Start at the end. Elon Musk finalized the purchase of Twitter in October 2022; the book was published in 2023. Two things becomes clear as you read:
First, Twitter/X’s financial troubles mirror the troubles of all of Musk’s purchases and inventions; there is always a steep learning and profitability curve. The final accounting hadn’t happened before the book was published – and probably still hasn’t. If you want to know how it ends, the book has no answer.
Second, X is the one Musk purchase that involves people, thoughts, emotions, and politics (which involves people, thoughts, and emotions), and about which people are, perhaps, irrationally fervent. This, you will learn after a few chapters, is NOT Musk’s forte.
Once you read the book, you understand the current, maybe-but-not-necessarily-permanent, problem of X. Several chapters are devoted to that, as well as the plusses and minuses of totally free speech, sort of free speech, and not-so-free speech depending on who controls the speech.
Those chapters are worth reading. When a book is 600+ pages long, it is useful to know where to focus.
Now the Review:
Love him or hate him
Admire Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Twitter, The Boring Company, Neuralink, and X. AI or hope the next project fails
Love X or miss Twitter
Agree with the British government that he should be arrested for his interview with Donald Trump or thank heaven we had a Revolution
No matter which way you go, Elon Musk is one of the most innovative and provocative people in the world today. Riding the ubiquitous world of social media, people think they know all about him.
Walter Isaacson’s biography, Elon Musk, gives you the back story. Sort of.
On the one hand, Isaacson has done a masterful job. Musk was a strange and difficult child with a strange, heavy-handed, and difficult father. Physical punishment appears to have been severe and fisticuffs the norm between Elon and his brother Kimbal and their cousins, who, interestingly, are all his friends in adulthood. It seems hard to be Musk’s friend, although a number of people try.
All the chapters about family are interesting.
On the other hand, after a while, you begin to feel that you’ve walked several thousand production lines, seen umpteen million wires, shafts, motors, and tanks, and met most of the engineers in the US and Canada. That appears to be a shortcoming of Isaacson’s – he is enamored of the process of production. You may be less so.
On the third hand, or maybe it is an extension of the other hand, Isaacson enters the story more, perhaps, than an author should. His dislike of Musk’s politics is very, very evident as the subject moves rightward, and sometimes undermines his own high-flown rhetoric. Isaacson concludes: “Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an asshole? The answer is no, of course not.”
Thanks, Walter.
Motivation
Musk himself has three main motivators:
Technological progress is not inevitable, and civilization can backslide. After the grounding of the Space Shuttle, he said, “Do we want to tell our children that going to the moon is the best we did, and then we gave up?” And “People are mistaken when they think technology just automatically improves…It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better.”
The Earth is not indestructible. Whether a catastrophe is caused by nature or by man, Musk believes that which we have developed should be exportable to other sites in the universe and he is particularly enamored of colonizing Mars.
His family background. The Musk family was strange but adventurous, and then he moved to the United States, which he called, “literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration. This is a land of adventurers.” The next adventure is always calling.
“Question Every Cost”
Musk’s operating principle appears to be “reduce, reuse, recycle” with a heavy dash of skepticism about government regulation (or any regulation), a firm belief in domestic American production facilities and supply chains, and what appears to be a mania about shortening timelines. All of these operate across all of his inventions, purchases, contracts.
Tesla
Between 2000 and 2010, the US lost 1/3 of its manufacturing jobs. Globalization of the 1980s was a horror “relentlessly driven by cost-cutting CEOs and their activist investors.”
You’d think Musk, cost-driven himself, would approve. He did not. Fearing American companies had “lost the daily feel for ways to improve their products,” he wanted control of the manufacturing process and believed “designing the factory to build a car – the ‘machine that builds the machine’ – was as important as designing the car itself.”
Tesla was almost dead in 2008. In 2010, Musk bought a “used” Toyota factory once valued at $1 billion for $42 million and convinced Toyota to invest another $50 million in Tesla. The late 2010 Tesla IPO was the first by an American carmaker since Ford in 1956.
But when the first cars rolled off the new assembly line, Musk wasn’t happy (he’s rarely happy in the book) and said the production quality “sucked.” He and his engineers dug deeply into both design and production. “Musk joined them two or three nights a week. His focus was on root causes. What in the design was to blame for a production line problem?”
In 2012, Motor Trend picked the Tesla Model S as its “Car of the Year,” calling it a “shocking winner.”
Cost Plus
The chapter SpaceX, 2002-2003 is important. Not only does it walk you through the SpaceX story and emphasize Musk’s determination to focus on cost-saving, but it also explains how the US government’s “cost plus” contracts for new technology raise prices (which you expect) and stifle innovation (which you might not expect). It starts with sourcing vs producing parts. Since the contract is cost plus, if the supplier produces a successful part and receives an add-on contract, any price hikes will simply be passed on to the government, i.e., to you.
It happens a lot.
The second problem Musk discovered, was the number and intricacy of government specifications and requirements. As he found ones that made no sense to him, he would ask, “Who wrote this and why?” One engineer said that for Musk, “All requirements should be treated as recommendations… the only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.”
The same applied to schedules. Cost plus means people will be paid for as long as it takes to do a job. Musk’s timeline mantra is “make it shorter, do it faster.” In one case, he demanded that the schedule for producing Merlin engines be cut in half. The chief engineer balked. “You can’t just take a schedule that we already cut in half and then cut it in half again.” But Musk did and the engineers did. “A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle.”
It didn’t work all the time, and it didn’t work for everyone.
The Numbers
There are interesting savings. The government specified cranes to lift the Falcon 9, planning to spend $2 million on them. Musk believed the safety standards for the cranes were “obsolete,” and had his engineers meet with the military. The standards were revised, and the cranes cost $300,000. A latch on the Space Station was projected at $1,500 – SpaceX engineers modified a bathroom stall lock to build one for $30. Air cooling system for Falcon 9 were budgeted at more than $3 million, compared to a home air-conditioning system that cost about $6,000.
Twitter/X
Twitter, of course, takes up a lot of mental – if not physical – space. Here, btw, Isaacson inserts himself directly into the storyline – telling you in his own voice why he thinks Musk bought Twitter. It wasn’t necessary.
After all the design, hardware, and production chapters, why Twitter? Actually, it fits right into the Musk mode. “I’ve come to believe it can be part of the mission of preserving civilization” by enlarging the space for free speech. “There seems to be more and more group-think in the media…so if you weren’t in step, you’re just going to be ostracized, or your voice will be shut off.”
“We want to prevent a world in which people split into their own echo chambers on social media… We want to have one place where people with different viewpoints can interact.” “I don’t think from a cognitive standpoint it’s nearly as hard as SpaceX or Tesla. It’s not like getting to Mars. Its not as hard as changing the entire industrial base of Earth to sustainable energy.”
Perhaps not. But it comes with an entirely different set of rules and expectations, based on the fact that it is driven by human emotion – which is not engineerable. Musk found that out when Twitter had a massive drop in revenue as activist groups pressured advertisers to drop the platform. The activists were successful, and Musk’s response was predictable: his “trancelike, darkest persona” emerged, writes Isaacson, and he had not “learned how to ride out the storms.” He demanded that Twitter ban the “blackmailers” – regardless of his prior commitment to free speech. He called the agitators “immoral.”
The “Twitter Files”
Musk brought in two iconoclastic journalists – Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss – who discovered what Twitter users had long suspected: the site was doing “visibility filtering” and “shadow banning,” with a political bias. “Weiss concluded that Twitter moderators were more aggressive at suppressing right-wing tweets. ‘It operated with a secret blacklist, with teams of employees tasked with suppressing the visibility of accounts or subjects deemed undesirable.’” [Also, see Mark Zuckerberg’s August 2024 letter admitting that Facebook submitted to government censorship.]
Musk reinstated Kathy Griffin, Jordan Peterson, and Babylon Bee, but not Alex Jones or Kanye West. Users were asked to vote on the reinstatement of Donald Trump – Trump won. Asked whether he would have kept Trump banned if the vote went the other way, Musk replied, ‘Yes. I’m not Trump’s fan. He’s disruptive. He’s the world’s champion of bullshit.’” [Have I mentioned that the book was published in 2023?]
Coordination and cooperation between journalists and government agencies grew exponentially during COVID. Should COVID information have been censored? The FBI found Russian bot accounts. Should they be censored? An account dedicated to stalking Elon Musk resulted in a confrontation with Musk’s security guard when Musk was not in the car, but his son was. Should the stalker be banned? There is no answer available in a biography, but Musk’s devotion to free speech was compromised in several areas.
AI
If you worry about self-driving cars, don’t read the chapter Tesla 2022-2023.
The chapter X.AI 2023 won’t help you either as Musk expresses concern that AI could forge ahead on its own, leaving humans behind. “That could happen sooner than we expected.”
SpaceX April 2023
“This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year, there are more referees and fewer doers… When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”
That is not his problem
The April 2023 launch of SpaceX appears to have made Musk more nervous than his other risky adventures. It failed.
But failure is a matter of perception. When the “destruct” button was pushed, “the control room applauded – they were jubilant at what they had achieved and what they had learned.” His response, “Nicely done, guys. Success. Our goal was to get clear of the pad and explode out of sight and we did. There’s too much that can go wrong to get to orbit the first time. This is an awesome day.”
They went out and celebrated.
Conclusion
The best conclusion is Musk’s own: “My main regret is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.”
Buy it.
Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center and Editor of inFOCUS Quarterly.
