what he learned during his two years shadowing the billionaire entrepreneur, including how Musk’s childhood influenced his leadership and instilled in him an aversion to contentment. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/The Wall Street Journal

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In a new biography about Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson shares what he learned during his two years shadowing the billionaire entrepreneur, including how Musk’s childhood influenced his leadership and instilled in him an aversion to contentment. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/The Wall Street Journal

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‘He’s Addicted to Risk’: Elon Musk’s Biographer on the Tesla CEO

A lot has already been written about Elon Musk. He lives his life between the tweets, upended, reinvented the auto industry, aerospace, now trying it with Twitter turned X. You spent two years shadowing him. What did you learn that we didn't already know about Elon Musk?

Well, there's certainly multiple Elon Musks, multiple personalities. Whether it's a hardcore engineering mode that you know so well, where he can figure out how to do a battery cell, or more importantly, figure out how to do steps on an assembly line that will make the battery cell. But also, there's almost a demon mode of Elon Musk, where he turns really dark. And that can be very problematic, especially when it came to acquiring Twitter, which I think involves more emotional intelligence.

Are there ground rules, anything off limits? Did you sleep on the factory floor next to him?

You know, I slept in Airstream trailers down in the south tip of Texas where SpaceX has its launchpad. I spent a lotta late nights in factories. He put nothing off limits, which surprised the heck out of me. I mean, meetings that were about forward-looking products, everything else, he said, "I just wanna surprise you about the transparency." And my side of the deal was, "Fine, I wanna be everywhere, but you get no control over the book. You don't even get to read it before it comes out."

You've written a lot of books. "Steve Jobs," biography was maybe, perhaps, an instant classic. And in that book, you talk about the challenge of breaking through the Apple co-founder's reality distortion field. With Musk, you had extraordinary access. By my count, you talked to more than 120 people around him, close deputies, even family members, his father even. Did you worry about that reality distortion field that he has, the fact that he can sometimes be an unreliable narrator in his own life?

Well, yes, he can be unreliable, and his memory is fallible and he sort of cloaks himself as a hero in every tale. But I didn't feel a reality distortion field. He was not, he almost was unaware of my presence, it seemed, a lot of the time. 'Cause he'd be being a real jerk to people at a meeting or blow up on a walk around one of the rocket sites. And I'd think, "Wait a minute, doesn't he know I'm taking notes here?" So it did surprise me how open and in some ways not trying to sugar coat things he was.

You spent a really significant part of the book in the beginning talking about his childhood and his relationship with his father. What was the early days of Elon Musk like?

You know, he was a scrawny kid, socially awkward, beaten up on the playground a whole lot, went to a wilderness camp, in which, you know, sort of the survival. And he lost 10 pounds in a week because they kept beating him up and taking his food. But when he went back to the wilderness camp a few years later, he had gotten bigger. He had learned a little judo, and he said, "I just learned to punch people in the nose as hard as I could when they were being mean to me. And sometimes they'd beat me up, but if I punched them really hard in the nose, they wouldn't do it again." You almost see that nowadays, which is he's pugnacious. He sometimes can be so confrontational, and when in doubt, he punches in the nose.

You talk about his relationship with his father. His father is almost described like a Jekyll and Hyde-like character. Sometimes he can be friendly, sometimes he can be volatile. I've never seen him go so in-depth about that childhood experience. Why do you think he was ready to talk about it now?

It took a long time for Musk to wanna talk about his childhood. I just sat there, I'd raise it every now and then, and sometimes we'd get to a place where suddenly, he'd start talking about his father. And he would go, get teary-eyed at times, very, very emotional, and just say, "You don't know how bad the abuse was." And after awhile, Elon just kept opening up about the psychological scars he had when his father would make him stand in front of his father and yell at him for more than an hour and take the sides of the people who had beaten up Elon and call Elon stupid.

You write that, "The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment." What do you think that means for the companies that he runs? What does that mean for the people that work for him as they try to reach the goals and sometimes achieve those goals?

He's addicted to drama. He's addicted to risk. And whenever things seem to be going smoothly, he almost has a compulsion to stir things up. It allows him to become a disruptive figure, but also a difficult leader.

What do you think was one of the most surprising kind of instances of him losing his temper with one of his employees?

Oh, one night in South Texas at the launchpad of SpaceX, it's a Friday night at 10:00 p.m. And everything's going smoothly. There's no launches being scheduled. And he looks and there's only two people working at the launchpad. And all of a sudden, I see demon mode coming in, almost like storm clouds from the Gulf of Mexico. And I'm thinking, "Well, it's Friday night at 10:00 p.m." And yet, he just reams out this guy named Andy who was in charge of the launchpad site. And he orders a surge. He orders 100 people to come in from different parts of SpaceX, from Florida, California, so they can all work for 24 hours a day getting this thing done, even though there was no need to.

What is demon mode in your mind?

It's almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Where a cloud comes over and he gets into a trance, and he can just be tough in a cold way. He never gets really angry, never gets that physical, but coldly brutal to people. And he almost doesn't remember afterwards what he's done. Sometimes I'll say, "Why did you say that to that person?" And he'll look at me blankly, as if he didn't quite remember what happened while he was in demon mode. Now, one of the things that Claire Boucher, known as Grimes, says is, "You don't wanna be around him when he's in demon mode. It's really frightening," she said. But then she added, "But demon mode is what gets shit done."

Given all of the stories about how he treats people, why do you think he still has the ability to attract talent to his companies?

I talked to some of the people on the Autopilot team at Tesla when they were doing Optimus, the robot. And a couple of 'em had quit because it was just too brutal dealing with him, and they got burned out. But then one of 'em was back. I said, "What happened?" He said, "I decided I had a choice between being burned out or being bored and I decided I wanted to be burned out because I believed in the mission." So some survive, but a whole lot don't.

Another key one of the ways of how he tries to manage or how we kinda tries to think about the world is something he calls first principles, which is essentially a problem-solving way to not take what's been done in the past as the way it should be done in the future. As trying to reach the ultimate goal of whatever you're setting out, kind of getting to the root problem and figuring it out from there. But that's very abstract. It's kind of hard to put that, understand what he means by that, but it seems as if by sitting around with him, you've kind of seen the way he's trying to impart that decision-making framework to people with something called the algorithm. What is the algorithm?

The algorithm is a five-step process for not only making good products and designing good products, but manufacturing them. And you're right. It begins with first principles. He says, "Question every requirement." And by first principles, he means look down at the physics. If somebody says, "No, we can't build it at this price," he says, "Tell me how much the materials cost. Tell me exactly what's involved here. And then, tell me you can or can't do it." When he first was trying to buy a rocket booster in Russia early on, and they were charging him $15 million or something, on the flight home, he calculated how much is the cost of materials and fuel, and he said, "Okay, those are the first principles. We should be able to make it at a much cheaper cost." With the algorithm, he's always saying, "Question every requirement. And then delete, delete, delete." So he simplifies things. And then, only then do you start to speed up the manufacturing process, and eventually, automate it. One of his big mistakes at Tesla was he went to automation too quickly before he had deleted every part and questioned every requirement.

Do you see him moving into a new era where he's essentially seeding a bunch of ideas, almost a Thomas Edison character, putting money towards bigger ideas and letting smart people invent it? Or is he gonna kinda keep control like a Henry Ford back in the day of making sure the Model T was the Model T for as long as possible?

Well, I think one of his weaknesses, I'll call it, is he really is a control freak. You want him to give up control. Say of Twitter, you're thinking, "Okay, Linda Yaccarino should run it." But he doesn't really cede too much control. Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX learns how to deal with him. He really is focused on the product. She gets to run the company. But no, I don't see him giving up a lotta control over these companies, even though they're are now six or seven of 'em, depending on how you count, that he's running.

Are we in the final act of this kind of narrative? Has he peaked? Is he on the decline? I would say that, for many years, people have predicted his kinda the epic collapse of something, and he's been able to get through it. Is this just another example of that?

Some of 'me are gonna collapse. It's gonna be like his rocket ships and everything else. He believes you can't get into orbit without blowing things up every now and then. So there will be debris. There will be things blown up. But I think, you know, most things he's done keep surprising me as being successful.

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