I recently finished reading: Elon Musk the authorised biography by Walter Isaacson 📚, who also wrote the authorised biography of Steve Jobs shortly before he died. I mention it because there are some clear similarities between Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, which I’m sure is not news to anyone.

When I read biographies about business tycoons I’m never much interested in the sections on their personal lives, except for as much as it goes someway to explain their personalities, what drives them, and some of the factors that may have led to their successes and failures.

The book delves into Musk’s personal life and childhood, and it’s clear how his relationship with his father and his experiences of being bullied at school influenced him later in life.

Elon Musk is a complicated man. It’s very easy to write him off as some right-wing nut-job, as many have.

Since he bought Twitter (now X), started spouting conspiracy theories, and is now an active Trump supporter, troves of seemingly sensible people suddenly decided that he his akin to Hitler. What’s more, they then used this as a justification to write nonsense undermining what he has achieved. According to a lot of journalists and others that I follow online, the case goes that Musk isn’t a very good engineer, he’s been lucky, he’s not a genius and just takes credit for the work of his staff. Blah, blah, blah.

Of course, no man is an island and he could not have achieved what he has unless he hired brilliant engineers. The question is though, could the engineers have achieved success if they weren’t driven by a hugely demanding, difficult boss who sets near impossible goals? Could Apple have come back from near bankruptcy in the 90’s if Steve Jobs had not returned and set the company on a new path?

Like him or loathe him, it’s clear to me that Elon Musk is one of those once in a generation entrepreneurs who you would hate to work for, but who really is changing the world.

I don’t think I could work for him, but I understand those who do. If you go to work for one of Elon’s companies you know what you’re letting yourself in for. For a start, there’s zero job security. He fires people on a whim. He personalises blame - lashing out at individuals for the slightest transgression. The result is a culture of immense pressure and fear. However, if you have a thick-skin and are confident in your abilities, the upside is that you get to work on career-defining projects that could potentially change the world. Not to mention the potential for excellent renumeration and share options which could set you up financially for life.

Elon Musk Companies

As a reminder, this is where we currently are with Elon Musk’s portfolio of companies:

Tesla

Musk has played a transformative role in the electric vehicle industry. I think it would be hard to argue that we would be seeing as many electric vehicles on the road today if Tesla has not led the way. As with some of his other companies, Tesla wasn’t an immediate success. It very nearly went bankrupt and things could be a whole lot different now if his risk-taking had not paid off. His companies are very much interconnected. If Tesla had failed, this would have had a clear knock-on affect on his ability to develop the other businesses.

Despite what he tells people, Musk is not a founder of Tesla. Martin Eberhard probably deserves the most credit. Yet it’s really only when Musk became the largest investor, took over day-to-day and started making product decisions that Tesla became a success.

Just last week I watched the Robotaxi event where he unveiled the self-driving cars that he’s betting will turn Tesla into a 10 trillion dollar company. His vision is that we will be seeing fleets of these all over the world and most people will not be interested in buying a car anymore. It will make more financial sense just to hop into one of these. Who knows whether he’s right. Only time will tell. Only a fool would bet against him though (just like the many fools who shorted Tesla stock).

Just like Steve Jobs, he seems to have the reality distortion field. Every year since 2016 he has been saying that full self-driving is only a year away. In his defence, he openly admits that he’s extremely optimistic in his timeframes. The Robotaxi event, of course, failed to mention that Weymo (owned by Alphabet, who own Google) already have driver-less taxis on the roads in Phoenix, San Francisco, and is rolling them out to L.A and Austin, Texas.

SpaceX

The achievements he has made with SpaceX are mind-blowing. Again, only last week we were able to watch visions of the Super Heavy Booster from the Starship rocket launch, separate, and then land back on its launch pad - caught by mechanical arms, nicknamed “Chopsticks”.

The progress with SpaceX is astonishing. Again, this was all due to massive risk-taking. At the beginning, if the company had just one more rocket failure it would have been game over - no more money to keep trying and no NASA contract.

To think that now SpaceX is responsible for launching 90% of all payload worldwide that goes into space.

SpaceX also has Starlink - the constellation of thousands of low-orbit satellites that are providing fast broadband to pretty much every corner of the earth. It’s incredible, and slightly concerning, where this is going. Starlink can now compete with most ISP’s around the world, and for dictatorships who control citizen’s internet access I’m sure it’s very worrying. For the rest of us, it creates questions of what power this gives Elon Musk. We have already seen what happened when he decided to take unilateral action to shut off Starlink for Ukraine’s assault on Crimea. Thankfully, that issue was resolved by delegating authority to the pentagon to make those decisions. We really don’t want lone billionaire businessmen to have the ability to impact wars and geo-politics, yet this is what’s happening.

The Boring Company

A great name for a company. His aim is to revolutionise urban transportation by building underground tunnels to reduce traffic congestions. A short tunnel has been completed in Las Vegas but we’re a long way from knowing whether or not this will be a success.

Another of Musk’s companies where you can’t help but be in awe of what’s being achieved. It’s not the only company to be working on brain-computer interfaces to help cure paralysis, blindness and other neurological conditions, but I wouldn’t bet against Neuralink eventually being a winner in the race.

Twitter (X)

Musk acquired Twitter in 2022 for $44 billion and immediately took it private. The changes he has made has reportedly resulted in advertisers fleeing the company in droves and many doubt that X is worth anywhere near $44 billion now. He’s clearly playing the long game though. He has said his aim his for X to be like one of the big Chinese apps which basically does everything.

Twitter is a fascinating example of his core business philosophies at play. He waltzed in there (carrying a sink and tweeting ‘Let that sink in’) and quickly got to work laying off 75% of staff. Many commentators tweeted and wrote with glee that Twitter would start to fail within days. After all, you can’t lay off that amount of staff and still expect the servers to keep running, can you?

Again, his risk-taking seems to have worked. Twitter stayed up and running.

I’ve read all kinds of nonsense about how X is now a cesspool because of the lack of moderation. That’s not been my experience at all. If anything, it has improved. Whether you agree with him or not, his principle around content moderation has been freedom of speech but not freedom of reach. If you look for objectionable content on X you can find it, but that’s it, you have to go looking. I found that my Twitter feed used to be full of angry political content whether I wanted it or not. Today, that’s not the case. If you unfollow people who tweet politics, and make it clear to the algorithm that you don’t want political content (by flagging users and posts you are not interested in), you won’t see it. That’s my results at least.

As soon as Musk took over Twitter there was a mass exodus of users who objected to his politics and the changes he was planning. The result was, for me anyway, it actually made the platform better. Those who left tended to be the opinionated gob-shites who couldn’t help themselves to espousing their political views every 5 minutes. I would follow film-critics, business leaders, techies, and others in my areas of interest, but, as they are free to-do, I would also have to hear their latest uninformed opinion on whatever was going on in the political world.

In truth, I would love it if all the people I follow went over to Mastadon or Bluesky, but it hasn’t happened. Social networks are only as good as their content. The network effect means that if, as I do, you want to get the latest and best news of what’s happening in Ukraine, X remains the best platform because that’s where all the best experts are.

Threads is doing quite well but it’s a Meta (Facebook) company and I find it hard to trust Facebook after all their past transgressions.

X.AI

Musk founded X.AI as a competitor to OpenAI (of which he was a co-founder). He is clearly not happy that OpenAI sold shares to Microsoft and is very bitter about how all that happened.

OpenAI (Chat-GPT) and Google Gemini are dominating the news cycle in terms of AI but I would not being against X.AI in the long term. He has a massive advantage. Hundreds of millions of hours of video content from Tesla cars combined with millions of tweets per hour from X gives him a huge amount of content to train neural networks. The race is on and the more competition the better it is for all of us. At least in Musk’s case he is very concerned about AI safety. There’s an extremely concerning passage in the book where he talks to Larry Page (Google) about AI safety and Page dismisses the risks, accusing Musk of being a “specist” (biased in favour of humans). It is partly this conversation that led Musk to co-found OpenAI, as a counter to Google’s dominance.

Business Learnings

So what are they key traits and business philosophies of Elon Musk that has led to his success. Here’s what I have summarised from the book:

  1. First Principles

First principles thinking means he breaks down complex problems to their most basic components and then builds solutions from scratch. For example, at SpaceX he developed an “idiot index” to highlight the ridiculous costs of components. He pressured suppliers into reducing prices by demonstrating how the cost he was paying for raw materials for Tesla parts was substantially cheaper than what was being charged for SpaceX. It seems that using the words Aeronautics or Defence when making purchases is akin to saying the word ‘Wedding’ at a flower shop. Everything immediately quadruples in price!

  1. Relentless Efficiency

Musk is obsessed with cost cutting and pays attention to the cost of every part of the process. He challenges every assumption and product specification. If a product spec says that a panel needs 5 rivets, he would get the engineers to test it with 3 rivets and take on the safety risk. At Tesla, he implemented a five-step algorithm for product development that included questioning every requirement, deleting unnecessary parts, simplifying proccesses, accelerating timelines, and only then automating the process.

  1. High Standards

Musk sets extraordinarily high standards for product quality, obsessing over every detail. It’s not enough that the product functionally works, it must also be beautiful and innovative. As an example, during the development of the Tesla Roadster, Musk insisted on modifying the Lotus body even though it increased costs and complexity.

  1. Accountability and Feedback

Musk has zero-tolerance to failure. He expects accountability from every member of his teams and often attributes failure to individuals, rather than teams, delivering harsh feedback. His review meetings are described as brutal. There are countless stories of him calling meetings at 11pm at night and requiring staff to immediately fly in that night from wherever they are in the country.

  1. Risk Tolerance

Musk believes in taking big risks and failing fast. You see this with a lot of the big tech companies. The “move fast and break things” philosophy certainly didn’t start with Elon Musk but he has embraced it with gusto. At SpaceX he pushed engineers to break engines during testing to understand their limits. He ordered engineers to redesign the Starship’s rocket’s heat shield with stainless steel - a massive risk that paid off with new efficiencies. It’s hard to imagine that NASA would have taken the same risk.

  1. Hardcore Work Ethic

Shortly after taking over Twitter, he sent out an email to all staff demanding that they work long hours at high intensity. Anyone who disagreed were let go. At Tesla, he drove teams to meet arbitrary, crazy production targets, even when working conditions led to higher-than-average injury rates in the factory.

  1. Big Thinking. Audacious Goals.

Musk’s business ethos revolves around pursuing world-changing missions, such as making life multi-planetary or transitioning the world to sustainable energy. He sets seemingly impossible goals but galvanises his teams to accomplish remarkable results.

Summary

The book is a fascinating insight to an icon of our times. At every turn, he confounds his critics who write him off at every chance they can get.

He doesn’t come across as a likeable person, that’s for sure, but neither did Steve Jobs. It doesn’t matter. Unless you’re one of his employees, or one of his many kids, those things really don’t matter in the scheme of things. What matters is what he achieves and the impact he has on the world. The jury is still out on a lot of this.

One thing that does worry me is the amount of power he has. His vast wealth, the advances in AI, his politics, and his control over so much data, gives him a scary amount of power and influence. The future of the world could be dependent upon the whims of a deeply-flawed man who is prone to impulsive behaviour and risk-taking.

There’s no doubt that the man is nuts, but maybe that’s what it takes.

“Here’s to the crazy ones.

The misfits.

The rebels.

The troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes.

The ones who see things differently.

They’re not fond of rules.

And they have no respect for the status quo.

You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them.

About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them.

Because they change things.

They invent. They imagine. They heal.

They explore. They create. They inspire.

They push the human race forward.

Maybe they have to be crazy.

How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art?

Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written?

Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?

We make tools for these kinds of people.

While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius.

Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Here’s to the crazy ones

Verdict: 5/5 Isaacson’s biography offers a thorough and insightful exploration of one of the most influential and controversial figures of the 21st century. Elon Musk captures both the awe and the unease that Musk evokes, making it an essential read for those looking to understand the man behind some of the most transformative technologies of our time.