Tarun's Blog

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
5 of 5 stars

The whole world is enamoured by Elon Musk’s unfiltered personality, unbounded energy, and his grand vision of making us humans into a multiplanetary race. But what is it that differentiates Musk from other innovators and makes him so successful in multiple endeavours covering such diverse fields as Automobile, Space, Telecommunication, Renewables, AI, Robotics? If you’re curious enough to find some answers, then Walter Isaacson’s book is the right place to start with. Walter Isaacson shadowed Musk for two long years, sat in his meetings, interviewed him multiple times, talked to number of his close family members, friends, colleagues, competitors and has documented all that in this authoritative biography. Walter Isaacson has presented an intimate peek at the vagabond life Musk leads on day-to-day basis, how he drives his teams at Tesla, SpaceX and now Twitter, his decision-making style, the ruthlessness that allows him to achieve impossible results, his undulating mood swings and his love for his family and kids.

Musk’s childhood at South Africa was rough and stormy, he was bullied, beaten, and harassed both at home and schools, he attended. Elon Musk had an abusive father who would repeatedly berate him and encouraged physical and emotional toughness. He is no longer on speaking terms with his father but somewhere in his psyche, Musk’s father is still bedevilling him and some of his callousness and impulsiveness can be attributed to the abuse he suffered as a child. Musk’s attraction to risk like his daring attempt to launch rockets and disrupting the whole automobile industry was a family trait. His maternal grandfather it seems was a daredevil himself indulging in movements like Social Credit Party advocating issuing free credit notes to citizens, joining another one called Technocracy advocating that governments be run by Technocrats and taught himself to fly a single seater plane. At one point he got enamoured with the idea of discovering an ancient lost city in Kalahari Desert and spent all his fortune in that futile search. Through his grandfather, Elon got the taste of risk taking and the feel that real adventure involve risk. Musk’s father was an engineer too and a risk taker himself. He loved flying and once owned a share in an emerald mine. Elon was named by her parents after his mother’s grandfather who was named J. Elon Haldeman. Elon’s father agreed to the name as it was also the name of a protagonist in a science fiction book, he was fond of called Project Mars which describes a colony on the planet by an executive known as “the Elon”. Little did he know that his son would grow up creating the only viable rocket capable of populating Mars and might also end up running a Mars colony in future.

Elon as a child was curious, intelligent and a voracious reader but was socially unadapt. Compounding his social problems was his unwillingness to suffer politely those he considered fools and would use word “stupid” often. As a result, Elon had a lonely childhood which led to him to develop an aversion for loneliness as an adult. To this day Elon sleeps at his friend’s house when travelling and often sleep at Tesla or SpaceX factory floors.

Elon left South Africa at the age of seventeen and applied for Canadian citizenship as his mother was born in Canada. He first started as an intern at Microsoft’s Toronto office and one of his first purchase was a computer in 1989. He had no friends or social life in Toronto, and spent most of his time reading or working on the computer. He scored moderately in SAT tests and got himself an engineering seat at Queen’s university at Toronto. He was more interested in late-night philosophy discussions about the meaning of life and years later he told the Queen’s Alumni magazine that the most important thing he learned during his two years there was “how to work collaboratively with smart people and make use of the Socratic method to achieve commonality of purpose”. While at Queen’s Elon got addicted to strategy games first the board ones and later computer-generated ones like Civilisation, Warcraft and that addiction has persisted to this day, and he is still addicted to Polytopia game. When his brother Kimbal moved to Canada and joined Elon as a student at Queen’s, the brothers developed a routine. They would read the newspaper and pick out the person they found most interesting. Then they would try to call them and if they get through then they would convince them to have a lunch with them. Once they picked a Scotia bank’s executive and over lunch got themselves an offer for summer job. One topic Musk researched at Scotia bank was Latin American debt and figured out that there is money to be made by buying the Latin American bonds at a cheap price and proposed it to the bank but could not convince them. Out of that incident he developed a healthy disrespect for banks and financial industry which ultimately led him to found PayPal. Musk later shifted to Penn’s to do his major in Physics. At Penn’s Musk focussed on the three areas that paved his career path in later years. He was interested in calibrating force of gravity to see how it applied to building rockets. Musk would also read academic papers on batteries and started talking about electric cars. In senior year Musk wrote a term end paper titled “The Importance of Being Solar” in which he proposed building a power station of future involving a satellite with mirrors that would concentrate sunlight onto solar panels and send the resulting electricity back to Earth via Microwave beam.

As he completed the major at Penn’s, the Internet wave was in full bloom and Elon decided to ride on it. Along with his brother they moved to Silicon Valley and decided to put up a searchable directory of businesses online and combine it with map software that would give users directions to them. They named at company Zip2 i.e. where you want to go. They were able to pitch to potential investors and were able to secure $3 million in seed funding. But as it happens with venture capitalists, they quickly brought in adult supervision and Rich Sorkin was made the CEO of Zip2 and Musk was made the CTO. Initially Musk liked the arrangement as he thought he was more suited to product development, but along the way he learned the most important lesson that it’s the CEO that holds the power to break or make the company. And that lesson he imbibed to his heart and never let CEO role to be taken by anyone else in his later ventures. In January 1999, less than four years after Elon & Kimbal launched Zip2, they were able to sell their stake over to Compaq and Elon became multi-millionaire at the age of 27 pocketing neat 22 million from the sale.

Elon then started delving over books on the banking system and in March 1999 he founded X.com. His concept was grand, X.com would be a one stop shop for all financial needs, banking, digital purchase, credit, investments, and he wanted to devise a way that all transactions were securely recorded in real time. Meanwhile another company Continuity led by Peter Theil had a similar person to person payment offering called PayPal. By the beginning of 2000, amid the first signs of Internet bubble bursting, both the companies decided to merge instead of competing against each other with Musk as CEO. By late summer 2000, other founders at Continuity and X.com found Musk increasingly difficult to deal with. While Musk was honeymooning with his new wife Justine at Australia, the other founders staged a coup against Musk and removed him as CEO. For the second time in three years, Musk had been pushed out of company he founded. He was a visionary who didn’t play well with others. PayPal went public in early 2002 and was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion. Musk pay-out was $250 million. His vision for X.com was unfulfilled, perhaps for the better, when years later he bought Twitter, he reenergised his old vision of making a one stop shop for humanity’s financial needs. Time will tell if he succeeds but looking at Musk’s entrepreneurial growth path, anyone will give it a high probability of success. Though he was summarily ousted from PayPal he never kept a grudge with other cofounders and moved on. That was another lesson to be learned from Musk success story that never burn bridges with people you cross paths with. And this came in handy when his PayPal buddies helped him tide over a tough situation a decade later when he was struggling with his new ventures.

After his ouster from PayPal, Musk decided to try his luck on his greatest love i.e. Space. Musk wasn’t sure that a private company could do much in space. One day in early 2001 he logged on to NASA’s website to check on NASA’s plan to go to Mars, but when he found that there is no plan at NASA to go to Mars he was dumbfounded and decided to explore more. He went to Palo Alto public library to read about rocket engineering and started calling experts, asking to borrow their old engine manuals. It is no doubt crazy to note that a thirty-year-old entrepreneur who had been ousted from two tech start-ups decides to build rockets that could take humanity with aim to populate Mars. But when asked Musk had three motivations for that decision. First, he found it surprising and frightening that technological progress was not inevitable. It could stop and could even backslide. America had gone to the moon but then grounded their shuttle program. Egyptians learned how to build the pyramids, but then lost that knowledge. Second was the survival of human civilisation and consciousness in case something happened to our fragile planet. Mathematically it seemed logical there were other civilisations, but the lack of any evidence raised the uncomfortable possibility that the Earth’s human species might be the only example of consciousness and needs to be preserved. Musk’s third motivation was more inspirational. For him US is a land of adventurers, it is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. This spirit needed to be rekindled in America and for Musk best way to do that would be to embark on a mission to colonise Mars.

Musk decided that, if he wanted to start a rocket company, it was best to move to Los Angeles, which was home to most of the aerospace companies like Lockheed and Boeing. He was now eligible to become a US citizen because of his marriage to Justine and he took oath in early 2002. Musk moved to Los Angeles and began gathering rocket engineers for meetings at a hotel near LA airport. He first came up with an idea to send a Greenhouse to Mars which would send pictures of plants growing back to Earth. He had money but no affordable rocket that could take the greenhouse to Mars. Through his meetings with Rocket engineers, he encountered someone who had dealt with Russians, and they planned to go to Russia to see if they could buy some launch slots or rockets. Elon met Russian officials to buy two Dnepr rockets but more he negotiated the higher the price went. It prodded Musk to think bigger. As he stewed about the absurd price the Russians wanted to charge, he employed some first principles thinking, drilling down to the basic physics of the situation, and building up from there. That’s when he conceived an “idiot index” which calculated how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. If a product had a high index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising more efficient manufacturing process. Once he found that Russian rockets had an extremely high idiot index, he decided to embark on one of the most audacious ventures of our times of privately building rockets that could launch satellites and then humans into orbit and eventually send them to Mars and beyond. Musk incorporated SpaceX in May 2002 and set for himself audacious target to launch its first rocket by September 2003 and to send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2010.

Musk heard of Tom Mueller who had been part of the team at TRW which built the rocket engine that took Neil Armstrong to the moon and enlisted him as the first hire of Space X. He hired few more engineers, found an old warehouse right near the LA airport which became SpaceX headquarters. In laying out the factory, Musk followed his philosophy that the design, engineering and manufacturing team would all be clustered together. As his team grew, Musk infused it with his tolerance for risk and reality bending wilfulness. Musk named the rocket they were building Falcon 1, after the spacecraft from Star Wars. Musk was laser focussed on keeping costs down because for him cost effectiveness was critical for his goal of colonising Mars. That led him to manufacture as many components as possible in house. He was also able to instil a maniacal sense of urgency in his team and insisted on setting unrealistic deadlines even when they were not necessary. Musk also let his team learn by failing and took an iterative approach to design. Move fast, blow things up, repeat. It’s not how well you avoid problems; it’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it. Improvisation was another principle that was promoted to do things faster, cheaper, and better. Musk was able to win his first SpaceX contract in 2003 from defence department to launch a new breed of satellites that would help ground force in live battle scenarios. His risk-taking attitude came to fore when he learned that NASA has awarded a no bid $227 million contract to a competitor for rockets that could resupply ISS. Musk believed SpaceX could also do that and he sued NASA over that and ultimately won that dispute when court ordered NASA to open the project to competitive bidding and SpaceX got a major portion of that.

SpaceX was always an endeavour to get humanity to Mars, but that was not the end goal. Musk is also interested in how a Mars colony would look like and how it should be governed. He has seen how overall governance has improved on Earth after the advent of Internet and he wanted something similar for a Mars colony i.e. an internet for outer space. As Musk often did, he combined an aspirational mission with a practical business plan. He conceived an idea of providing satellite-based internet service to paying customers. To pursue this mission, Musk announced in January 2015 the creation of a new division of SpaceX called Starlink. The plan was to send satellites into low-earth orbit, about 340 miles high to have low signal latency with the aim of creating a mega-constellation of forty thousand satellites covering every nook and corner of planet Earth. Musk has plans to replicate similar constellation for planet Mars once colonization starts there. The worth of Startlink was noticeable in recent Ukraine war when Russia destroyed all communication infrastructure on ground but with the help of Star link terminals, Ukrainian army could still maintain communication channels with its ground forces.

While Musk was building up SpaceX, he had a chance encounter with Jeffrey Brian Straubel who had idea for building an electric car using lithium-ion batteries and was looking for someone to invest in that venture. Straubel suggested that Musk talk to Tom Gage who has co-founded small company AC propulsion that was pursuing the same idea. They had built a fibreglass prototype and demoed it to Musk who was impressed. Musk wanted them to build a speedy roadster, but Gage was interested in building a smaller slower car. Gage nudged him to Martin Eberhard another Electric car enthusiast who had recently founded a company named Tesla to build fast electric cars using lithium-ion batteries. Martin had the idea but no funding when he first met with Elon Musk in March 2004. Musk listened to his vision for a supercharged electric car and decided to invest and became the chair of the board of Tesla motors.

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. tesla would control its own destiny, quality and costs and supply chain by being vertically integrated. One issue with start-ups, especially those with multiple founders and funders, is who should be in charge. Both Eberhard and Musk considered themselves to be the main founder of Tesla. In Eberhart’s mind, he had come up with the idea, chosen a name and gone out and found funders. But in Musk’s mind, he was the one who put Eberhard together with Straubel and provided the funding needed to start the company, before that there was no IP, no employees, nothing. At first this difference in perspective was not a big problem but later it boiled up during design decision meetings and Eberhard was pushed out with Musk in driving seat leading Tesla on its path of success.

The book goes into a lot of detail on how Musk led from front applied his first principles to lead SpaceX and Tesla to become the pioneering companies in their respective fields. His tenacity allowed him to rise after each failure and start again. Musk had budgeted for three launch attempts of Falcon 1 at SpaceX, and all had exploded before they could get to the orbit. Facing personal bankruptcy and with Tesla in financial crisis, his fellow co-founder of PayPal landed him a lifeline. Luckily for Elon and SpaceX, the fourth attempt was a charming success and allowed them to get the NASA contract to resupply ISS. Since then, SpaceX has proven that space pioneering could be led by private entrepreneurs. Similarly, Musk in 2008 got some funding from Department of Energy and Daimler that allowed him to proceed with a project that would turn Tesla into a real automotive company that could lead the way into the electric vehicle era, a mainstream four door sedan called Model-S. Since then, Tesla has grown in leaps and bounds and has single headedly transitioned the automobile industry into the electric path.

While building SpaceX rockets and Tesla electric cars, Musk was also keeping an eye on the advancements in Artificial Intelligence. Musk primary reason for building SpaceX was to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike or civilisational collapse. But as he delved deeper into the world of artificial intelligence, he saw another potential thread to this list i.e. AI. The potential dangers of AI became a topic that Musk would raise, almost obsessively during late night conversations with his friends like Larry Page of Google. Musk argued that unless we built in safeguards, AI might replace humans, making our species irrelevant or even extinct. Page would push back, why would it matter if machines someday surpassed humans in intelligence, even consciousness? It would simply be the next stage of evolution. But for Musk human consciousness was a precious flicker of light in the universe that should not be allowed to be extinguished. When Google bought Deep Mind in 2013, Musk was dismayed and he decided to collaborate with Sam Altman to cofound a non-profit artificial intelligence research lab, which they named OpenAI to counter Google Deep Mind. The goal was to increase the probability that AI would develop in a safe way that would be beneficial to humanity. One sidekick to Musk’s interest in AI was the launch of Autopilot for Tesla with the goal to create autonomous vehicles.

Another sidekick was to create a humanoid robot, one that could process visual inputs and learn to perform tasks without violating Asimov’s law that a robot shall not harm humanity. While Google and other AI pioneers were focussing on creating chatbots, Musk decided to focus on AI systems that operated in real physical world such as robots and cars. And thus, Optimus came into being, a humanoid robot that would learn to perform tasks without needing line by line instructions. Like a human, it would teach itself by observing. Musk believed it would transform not only our economy, but the way we live. Neuralink is another iteration of this deeper dive in AI where Musk is trying to create a human computer interface by planting chips inside human mind to create Man-Computer Symbiosis. According to Musk, the hope is that in not far in future, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly.

In early 2022, Musk got a Tweet out “I made an offer” and it started a roller-coaster journey to take control of ultimate playground which was Twitter. Musk had founded SpaceX to increase the chances of survival of human consciousness by making humanity a multi planetary species. The grand rationale for Tesla was to lead the way to sustainable energy future. Optimus and Neuralink were launched to create human machine interfaces that would protect from evil AI. For musk Twitter can also be a part of the mission of preserving civilization, buying our society more time to become multiplanetary. For democracy to survive, it is important to purge woke culture, root out its biases and create an open space for all opinions and Musk feels Twitter can be that place. Also, Twitter gives Musk a platform through which he can relive his dream of creating a one stop shop for all human financial needs. Musk has already rebranded Twitter as X and is well on course to build all new functionality to link social media with finance.

Elon Musk is impulsive, unhinged, and unrestrained but he can get the rockets to orbit, transition automobile industry to EVs, safeguard us from evil AI and might create an everything app in X. He can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic, and also crazy. Crazy enough to think he can change the world.

– Tarun Rattan

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