One point in favor of X succeeding: personal social skills don’t seem to be required for building a social media giant. Case in point: Mark Zuckerberg, who is ten times more awkward and less inspiring than Musk. Yet Meta still manages to be the industry leader, dumb metaverse decisions included.
As somebody who also worked on getting humans to Mars (the Orion project, which now only going to the moon after a large demotion), yeah having good ideas at those companies is soul crushing.
Getting trivial changes done to anything takes 6-12 months. I’m talking 1 hour fixes. Because they weren’t planned for already, so they can’t even be planned in this 3 month cycle.
And on the workload front I used to put in 70+ hour weeks every once in a while, so working for SpaceX would be a large step up in quality of getting things done and getting to build the cool stuff, while not being a horrendous downgrade in the other dimensions (though 75 hour weeks eat you alive. It’s basically 6 hours of sleep per night and every other moment is reserved to working or getting ready for work / commuting).
I remember seeing a talk by the UK rapper Akala a couple years back. A (paraphased) line that stood out to me:
"You spend your 20s reading about how to become successful and think you know it all. Then, later, when you actually try and build something yourself, you realize just how difficult it is to make anything even moderately successful, and your respect for people who have done so grows exponentially".
I think a lot about this when I hear the weird sub cult of people who hand wave away Elon Musk's accomplishments and dismiss him.
You don't have to like Musk, he is absolutely a massive tool on a regular basis. But he is, by any reasonable metric, an outlier and an exceptional human being, who's achievements speak for themselves.
We shouldn't conflate politics with recognition of the above.
Re "everyone always thinks Musk companies will fail but then they succeed", worth noting that he has also had some flops (e.g. the boring company or the Hyperloop). He still has a pretty good batting average in tough businesses, but it's far from guaranteed.
(also, most likely outcome seems to be "twitter keeps working about as well as before but he still loses money on the deal because of the general tech downturn". Is that success or failure?)
To me the worst thing he's done at Twitter/X is elevate the blue checks to the top of the reply stream. Reading the top replies was my favorite part of the site. Now you have to wade through dozens, or hundreds of posts of nonsense to get to actual good posts. And since no one does that anymore, good posts don't get much replies or likes anyway.
My time spent on Twitter has dropped to almost zero for this reason. But on the flip side, my productivity and outlook on life have improved significantly. So maybe I should thank him.
> Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?
This turns up a lot in Alon Levy's research on transit costs: government departments generally don't do the design (let alone the actual construction) themselves, but it still really matters that they have enough people to understand the engineering of the project and what they really need (and how much it should cost). One of the major problems in the anglosphere is that the top people with actual power tend to be lawyers and political appointments (who don't understand the technical issues, or care to) instead of engineers who rose up through the ranks and understand the physics of the problems.
Conversely the best transit project I know of (the Madrid metro, which built a citywide metro system in four years then doubled it in the next four, all for absurdly low costs) talks a lot about (a) the geology and engineering, but also (b) how they could get responses from the government within 24 hours when they needed a change of plans due to unexpected conditions.
To what extent is civilization's story to be told in terms of a finite number of great men - as opposed to one of infinite impersonal socio-historical forces?.... would make a great study.
Sorry, but this does nothing to alleviate my cognitive dissonance either, and I am not 100% willing to believe stories about Musk's brilliance, simply because he has pitched, and invested time and money, into so many ideas that were obviously daft and indeed turned out to be so - the "Loop" (digging tunnels for battery-powered sleds to transport cars under cities to "fix traffic") was hare-brained on so many levels I don't know where to start, and the "hyperloop" did not make sense on its own terms either, not to mention it's an engineering nightmare wrapped in impossibilities.
As for his psychology, I don't believe for a second that he's autistic. IMO, raging narcissism is a much better explanation for his behavior. Consider this: after the Suoerbowl, Elon was so enraged that his inane tweet had received less attention than that of the POTUS, so the next day he called in his engineers to come up with some way to give his tweets more reach, NOW. Autist or narcissist?
For those interested in further reading/hearing and don't want to jump into the new book, Lex Fridman just interviewed the author of the new book about Musk, Walter Isaacson, mostly about Musk but also about other things.
I will note that I found some important discrepancies between Scott's summary here and the interview (haven't read the book). Most noticeably, the childhood described by Isaacson is one of difficulty and abuse, and perhaps has a more profound impact on how Musk works and why he succeeds.
Reading some of these stories of Musk's focus reminds me of an anecdote I heard about Richard Feynman. A paper of his had been rejected and he came to the office of a colleague to address the concern. The topic of the paper was something obscure and not particularly important (something on 2D elastic theory as I recall). Feynman spent 8 to 10 hours working on the problem without break, but ultimately failed to fix the issue and went home. A few hours later the colleague received a call from Richard that he had finally solved the problem. He'd kept working on it even after he went home. The kicker? This all happened just a few days before Feynman was scheduled to undergo surgery to treat and aggressive form of rare cancer (the one that eventually killed him). The prognosis wasn't great and he literally didn't know if he would be alive at the end of the week. But his focus was so absolute that he could push everything else away to work on whatever task was at hand.
Some choice quotes from the review, as posted on ACXD
> Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time?
> A Tesla employee described his style as demanding a car go from LA to NYC on a single charge, which is impossible, but he puts in such a strong effort that the car makes it to New Mexico.
> He excels at determining whether something is technically impossible or not. If it’s not, he hands it off to his employees as an implementation problem.
> Unlike in engineering, where he tries to do everything himself but is often right, in PR he tries to do everything himself, does a terrible job, and never learns
> a pleasure-pain, sadomasochistic vibe that comes with working for Musk. Numerous people interviewed for this book decried the work hours, Musk’s blunt style, and his sometimes ludicrous expectations. Yet almost every person—even those who had been fired — still worshipped Musk and talked about him in terms usually reserved for superheroes or deities.
Even his ex-wife who had a protracted divorce suit against him spent most of the interview trying to make excuses for his behavior.
> He’s not secretive about his plans; more often he says them openly and nobody believes him.
> people keep failing by not taking Musk literally
This review makes me inclined to bet *against* Twitter/X getting notably impressive results. Yes, he does seem to have a track record of beating the skeptics, but specifically in the domain of "hard engineering challenges that are clearly possible in principle but just require what looks like an unrealistically large amount of optimization effort". Twitter's problems, such as they are, seem totally different in character from that. Heck, even deciding what the problem is and how you want to solve it, at least if you're trying to do it in a civically-minded way like he says he is, seems like it leans primarily on the philosopher/intellectual skillset that he's not that good at. And if he's generally open about what his grand visions/master plans are, then his failure to articulate anything beyond the slogan "the everything app" would seem to suggest that he doesn't actually *have* a coherent vision for it.
(I do think the "engineering wizard" hypothesis has some explanatory power for how he was able to fire 90% of the workforce without creating obvious embarrassing outages for users, and if his goal was just to make Twitter *profitable* then I guess he can declare victory if/when the advertisers come back. But this would be a much less impressive achievement than Tesla or SpaceX, and he says he's thinking bigger.)
Not particularly relevant, but what kind of a parent is Musk? If he’s anything other than “completely absent” I want to know how he does it. Doesn’t he have like, nine kids? And they’re with how many women? Do they all live with him part time? Do they overlap? What’s a typical breakfast look like?
I wonder why Scott never mentioned Neuralink. If you believe that "He’s not secretive about his plans; more often he says them openly and nobody believes him.... people keep failing by not taking Musk literally" then Scott just fell into the same trap. Musk's claims about Neuralink are way more ambitious than anything he ever said about Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.
Nitpick: we don't colonise Antarctica because of the Antarctic Treaty, which forbids commercial exploitation of the continent. There are a lot of mineral resources there, and I have seen suggestions that the Treaty will be quietly put aside once climate change makes mining a little easier. Also, a handful of children have been born in Antarctica in support of various countries' territorial claims.
I think an app that incorporates chat and payments is an extremely good idea. I loved it when keybase did it. So I should probably predict that Musk will succeed, since pushing through the pain and delivering seems to be one of his super powers.
Still, it's hard to get away from how colossally he overpaid for twitter due to pure silliness, and I do wonder if it's a bit of a perfect trap for someone like him. He seems to have a high need for attention, and a low ability to moderate himself. If he's insisting that algorithms be changed in order to inflate his personal reach (https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter), then he's undermining the trust that the social aspect of twitter is built on and pulling effort away from actually achieving the vision. The nature of twitter is that there will be lots of opportunity for ego stroking at the expense of the mission.
Facebook tried to add payments via a crypto and it fell apart not because it was a bad idea but because Facebook are hated and Zuck is not trusted by the people who would have to be enthusiastic about it. Musk of 2008 might have been loved enough to pull the mission off, but I don't think Musk of 2023 is.
"Starlink (high-speed Internet everywhere including the developing world, hard for authoritarian governments to censor)"
This highlights another potential issue that was not really raised in this review, in that certain benefits of Musk's projects may be dependent on his personal whims or be lost as a result of him pursuing his own interests. While I've seen some Ukrainians speak very highly of Starlink and Musk himself, at other times it seems like he has prevented them from reaping its full benefits. There have also been reports that Musk's demands to Taiwan have prevented a Starlink deal being done with the government there.
Indeed, for someone who is so vocal about free speech issues in America, his willingness to cozy up to Xi's government in China is pretty notable; his apparent comfort with authoritarianism is not a trait I would hope for in someone with ambitions to shape the future. People are rightly impressed with the development of AI and rightly concerned about the way in which we mange its development, as well as worried about the implications for the far future. Colonization of space is a worthwhile goal, but shouldn't we be concerned about the way in which we do it and the implications for future people? A society on Mars would be a staggering achievement, however it doesn't seem crazy to hope that that society will not be designed according to Musk's vision.
As for making X the "everything app", I'm also skeptical, and skeptical it would necessarily be a good thing. He has mentioned WeChat many times and seems to take it as an inspiration. As someone who lives in China, the downsides to app dependence are pretty clear (especially during covid), without even getting into what happens when the government or Musk decide that you can't use the app anymore. I'm not an expert but I would guess Wechat has also benefitted from some pretty specific factors in attaining the success it did (e.g. China skipping straight from cash to mobile payments).
Aren't asteroids the main reason we should colonize Mars and not Antarctica? I mean, in case of any high-impact disaster that could destroy life on one planet but not the other, the two-planet system would save human kind. Isn't this what Musk has brought up as the main reason for making a Mars colony?
He is a polymathic engineer of rare but not unparalleled breadth, and the **sequence of areas** he attained expert-level knowledge in, and hands-on skill, are a first-order factor in the probability of success of the *series* of companies.
- Software first.
- Off the shelf hardware in parallel (the datacenters) with scaling
- Hand-built maximally esoteric hardware second (Falcon 1)
- Then hand-built medium-complexity hardware with a firm eye on eventually manufacturing at scale (Roadster).
- Then medium-complexity manufacturing at scale (Model S).
Assertions:
1. Building expert level skill creating software takes longer, and is less likely to occur than any other skill required in any of the industries that Elon‘s companies operate in. It is basically impossible to become a world-class software developer if you start after you’ve achieved career success in another industry.
- 1 is hardest, and most important
2. Hands-on expertise in spaceflight physics, metallurgy and fabrication, rad-hardening, rocket engine design, spacecraft structures, NDE/NDT fixturing: the physics and builder-level skills for these can be learned on the job and with intense solo study by a sufficiently motivated and adequately intelligent person within a few years, if given a free hand to roam/rotate.
- 2 & 3 are harder than all that follow
3. Space tech is nearly maximally esoteric, engineering and construction-wise. (Only the largest multi billion $ physics/astrophysics projects have a larger design envelope than space tech). Building expertise in space tech makes terrestrial engineering and fabrication challenges like car parts and solar panels seem pedestrian by comparison.
4. The techniques for manufacturing macro scale components (everything larger than 1mm) at scale, and subcomponent assembly at scale, etc etc - these can also be learned on the job a sufficiently motivated and adequately intelligent person within a few years, and some mfg folks to absorb knowledge from.
5. Learning supply chain optimization is something 1/4 of humans can lead to do well, 1/20 can learn to do well in their spare time, and is slightly more than a triviality for anybody who can handle items 1-4.
I’m making these positions from a position of having some experience in all five of these areas, for satellites, rockets, cars and other vehicles, but starting with software. Biased but also have trod the path in the same sequence, just not nearly at the same level of success, and I firmly believe that the sequence matters.
I'm pretty sure he still personally reviews approves the hiring packet of every new hire at SpaceX, maybe Tesla too.
On him being an engineer-ceo. I once read that there is a lot of benefit to him having effectively combined the financial and engineering decisions of the company where usually these are separate. So he can quickly approve and fund designs or shut down projects.
In the Everyday Astronaut interview, Tim makes some comment about the rocket and Elon realizes that he should change the design of the rocket on the spot. So it's sort of like the chief PR person also being the chief engineer. It just seems like once you put in the intensity and evwrything else then all new kinds of feedback loops emerge.
"he famously read lots of rocketry textbooks before starting SpaceX, including old Soviet manuals nobody else had heard of"
Heh, just a couple days ago I was watching the series "Young Sheldon" for the first time, in one of the first episodes rocket equations are discussed, and I was surprised to see Musk pop up as a guest star in an after-end-credits scene, reading Sheldon's notes !
(Only somewhat surprised, since he's done that before, and the plot was an *obvious* callout to the future SpaceX, even specifically mentioning landing rockets.)
Re: "Starlink (high-speed Internet everywhere including the developing world, hard for authoritarian governments to censor)"
Starlink is very easy for authoritarian governments to censor: don't allow the import of the transceivers, make owning one illegal, make paying for Starlink services illegal. Voila, no Starlink in your country, at least not on a scale that matters. If your government can't do this, it is probably not that authoritarian.
> He fired 80%-90% of the workforce [of Twitter] without any clear change in user experience. This was bad for the fired people and bad for PR. But it makes him look more competent than whoever was there before him and hired 5-10x more people than they needed.
Two things to remember about this:
1. Twitter's revenue is mostly advertising.
2. Per Musk, advertising revenue is down 60% since the acquisition.
Musk says the lost revenue is primary due to pressure by the Anti-Defamation League (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698755938541330907), but I feel like "there are now a tenth as many people working there" is also a plausible hypothesis.
I don't think Musk is as bad as PR as you (and Vance) are saying. Some of his moves have been very good at attracting attention and building hype about what his companies do. SpaceX rockets are fitted with high quality cameras, which stream footage of the launches. The landings were all filmed, and they were happy to make compilation of their failed attempts. When he talks about SpaceX he doesn't talk about the mundane business of launching small satellites, he talks about Mars and building an interplanetary civilization. These are all things that have helped build hype and excitement about his projects, and its things that few other businessmen do well.
Why I don’t think he will succceed with ”X”: Building a good rocket or a good car is ultimatel6 a question of engineering - you _can_ bore down to the physics. But a social media site isn’t - the engineering is social and when you bore down, you end up at psychology, not physics. And this clearly isn’t Musk’s strength.
This isn’t to say he won’t be able to get costs down and restore value for the existing property, but the “everything app” strikes me as nonsense. For instance, if you want to do banking or run your own currency, the challenge isn’t technical - it’s _legal_.
One other thing that doesn't seem to fit with this review, but that I'm not sure how to think about. Musk famously gets into a lot of fights with the US government, for example around SEC enforcement and the covid response. But we don't see him criticize China much -- maybe never publicly since covid? From a business perspective that seems smart: the Chinese government has a lot of ways to retaliate against Musk through Tesla, and it seems believable that they would if he criticized them publicly too much. But the review paints a picture of a guy who couldn't maintain that amount of message discipline on subjects he was really passionate about.
Maybe the fights with USG are more tactical than deeply-felt? Maybe China is just intimidating in a way that America isn't? I don't have a conclusion here, just a vague sense that I'm missing something.
Quick hit, long before I've finished the article. Musk's hands-on learn-how-it's-done practice reminds me a bit of Walt Disney, of all people. Do you know how Disneyland came about? During WWII Walt became interested in (obsessed with) model railroads. So he went into the company's machine shop and learned how to use the equipment to build his own models from scratch. Then, after the war, he had the idea that his employees needed a park where they could relax with their families. That much I learned from two biographies, a thick tome by Neal Gabler, and a somewhat more sympathatic one by Mike Barrier (and, I believe, a bit deeper). So, you merge the idea of a park with the skill of building model trains and out comes Disneyland, the world's first theme park and, some have said, a masterpiece of urban planning.
Disney, too, has been a controversial figure, very.
One noticeable difference between Twitter and Musk's other companies is that it is straightforward to articulate what the other companies are for, but it's not really clear what Twitter is for. "Connecting the world" doesn't cut it; everyone can claim to do it and not everyone even agrees if it's a good thing. It's hard to be in hyper-focused mode for a longer time if there is no clear-cut goal.
Out of everything Musk has done to Twitter, Birdwatch (Community Notes) is the only feature that shows genius. Pissing off the schoolmarms was a good thing, but any unwoke leadership would have had the same effect. Changes to the UI were questionable, and his forays into rate limiting and closing off the timeline to non-registered users (forcing everyone to use nitter and the likes) look self-defeating to me.
Clicking on the footnotes numbers from the text opens a popup that cuts out and shows text from mid-sentence on Android for me, forcing me to skip reading them.
Right, reading the review of this biography made me update towards the direction that Musk isn't just an incompetent struck by blind luck a few times in a row, and then just coasting on the ill-deserved reputation (star engineers wanting to work on SpaceX/Testla, getting the government contracts, etc). I can well believe that cutting through the red tape and ACTUALLY doing whatever it takes (the sort of heroic responsibility Eliezer talks about) is a recipe for success, because I already believe it.
It didn't shift my belief in that Musk is an utterly despicable human being.
Whenever I read about Musk, I have only a single thought: he's a Heinlein's character. To be fair, many other writers with varying libertarian bend wrote 4D-chessmaster-technical-and-business-genius- characters - Neal Stehpenson and Michael Flynn come to mind among the more recent ones ("Firestar" series has "Musk-in-a-drag" obsessed female space company CEO with a childhood trauma), but all his talk about Mars makes me think about Heinlein specifically.
Another example about getting himself into a lucky position is buying Twitter and now being able to use that data for an LLM project, he didn't anticipate that but considered it a nice bonus.
The main thing I took away from this review is that you can buy an emerald mine in Zambia for fifty thousand dollars.
For the price of an Audi you can have an emerald mine in Zambia, and if you can find a way to drop it into conversation that you own an emerald mine in Zambia then it sounds way more impressive than owning an Audi.
" I think when he’s tried to form philosophical/intellectual opinions, they’ve been well-intentioned, shown good instincts, and sometimes displayed deep insight, but also often been unsophisticated or messed up key points.... IQ 120 when he’s thinking about about horrible fuzzy messes." This seems like a very generous description considering his output on twitter...looking admiringly at Andrew Tate the first example that comes to mind.
This derailed my train of thought badly enough that I had to comment on it before reading the rest of the post. Sorry if it's elaborated on later, I might feel silly if it is.
> I like this story but find myself dwelling on Musk’s request - why shouldn’t he be allowed to read his own biography before publication and include footnotes giving his side of the story where he disagrees? That sounds like it should be standard practice!
I understand this moral impulse on a 'nice-to-have' level comparable to the notion that it's nice (and standard practice!) for a journalist writing an article about someone to reach out for comment, and we consider it an obvious dick move when they "reach out" at 2am for an article that's running at 5. But the implementation can be so variable and the specifics given here so unworkable (and hypocritical?) that I've lost the plot on how obligatory this "should" is supposed to be.
A commitment to include material from someone hostile to the project is a nightmare, both editorially and legally. Am I allowed to make changes to their input, at a minimum editing for length or shuffling it around in the book? Either a yes or no is a headache. Am I allowed to make changes to *my* work after they've seen an advance copy? (It's not unusual for sweeping changes to come in at the last minute - or even after publication, in digital!) Heck, can I even respond to their footnotes without requesting another round of commentary?
> If I ever write a post about any of you and you disagree with it, feel free to ask me to add a footnote giving your side of the story (or realistically I’ll put it in an Open Thread).
Specifically: there is a *huge* difference sending a work to someone for their inclusion in the published copy, and sticking some commentary in what is functionally Author's Notes sold separately. If I'm to take this footnotes idea seriously, I want Scott to take seriously the notion that he's obligated to withhold posting until adding (unlimited?) the commentary from subjects within the same piece. This is not a small ask!
I wrote a piece for Foriegn Policy about why the vision of an 'Everything App' in the US market is essentially impossible. WeChat was created in a very specific Chinese context that simply doesn't translate to the US
Ashlee Vance is a terrific journalist and his book will likely be far superior to whatever fluff piece Isaacson has come out with.
Muggles just don’t understand what motivates engineers, and why they will knowingly and willingly work for abusive bosses like Jobs or Musk, or in an earlier era Adm Hyman Rickover or Howard Hugues. It’s about achievement more than even the mission.
As for his foibles, that reminds me of Inspector Lestrange in the BBC series Sherlock: “I do it because I believe Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and he may someday be a good one”.
> He took over Twitter because he was addicted to Twitter, got a seat on the board, and then the other board members said he had to behave and he didn’t want to.
You write further down about people making the mistake of misunderstanding Musk because they dismiss what he says and don't take it literally. Well, what did Musk literally say about taking over Twitter? He said that people pushing toxic identity politics caused one of his children to become estranged from him, and Twitter was so deep in the toxic identity politics camp that he was literally not allowed to talk about the harms it was causing, so he took over in order to clean up the cesspool that Twitter had become.
"One of his worst moments came after a prototype Falcon 1 failed halfway through the launch. Musk immediately blamed key engineer Jeremy Hollman. This was a reasonable assumption - he had been the last person to work on the rocket before liftoff - but instead of waiting for the investigation, Musk went straight to publicly accusing him."
That's probably his biggest way of shooting himself in the foot - he won't back down from what he perceives as a challenge to his authority, or rather, his *rightness* about something.
"This happened, it must be somebody's fault, you're the guy holding the hot potato at the time, it was your fault!"
Look at the absolutely stupid fight he got into with the cave diver in Thailand - yes, Elon, your submarine idea was cute but it wouldn't work. Doubling down and implying the guy was a paedophile (because why else would he be an ex-pat in Thailand if not for cheap young sex workers?) was not edifying and I think probably cost him a lot of credit with the public.
That's the kind of thing comes back to bite you in the behind later, e.g. when taking over Twitter, a lot of ordinary people were "Oh, isn't that paedo-guy?" and discounted what he was trying to do. And were more easily convinced that he was a crypto-fascist or whatever. Blood emeralds!
Musk is a net positive to society imo and admittedly I may be mistaken as to why(Pascal) but to say he "never changes" and "a paradox" smacks of hero worship.
I think the move to X will work because the social media giants can't grow exponentially forever. At some point they need to shift into being utility companies - regulated monopolies that make plenty of cash, enough to support some interesting research, but not growing at 20%/year forever. But this is horrible and scary for their investors, so you get crazy ideas like the Metaverse instead of just improving the core model. Twitter needed to be slashed. The product, basically, worked, and hadn't changed much in years. But the investors never would have accepted "OK, that's enough growth, now we cut costs and profit" without some huge disruption to blame it on.
“He took over Twitter because he was addicted to Twitter, got a seat on the board, and then the other board members said he had to behave and he didn’t want to.”
I don’t think this is fair; he’s been exceedingly clear and consistent about his philosophical reasons for buying Twitter.
There are other answers to that interview question. You could be a distance from the south pole such that if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the earth becomes 0.5 miles (or 1/n miles, for any positive integer n).
Really enjoyed the review, its been ages since I read this book so it was a good refresher.
I do disagree with your stance on Twitter/X on a couple of fronts. In terms of Twitter Blue, I don't see it as successful or on the path to success because it is kind of a half-measure. Twitter should either be primarily subscription model that basically operates on "FOMO" for its addicted users or rely strictly on advertising and be the town square. Twitter Blue is in this weird in-between where there are benefits to membership but its not needed to use Twitter, and so it becomes just a poor enough experience for non-subscribers that I think over time they will start losing users as the site becomes less useful (Like seeing subscriber tweets and comments before the people you actually want to read).
The second issue I have is with the idea advertisers need Twitter instead of vice versa. There are plenty of social media options for advertisers to go to, I just don't believe Twitter is essential there. Especially when Twitter isn't really associated with buying things as a consumer. No one shops on Twitter. I can see this actually being a major problem if advertisers stay away and realize their bottom line isn't actually hurting, so might as well just make this decision permanent since its all downside being in the Elon Musk business from a PR perspective (As your own review noted in terms of how he handles PR and drives folks nuts).
Steve Davis, director of advanced projects at SpaceX, describes his experience:
"He got a quote back for $120,000 ... Davis spent nine months building the actuator ... The actuator Davis designed ended up costing $3,900 and flew with Falcon 1 into space."
Presumably the 'director of advanced projects' gets at least a six-figure salary, which should be included in the calculation? Of course, as mentioned, there are benefits to in-housing etc, but this particular example doesn't really seem to carry the argument.
Napoleon Bonaparte reminds me of this. Or rather, reading about Napoleon reminded me of Elon Musk - particularly the terrifying intensity and emphasis on speed, the micromanaging, the ability rapidly to suck information out of people's skulls via conversation, the incredibly bold bets.
To get a generic replacement mouse, my current employer required 3rd level management approval for the expenditure. Yes, it was for about $20. Too much middle-management is absolutely a thing.
It's interesting to read all this with an inversion of the question in mind: not, "what is Musk's true nature such that he has been so successful?", but "what is the nature of society such that someone like Musk could be one of it's most successful individuals?"
I agree that " in a purely business sense he’s mostly self-made", but he also benefited more from privilege than I think you're acknowledging. If he'd gone bust in his early efforts, family money could've come to the rescue; he was never risking not having enough to get by.
There's a reason tightrope walkers who go between skyscrapers with no net do much less impressive stunts than circus performers who have one, even though I've never seen the circus performers fall.
Per your point that Musk might not be playing 4D chess but more like stumbling into it by being in the right place at the right time:
>[on Starlink] He just happened to be in the exact right place to make it happen.
> [on self-driving cars]Musk wasn’t expecting this to happen. But by doing things bigger and faster than anyone else, he must have put himself in a place where something was going to right for him.
In my observation, that's basically how chess masters beat you too. For the most part, they only rarely think more than a couple of moves ahead (especially when playing non-masters). They just have a really good idea of roughly where the pieces need to go to get a good position and then "the tactics tend to favor the side with the better position."
But largely, they don't know ahead of time which tactics exactly are going to win, but they have high confidence that they've put themselves in a position where something will work out well for them.
This does sort of sound like exactly what Musk is doing, so maybe he is playing some 4D chess? But then again, even masters blunder sometimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK5QdJ715zw
For what it's worth, both Tesla and SpaceX do amazing things with much less money and time than you'd expect them to. But some of these amazing things come with trade-offs that are invisible to the average consumer. For example, Tesla batteries have amazing charge density and recharge speed; however, their lifetimes are slightly worse than other comparable batteries even at slower charge speeds. Tesla's current top-of-the-line batteries have a lifespan of 1000 cycles at C/3 per their patent (three hours to charge, three hours to discharge.) This is well below the 800 at C (one hour to charge) that Apple's current top-of-the-line batteries have. These issues come from high charge density with a fairly low Li transference number due to the electrolyte used, which leads to lithium dendrite growth between the anode and cathode, and once they meet, short circuits (which, in the worst cases, may lead to (in Apple's phrasing) "fire or burning"). It's uncommon for lifespan and stability to be sacrificed in batteries in this way, but if you do such a thing, you can certainly make them cheaper and higher-energy on initial sale.
This sort of thing is pretty common among Tesla and SpaceX projects and is generally why I'm not so optimistic about SpaceX's push towards reusable launch platforms- Musk's companies are fantastic at making things that work very well exactly once. I'm not so sure he can make the push towards something that works moderately well repeatedly, especially with the concerning lack of redundancy we're seeing.
I really have to give Musk credit for is just embodying the kind of arc-of-history techno-optimism that seems to have been a hallmark of the space age and just abandoned for blinkered, ultimately transient concerns that are just less inspiring and less long-term relevant than the kind of challenges Musk has taken off.
At a certain level, "Why should we go to Mars?" has to be a question that answers itself, and I think Musk is the primary counterweight against various forces that would pose it. Pose it in a manner that makes short-term sense but at the cost of any sort of long-term vision for human advancement. Perpetual local optimizations can generate a tremendous amount of value but it is not a total replacement for an overarching teleology. Wisdom is slave to the passions -- let us have our damn passions back.
Telos is humanity reaching out into the uncaring universe and wresting meaning from the void by force of will. It's worth going to Mars *because it's fucking going to Mars.*
I love Tolkien’s work, and, oddly, when I was reading this, my mind turned to Feanor in The Silmarillion.
Feanor was the most gifted of the elves. His was unbelievably brilliant, talented, and determined, and “his spirit burned like a bright flame.” He would work obsessively hard and he achieved many great things, including making the three Silmarils, the magnificent jewels after which the story is named.
He was also arrogant and quick to take offense, and he made some catastrophic errors in judgment that cost both him and his people dearly. He was very charismatic when getting people to follow him, but had zero kindness or understanding of others.
He had seven children, so not as many as Musk but still a large number, and he and his wife became “estranged “ due to his bad choices. Bear in mind that this is in a culture where divorce didn’t exist and true love was forever, so becoming estranged from your spouse was a really huge deal and a sign of something being deeply broken and wrong.
FWIW, I have a few friends who work at the gigafactory and they have a picture of Elon in their front room as a saint and call him daddy. They also work 6-7 days a week
Elon's personality appears amusingly similar to that of Napoleon (at least, as related in Andrew Roberts' 'Napoleon the Great').
Both boast/boasted near-perfect recall (Napoleon could recognise and name common soldiers he'd met two decades prior), a widely remarked-upon ability to rapidly master the complex details of processes at every level of thier operations (+esoteric topics of interest), a tendancy towards obsessive micromanagerial interventions, and reputation for meeting timelines conventional wisdom deemed impossible, though a combination of belligerence and highly motivated employees. Both worked their way out from initial training in maths/engineering, were/are obsessed with the frontiers of technology, and think/thought in terms of archs of history. The megalomaniac box also probably gets a tick in both cases.
Is Napoleon what happens when would-be tech bros lack silicon?
Key differences between the two are that Napoleon had a habit of being (often unjustifiably) trusting of long-time colleagues, built rapport with his low-level employees, and was exceedingly charismatic.
After decades of risk-taking, Napoleon's luck eventually ran out. It will be interesting to see if Musk meets his own proverbial early Russian winter.
I had assumed a major part of the reason for renaming Twitter something so generic was thinking that it was well-known enough to get away with being one of the main associations of a whole letter. If he previously named a startup (which necessarily wasn't already famous) the same thing, that's an argument against this, but I guess Musk's extreme optimism about his projects makes that still possible.
I mean, he might succeed in creating "X, the everything app", but I would not describe this as "okay" insofar as "X, the everything app" sounds dystopian and evil. (In particular, it sounds like combing Twitter with PayPal would involve going forward with the noises he's made about banning anonymity/pseudonymity, which I think would be a bigger blow to freedom of speech, and human freedom in general, than a thousand old-school Twitter censors…)
My personal theory is that 1) PR doesn't matter, but PR people have convinced us it does 2) many of the cited mistakes Musk has made, were indeed mistakes, but they were things that matter less than we might think 3) making mistakes in general matters less than people think. If you keep taking bets where you can win 1000x more than you can lose, it doesn't take long to end up the world's richest person. If you're paralyzed by the possibility of failure, then you're an internet commentor.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere before, I'll note that SpaceX almost certainly needs Starlink for internal use. If you're going to launch dozens/hundreds of people into space every week on Super Heavys, or build out any kind of significant human presence in space, you're going to need to be able to communicate with them. The existing NASA ground station network and things like TDRSS are insufficient for the scale, or for providing communications infrastructure to people who live in space but aren't working for a government 24/7. Even if somebody else had the "idea" for Starlink first, it was going to become an obvious necessity at some point in the long-term planning process for "I want to put lots of people into space".
He'll probably want a Starlink equivalent on Mars, and some sort of interplanetary interconnection between the two. I can't imagine he'll want to pause deliveries to Mars just because there's a conjunction.
>but in a purely business sense he’s mostly self-made
The idea of 'self-made' is a myth. Musk had plenty of employees and business partners who were indispensable in getting him where he is. This is like the Great Man Theory of Business.
Description of Elon really reminds description of Stalin from Mikoyan diaries
Very alike idea of ruthlessly appointing and firing people, same treating people like cogs, same very deep micromanagement where he both knew ton about ton and also faked a lot of it
He even did that very aggressive examining of his subordinates that for many looked like brutal test, but actually it was him figuring out
One anecdotal story tells how Stalin that Germans use electric melting of steel, so he drove right to home of minister responsible for the newest steel factory and accused him of sabotage for using coal
For the next hour a minister afraid of his life was proving and explaining all details of steel industry and why on certain mill the coal was preferable
The same was near-endless work stamina and also charm, for some reason people believed he was a great person no matter what Stalin did to/with them
The "1 in 1,000 level intelligent" estimate seems quite low. The Space-X engineers he's talking to are probably already 1 in 10,000: it takes about 1 in 100 intellect to get into Stanford, plus they're at the top of their class in one of the hardest majors to get to Space-X, and then are promoted at least once to be speaking with Musk. And these 1 in 10,000 folks are amazed by his intelligence. So shouldn't we estimate Musk at least at 1 in 1,000,000? (A 1 in 10,000 person might recognize that a 1 in 100,000 person is a bit smarter than them, but would not yet be amazed.)
To Scott's other point in that section, I agree that his intensity is why he's the richest man in the world, instead the other ~1,000 people or so at his level of intellect.
> Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?
> Part of the answer must come from that story above about him taking over people’s jobs. His strategy is to demand people do seemingly impossible things, then fire them if they fail. To pull that off, you need to really understand the exact limits of impossibility.
I agree with this, and would add that it's not specific to his strategy of micromanaging folks and taking over their audaciously-scoped tasks if they can't complete them. For any tech company, a technical CEO has superpowers compared to a non-technical one (but are predisposed to a fairly standard set of weaknesses too).
Even beyond just the CEO role, in the tech industry there is a very widely discussed challenge of "technical vs. non-technical managers". The engineers doing Individual Contributor (IC) work can grow to resent non-technical managers if they don't have a sense for how hard a given ask will be to implement, and a common anti-pattern is for the non-technical product, marketing, sales, and scheduling decisions to be made without a deep understanding of the actual feasibility as it bottoms out in the technical implementation. At worst this can lead to myopic leadership ("MBA management" etc.).
At the end of the day, a non-technical manager/CEO must be good at synthesizing the team's estimates and opinions, and knowing when to defer to concerns about tactical considerations, vs. take a tactically more difficult path which will advance strategic aims. (Aluminum chassis is a great example of this kind of tactically-painful but strategically visionary decision where a non-technical leader might struggle.) In a normal tech org the CEO has to trust the CTO, and then the CTO works through layers of managers to enact their technical vision, so there are multiple hops where the CEO's vision can be lost in translation. At Tesla Musk is collapsing both CEO-CTO and CTO-manager-IC communication down to him directly talking to ICs, which (while having other obvious organizational issues) allows him to make bold technical bets and stay very aligned on what is actually possible for his ICs to do.
Coming at the same issue from the bottom-up direction, technical ICs often don't have the context of the full strategic vision, and non-technical leaders often struggle to communicate it downwards in ways that are meaningful to the technical implementors. This is another thing Musk is better than almost anyone at; taking a lofty objective and chaining it down to an individual's role. I heard a SpaceX employee giving an answer in an interview like "Our mission is to become an inter-planetary species. To do that we must first colonize Mars. To do that we need to build a heavy lift rocket (Starship). To do that we need to build a more powerful engine. To build our new engine we need this valve assembly to work; my mission is to optimize this valve to X performance requirement".
Having said all that, why not just use technical managers? The answer is that it's usually not the best use of a strong IC's time; managing is very hard, requires strong empathy, is hard to teach, and training is criminally underfunded and under-appreciated. Managing is very different than IC work; it's meetings and interrupt-driven communications and performance management, whereas ICs usually thrive on "Maker Time" where they (optimally) get long blocks of uninterrupted time to get into the flow state and think about one problem. So while a good senior IC starts to get involved in communications and scheduling and other "outwards-facing" non-technical activities, there isn't an obvious universal progression from IC to manager. It used to be quite standard to have "senior IC" as the pinnacle of technical career progression, and the only way to get promoted further was to become a manager; this turns your best ICs (technical leads, mentors, or whole-system generalists) into normally-distributed managers (i.e. some good some bad, with no expectation for them to be better-than-average). Now at least in software it's more common to have a strong IC progression track that's parallel to managers, but you still see some degree of "strong IC -> mediocre manager" career paths.
The reasons you'd favor non-technical managers also apply to why non-technical CEOs are usually better at their jobs; in most organizations, the technical work is one or maybe a handful of roles in the C-suite (you might have a CTO and a Chief Scientist, say), while there are more non-technical roles (Sales, Operations, Marketing, Legal, HR, fundraising, and so on), and the CEO needs to be something of a jack-of-all-trades between all of those; in aggregate, non-technical skills are required more than technical ones. Musk's successful companies are outliers in that they benefit from being heavily technology-focused; they are applying tech company style iterative innovation and experimentation to historically non-software/non-"tech" domains, which I believe increases the importance of the CEO->CTO->IC chain, and is why Musk's strength in that area is disproportionately impactful. Having a Musk-style technical CEO would not be useful in a traditional car company, or a sales-driven enterprise software company like SAP.
If you put any stock on myers-briggs theory stuff, this article shows that Musk is the definition of the strengths and weaknesses of extraverted thinking vs introverted thinking. Probably an ENTJ.
Very much a side note to the thrust of the review, but it was a trip to see Andy Beal mentioned. I had an internship at Beal Aerospace in the long ago, have always been saddened that it full-stopped so soon.
Don't over-estimate the significance of mistakes in business. You don't have to make zero mistakes. You just have to make fewer mistakes than the other guy. In the sorts of ambiguous business situations that Musk puts himself in, the other guy will make plenty of mistakes.
"Grimes was furious when she found out later and wasn’t at all sure whether she would ever allow her Musk babies (a boy named X and a girl named Y and a new baby boy named Techno Mechanicus) to hang out with Zilis’s Musk babies (a boy named Strider Sekhar Sirius and a girl named Azure Astra Alice)."
He sounds like a smart, intense guy - but also one that has gotten very, very lucky. Musk has not managed to piss off the wrong employee at the wrong time in a way that does irreparable damage to one or more of his businesses, or maybe those employees have become fully adept at avoiding that to save themselves.
As for Twitter/X, I'm more skeptical. He wants to make Twitter into WeChat for America, but WeChat only became that in China because of good timing and their connections with the Chinese government. Twitter does not have good timing on getting into mobile payments, and it's insanely competitive.
Musk is a genius in some ways, but in others he's merely average. I wrote in 2022:
"Musk's biography should be titled "the everyman." He gets married and then gets divorced. His second wife is an actress, exactly what an everyman would pick if he were rich and famous and too dumb to notice that Hollywood marriages never last. He gets divorced, then remarries the same woman, then divorces again. Then he decides to not bother with marriage and have some kids out of wedlock with a musician. The relationship shockingly does not last. He was accused of offering to buy sex from a masseuse. He's denied it, but if it happened it would have been a very everyman story. "Hey, I thought "massage" was a code word for sex! What, you mean some of you don't give happy endings?" He initially refused the COVID vaccine as he thought he was "not at risk of COVID" as a 49-year-old man. He always voted Democrat, but recently became a Republican. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was when one of the kids he has scattered around decides he's "transgender." Like a lot of everymen, he has this funny idea that his son cutting his d*** off is a negative util hit."
"The only good answer to this question I’ve ever heard is that maybe it’s some sort of grand charter city proposal, and the benefit is that Earthly governments can’t touch it. As I explain later, I don’t think Musk is enough of a 4D chessmaster to think of this and keep it secret, although maybe he’s just so good a chessmaster that he hides it."
It is completely obvious and heavily signaled that Mars is about liberty/independence as far as Musk is concerned.
"Starlink's terms of service include a Mars clause: Users must agree that Mars is a free planet unbound by the authority or sovereignty of any Earth-bound government."
Zubrin's Mars Society was an early influence on Musk, and Zubrin's whole thing is that Mars is a new America, free from the old world's stultifying influence. "No EPA on Mars is one of the major reasons we have to go there" among other quotes.
It's somewhat annoying that people act like the Mars thing is out of pocket. It's the only planet besides Earth where you can sit on the surface and get as much CO2 as you want. It has readily available water ice. You can launch a single stage rocket from Mars to anywhere in the solar system because of the shallow gravity well and thin atmosphere. It is the only planet where independent survival is possible with near-term tech. Living on another planet can't be compared to Antarctica.
This review/book seems to presume that he has random obsessions and just happened to make electric cars and rockets -- it's pretty clear that rocketry needed major improvements and that those improvements were technically possible, same with clean energy/electric cars. Those were also at the burning core of America's national interest. This is a man who loves sex, video games, and porn - an accomplished womanizer who jets around including with Hollywood actresses. He's ravenous for all that life has to offer and takes a big bite out of everything. Yet he'll still buckle down and work day and night on what he thinks is important -- sacrificing an AAA class lifestyle long periods of time. How many people have "made it" and kept swinging in that manner? None of the other major tech people seem to have that fight in them - they shoot their shot and then move on to their foundation. Where's Jeff Bezos? Where are Larry and Sergei? Where's Bill Gates?
Yet more than any of the other tech billionaires, who "hit it and quit it," or who knock one thing out of the park and whiff thereafter, he has gone back to bat time and time again, and each time for something incredibly important. Yet despite being the most admirable and principled tech magnate in this most important of regards, he has by far the worst reputation because, essentially, of his vibes.
Maybe his irreverence for norms should reflect badly on the norms, not on him.
I have seen several interviews with Musk and in none of them does he come off as being >120 IQ. Second-hand reports claim that he is very smart but I don't believe second-hand reports. Does anyone have any unfalsifiable proof that Musk is highly intelligent, like a video of him giving an unscripted talk about numerical methods for control systems or something? If he is able to meaningfully interrogate his employees about their work he should be able to lecture about various aspects of aerospace engineering. Where are the videos of him clearly demonstrating a genius-level IQ?
Yeah I remember the days when SpaceX was really ramping up university recruitment. They were the table at the career fair everyone wanted to give their resume to. Naturally, SpaceX sent a spectacular a-hole who yelled at and belittled most of the students applying. It got so bad they actually apologized about it when they held a talk at the next career fair. Turned quite a few folks off, it was a real embarrassment. Took a couple of years to wash that one out.
I sometimes think about the people that knew the type of behavior going on and still stood in line and applied. I think a large part of why all those ex Musk employees and etc. still excuse various behaviors and defend him so fervently is that there is approximately no one who goes to work at one of his companies just to work a job. No one would put up with that crap for a 9-5, and now that it's so well known, no one would apply for it. It's all starry-eyed (mostly recent college grad) true believers. And the turnover rates speak pretty well for themselves.
Let's say I am a tech entrepreneur and engineer who reads this bio of Elon Musk. My takeaways are that you should search for radically innovative solutions grounded in materials science expertise, relentlessly seek to drive down costs of components, ignore or fire any experts who tell you it can't be done, and generally seek to be a bold and contrarian visionary who succeeds by knowing when to break the rules about how things are "normally" done. Now, for my first project, I decide to build a low-cost deep sea submersible to disrupt the ocean tourism industry...
I got nerdsniped by Elon's interview question: "You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”
I'm not reading through all the comments in case someone already mentioned this, but by this reasoning aren't there a ton of other places you could be near the south pole? For instance, if you walk one mile south and the circumference becomes 0.5 miles you just do 2 circuits of the circumference and then go north to your original point. If you're initially 1 mile north of the 0.1 mile circumference you just go 10 times around the circumference of the earth, etc. Am I missing something?
Feels weird talking about Musk, since his biggest impacts are fuzzier ones on x-risk (cofounding OpenAI and also the Ukraine Starlink non-activation event). AI risk and global geopolitical/nuclear risk. So far, what he's done in those areas is questionable at best and unusually terrible at worst.
Taking near-term extinction risk seriously, even getting to Mars wouldn't necessarily outweigh nudging the AGI field in a more dangerous direction (i.e. if OpenAI has contributed more to capabilities than alignment, or if X.ai does anything big).
IMHO these are the 3 things (X.ai, openai, and Ukraine) that matter most about Musk, and so far he seems net negative. The other massive things are rounding errors in the face of that, yet get more attention. (The extreme case: Twitter/X is a rounding error *on those other rounding errors*, and ofc that gets discussed 1000x more than everything else.)
I have to thank you for this piece. I was (embarrassingly) taken by the rumor that his accomplishments were thanks to financial advantages. I ought to have researched.
Elon Musk is frankly good looking and has a charming perceived generosity of trust that accompany his intellectual pursuits.
I think regarding X, it will take a very quick response to be more than a break-even effort to "save free speech." Where at first he was optimistic about renewed interest he is now releasing profit statistics that reveal extreme losses the value of the company. Regarding freedom of speech, is he really so passionate about it? That is important to how hard he tried. My instinct is that he is not extremely in favour of free speech. As in he holds some views that could easily be debunked if he really had to open his ears. Ie 'two genders no trans" or something like "im pro socialism but not in terms of helping unproductive."
I don't think it is impossible to make people want to pay money for online only things. I know about a website that people pay money in irrational spurts. The product is "fg" aka "forum gold" and it is exchanged for diablo 2 items. (ie. person x buys fg with real currency, Person x xfer fg to person y and person y joins the same room as person x to give them in game loot that otherwise takes hours. It's called d2jsp. I'm not sure how this principle could help Musk monetize x exactly but maybe it could. That said he valued twitter really highly for what the profit might be.
Good write-up. The ability to sell his vision to investors (including retail investors) is a big deal too, reducing the cost of capital and making it more likely he succeeds. It is not just great engineers he attracts.
I feel like this overhypes musks successes a great deal. For example, aluminum has a long history in auto manufacturing, with the first all aluminum production car being the nsx from 1989.
This reads, to me, like Elon is a smart man who routinely bullies his employees, often with his intelligence. Now most are afraid to tell him that some of his ideas are just bad. Even the smartest among us are bound to come up with an outright lousy idea every once in a while. And if one knows that the consequences of telling their boss that the idea is lousy is at best a very long assignment of having to prove that down to fundamental physics, and also likely to get one fired, why would anyone bother? "You want to put a nitrogen tank in your roadster and make it fly? Sure thing. Why not."
Removing oneself from negative feedback has rather predictable results.
I wonder what Musk's Dunbar number is. With his enormous memory for detail, it's possible that he's running the world's biggest small business, with the owner/manager directly supervising every worker.
This is a terrible review. The most egregious issue: it is impossible to distinguish what the book actually says vs. the review author pulling out bits to support said reviewer's views.
The reviewer has also done a terrible job of not reading their own review. Someone who can memorize a list of 80 technical items and track them (along with running a couple of companies and micromanaging tens of thousands of employees) is somehow only 1/1,000 smart? Who can grill a subject matter expert and get to 99% of said SME's knowledge in a few weeks? Puh-lease.
There is also a very clear case of "Musk is bad" syndrome going on here - one which I strongly suspect was "Musk was good" when he was the darling of the liberals because of Tesla and his stance on Marijuana etc. - before COVID in other words. In every case, if the choice is Musk is <good> vs. Musk is <lucky, persistent, a super trudger etc>, the latter choice is the answer 90%+ of the time.
"Musk seems IQ 150+ when he’s thinking about the interactions of well-behaved physical laws, and IQ 120 when he’s thinking about about horrible fuzzy messes."
I think this combo of multi-modal performance in those 2 domains is a competitive advantage when aiming for instrumental rationality.
I’ve always wondered why there aren’t more successful founders in the EA / LW spaces. There are a lot of successful founders of course (a higher rate than any other group I think probably - eg. Stanford students), but I think there should be even more, given the raw talent, IQ, first principles thinking in the movements.
I’ve occasionally discussed the differences between instrumental and epistemic rationality. Modern LW style rationalism (eg. Elieizer / Zvi) is very focused on epistemic rationality whereas in some ways I think it can confer an instrumental advantage towards success in startups if you're a bit crazy (instrumentally rational, but not necessarily maxing out on epistemically rationality).
I think the fact that Scott was interested in and read RAW / Crowley / Giurdjieff / the first wave psychedelicists etc. in his uni days makes him a uniquely interesting rationalist writer. Because both epistemic and instrumental rationality forked out from Korzybski’s map-territory distinction, but are distinct now.
Anyway - a joy to read one of the best writers and thinkers of our generation, analyzing the original biography of one of the most successful business people of all time. Looking forward to your review of the Isaacson one ;)
BTW there’s a "Paris in the the spring” typo in that original sentence I quoted
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
I find that exceedingly impressive. I couldn't do that in a million years. It is hard enough to keep track of the major questions in one area of a technology. Keeping track of them across all the relevant technologies for multiple companies is mind-boggling.
Re. "Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?"
Because middle managers AREN'T great engineers, but most of them want to make decisions over the objections of the engineers.
Re. Steve Jobs as a designer: His main design contributions to the Apple were:
- Integrate the keyboard into the computer (a terrible design)
- Have no network connectors (a terrible decision)
- Integrate the monitor into the Mac (a terrible design)
- Make that monitor black and white instead of color (a terrible decision)
- Insist that the mouse have only 1 button (a terrible design)
I read Walter Isaacson's bio on Steve Jobs. And I notice a parallel that Jobs also set wildly unreasonable expectations. He had the drive, charisma, and sociopathy to simply will the impossible into existence.
Jobs supposedly had a keen eye for design, aesthetic, and marketing. The techne, however, was outsourced to colleagues.
Isn’t this the exact opposite of conventional wisdom in this area? Software, not rocket science, is the field with many bootcamp programs teaching people core skills for quick career transfer without a degree or major experience… the “private job skills bootcamp” model seems to be flourishing in coding, data science, and basically nowhere else — though maybe it’s doing well in other areas I haven’t heard of? Arguably self-sponsored police academy training counts as something like this?
I'm sure rivers have been written about this, but the Model S and X's UX was like going from a flip phone to an iPhone. Their software, charging network, and 0-60 times were game-changers. Tesla isn't for hardcore car fans.
When the Model S came out, its UX felt like an iPhone compared to flip phones on other cars in the same price range. Legacy still has not caught up. Whenever asked about the car, I'd say it's great, but not for people who care about cars too much.
The "expert at software engineering", AFAICT, wasn't musk but Max Levchin. Most of his decisions that I've read about at PayPal and at Twitter regarding software engineering specifically were not world class.
The obvious response to whether Musk will succeed or not with X/Twitter is "what counts as success"? This is not just a clever retort, it gets to the essence of the issue – why Musk bought the company, and what he hopes to achieve with it.
Suppose we take seriously _What's Our Problem?_ , the new book by your nemesis/doppelganger Tim Urban; then it's not unreasonable to see the closing of the American mind (and in particular the closing of places where free speech can be practiced in America) as THE most important problem of our time, the problem that has to be solved otherwise nothing else matters. If you take that seriously, then almost everything Musk has been doing around X/Twitter makes sense. He doesn't care if the DEIist's leave the platform – it's there to allow other voices to be heard. It's not exactly that he doesn't care if advertisers leave the platform, it's more that he wants to create one example showing that you can stand up to SJFs as a company and be just fine; he will welcome any other company that wishes to join his advertising platform, but he absolutely will not compromise the platform to allay their SJF-driven "concerns".
Most of the complaints being made against X/Twitter look a lot more self-serving when you understand this point. Getting rid of departments that claimed to be weeding out misinformation? Well, who exactly decides what counts as misinformation? Consider something as supposedly medical (ie science) based as large gatherings during covid. We have run the experiment, and we know the results – plenty of politicians and doctors said, loudly, that it was unacceptable to form such large groups – right up until the BLM protests, at which point we had always been fighting EastAsia.
Musk has presumably decided (correctly IMHO) that letting a thousand flowers bloom, and relying on people's exposure to all of them to come on a consensus (ie the way we did things up until about 2010) is, for all its flaws, vastly preferable to the alternative of an unaccountable Department of Goodthink that shuts down anything that even hints of disagreement with DEIist theology.
In other words, for Musk success for X/Twitter IMHO would probably be something like "Remains a vibrant platform for sharing ideas of all sorts, basically a more visible publicly version of the supposed 'Intellectual Dark Web'". This is very different from other metrics that people are going to use, like "retains as many users as in 2020" or "makes more money than in 2020" or whatever.
All the inevitable crowing around the "failure" of Twitter, which will only get louder as the next election approaches (along with the demonization of Musk) need to be understood in this context. Almost none of this is about people caring about the truth; it's about people driven furious by the fact that someone is willing to stand up to them and call them bullies – and that more than half the country agrees, but is cowed into being afraid to say so, except on Twitter.
Why shouldn't authors be obligated to include text by Elon Musk in any book they write about him, if that's what Elon Musk wants? Because it's their book, not his, and the author and publisher are not obliged to spend their money to publish Musk's views.
What they could do is say, "After the book is published, you're free to publish your own book giving your own side of the story." That would be nice of them. Oh, but wait, Musk could already do that anyway.
I haven't read that book since the day after it came out, but from my foggy recollection, I'm pretty sure this review is better.
One point in favor of X succeeding: personal social skills don’t seem to be required for building a social media giant. Case in point: Mark Zuckerberg, who is ten times more awkward and less inspiring than Musk. Yet Meta still manages to be the industry leader, dumb metaverse decisions included.
As somebody who also worked on getting humans to Mars (the Orion project, which now only going to the moon after a large demotion), yeah having good ideas at those companies is soul crushing.
Getting trivial changes done to anything takes 6-12 months. I’m talking 1 hour fixes. Because they weren’t planned for already, so they can’t even be planned in this 3 month cycle.
And on the workload front I used to put in 70+ hour weeks every once in a while, so working for SpaceX would be a large step up in quality of getting things done and getting to build the cool stuff, while not being a horrendous downgrade in the other dimensions (though 75 hour weeks eat you alive. It’s basically 6 hours of sleep per night and every other moment is reserved to working or getting ready for work / commuting).
Small note: Community Notes existed before Musk and I don’t think he’s improved it in any meaningful way. He did change its name from Birdwatch.
I read this book when it came out - thanks for review will have to reread I think.
I remember seeing a talk by the UK rapper Akala a couple years back. A (paraphased) line that stood out to me:
"You spend your 20s reading about how to become successful and think you know it all. Then, later, when you actually try and build something yourself, you realize just how difficult it is to make anything even moderately successful, and your respect for people who have done so grows exponentially".
I think a lot about this when I hear the weird sub cult of people who hand wave away Elon Musk's accomplishments and dismiss him.
You don't have to like Musk, he is absolutely a massive tool on a regular basis. But he is, by any reasonable metric, an outlier and an exceptional human being, who's achievements speak for themselves.
We shouldn't conflate politics with recognition of the above.
Re "everyone always thinks Musk companies will fail but then they succeed", worth noting that he has also had some flops (e.g. the boring company or the Hyperloop). He still has a pretty good batting average in tough businesses, but it's far from guaranteed.
(also, most likely outcome seems to be "twitter keeps working about as well as before but he still loses money on the deal because of the general tech downturn". Is that success or failure?)
At first I thought this was part of the Dictator Book Club series!
To me the worst thing he's done at Twitter/X is elevate the blue checks to the top of the reply stream. Reading the top replies was my favorite part of the site. Now you have to wade through dozens, or hundreds of posts of nonsense to get to actual good posts. And since no one does that anymore, good posts don't get much replies or likes anyway.
My time spent on Twitter has dropped to almost zero for this reason. But on the flip side, my productivity and outlook on life have improved significantly. So maybe I should thank him.
Also of note, a mini-biography (related to the new book ??) from the New Yorker, discussed here :
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/168m7me/elon_musks_shadow_rule_the_new_yorker/
> Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?
This turns up a lot in Alon Levy's research on transit costs: government departments generally don't do the design (let alone the actual construction) themselves, but it still really matters that they have enough people to understand the engineering of the project and what they really need (and how much it should cost). One of the major problems in the anglosphere is that the top people with actual power tend to be lawyers and political appointments (who don't understand the technical issues, or care to) instead of engineers who rose up through the ranks and understand the physics of the problems.
Conversely the best transit project I know of (the Madrid metro, which built a citywide metro system in four years then doubled it in the next four, all for absurdly low costs) talks a lot about (a) the geology and engineering, but also (b) how they could get responses from the government within 24 hours when they needed a change of plans due to unexpected conditions.
https://tunnelbuilder.com/metrosur/edition2pdf/page2.pdf
To what extent is civilization's story to be told in terms of a finite number of great men - as opposed to one of infinite impersonal socio-historical forces?.... would make a great study.
Sorry, but this does nothing to alleviate my cognitive dissonance either, and I am not 100% willing to believe stories about Musk's brilliance, simply because he has pitched, and invested time and money, into so many ideas that were obviously daft and indeed turned out to be so - the "Loop" (digging tunnels for battery-powered sleds to transport cars under cities to "fix traffic") was hare-brained on so many levels I don't know where to start, and the "hyperloop" did not make sense on its own terms either, not to mention it's an engineering nightmare wrapped in impossibilities.
As for his psychology, I don't believe for a second that he's autistic. IMO, raging narcissism is a much better explanation for his behavior. Consider this: after the Suoerbowl, Elon was so enraged that his inane tweet had received less attention than that of the POTUS, so the next day he called in his engineers to come up with some way to give his tweets more reach, NOW. Autist or narcissist?
For those interested in further reading/hearing and don't want to jump into the new book, Lex Fridman just interviewed the author of the new book about Musk, Walter Isaacson, mostly about Musk but also about other things.
I will note that I found some important discrepancies between Scott's summary here and the interview (haven't read the book). Most noticeably, the childhood described by Isaacson is one of difficulty and abuse, and perhaps has a more profound impact on how Musk works and why he succeeds.
YT link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGOV5R7M1Js (Childhood part pretty much the first thing they discuss)
Reading some of these stories of Musk's focus reminds me of an anecdote I heard about Richard Feynman. A paper of his had been rejected and he came to the office of a colleague to address the concern. The topic of the paper was something obscure and not particularly important (something on 2D elastic theory as I recall). Feynman spent 8 to 10 hours working on the problem without break, but ultimately failed to fix the issue and went home. A few hours later the colleague received a call from Richard that he had finally solved the problem. He'd kept working on it even after he went home. The kicker? This all happened just a few days before Feynman was scheduled to undergo surgery to treat and aggressive form of rare cancer (the one that eventually killed him). The prognosis wasn't great and he literally didn't know if he would be alive at the end of the week. But his focus was so absolute that he could push everything else away to work on whatever task was at hand.
Some choice quotes from the review, as posted on ACXD
> Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time?
> A Tesla employee described his style as demanding a car go from LA to NYC on a single charge, which is impossible, but he puts in such a strong effort that the car makes it to New Mexico.
> He excels at determining whether something is technically impossible or not. If it’s not, he hands it off to his employees as an implementation problem.
> Unlike in engineering, where he tries to do everything himself but is often right, in PR he tries to do everything himself, does a terrible job, and never learns
> a pleasure-pain, sadomasochistic vibe that comes with working for Musk. Numerous people interviewed for this book decried the work hours, Musk’s blunt style, and his sometimes ludicrous expectations. Yet almost every person—even those who had been fired — still worshipped Musk and talked about him in terms usually reserved for superheroes or deities.
Even his ex-wife who had a protracted divorce suit against him spent most of the interview trying to make excuses for his behavior.
> He’s not secretive about his plans; more often he says them openly and nobody believes him.
> people keep failing by not taking Musk literally
And, of course, the concluding sentence.
This review makes me inclined to bet *against* Twitter/X getting notably impressive results. Yes, he does seem to have a track record of beating the skeptics, but specifically in the domain of "hard engineering challenges that are clearly possible in principle but just require what looks like an unrealistically large amount of optimization effort". Twitter's problems, such as they are, seem totally different in character from that. Heck, even deciding what the problem is and how you want to solve it, at least if you're trying to do it in a civically-minded way like he says he is, seems like it leans primarily on the philosopher/intellectual skillset that he's not that good at. And if he's generally open about what his grand visions/master plans are, then his failure to articulate anything beyond the slogan "the everything app" would seem to suggest that he doesn't actually *have* a coherent vision for it.
(I do think the "engineering wizard" hypothesis has some explanatory power for how he was able to fire 90% of the workforce without creating obvious embarrassing outages for users, and if his goal was just to make Twitter *profitable* then I guess he can declare victory if/when the advertisers come back. But this would be a much less impressive achievement than Tesla or SpaceX, and he says he's thinking bigger.)
Not particularly relevant, but what kind of a parent is Musk? If he’s anything other than “completely absent” I want to know how he does it. Doesn’t he have like, nine kids? And they’re with how many women? Do they all live with him part time? Do they overlap? What’s a typical breakfast look like?
You want to find+replace "4D" with "5D".
I wonder why Scott never mentioned Neuralink. If you believe that "He’s not secretive about his plans; more often he says them openly and nobody believes him.... people keep failing by not taking Musk literally" then Scott just fell into the same trap. Musk's claims about Neuralink are way more ambitious than anything he ever said about Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.
Nitpick: we don't colonise Antarctica because of the Antarctic Treaty, which forbids commercial exploitation of the continent. There are a lot of mineral resources there, and I have seen suggestions that the Treaty will be quietly put aside once climate change makes mining a little easier. Also, a handful of children have been born in Antarctica in support of various countries' territorial claims.
I think an app that incorporates chat and payments is an extremely good idea. I loved it when keybase did it. So I should probably predict that Musk will succeed, since pushing through the pain and delivering seems to be one of his super powers.
Still, it's hard to get away from how colossally he overpaid for twitter due to pure silliness, and I do wonder if it's a bit of a perfect trap for someone like him. He seems to have a high need for attention, and a low ability to moderate himself. If he's insisting that algorithms be changed in order to inflate his personal reach (https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets-algorithm-changes-twitter), then he's undermining the trust that the social aspect of twitter is built on and pulling effort away from actually achieving the vision. The nature of twitter is that there will be lots of opportunity for ego stroking at the expense of the mission.
Facebook tried to add payments via a crypto and it fell apart not because it was a bad idea but because Facebook are hated and Zuck is not trusted by the people who would have to be enthusiastic about it. Musk of 2008 might have been loved enough to pull the mission off, but I don't think Musk of 2023 is.
"Starlink (high-speed Internet everywhere including the developing world, hard for authoritarian governments to censor)"
This highlights another potential issue that was not really raised in this review, in that certain benefits of Musk's projects may be dependent on his personal whims or be lost as a result of him pursuing his own interests. While I've seen some Ukrainians speak very highly of Starlink and Musk himself, at other times it seems like he has prevented them from reaping its full benefits. There have also been reports that Musk's demands to Taiwan have prevented a Starlink deal being done with the government there.
Indeed, for someone who is so vocal about free speech issues in America, his willingness to cozy up to Xi's government in China is pretty notable; his apparent comfort with authoritarianism is not a trait I would hope for in someone with ambitions to shape the future. People are rightly impressed with the development of AI and rightly concerned about the way in which we mange its development, as well as worried about the implications for the far future. Colonization of space is a worthwhile goal, but shouldn't we be concerned about the way in which we do it and the implications for future people? A society on Mars would be a staggering achievement, however it doesn't seem crazy to hope that that society will not be designed according to Musk's vision.
As for making X the "everything app", I'm also skeptical, and skeptical it would necessarily be a good thing. He has mentioned WeChat many times and seems to take it as an inspiration. As someone who lives in China, the downsides to app dependence are pretty clear (especially during covid), without even getting into what happens when the government or Musk decide that you can't use the app anymore. I'm not an expert but I would guess Wechat has also benefitted from some pretty specific factors in attaining the success it did (e.g. China skipping straight from cash to mobile payments).
Aren't asteroids the main reason we should colonize Mars and not Antarctica? I mean, in case of any high-impact disaster that could destroy life on one planet but not the other, the two-planet system would save human kind. Isn't this what Musk has brought up as the main reason for making a Mars colony?
The $3,900 actuator cost $1m minimum if it took 9 months of the time of a senior project director.
Is Musk trying to turn Twitter, I mean X, into Weibo? Weibo is an all-in-one app where you can also make payments. Seems like an ambitious idea.
He is a polymathic engineer of rare but not unparalleled breadth, and the **sequence of areas** he attained expert-level knowledge in, and hands-on skill, are a first-order factor in the probability of success of the *series* of companies.
- Software first.
- Off the shelf hardware in parallel (the datacenters) with scaling
- Hand-built maximally esoteric hardware second (Falcon 1)
- Then hand-built medium-complexity hardware with a firm eye on eventually manufacturing at scale (Roadster).
- Then medium-complexity manufacturing at scale (Model S).
Assertions:
1. Building expert level skill creating software takes longer, and is less likely to occur than any other skill required in any of the industries that Elon‘s companies operate in. It is basically impossible to become a world-class software developer if you start after you’ve achieved career success in another industry.
- 1 is hardest, and most important
2. Hands-on expertise in spaceflight physics, metallurgy and fabrication, rad-hardening, rocket engine design, spacecraft structures, NDE/NDT fixturing: the physics and builder-level skills for these can be learned on the job and with intense solo study by a sufficiently motivated and adequately intelligent person within a few years, if given a free hand to roam/rotate.
- 2 & 3 are harder than all that follow
3. Space tech is nearly maximally esoteric, engineering and construction-wise. (Only the largest multi billion $ physics/astrophysics projects have a larger design envelope than space tech). Building expertise in space tech makes terrestrial engineering and fabrication challenges like car parts and solar panels seem pedestrian by comparison.
4. The techniques for manufacturing macro scale components (everything larger than 1mm) at scale, and subcomponent assembly at scale, etc etc - these can also be learned on the job a sufficiently motivated and adequately intelligent person within a few years, and some mfg folks to absorb knowledge from.
5. Learning supply chain optimization is something 1/4 of humans can lead to do well, 1/20 can learn to do well in their spare time, and is slightly more than a triviality for anybody who can handle items 1-4.
I’m making these positions from a position of having some experience in all five of these areas, for satellites, rockets, cars and other vehicles, but starting with software. Biased but also have trod the path in the same sequence, just not nearly at the same level of success, and I firmly believe that the sequence matters.
I'm pretty sure he still personally reviews approves the hiring packet of every new hire at SpaceX, maybe Tesla too.
On him being an engineer-ceo. I once read that there is a lot of benefit to him having effectively combined the financial and engineering decisions of the company where usually these are separate. So he can quickly approve and fund designs or shut down projects.
In the Everyday Astronaut interview, Tim makes some comment about the rocket and Elon realizes that he should change the design of the rocket on the spot. So it's sort of like the chief PR person also being the chief engineer. It just seems like once you put in the intensity and evwrything else then all new kinds of feedback loops emerge.
"he famously read lots of rocketry textbooks before starting SpaceX, including old Soviet manuals nobody else had heard of"
Heh, just a couple days ago I was watching the series "Young Sheldon" for the first time, in one of the first episodes rocket equations are discussed, and I was surprised to see Musk pop up as a guest star in an after-end-credits scene, reading Sheldon's notes !
(Only somewhat surprised, since he's done that before, and the plot was an *obvious* callout to the future SpaceX, even specifically mentioning landing rockets.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpSzEKUcGnM
Re: "Starlink (high-speed Internet everywhere including the developing world, hard for authoritarian governments to censor)"
Starlink is very easy for authoritarian governments to censor: don't allow the import of the transceivers, make owning one illegal, make paying for Starlink services illegal. Voila, no Starlink in your country, at least not on a scale that matters. If your government can't do this, it is probably not that authoritarian.
> He fired 80%-90% of the workforce [of Twitter] without any clear change in user experience. This was bad for the fired people and bad for PR. But it makes him look more competent than whoever was there before him and hired 5-10x more people than they needed.
Two things to remember about this:
1. Twitter's revenue is mostly advertising.
2. Per Musk, advertising revenue is down 60% since the acquisition.
Musk says the lost revenue is primary due to pressure by the Anti-Defamation League (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1698755938541330907), but I feel like "there are now a tenth as many people working there" is also a plausible hypothesis.
I don't think Musk is as bad as PR as you (and Vance) are saying. Some of his moves have been very good at attracting attention and building hype about what his companies do. SpaceX rockets are fitted with high quality cameras, which stream footage of the launches. The landings were all filmed, and they were happy to make compilation of their failed attempts. When he talks about SpaceX he doesn't talk about the mundane business of launching small satellites, he talks about Mars and building an interplanetary civilization. These are all things that have helped build hype and excitement about his projects, and its things that few other businessmen do well.
Why I don’t think he will succceed with ”X”: Building a good rocket or a good car is ultimatel6 a question of engineering - you _can_ bore down to the physics. But a social media site isn’t - the engineering is social and when you bore down, you end up at psychology, not physics. And this clearly isn’t Musk’s strength.
This isn’t to say he won’t be able to get costs down and restore value for the existing property, but the “everything app” strikes me as nonsense. For instance, if you want to do banking or run your own currency, the challenge isn’t technical - it’s _legal_.
One other thing that doesn't seem to fit with this review, but that I'm not sure how to think about. Musk famously gets into a lot of fights with the US government, for example around SEC enforcement and the covid response. But we don't see him criticize China much -- maybe never publicly since covid? From a business perspective that seems smart: the Chinese government has a lot of ways to retaliate against Musk through Tesla, and it seems believable that they would if he criticized them publicly too much. But the review paints a picture of a guy who couldn't maintain that amount of message discipline on subjects he was really passionate about.
Maybe the fights with USG are more tactical than deeply-felt? Maybe China is just intimidating in a way that America isn't? I don't have a conclusion here, just a vague sense that I'm missing something.
Quick hit, long before I've finished the article. Musk's hands-on learn-how-it's-done practice reminds me a bit of Walt Disney, of all people. Do you know how Disneyland came about? During WWII Walt became interested in (obsessed with) model railroads. So he went into the company's machine shop and learned how to use the equipment to build his own models from scratch. Then, after the war, he had the idea that his employees needed a park where they could relax with their families. That much I learned from two biographies, a thick tome by Neal Gabler, and a somewhat more sympathatic one by Mike Barrier (and, I believe, a bit deeper). So, you merge the idea of a park with the skill of building model trains and out comes Disneyland, the world's first theme park and, some have said, a masterpiece of urban planning.
Disney, too, has been a controversial figure, very.
One noticeable difference between Twitter and Musk's other companies is that it is straightforward to articulate what the other companies are for, but it's not really clear what Twitter is for. "Connecting the world" doesn't cut it; everyone can claim to do it and not everyone even agrees if it's a good thing. It's hard to be in hyper-focused mode for a longer time if there is no clear-cut goal.
Out of everything Musk has done to Twitter, Birdwatch (Community Notes) is the only feature that shows genius. Pissing off the schoolmarms was a good thing, but any unwoke leadership would have had the same effect. Changes to the UI were questionable, and his forays into rate limiting and closing off the timeline to non-registered users (forcing everyone to use nitter and the likes) look self-defeating to me.
Clicking on the footnotes numbers from the text opens a popup that cuts out and shows text from mid-sentence on Android for me, forcing me to skip reading them.
I dropped the incredibly boring biography after reading about 70%. This review of it is much better.
Right, reading the review of this biography made me update towards the direction that Musk isn't just an incompetent struck by blind luck a few times in a row, and then just coasting on the ill-deserved reputation (star engineers wanting to work on SpaceX/Testla, getting the government contracts, etc). I can well believe that cutting through the red tape and ACTUALLY doing whatever it takes (the sort of heroic responsibility Eliezer talks about) is a recipe for success, because I already believe it.
It didn't shift my belief in that Musk is an utterly despicable human being.
"Starlink (high-speed Internet everywhere including the developing world, hard for authoritarian governments to censor)"
Unless they ask him nicely, then he'll switch it on and off on the dictator's whims.
Whenever I read about Musk, I have only a single thought: he's a Heinlein's character. To be fair, many other writers with varying libertarian bend wrote 4D-chessmaster-technical-and-business-genius- characters - Neal Stehpenson and Michael Flynn come to mind among the more recent ones ("Firestar" series has "Musk-in-a-drag" obsessed female space company CEO with a childhood trauma), but all his talk about Mars makes me think about Heinlein specifically.
Another example about getting himself into a lucky position is buying Twitter and now being able to use that data for an LLM project, he didn't anticipate that but considered it a nice bonus.
The main thing I took away from this review is that you can buy an emerald mine in Zambia for fifty thousand dollars.
For the price of an Audi you can have an emerald mine in Zambia, and if you can find a way to drop it into conversation that you own an emerald mine in Zambia then it sounds way more impressive than owning an Audi.
Regarding the "Why?" question for a Mars Colony: Robert Zubrin has a coming book about it
"The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet"
" I think when he’s tried to form philosophical/intellectual opinions, they’ve been well-intentioned, shown good instincts, and sometimes displayed deep insight, but also often been unsophisticated or messed up key points.... IQ 120 when he’s thinking about about horrible fuzzy messes." This seems like a very generous description considering his output on twitter...looking admiringly at Andrew Tate the first example that comes to mind.
This derailed my train of thought badly enough that I had to comment on it before reading the rest of the post. Sorry if it's elaborated on later, I might feel silly if it is.
> I like this story but find myself dwelling on Musk’s request - why shouldn’t he be allowed to read his own biography before publication and include footnotes giving his side of the story where he disagrees? That sounds like it should be standard practice!
I understand this moral impulse on a 'nice-to-have' level comparable to the notion that it's nice (and standard practice!) for a journalist writing an article about someone to reach out for comment, and we consider it an obvious dick move when they "reach out" at 2am for an article that's running at 5. But the implementation can be so variable and the specifics given here so unworkable (and hypocritical?) that I've lost the plot on how obligatory this "should" is supposed to be.
A commitment to include material from someone hostile to the project is a nightmare, both editorially and legally. Am I allowed to make changes to their input, at a minimum editing for length or shuffling it around in the book? Either a yes or no is a headache. Am I allowed to make changes to *my* work after they've seen an advance copy? (It's not unusual for sweeping changes to come in at the last minute - or even after publication, in digital!) Heck, can I even respond to their footnotes without requesting another round of commentary?
> If I ever write a post about any of you and you disagree with it, feel free to ask me to add a footnote giving your side of the story (or realistically I’ll put it in an Open Thread).
Specifically: there is a *huge* difference sending a work to someone for their inclusion in the published copy, and sticking some commentary in what is functionally Author's Notes sold separately. If I'm to take this footnotes idea seriously, I want Scott to take seriously the notion that he's obligated to withhold posting until adding (unlimited?) the commentary from subjects within the same piece. This is not a small ask!
If you asked me who are the 2 extent people that I wouldn't want to share a beer with: Trump and Musk. No question about it.
Re: Everything App
I wrote a piece for Foriegn Policy about why the vision of an 'Everything App' in the US market is essentially impossible. WeChat was created in a very specific Chinese context that simply doesn't translate to the US
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/31/elon-musk-wechat-twitter-x-united-states-everything-apps/
Ashlee Vance is a terrific journalist and his book will likely be far superior to whatever fluff piece Isaacson has come out with.
Muggles just don’t understand what motivates engineers, and why they will knowingly and willingly work for abusive bosses like Jobs or Musk, or in an earlier era Adm Hyman Rickover or Howard Hugues. It’s about achievement more than even the mission.
As for his foibles, that reminds me of Inspector Lestrange in the BBC series Sherlock: “I do it because I believe Sherlock Holmes is a great man, and he may someday be a good one”.
> He took over Twitter because he was addicted to Twitter, got a seat on the board, and then the other board members said he had to behave and he didn’t want to.
You write further down about people making the mistake of misunderstanding Musk because they dismiss what he says and don't take it literally. Well, what did Musk literally say about taking over Twitter? He said that people pushing toxic identity politics caused one of his children to become estranged from him, and Twitter was so deep in the toxic identity politics camp that he was literally not allowed to talk about the harms it was causing, so he took over in order to clean up the cesspool that Twitter had become.
"One of his worst moments came after a prototype Falcon 1 failed halfway through the launch. Musk immediately blamed key engineer Jeremy Hollman. This was a reasonable assumption - he had been the last person to work on the rocket before liftoff - but instead of waiting for the investigation, Musk went straight to publicly accusing him."
That's probably his biggest way of shooting himself in the foot - he won't back down from what he perceives as a challenge to his authority, or rather, his *rightness* about something.
"This happened, it must be somebody's fault, you're the guy holding the hot potato at the time, it was your fault!"
Look at the absolutely stupid fight he got into with the cave diver in Thailand - yes, Elon, your submarine idea was cute but it wouldn't work. Doubling down and implying the guy was a paedophile (because why else would he be an ex-pat in Thailand if not for cheap young sex workers?) was not edifying and I think probably cost him a lot of credit with the public.
That's the kind of thing comes back to bite you in the behind later, e.g. when taking over Twitter, a lot of ordinary people were "Oh, isn't that paedo-guy?" and discounted what he was trying to do. And were more easily convinced that he was a crypto-fascist or whatever. Blood emeralds!
Musk is a net positive to society imo and admittedly I may be mistaken as to why(Pascal) but to say he "never changes" and "a paradox" smacks of hero worship.
I think the move to X will work because the social media giants can't grow exponentially forever. At some point they need to shift into being utility companies - regulated monopolies that make plenty of cash, enough to support some interesting research, but not growing at 20%/year forever. But this is horrible and scary for their investors, so you get crazy ideas like the Metaverse instead of just improving the core model. Twitter needed to be slashed. The product, basically, worked, and hadn't changed much in years. But the investors never would have accepted "OK, that's enough growth, now we cut costs and profit" without some huge disruption to blame it on.
“He took over Twitter because he was addicted to Twitter, got a seat on the board, and then the other board members said he had to behave and he didn’t want to.”
I don’t think this is fair; he’s been exceedingly clear and consistent about his philosophical reasons for buying Twitter.
There are other answers to that interview question. You could be a distance from the south pole such that if you walk one mile south, the circumference of the earth becomes 0.5 miles (or 1/n miles, for any positive integer n).
Really enjoyed the review, its been ages since I read this book so it was a good refresher.
I do disagree with your stance on Twitter/X on a couple of fronts. In terms of Twitter Blue, I don't see it as successful or on the path to success because it is kind of a half-measure. Twitter should either be primarily subscription model that basically operates on "FOMO" for its addicted users or rely strictly on advertising and be the town square. Twitter Blue is in this weird in-between where there are benefits to membership but its not needed to use Twitter, and so it becomes just a poor enough experience for non-subscribers that I think over time they will start losing users as the site becomes less useful (Like seeing subscriber tweets and comments before the people you actually want to read).
The second issue I have is with the idea advertisers need Twitter instead of vice versa. There are plenty of social media options for advertisers to go to, I just don't believe Twitter is essential there. Especially when Twitter isn't really associated with buying things as a consumer. No one shops on Twitter. I can see this actually being a major problem if advertisers stay away and realize their bottom line isn't actually hurting, so might as well just make this decision permanent since its all downside being in the Elon Musk business from a PR perspective (As your own review noted in terms of how he handles PR and drives folks nuts).
Steve Davis, director of advanced projects at SpaceX, describes his experience:
"He got a quote back for $120,000 ... Davis spent nine months building the actuator ... The actuator Davis designed ended up costing $3,900 and flew with Falcon 1 into space."
Presumably the 'director of advanced projects' gets at least a six-figure salary, which should be included in the calculation? Of course, as mentioned, there are benefits to in-housing etc, but this particular example doesn't really seem to carry the argument.
Napoleon Bonaparte reminds me of this. Or rather, reading about Napoleon reminded me of Elon Musk - particularly the terrifying intensity and emphasis on speed, the micromanaging, the ability rapidly to suck information out of people's skulls via conversation, the incredibly bold bets.
Enjoyed this review and the book when I read it a couple years ago. Also just want to add a link to the Search Engine podcast (for people who like that kind of thing) with a good deep dive into more recent Elon: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7dxqaAKNQhLzRzfOTJ60mI?si=ab9b530a373a48d5
To get a generic replacement mouse, my current employer required 3rd level management approval for the expenditure. Yes, it was for about $20. Too much middle-management is absolutely a thing.
This was the most cogent and useful review of my book that I've ever seen.
It's interesting to read all this with an inversion of the question in mind: not, "what is Musk's true nature such that he has been so successful?", but "what is the nature of society such that someone like Musk could be one of it's most successful individuals?"
I agree that " in a purely business sense he’s mostly self-made", but he also benefited more from privilege than I think you're acknowledging. If he'd gone bust in his early efforts, family money could've come to the rescue; he was never risking not having enough to get by.
There's a reason tightrope walkers who go between skyscrapers with no net do much less impressive stunts than circus performers who have one, even though I've never seen the circus performers fall.
Per your point that Musk might not be playing 4D chess but more like stumbling into it by being in the right place at the right time:
>[on Starlink] He just happened to be in the exact right place to make it happen.
> [on self-driving cars]Musk wasn’t expecting this to happen. But by doing things bigger and faster than anyone else, he must have put himself in a place where something was going to right for him.
In my observation, that's basically how chess masters beat you too. For the most part, they only rarely think more than a couple of moves ahead (especially when playing non-masters). They just have a really good idea of roughly where the pieces need to go to get a good position and then "the tactics tend to favor the side with the better position."
But largely, they don't know ahead of time which tactics exactly are going to win, but they have high confidence that they've put themselves in a position where something will work out well for them.
This does sort of sound like exactly what Musk is doing, so maybe he is playing some 4D chess? But then again, even masters blunder sometimes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK5QdJ715zw
For what it's worth, both Tesla and SpaceX do amazing things with much less money and time than you'd expect them to. But some of these amazing things come with trade-offs that are invisible to the average consumer. For example, Tesla batteries have amazing charge density and recharge speed; however, their lifetimes are slightly worse than other comparable batteries even at slower charge speeds. Tesla's current top-of-the-line batteries have a lifespan of 1000 cycles at C/3 per their patent (three hours to charge, three hours to discharge.) This is well below the 800 at C (one hour to charge) that Apple's current top-of-the-line batteries have. These issues come from high charge density with a fairly low Li transference number due to the electrolyte used, which leads to lithium dendrite growth between the anode and cathode, and once they meet, short circuits (which, in the worst cases, may lead to (in Apple's phrasing) "fire or burning"). It's uncommon for lifespan and stability to be sacrificed in batteries in this way, but if you do such a thing, you can certainly make them cheaper and higher-energy on initial sale.
This sort of thing is pretty common among Tesla and SpaceX projects and is generally why I'm not so optimistic about SpaceX's push towards reusable launch platforms- Musk's companies are fantastic at making things that work very well exactly once. I'm not so sure he can make the push towards something that works moderately well repeatedly, especially with the concerning lack of redundancy we're seeing.
I really have to give Musk credit for is just embodying the kind of arc-of-history techno-optimism that seems to have been a hallmark of the space age and just abandoned for blinkered, ultimately transient concerns that are just less inspiring and less long-term relevant than the kind of challenges Musk has taken off.
At a certain level, "Why should we go to Mars?" has to be a question that answers itself, and I think Musk is the primary counterweight against various forces that would pose it. Pose it in a manner that makes short-term sense but at the cost of any sort of long-term vision for human advancement. Perpetual local optimizations can generate a tremendous amount of value but it is not a total replacement for an overarching teleology. Wisdom is slave to the passions -- let us have our damn passions back.
Telos is humanity reaching out into the uncaring universe and wresting meaning from the void by force of will. It's worth going to Mars *because it's fucking going to Mars.*
I love Tolkien’s work, and, oddly, when I was reading this, my mind turned to Feanor in The Silmarillion.
Feanor was the most gifted of the elves. His was unbelievably brilliant, talented, and determined, and “his spirit burned like a bright flame.” He would work obsessively hard and he achieved many great things, including making the three Silmarils, the magnificent jewels after which the story is named.
He was also arrogant and quick to take offense, and he made some catastrophic errors in judgment that cost both him and his people dearly. He was very charismatic when getting people to follow him, but had zero kindness or understanding of others.
He had seven children, so not as many as Musk but still a large number, and he and his wife became “estranged “ due to his bad choices. Bear in mind that this is in a culture where divorce didn’t exist and true love was forever, so becoming estranged from your spouse was a really huge deal and a sign of something being deeply broken and wrong.
As Scott would say, TINACBNIAC.
Regarding autism, Musk self-described as having Asperger's syndrome in 2021 (on Saturday Night Live, for some reason): https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-57045770.
FWIW, I have a few friends who work at the gigafactory and they have a picture of Elon in their front room as a saint and call him daddy. They also work 6-7 days a week
https://www.redbubble.com/i/poster/Saint-Elon-of-Musk-Elon-Musk-Original-Religious-Painting-by-6amCrisis/94604861.LVTDI
Elon's personality appears amusingly similar to that of Napoleon (at least, as related in Andrew Roberts' 'Napoleon the Great').
Both boast/boasted near-perfect recall (Napoleon could recognise and name common soldiers he'd met two decades prior), a widely remarked-upon ability to rapidly master the complex details of processes at every level of thier operations (+esoteric topics of interest), a tendancy towards obsessive micromanagerial interventions, and reputation for meeting timelines conventional wisdom deemed impossible, though a combination of belligerence and highly motivated employees. Both worked their way out from initial training in maths/engineering, were/are obsessed with the frontiers of technology, and think/thought in terms of archs of history. The megalomaniac box also probably gets a tick in both cases.
Is Napoleon what happens when would-be tech bros lack silicon?
Key differences between the two are that Napoleon had a habit of being (often unjustifiably) trusting of long-time colleagues, built rapport with his low-level employees, and was exceedingly charismatic.
After decades of risk-taking, Napoleon's luck eventually ran out. It will be interesting to see if Musk meets his own proverbial early Russian winter.
I had assumed a major part of the reason for renaming Twitter something so generic was thinking that it was well-known enough to get away with being one of the main associations of a whole letter. If he previously named a startup (which necessarily wasn't already famous) the same thing, that's an argument against this, but I guess Musk's extreme optimism about his projects makes that still possible.
I mean, he might succeed in creating "X, the everything app", but I would not describe this as "okay" insofar as "X, the everything app" sounds dystopian and evil. (In particular, it sounds like combing Twitter with PayPal would involve going forward with the noises he's made about banning anonymity/pseudonymity, which I think would be a bigger blow to freedom of speech, and human freedom in general, than a thousand old-school Twitter censors…)
My personal theory is that 1) PR doesn't matter, but PR people have convinced us it does 2) many of the cited mistakes Musk has made, were indeed mistakes, but they were things that matter less than we might think 3) making mistakes in general matters less than people think. If you keep taking bets where you can win 1000x more than you can lose, it doesn't take long to end up the world's richest person. If you're paralyzed by the possibility of failure, then you're an internet commentor.
Since I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere before, I'll note that SpaceX almost certainly needs Starlink for internal use. If you're going to launch dozens/hundreds of people into space every week on Super Heavys, or build out any kind of significant human presence in space, you're going to need to be able to communicate with them. The existing NASA ground station network and things like TDRSS are insufficient for the scale, or for providing communications infrastructure to people who live in space but aren't working for a government 24/7. Even if somebody else had the "idea" for Starlink first, it was going to become an obvious necessity at some point in the long-term planning process for "I want to put lots of people into space".
He'll probably want a Starlink equivalent on Mars, and some sort of interplanetary interconnection between the two. I can't imagine he'll want to pause deliveries to Mars just because there's a conjunction.
>but in a purely business sense he’s mostly self-made
The idea of 'self-made' is a myth. Musk had plenty of employees and business partners who were indispensable in getting him where he is. This is like the Great Man Theory of Business.
Description of Elon really reminds description of Stalin from Mikoyan diaries
Very alike idea of ruthlessly appointing and firing people, same treating people like cogs, same very deep micromanagement where he both knew ton about ton and also faked a lot of it
He even did that very aggressive examining of his subordinates that for many looked like brutal test, but actually it was him figuring out
One anecdotal story tells how Stalin that Germans use electric melting of steel, so he drove right to home of minister responsible for the newest steel factory and accused him of sabotage for using coal
For the next hour a minister afraid of his life was proving and explaining all details of steel industry and why on certain mill the coal was preferable
The same was near-endless work stamina and also charm, for some reason people believed he was a great person no matter what Stalin did to/with them
Does the book offer any insight on why he’s so desperately supporting Putin, including repeatedly taking down Starlink to sabotage Ukrainian efforts?
The "1 in 1,000 level intelligent" estimate seems quite low. The Space-X engineers he's talking to are probably already 1 in 10,000: it takes about 1 in 100 intellect to get into Stanford, plus they're at the top of their class in one of the hardest majors to get to Space-X, and then are promoted at least once to be speaking with Musk. And these 1 in 10,000 folks are amazed by his intelligence. So shouldn't we estimate Musk at least at 1 in 1,000,000? (A 1 in 10,000 person might recognize that a 1 in 100,000 person is a bit smarter than them, but would not yet be amazed.)
To Scott's other point in that section, I agree that his intensity is why he's the richest man in the world, instead the other ~1,000 people or so at his level of intellect.
> Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?
> Part of the answer must come from that story above about him taking over people’s jobs. His strategy is to demand people do seemingly impossible things, then fire them if they fail. To pull that off, you need to really understand the exact limits of impossibility.
I agree with this, and would add that it's not specific to his strategy of micromanaging folks and taking over their audaciously-scoped tasks if they can't complete them. For any tech company, a technical CEO has superpowers compared to a non-technical one (but are predisposed to a fairly standard set of weaknesses too).
Even beyond just the CEO role, in the tech industry there is a very widely discussed challenge of "technical vs. non-technical managers". The engineers doing Individual Contributor (IC) work can grow to resent non-technical managers if they don't have a sense for how hard a given ask will be to implement, and a common anti-pattern is for the non-technical product, marketing, sales, and scheduling decisions to be made without a deep understanding of the actual feasibility as it bottoms out in the technical implementation. At worst this can lead to myopic leadership ("MBA management" etc.).
At the end of the day, a non-technical manager/CEO must be good at synthesizing the team's estimates and opinions, and knowing when to defer to concerns about tactical considerations, vs. take a tactically more difficult path which will advance strategic aims. (Aluminum chassis is a great example of this kind of tactically-painful but strategically visionary decision where a non-technical leader might struggle.) In a normal tech org the CEO has to trust the CTO, and then the CTO works through layers of managers to enact their technical vision, so there are multiple hops where the CEO's vision can be lost in translation. At Tesla Musk is collapsing both CEO-CTO and CTO-manager-IC communication down to him directly talking to ICs, which (while having other obvious organizational issues) allows him to make bold technical bets and stay very aligned on what is actually possible for his ICs to do.
Coming at the same issue from the bottom-up direction, technical ICs often don't have the context of the full strategic vision, and non-technical leaders often struggle to communicate it downwards in ways that are meaningful to the technical implementors. This is another thing Musk is better than almost anyone at; taking a lofty objective and chaining it down to an individual's role. I heard a SpaceX employee giving an answer in an interview like "Our mission is to become an inter-planetary species. To do that we must first colonize Mars. To do that we need to build a heavy lift rocket (Starship). To do that we need to build a more powerful engine. To build our new engine we need this valve assembly to work; my mission is to optimize this valve to X performance requirement".
Having said all that, why not just use technical managers? The answer is that it's usually not the best use of a strong IC's time; managing is very hard, requires strong empathy, is hard to teach, and training is criminally underfunded and under-appreciated. Managing is very different than IC work; it's meetings and interrupt-driven communications and performance management, whereas ICs usually thrive on "Maker Time" where they (optimally) get long blocks of uninterrupted time to get into the flow state and think about one problem. So while a good senior IC starts to get involved in communications and scheduling and other "outwards-facing" non-technical activities, there isn't an obvious universal progression from IC to manager. It used to be quite standard to have "senior IC" as the pinnacle of technical career progression, and the only way to get promoted further was to become a manager; this turns your best ICs (technical leads, mentors, or whole-system generalists) into normally-distributed managers (i.e. some good some bad, with no expectation for them to be better-than-average). Now at least in software it's more common to have a strong IC progression track that's parallel to managers, but you still see some degree of "strong IC -> mediocre manager" career paths.
The reasons you'd favor non-technical managers also apply to why non-technical CEOs are usually better at their jobs; in most organizations, the technical work is one or maybe a handful of roles in the C-suite (you might have a CTO and a Chief Scientist, say), while there are more non-technical roles (Sales, Operations, Marketing, Legal, HR, fundraising, and so on), and the CEO needs to be something of a jack-of-all-trades between all of those; in aggregate, non-technical skills are required more than technical ones. Musk's successful companies are outliers in that they benefit from being heavily technology-focused; they are applying tech company style iterative innovation and experimentation to historically non-software/non-"tech" domains, which I believe increases the importance of the CEO->CTO->IC chain, and is why Musk's strength in that area is disproportionately impactful. Having a Musk-style technical CEO would not be useful in a traditional car company, or a sales-driven enterprise software company like SAP.
What do Musk admirers think of the cringy names he gave to his kids?
If you put any stock on myers-briggs theory stuff, this article shows that Musk is the definition of the strengths and weaknesses of extraverted thinking vs introverted thinking. Probably an ENTJ.
I'm assuming it was an error that this wasn't filed under the "Dictator's Book Club" section of ACX
Very much a side note to the thrust of the review, but it was a trip to see Andy Beal mentioned. I had an internship at Beal Aerospace in the long ago, have always been saddened that it full-stopped so soon.
Don't over-estimate the significance of mistakes in business. You don't have to make zero mistakes. You just have to make fewer mistakes than the other guy. In the sorts of ambiguous business situations that Musk puts himself in, the other guy will make plenty of mistakes.
Reportedly from the Issacson book:
"Grimes was furious when she found out later and wasn’t at all sure whether she would ever allow her Musk babies (a boy named X and a girl named Y and a new baby boy named Techno Mechanicus) to hang out with Zilis’s Musk babies (a boy named Strider Sekhar Sirius and a girl named Azure Astra Alice)."
He sounds like a smart, intense guy - but also one that has gotten very, very lucky. Musk has not managed to piss off the wrong employee at the wrong time in a way that does irreparable damage to one or more of his businesses, or maybe those employees have become fully adept at avoiding that to save themselves.
As for Twitter/X, I'm more skeptical. He wants to make Twitter into WeChat for America, but WeChat only became that in China because of good timing and their connections with the Chinese government. Twitter does not have good timing on getting into mobile payments, and it's insanely competitive.
Musk is a genius in some ways, but in others he's merely average. I wrote in 2022:
"Musk's biography should be titled "the everyman." He gets married and then gets divorced. His second wife is an actress, exactly what an everyman would pick if he were rich and famous and too dumb to notice that Hollywood marriages never last. He gets divorced, then remarries the same woman, then divorces again. Then he decides to not bother with marriage and have some kids out of wedlock with a musician. The relationship shockingly does not last. He was accused of offering to buy sex from a masseuse. He's denied it, but if it happened it would have been a very everyman story. "Hey, I thought "massage" was a code word for sex! What, you mean some of you don't give happy endings?" He initially refused the COVID vaccine as he thought he was "not at risk of COVID" as a 49-year-old man. He always voted Democrat, but recently became a Republican. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was when one of the kids he has scattered around decides he's "transgender." Like a lot of everymen, he has this funny idea that his son cutting his d*** off is a negative util hit."
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6210.msg269419.html#msg269419
"The only good answer to this question I’ve ever heard is that maybe it’s some sort of grand charter city proposal, and the benefit is that Earthly governments can’t touch it. As I explain later, I don’t think Musk is enough of a 4D chessmaster to think of this and keep it secret, although maybe he’s just so good a chessmaster that he hides it."
It is completely obvious and heavily signaled that Mars is about liberty/independence as far as Musk is concerned.
"Starlink's terms of service include a Mars clause: Users must agree that Mars is a free planet unbound by the authority or sovereignty of any Earth-bound government."
Zubrin's Mars Society was an early influence on Musk, and Zubrin's whole thing is that Mars is a new America, free from the old world's stultifying influence. "No EPA on Mars is one of the major reasons we have to go there" among other quotes.
It's somewhat annoying that people act like the Mars thing is out of pocket. It's the only planet besides Earth where you can sit on the surface and get as much CO2 as you want. It has readily available water ice. You can launch a single stage rocket from Mars to anywhere in the solar system because of the shallow gravity well and thin atmosphere. It is the only planet where independent survival is possible with near-term tech. Living on another planet can't be compared to Antarctica.
This review/book seems to presume that he has random obsessions and just happened to make electric cars and rockets -- it's pretty clear that rocketry needed major improvements and that those improvements were technically possible, same with clean energy/electric cars. Those were also at the burning core of America's national interest. This is a man who loves sex, video games, and porn - an accomplished womanizer who jets around including with Hollywood actresses. He's ravenous for all that life has to offer and takes a big bite out of everything. Yet he'll still buckle down and work day and night on what he thinks is important -- sacrificing an AAA class lifestyle long periods of time. How many people have "made it" and kept swinging in that manner? None of the other major tech people seem to have that fight in them - they shoot their shot and then move on to their foundation. Where's Jeff Bezos? Where are Larry and Sergei? Where's Bill Gates?
Yet more than any of the other tech billionaires, who "hit it and quit it," or who knock one thing out of the park and whiff thereafter, he has gone back to bat time and time again, and each time for something incredibly important. Yet despite being the most admirable and principled tech magnate in this most important of regards, he has by far the worst reputation because, essentially, of his vibes.
Maybe his irreverence for norms should reflect badly on the norms, not on him.
I have seen several interviews with Musk and in none of them does he come off as being >120 IQ. Second-hand reports claim that he is very smart but I don't believe second-hand reports. Does anyone have any unfalsifiable proof that Musk is highly intelligent, like a video of him giving an unscripted talk about numerical methods for control systems or something? If he is able to meaningfully interrogate his employees about their work he should be able to lecture about various aspects of aerospace engineering. Where are the videos of him clearly demonstrating a genius-level IQ?
>More on Musk’s recruitment strategy:
Yeah I remember the days when SpaceX was really ramping up university recruitment. They were the table at the career fair everyone wanted to give their resume to. Naturally, SpaceX sent a spectacular a-hole who yelled at and belittled most of the students applying. It got so bad they actually apologized about it when they held a talk at the next career fair. Turned quite a few folks off, it was a real embarrassment. Took a couple of years to wash that one out.
I sometimes think about the people that knew the type of behavior going on and still stood in line and applied. I think a large part of why all those ex Musk employees and etc. still excuse various behaviors and defend him so fervently is that there is approximately no one who goes to work at one of his companies just to work a job. No one would put up with that crap for a 9-5, and now that it's so well known, no one would apply for it. It's all starry-eyed (mostly recent college grad) true believers. And the turnover rates speak pretty well for themselves.
Musk is like our current day D.D. Harriman (The Man Who Sold the Moon, RAH) only better!
Let's say I am a tech entrepreneur and engineer who reads this bio of Elon Musk. My takeaways are that you should search for radically innovative solutions grounded in materials science expertise, relentlessly seek to drive down costs of components, ignore or fire any experts who tell you it can't be done, and generally seek to be a bold and contrarian visionary who succeeds by knowing when to break the rules about how things are "normally" done. Now, for my first project, I decide to build a low-cost deep sea submersible to disrupt the ocean tourism industry...
I got nerdsniped by Elon's interview question: "You walk one mile south, one mile west, and one mile north. You end up exactly where you started. Where are you?”
I'm not reading through all the comments in case someone already mentioned this, but by this reasoning aren't there a ton of other places you could be near the south pole? For instance, if you walk one mile south and the circumference becomes 0.5 miles you just do 2 circuits of the circumference and then go north to your original point. If you're initially 1 mile north of the 0.1 mile circumference you just go 10 times around the circumference of the earth, etc. Am I missing something?
I care not a fig for Musk, but I hearted this review for footnote 1.
Feels weird talking about Musk, since his biggest impacts are fuzzier ones on x-risk (cofounding OpenAI and also the Ukraine Starlink non-activation event). AI risk and global geopolitical/nuclear risk. So far, what he's done in those areas is questionable at best and unusually terrible at worst.
Taking near-term extinction risk seriously, even getting to Mars wouldn't necessarily outweigh nudging the AGI field in a more dangerous direction (i.e. if OpenAI has contributed more to capabilities than alignment, or if X.ai does anything big).
IMHO these are the 3 things (X.ai, openai, and Ukraine) that matter most about Musk, and so far he seems net negative. The other massive things are rounding errors in the face of that, yet get more attention. (The extreme case: Twitter/X is a rounding error *on those other rounding errors*, and ofc that gets discussed 1000x more than everything else.)
I have to thank you for this piece. I was (embarrassingly) taken by the rumor that his accomplishments were thanks to financial advantages. I ought to have researched.
Elon Musk is frankly good looking and has a charming perceived generosity of trust that accompany his intellectual pursuits.
I think regarding X, it will take a very quick response to be more than a break-even effort to "save free speech." Where at first he was optimistic about renewed interest he is now releasing profit statistics that reveal extreme losses the value of the company. Regarding freedom of speech, is he really so passionate about it? That is important to how hard he tried. My instinct is that he is not extremely in favour of free speech. As in he holds some views that could easily be debunked if he really had to open his ears. Ie 'two genders no trans" or something like "im pro socialism but not in terms of helping unproductive."
I don't think it is impossible to make people want to pay money for online only things. I know about a website that people pay money in irrational spurts. The product is "fg" aka "forum gold" and it is exchanged for diablo 2 items. (ie. person x buys fg with real currency, Person x xfer fg to person y and person y joins the same room as person x to give them in game loot that otherwise takes hours. It's called d2jsp. I'm not sure how this principle could help Musk monetize x exactly but maybe it could. That said he valued twitter really highly for what the profit might be.
Good write-up. The ability to sell his vision to investors (including retail investors) is a big deal too, reducing the cost of capital and making it more likely he succeeds. It is not just great engineers he attracts.
I feel like this overhypes musks successes a great deal. For example, aluminum has a long history in auto manufacturing, with the first all aluminum production car being the nsx from 1989.
This reads, to me, like Elon is a smart man who routinely bullies his employees, often with his intelligence. Now most are afraid to tell him that some of his ideas are just bad. Even the smartest among us are bound to come up with an outright lousy idea every once in a while. And if one knows that the consequences of telling their boss that the idea is lousy is at best a very long assignment of having to prove that down to fundamental physics, and also likely to get one fired, why would anyone bother? "You want to put a nitrogen tank in your roadster and make it fly? Sure thing. Why not."
Removing oneself from negative feedback has rather predictable results.
I wonder what Musk's Dunbar number is. With his enormous memory for detail, it's possible that he's running the world's biggest small business, with the owner/manager directly supervising every worker.
So has Musk had any new major successes since the biography was written?
This is a terrible review. The most egregious issue: it is impossible to distinguish what the book actually says vs. the review author pulling out bits to support said reviewer's views.
The reviewer has also done a terrible job of not reading their own review. Someone who can memorize a list of 80 technical items and track them (along with running a couple of companies and micromanaging tens of thousands of employees) is somehow only 1/1,000 smart? Who can grill a subject matter expert and get to 99% of said SME's knowledge in a few weeks? Puh-lease.
There is also a very clear case of "Musk is bad" syndrome going on here - one which I strongly suspect was "Musk was good" when he was the darling of the liberals because of Tesla and his stance on Marijuana etc. - before COVID in other words. In every case, if the choice is Musk is <good> vs. Musk is <lucky, persistent, a super trudger etc>, the latter choice is the answer 90%+ of the time.
"Musk seems IQ 150+ when he’s thinking about the interactions of well-behaved physical laws, and IQ 120 when he’s thinking about about horrible fuzzy messes."
I think this combo of multi-modal performance in those 2 domains is a competitive advantage when aiming for instrumental rationality.
I’ve always wondered why there aren’t more successful founders in the EA / LW spaces. There are a lot of successful founders of course (a higher rate than any other group I think probably - eg. Stanford students), but I think there should be even more, given the raw talent, IQ, first principles thinking in the movements.
I’ve occasionally discussed the differences between instrumental and epistemic rationality. Modern LW style rationalism (eg. Elieizer / Zvi) is very focused on epistemic rationality whereas in some ways I think it can confer an instrumental advantage towards success in startups if you're a bit crazy (instrumentally rational, but not necessarily maxing out on epistemically rationality).
I think the fact that Scott was interested in and read RAW / Crowley / Giurdjieff / the first wave psychedelicists etc. in his uni days makes him a uniquely interesting rationalist writer. Because both epistemic and instrumental rationality forked out from Korzybski’s map-territory distinction, but are distinct now.
Anyway - a joy to read one of the best writers and thinkers of our generation, analyzing the original biography of one of the most successful business people of all time. Looking forward to your review of the Isaacson one ;)
BTW there’s a "Paris in the the spring” typo in that original sentence I quoted
"What's really remarkable to me is the breadth of his knowledge. I mean I've met a lot of super super smart people but they're usually super super smart on one thing and he's able to have conversations with our top engineers about the software, and the most arcane aspects of that and then he'll turn to our manufacturing engineers and have discussions about some really esoteric welding process for some crazy alloy and he'll just go back and forth and his ability to do that across the different technologies that go into rockets cars and everything else he does."
I find that exceedingly impressive. I couldn't do that in a million years. It is hard enough to keep track of the major questions in one area of a technology. Keeping track of them across all the relevant technologies for multiple companies is mind-boggling.
I hate how slow the interface has become after they integrated with Subatack Notes.
Not sure why you'd hesitate to call the person behind SpaceX and Tesla "smart"? If he doesn't qualify, not sure who does.
Also, the recent NYT article on Starlink suggests Musk has been thinking about it since at least 2001
Re. "Since these companies already have hundreds of engineers, each specializing in whatever component they’re making, why does it matter whether or not the boss is also a good engineer?"
Because middle managers AREN'T great engineers, but most of them want to make decisions over the objections of the engineers.
Re. Steve Jobs as a designer: His main design contributions to the Apple were:
- Integrate the keyboard into the computer (a terrible design)
- Have no network connectors (a terrible decision)
- Integrate the monitor into the Mac (a terrible design)
- Make that monitor black and white instead of color (a terrible decision)
- Insist that the mouse have only 1 button (a terrible design)
This is best and the most entertaining book review i have ever come across. Thanks a ton. 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
I read Walter Isaacson's bio on Steve Jobs. And I notice a parallel that Jobs also set wildly unreasonable expectations. He had the drive, charisma, and sociopathy to simply will the impossible into existence.
Jobs supposedly had a keen eye for design, aesthetic, and marketing. The techne, however, was outsourced to colleagues.
Isn’t this the exact opposite of conventional wisdom in this area? Software, not rocket science, is the field with many bootcamp programs teaching people core skills for quick career transfer without a degree or major experience… the “private job skills bootcamp” model seems to be flourishing in coding, data science, and basically nowhere else — though maybe it’s doing well in other areas I haven’t heard of? Arguably self-sponsored police academy training counts as something like this?
I'm sure rivers have been written about this, but the Model S and X's UX was like going from a flip phone to an iPhone. Their software, charging network, and 0-60 times were game-changers. Tesla isn't for hardcore car fans.
The death of one monkey is a tragedy, the death of a million is a PR stunt.
When the Model S came out, its UX felt like an iPhone compared to flip phones on other cars in the same price range. Legacy still has not caught up. Whenever asked about the car, I'd say it's great, but not for people who care about cars too much.
Wikipedia: "In 2008, Riley began dating Elon Musk; they married in 2010 at Dornoch Cathedral in Scotland."
Strangest fact is that Talulah Riley was a virgin as 23 year old? For some reason I don't expect beautiful women to be inexperienced.
The "expert at software engineering", AFAICT, wasn't musk but Max Levchin. Most of his decisions that I've read about at PayPal and at Twitter regarding software engineering specifically were not world class.
The obvious response to whether Musk will succeed or not with X/Twitter is "what counts as success"? This is not just a clever retort, it gets to the essence of the issue – why Musk bought the company, and what he hopes to achieve with it.
Suppose we take seriously _What's Our Problem?_ , the new book by your nemesis/doppelganger Tim Urban; then it's not unreasonable to see the closing of the American mind (and in particular the closing of places where free speech can be practiced in America) as THE most important problem of our time, the problem that has to be solved otherwise nothing else matters. If you take that seriously, then almost everything Musk has been doing around X/Twitter makes sense. He doesn't care if the DEIist's leave the platform – it's there to allow other voices to be heard. It's not exactly that he doesn't care if advertisers leave the platform, it's more that he wants to create one example showing that you can stand up to SJFs as a company and be just fine; he will welcome any other company that wishes to join his advertising platform, but he absolutely will not compromise the platform to allay their SJF-driven "concerns".
Most of the complaints being made against X/Twitter look a lot more self-serving when you understand this point. Getting rid of departments that claimed to be weeding out misinformation? Well, who exactly decides what counts as misinformation? Consider something as supposedly medical (ie science) based as large gatherings during covid. We have run the experiment, and we know the results – plenty of politicians and doctors said, loudly, that it was unacceptable to form such large groups – right up until the BLM protests, at which point we had always been fighting EastAsia.
Musk has presumably decided (correctly IMHO) that letting a thousand flowers bloom, and relying on people's exposure to all of them to come on a consensus (ie the way we did things up until about 2010) is, for all its flaws, vastly preferable to the alternative of an unaccountable Department of Goodthink that shuts down anything that even hints of disagreement with DEIist theology.
In other words, for Musk success for X/Twitter IMHO would probably be something like "Remains a vibrant platform for sharing ideas of all sorts, basically a more visible publicly version of the supposed 'Intellectual Dark Web'". This is very different from other metrics that people are going to use, like "retains as many users as in 2020" or "makes more money than in 2020" or whatever.
All the inevitable crowing around the "failure" of Twitter, which will only get louder as the next election approaches (along with the demonization of Musk) need to be understood in this context. Almost none of this is about people caring about the truth; it's about people driven furious by the fact that someone is willing to stand up to them and call them bullies – and that more than half the country agrees, but is cowed into being afraid to say so, except on Twitter.
Why shouldn't authors be obligated to include text by Elon Musk in any book they write about him, if that's what Elon Musk wants? Because it's their book, not his, and the author and publisher are not obliged to spend their money to publish Musk's views.
What they could do is say, "After the book is published, you're free to publish your own book giving your own side of the story." That would be nice of them. Oh, but wait, Musk could already do that anyway.