Elon Musk: Crazy Eccentric or Brilliant Entrepreneur?

 

When I began to read Walter Isaacson’s book, I had no idea what a roller coaster ride it would be. Isaacson was given almost full access to Musk, his friends and wives, children, colleagues and employees. Musk didn’t require his approval of the manuscript, and didn’t read the book before it was published. This access gives a remarkable picture of an amazing, complicated and brilliant man. In spite of all his shortcomings, his achievements inspired me to wish I could meet this unique man of the 21st century.

Elon Musk grew up in South Africa in a brutal environment:

South Africa in the 1980s was a violent place, with machine-gun attacks and knife killings common. Once, when Elon and Kimbal got off a train on their way to an anti-apartheid music concert, they had to wade through a pool of blood next to a dead person with a knife still sticking out of his brain.

Musk believed that these early experiences, in addition to growing up with an angry and abusive father, likely played a role in the man he became. He said this about his father:

He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was. Elon would just have to stand there, not allowed to leave. ‘It was mental torture,’ Elon says, pausing for a long time and choking up slightly. ‘He sure knew how to make anything terrible.’

Whether these experiences shaped his later life, Musk admitted to having difficulty in forming intimate relationships. One of his friends said this about him:

He had trouble picking up social cues. Empathy did not come naturally, and he had neither the desire nor the instinct to be ingratiating.

His mother, Maye, said that he believed he was on the Asperger’s spectrum, and she thought he was probably right. He was never officially evaluated.

Musk was absolutely clear on the goals for his most well-known companies: Tesla, an electric and fully automated self-driving car; Space X, to fly to Mars and make us a multi-planetary civilization; and Twitter, to realize a free speech platform.

The effect on his personal and work relationships was significant. He married several times; in some cases, he didn’t marry but had a total of 12 children with a number of women. He appeared to be sincere in his belief that having children was important to the human race, due to declining birthrates. And he lived out his belief.

Regarding his work relationships, there were many similarities among all the companies that he eventually owned, so I don’t necessarily make a distinction among them in the examples I give. Musk was not an easy person to work for. He had specific expectations for employees’ performance:

Musk had deployed what he called the ‘idiot index.’ That was the ratio of the total cost of a component to the cost of its raw materials. Something with a high idiot index—say, a component that cost $1,000 when the aluminum that composed it cost only $100—was likely to have a design that was too complex or a manufacturing process that was too inefficient. As Musk put it, ‘If the ratio is high, you’re an idiot.’

He also demanded that every employee commit to arduous work schedules and meet his projections for completing projects. If anyone dared to say a task wasn’t possible, he either fired them or re-stated the expectation, leaving them to their own devices. It was amazing how often impossible deadlines were met. He also insisted that the engineers form teams with the design staff and work closely on development. Eventually, he insisted that as many components as possible be manufactured in-house to save time and money.

Strangely enough, Musk seemed to go over the edge when things were going well. He loved the challenge of solving problems. He was known in his various companies for his meltdowns. His brother, Kimbal, was key in helping him return to reality.

Musk decided he had to move himself, literally, to the factory floors and lead an all-in surge; he did this on a few occasions. It was a tactic —personally surging into the breach 24/7 with an all-hands-on-deck cadre of fellow fanatics—that came to define the maniacal intensity that he demanded at his companies.

For his companies to be successful, he expected them to be efficient in developing products, as well as to be fiscally responsible. Here’s one example:

When an engineer came to Musk’s cubicle and told him that the air-cooling system for the payload bay of the Falcon 9 would cost more than $3 million, he shouted over to Gwynne Shotwell in her adjacent cubicle to ask what an air-conditioning system for a house cost. About $6,000, she said. So the SpaceX team bought some commercial air-conditioning units and modified their pumps so they could work atop the rocket.

To make sure that decisions were not just arbitrary, Musk developed what he called his algorithm. This was his explanation for the algorithm and its requirements:

‘Unless a sensor is absolutely needed to start an engine or safely stop an engine before it explodes, it must be deleted,’ he wrote in an email to SpaceX engineers. ‘Going forward, anyone who puts a sensor (or anything) on the engine that isn’t obviously critical will be asked to leave.’

  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.

  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.

  5. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step.

There are many, many more stories that Isaacson shares to give us Musk’s inside story. He was a mass of contradictions. He didn’t believe co-workers should be too attached to each other, but he believed in teamwork. He knew his plan to lead Tesla, Space X, Neuralink, Starlink and Twitter would be impossibly demanding, yet he was unwilling to relinquish control. He probably took more risks than any other company leader, but when they didn’t work out, he’d just try another solution.

Isaacson closed his book with two fascinating paragraphs:

(from Musk)

‘This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.’ That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. ‘When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.’

(from Isaacson)

Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.

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  1. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Artistic license, or something.  Nobody ever has to “wade through” a “pool of blood.”

    • #1
  2. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Artistic license, or something. Nobody ever has to “wade through” a “pool of blood.”

    I think you’re right. After all, Musk was just a kid when it happened. It probably seemed like a pool.

    • #2
  3. Full Size Tabby Member
    Full Size Tabby
    @FullSizeTabby

    “Crazy Eccentric or Brilliant Entrepreneur?”

    As the popular saying goes, embrace the possibility of “and.” 

    My career was in patent law, working with inventors. Inventors tend to be a crazy lot, which is exactly what enables them to see what might be that no one else has seen before. I worked mostly in large corporate settings, so the inventors  I worked with tended to be on the less-crazy end of the overall inventor crazy spectrum, but I certainly saw some examples of the truly nuts (pardon me – “eccentric”) inventors. 

    I have always expected that the world of the most successful entrepreneurs is also full of “crazies” – people who see things differently than the rest of us do, and thus come up with business opportunities and ideas the rest of us just can’t imagine.  Mr. Musk seems to be a particularly extreme example. 

    • #3
  4. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Full Size Tabby (View Comment):
    my career was in patent law, working with inventors. Inventors tend to be a crazy lot, which is exactly what enables them to see what might be that no one else has seen before

    That must have been a fascinating clientele! Thanks for sharing your experience, FST.

    • #4
  5. Unburdened Gerald Coolidge
    Unburdened Gerald
    @Jose

    Susan, I saw you had an article at American Thinker today.  Then I checked and saw that it is your second article at that site.  Congratulations on branching out!

    • #5
  6. Bartholomew Xerxes Ogilvie, Jr. Coolidge
    Bartholomew Xerxes Ogilvie, Jr.
    @BartholomewXerxesOgilvieJr

    When I watched the video of the Starship booster “catch” earlier this week, I couldn’t shake the idea that I was watching something impossible. To bring down something so massive and powerful with that kind of precision just seems like an absurd thing even to try. If a scene like that had appeared in a science-fiction movie five years ago, I probably would have rolled my eyes and said “That’s not plausible.”

    (Similarly, I remember reading something about Tesla shortly after it was founded, probably even before Musk took over. I had a similar reaction: the electric sportscar they claimed they were going to build sounded utterly unrealistic. I fully expected never to hear anything about that company again.)

    I’m sure I’m not the first person to suggest that Musk’s SpaceX seems to have somehow recreated the spirit that must have existed at NASA during the 1960s. The challenges that JFK placed before the space agency were beyond audacious, but the circumstances were such that no one was inclined to say “Sorry, that just can’t be done.” Instead they accepted the premise that it had to be done, and they made it happen. Gene Kranz never actually said the line “Failure is not an option” — that was made up for the Apollo 13 movie — but it was such a good summation of the attitude of the time that Kranz used it as the title of his memoir.

    It goes without saying that requiring people to do the impossible is not the recipe for success. Plenty of megalomaniacs have crashed and burned because they refuse to accept the limitations of reality. How do you find that balance? How do you know how hard you can push before you’ve crossed the line?

    It seems like hyperbole to call Musk a genius, and yet it’s hard to argue with what he has done. I could never work for him, but I’m glad that there are people who can. This country needs more people like them, and probably fewer like me!

    • #6
  7. Chris O Coolidge
    Chris O
    @ChrisO

    I’m beginning to think of Musk as a John Galt figure, one who is applying a different solution to a similar, though not as entrenched, problem. Rather than retirement, he is now a highly visible example of the visualization-to-realization cycle. Few outside of serious athletics had contemporary models for this, and no other example on the level Musk occupies.

    Risk, I tell anyone who will listen, is the best path to security. Failures are not final, they refine process, method, and/or design. 

    • #7
  8. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Unburdened Gerald (View Comment):

    Susan, I saw you had an article at American Thinker today. Then I checked and saw that it is your second article at that site. Congratulations on branching out!

    Oh, thanks so very much! I didn’t know if any of our folks from here would notice. Yes, I thought I’d branch out and they seem to be a very nice group of folks. 

    • #8
  9. Unburdened Gerald Coolidge
    Unburdened Gerald
    @Jose

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Unburdened Gerald (View Comment):

    Susan, I saw you had an article at American Thinker today. Then I checked and saw that it is your second article at that site. Congratulations on branching out!

    Oh, thanks so very much! I didn’t know if any of our folks from here would notice. Yes, I thought I’d branch out and they seem to be a very nice group of folks.

    I have been following Andrea Widberg there for many years.  She seems very nice, and rational! 

    • #9
  10. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Bartholomew Xerxes Ogilvie, Jr. (View Comment):

    It goes without saying that requiring people to do the impossible is not the recipe for success. Plenty of megalomaniacs have crashed and burned because they refuse to accept the limitations of reality. How do you find that balance? How do you know how hard you can push before you’ve crossed the line?

    It seems like hyperbole to call Musk a genius, and yet it’s hard to argue with what he has done. I could never work for him, but I’m glad that there are people who can. This country needs more people like them, and probably fewer like me!

    I don’t know how a person would find that balance, BXO! I suspect that he has an amazing intuition on these things, because when he failed, he often eventually recovered. I certainly am not at all inclined to be in that position. I read through the book gasping, groaning and shaking my head at the man. He’s quite amazing!

    • #10
  11. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Chris O (View Comment):
    Risk, I tell anyone who will listen, is the best path to security. Failures are not final, they refine process, method, and/or design. 

    I’m listening, Chris, and I agree!

    • #11
  12. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Unburdened Gerald (View Comment):
    I have been following Andrea Widberg there for many years.  She seems very nice, and rational! 

    I’ve worked with two editors, both nice, but Olivia Murray was especially kind. When she suggested a couple of minor changes that were needed, I thanked her, and she thanked me for being so gracious! Sheesh!

    • #12
  13. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    So the reader gets a dollop of Walter’s political musings?

    That’s a pity.

    • #13
  14. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Percival (View Comment):

    So the reader gets a dollop of Walter’s political musings?

    That’s a pity.

    What am I missing??

    • #14
  15. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    So the reader gets a dollop of Walter’s political musings?

    That’s a pity.

    What am I missing??

    I’m not sure.

    • #15
  16. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Percival (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    So the reader gets a dollop of Walter’s political musings?

    That’s a pity.

    What am I missing??

    I’m not sure.

    What’s a pity…

    • #16
  17. Percival Thatcher
    Percival
    @Percival

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Percival (View Comment):

    So the reader gets a dollop of Walter’s political musings?

    That’s a pity.

    What am I missing??

    I’m not sure.

    What’s a pity…

    The politics. Someone else I know read it and had the attitude that Isaacson lacked Musk’s level of appreciation for the First Amendment. I haven’t read it, thus should have held my peace.

    • #17
  18. David Foster Member
    David Foster
    @DavidFoster

    re taking risks….General Bernard Schriever, who ran the USAF ballistic missile program, recalled that after five or six successful launches, he got a telegram from the aerodynamicist Theodore von Karman:

    BENNY, YOU MUST NOT BE TAKING ENOUGH RISKS.

    Schriever was himself somewhat of a Muskian figure, albeit a little less free-wheeling given that he was a military officer…but still, some remarkable accomplishments on a very tight timeframe.  I reviewed his biography, A Fiery Peace in a Cold War.

     

    • #18
  19. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Percival (View Comment):
    The politics. Someone else I know read it and had the attitude that Isaacson lacked Musk’s level of appreciation for the First Amendment. I haven’t read it, thus should have held my peace.

    I had the distinct impression that Isaacson kept himself out of the stories. I’m trying to think when he might have touched on the First Amendment. In fact, I’ve read a few of his books and not one comes to mind with a Leftist slant. But then again, I might have ignored it. 

    • #19
  20. Richard Easton Coolidge
    Richard Easton
    @RichardEaston

    The book  was interesting but was full of Walter Isaacson’s leftist rantings. I appeared last year with Pete Wilhelm who has had business meetings with Musk.

    • #20
  21. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Richard Easton (View Comment):

    The book was interesting but was full of Walter Isaacson’s leftist rantings. I appeared last year with Pete Wilhelm who has had business meetings with Musk.

    Richard, could you point me to any of those? I didn’t pick up on “leftists rantings.” Were they Musk’s rantings or Isaacson’s? If Isaacson is describing something that Musk said, those belong to Musk.

    • #21
  22. Richard Easton Coolidge
    Richard Easton
    @RichardEaston

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Richard Easton (View Comment):

    The book was interesting but was full of Walter Isaacson’s leftist rantings. I appeared last year with Pete Wilhelm who has had business meetings with Musk.

    Richard, could you point me to any of those? I didn’t pick up on “leftists rantings.” Were they Musk’s rantings or Isaacson’s? If Isaacson is describing something that Musk said, those belong to Musk.

    They were Isaacson’ rantings. He made similar comments two decades ago on Milt Rosenberg’s radio program in Chicago.

    • #22
  23. Susan Quinn Member
    Susan Quinn
    @SusanQuinn

    Richard Easton (View Comment):

    Susan Quinn (View Comment):

    Richard Easton (View Comment):

    The book was interesting but was full of Walter Isaacson’s leftist rantings. I appeared last year with Pete Wilhelm who has had business meetings with Musk.

    Richard, could you point me to any of those? I didn’t pick up on “leftists rantings.” Were they Musk’s rantings or Isaacson’s? If Isaacson is describing something that Musk said, those belong to Musk.

    They were Isaacson’ rantings. He made similar comments two decades ago on Milt Rosenberg’s radio program in Chicago.

    As I said, if you could point me to a couple, I’d appreciate it. I can’t imagine how he would include himself in the story…

    • #23
  24. Hoyacon Member
    Hoyacon
    @Hoyacon

    Musk fascinates me.  I’m just not sure I can do 688 pages, when I could read 2 344 page books.  Did you bog down at any point?

    • #24
  25. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Bartholomew Xerxes Ogilvie, Jr. (View Comment):
    To bring down something so massive and powerful with that kind of precision just seems like an absurd thing even to try.

    It’s still a “tour de force” of precision, but empty boosters coming down are a lot less massive than when they go up.

    • #25
  26. E. Kent Golding Moderator
    E. Kent Golding
    @EKentGolding

    Musk is brilliant,  and pro free speech and pro independent thinking.   One thing that angers me is that he made much of his money on left wing market interventions – cap and trade of carbon credits and electric car subsidies.  I guess if the left is going to leave piles of our money laying around with these things, you can’t blame Elon for picking it up, but it still angers me.

    • #26
  27. KCVolunteer Lincoln
    KCVolunteer
    @KCVolunteer

    When an engineer came to Musk’s cubicle and told him that the air-cooling system for the payload bay of the Falcon 9 would cost more than $3 million, he shouted over to Gwynne Shotwell in her adjacent cubicle to ask what an air-conditioning system for a house cost. About $6,000, she said. So the SpaceX team bought some commercial air-conditioning units and modified their pumps so they could work atop the rocket.

    Many years ago, I worked with a person who worked on the atmospherics in the Apollo capsules. When they arrived at Cape Canaveral they were required to reengineer the cooling system for their control panel. Apparently they had used what amounted to a compressor from a Coke machine, but NASA requirements caused them to modify it to operate off of liquid nitrogen at considerably more expense.

    • #27
  28. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    There’s another angle to this kind of story that deserves mention.  It’s been noted that Steve Jobs didn’t really “innovate” any of the technology used for the iPhone, because “smart”/touch-screen cellular phones really got going in the mid-1990s and the first iPod came out in 2001, with the iPod “Mini” coming in early 2004 and the “Nano” in 2005.  Jobs “only” put both things in a single case, called the iPhone, which came out in 2007.

    Musk has actually done a lot of actual innovation perhaps especially with SpaceX, but it’s a reality that much of what he’s done depends on technology that simply wasn’t available not that long ago, not even to Elon Musk.  Nor could Musk have created it earlier himself, because THAT technology didn’t exist either…

    e.g., the first Pentium CPU could not have been invented at the same time as the 386 no matter how hard someone might have tried to “innovate” it, because the manufacturing capability at such a small scale wasn’t yet possible.

    It would be somewhat comparable to taking plans for a modern car – or even a Model T – back to earlier ages where they might not have been able to machine pistons etc to the necessary tolerances.  Not even getting to availability of refined petroleum for fuel.

    It would be interesting if someone were to ask Elon, “How recently would it have been impossible to do what you’ve done, just because the technology was not yet sufficiently advanced even to do the innovations that you’ve done?”

    He would probably be able to come up with a pretty accurate answer.

    • #28
  29. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    E. Kent Golding (View Comment):

    Musk is brilliant, and pro free speech and pro independent thinking. One thing that angers me is that he made much of his money on left wing market interventions – cap and trade of carbon credits and electric car subsidies. I guess if the left is going to leave piles of our money laying around with these things, you can’t blame Elon for picking it up, but it still angers me.

    Blame the people who left piles of money out, not people who pick them up and actually do great things with them.

    Mrs Mayor de Blasio “picked up” almost $1 BILLION of “mental health” money and made it disappear.

    • #29
  30. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    KCVolunteer (View Comment):

    When an engineer came to Musk’s cubicle and told him that the air-cooling system for the payload bay of the Falcon 9 would cost more than $3 million, he shouted over to Gwynne Shotwell in her adjacent cubicle to ask what an air-conditioning system for a house cost. About $6,000, she said. So the SpaceX team bought some commercial air-conditioning units and modified their pumps so they could work atop the rocket.

    Many years ago, I worked with a person who worked on the atmospherics in the Apollo capsules. When they arrived at Cape Canaveral they were required to reengineer the cooling system for their control panel. Apparently they had used what amounted to a compressor from a Coke machine, but NASA requirements caused them to modify it to operate off of liquid nitrogen at considerably more expense.

    Hmm, well, if they were using an older refrigeration system that used ammonia, for example, a leak could have been fatal to the astronauts.  That, and the spacecraft would have been carrying nitrogen already too.  Although I suppose there may not have been provision for “recharging” the cooling system while in flight.

    • #30
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