Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster. 688 pages. 2023
****
I read this book for two primary reasons. First, to learn about Elon Musk’s leadership, and second, because I had enjoyed the author’s book about Steve Jobs. Musk allowed the author to shadow him for two years, encouraged his friends, colleagues, family members, adversaries, and ex-wives to talk to him, and exercised no control over the book. A core question about Musk is whether his bad behavior can be separated from the all-in drive that made him successful.
Musk was born in 1971. His parents divorced when he was eight. Today, neither he, nor his brother Kimball, speak to their father. He was bullied and beaten in his public high school. Reading was Musk’s psychological retreat. The Hitchhiker’s Guide, combined with Musk’s later immersion into video and tabletop simulation games, led to a lifelong fascination with the tantalizing thought that we might merely be pawns in a simulation devised by some higher-order beings. Strategy games—those played on a board and then those for computers—would become central to Musk’s life.
Musk would move on his own from South African to the U.S. at a relatively early age. He attended Penn, where he majored in physics and business.
Musk has Asperger’s, a common name for a form of autism-spectrum disorder that can affect a person’s social skills, relationships, emotional connectivity, and self-regulation. We read that in times of emotional darkness, Musk throws himself into his work, maniacally.
From the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager, contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance. He genuinely did not care if he offended or intimidated the people he worked with, as long as he drove them to accomplish feats they thought were impossible. One of Musk’s management tactics is to set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it. He has a maniacal sense of urgency, and a willingness, even desire, to take risks.
The book goes into Musk’s relationship with women, including the mothers of his children (he has ten surviving children, with Nevada dying of sudden infant death syndrome). One son, Xavier, transitioned to female at age sixteen, is known as Jenna, and is estranged from Musk.
Musk’s leadership philosophy includes “the algorithm”, which has these five commandments:
- Question every requirement.
- Delete any part or process you can.
- Simplify and optimize.
- Accelerate cycle time.
- Automate.
Musk is guided by the principles of physics. A goal is to colonize Mars, so humans can survive when Earth is uninhabitable due to climate change. He is also striving for “Full Self-Driving” vehicles, which he promises will revolutionize the world.
The book discusses Musk’s political evolution. As he became more concerned about wokeness, Musk’s party loyalties shifted.
The author spends a lot of time discussing Musk’s eventual purchase of Twitter (now X), where he cut 75% of the workforce. The author details that in the period after the Twitter deal, Musk spun out of control.
At the time of the book’s release, Musk was amazingly running six companies: Tesla, SpaceX and its Starlink unit, X, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X.AI.
Elon Musk is a massive (nearly 700 pages), and detailed biography of a fascinating leader. It is hard to summarize in a short review such as this. Regarding Musk’s leadership, his innovation and vision are to be admired – his people skills not so much. How much of the latter is due to his Asperger’s is hard to tell. In some ways, his leadership reminded me of that of Steve Jobs.
Going back to that core question about whether Musk’s bad behavior can be separated from the all-in drive that made him successful, I would agree with the author when he states that one can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones.