Elon Musk

 

Walter Isaacson, “Elon Musk,” Simon & Schuster, 2023, 615 pp.

My Notes:

One of the first companies Musk got involved in was Zip2 Corp. A company that was a super yellow pages: On it, you could look up a business and then link to a map for directions.  Musk sold it to Compaq Computer in 1999.

In 1999, Elon and his brother Kimbal used the money from selling Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company.  Later they merged with PayPal and it is known today by that name.  Musk was the CEO of PayPal until he was ousted in October of 2002 but he remained the company’s largest shareholder with 11/7% of PayPal’s shares.  eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock two years after Musk was ousted as CEO.

Pg. 187:  On September 28, 2008 Musk and his small crew of just five hundred employees (Boeings’ comparable division had fifty-thousand) had designed the system from the ground up and done all the construction on its own, launched the first privately built rocket from the ground to reach orbit.

Pg. 189:  On December 22, 2008, Musk got a call confirming that SpaceX was going to be awarded a $1.6 billion contract to make twelve round trips to the Space Station.  Yet, at this time, Tesla was almost bankrupt.

Pg. 218:  Beginning with globalization in the 1980s, American companies shut down domestic factories and offshored manufacturing.  The trend accelerated in the early 2000s, just when Tesla was getting started.  Between 2000 and 2010, the US lost one-third of its manufacturing jobs.  Musk bucked this trend.

Pg. 284:  Musk’s Algorithm:  1;  Question every requirement, each should come with the name of the person who made it.  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 did not delete enough.  3.  Simplify and optimize; 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 after the first three steps have been performed.  5.  Automate, but only as the fifth step.

Pg. 348:  When NASA had awarded SpaceX the contract to build a rocket that would take astronauts to the Space Station, it had, on the same day in 2014, given a competing contract, with 40 percent more funding, to Boeing.  By the time SpaceX succeeded in 2020, Boeing had not even been able to get an unmanned test flight to dock with the station.

Pg. 408:  Tesla’s stock went down to $25 when COVID began to spread in early 2020 but rebounded ten-fold by the beginning of 2021.  On January 7, 2021, it hit $260.  That day Musk became the richest person in the world, with $190 billion.

Pg. 428f:  An hour before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it used a massive malware attack to disable the routers of the American satellite company Viasat that provided communications and internet to Ukraine.  Ukrainian officials appealed to Musk for help by providing Starlink stations.  Musk agreed.  However in September when Ukraine was preparing an attack on ships by Crimea, he limited Starlink coverage of the area as he felt this confrontation in Crimea could lead to a nuclear war. 

Pg. 441:  Value of Musk’s Companies in April 2022:  Tesla $1 trillion; SpaceX $100 billion; The Coring Company $5.6 billion; Neuralink $1 billion.  (This was before he contemplated starting the AI company X.AI.

Pg. 557:  When the dust settled after Musk’s purchase of Twitter, almost 75% of the workforce was fired.

Pg. 607:  Musk allowed the author of this book to shadow him for two years and sit in on his meetings and talk to anyone he wanted to.  Musk did not review this book before publication, nor did he ask to.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

• Tesla Motors was founded as an electric carmaker by engineers Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003.
• Elon Musk, co-founder of Paypal, led the initial rounds of investing for Tesla before taking over as CEO.
• In 2008, Tesla released its first electric car, the Roadster.
• Tesla aims to create more affordable electric car options to attract a broader customer base.
• Tesla expanded its geographic footprint, with production facilities in China and the U.S, as well as 438 stores and 100 service centers in various countries.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. commonly referred to as SpaceX, is an American spacecraft manufacturer, launch service provider, defense contractor and satellite communications company headquartered in Hawthorne, California. The company was founded in 2002 by Elon Musk with the goal of reducing space transportation costs and to colonize Mars.

Musk registered X.AI. The start-up is incorporated in Nevada, which also list the company’s officers as Mr. Musk and his financial manager, Jared Birchall. 

Google’s self-driving car uses radar.  Musk’s Tesla uses both radar and cameras.  Musk wants to eventually use just cameras.

 

NYT:

At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person, the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.” As the people closest to him will attest, he lacks empathy — something that Isaacson describes as a “gene” that’s “hard-wired.”

Yet even as Musk struggles to relate to the actual humans around him, his plans for humanity are grand. “A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single-planet civilization and being a multiplanet one”: Musk would “maniacally” repeat this message to his staff at SpaceX, his spacecraft and satellite company, where every decision is motivated by his determination to get earthlings to Mars. He pushes employees at his companies — he now runs six, including X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — to slash costs and meet brutal deadlines because he needs to pour resources into the moonshot of colonizing space “before civilization crumbles.” Disaster could come from climate change, from declining birthrates, from artificial intelligence. Isaacson describes Musk stalking the factory floor of Tesla, his electric car company, issuing orders on the fly. “If I don’t make decisions,” Musk explained, “we die.”

By “we,” Musk presumably meant Tesla in that instance. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure. Isaacson, whose previous biographical subjects include Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, is a patient chronicler of obsession; in the case of Musk, he can occasionally seem too patient — a hazard for any biographer who is given extraordinary access. At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he declares, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.” There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean?

Isaacson has ably conveyed that Musk doesn’t truly like pushback. Some of his lieutenants insist that he will eventually listen to reason, but Isaacson sees firsthand Musk’s habit of deriding as a saboteur or an idiot anyone who resists him. The musician Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children (the existence of the third, Techno Mechanicus, nicknamed Tau, has been kept private until now), calls his roiling anger “demon mode” — a mind-set that “causes a lot of chaos.” She also insists that it allows him to get stuff done.

For that we can turn to Isaacson’s reporting, of which there is plenty. (Another thoroughly reported biography, by Ashlee Vance, was published in 2015 — four years before SpaceX started launching Starlink satellites and seven years before Musk acquired Twitter.) Isaacson even managed to get Errol, Elon’s intermittently estranged father, to talk — though mostly what Errol offers are rambling bigoted comments (while insisting he isn’t racist) and self-aggrandizing tales (at least one of which turns out to be “provably false”).

Errol has two children with his stepdaughter. As for Elon, he has 10 children with three women, one of whom — Shivon Zilis, who bore his twins in 2021 — is an executive at one of his companies. (Another child, Musk’s first, born in 2002, died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome when he was 10 weeks old.)

He is mostly preoccupied with his businesses, where he expects his staff to abide by “the algorithm,” his workplace creed, which commands them to “question every requirement” from a department, including “the legal department” and “the safety department”; and to “delete any part or process” they can. “Comradery is dangerous,” is one of the corollaries. So is this: “The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

Still, Musk has accrued enough power to dictate his own rules. In one of the book’s biggest scoops, Isaacson describes Musk secretly instructing his engineers to “turn off” Starlink satellite internet coverage to prevent Ukraine from launching a surprise drone attack on Russian forces in Crimea. (Isaacson has since posted on X that contrary to what he writes in the book, Musk didn’t shut down coverage but denied a request to extend the network’s range.) Musk decided that he was saving humanity from a nuclear war. When Ukraine’s vice prime minister texted him to say that Starlink service was “a matter of life and death,” Musk instructed him to “seek peace while you have the upper hand.”

Counseling the Ukrainians to “seek peace” sounds especially rich coming from someone who is “energized,” Isaacson says, by “dire threats.” But then the overall sense you get from this biography is that for all of Musk’s talk about the world-changing magic of “the algorithm,” he ultimately does what he wants. He will order his companies to scrimp fanatically on some things while insisting that they spend lavishly on others. At Tesla, Musk’s obsession with the minutiae of automotive design inflated costs and drained the company of cash. At SpaceX, instead of spending $1,500 for the kind of latch used by NASA, an engineer figured out how to modify a $30 latch intended for a bathroom stall. When Musk acquired Twitter last year, he eliminated 75 percent of the staff.

Since Musk’s acquisition, hate speech on the platform has proliferated while ad sales have plunged. Reading this book, one begins to wonder if the old bird-site will be Musk’s Waterloo. “He thought of it as a technology company,” Isaacson writes, “when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships.” Isaacson believes that Musk wanted to buy Twitter because he had been so bullied as a kid and “now he could own the playground.” It’s an awkward metaphor, but that’s also what makes it perfect. Owning a playground won’t stop you from getting bullied. If you think about it, owning a playground won’t get you much of anything at all.