Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
Contra Dos Equis, The Actual Most Interesting Man in the World
I received this book as a Christmas gift and it being substantially less dense than my typical materials, I finished its 400+ pages early this month. I read print books at night, away from screens, to calm down before bed. This book had the opposite effect. Just reading about Elon’s razor-edged life was enough to cause mild insomnia.
Overall, my opinions of Musk haven’t changed since my post last year:
The biography offers more background color to the man that I’ll summarize below while it’s still in my short-term memory:
On Tesla
Musk definitely fits the pattern of the “sociopath takes crazy risks, gets lucky” Silicon Valley type founder. Yet his undeniable top-tier engineering skills have made these risks more manageable. His bet on electric cars, for example, was an extrapolation and likely a dimensional analysis of falling battery costs and government tax incentives. With very little margin for error, he timed the descent of this line on the very edge of Tesla’s bankruptcy for many years.
I have seen some insider data on the costs of electric cars, especially Chinese-made ones, where the trend is very much towards lower costs than internal combustion vehicles. Inferior products (i.e. limited range and hauling capacity, dysfunction in extreme weather) with lower costs in limited applications is the start of a classic disruption cycle.
The challenge will be electric charging capacity and power distribution. As a small percentage of the market, electric cars can utilize the excess power generation in existing electrical systems. In developed countries, expanding electricity generation and distribution will involve significant capital costs that will, per regulation, be baked into higher utility rates. In certain places already, it is more expensive to charge an electric car per mile than gasoline; if, as electric cars become mainstream, billions must be invested by regulated utilities in “clean” electricity infrastructure the same may happen in much of the nation, undermining at least the marginal cost advantage of electric cars.
In developing countries, they’ll simply expand electricity in cheap, dirty ways. Those Chinese electric cars will be significantly powered by cheap coal power generation, which likely blunts their supposed impact on carbon “pollution.”
All that said, most families in developed countries enjoy having two cars. One could easily be designated as a daily commuter, with the other petroleum-powered vehicle reserved for more passengers and longer trips. Even at cost parity with gasoline for fuel, if the electric car is cheaper to buy and maintain it can be a win. The winner may not be Tesla, however, but the Chinese manufacturers if they are allowed access to Western markets. Western governments are understandably not enthused about Chinese cars with cloud-connected GPS and cameras.
Tesla’s primary competitive advantage going forward may not be electric fuel but its development of ChatGPT-like machine learning powered self-driving. Autopilot shifted away, last year, from rules-based algorithms to neural network-type training, with data provided by Tesla drivers in everyday driving situations. This data, and Tesla’s overwhelming lead in acquiring it, may make self-driving the killer app that makes Tesla attractive to ordinary consumers. This is an open technological question, however. A self-driving algorithm would need lower error rates than ChatGPT.
Musk is obviously very open to “alternative” right-wing arguments. Suppose he is or gets red-pilled on global warming, and continues to tick off his core SJW customer. It wouldn’t be difficult for Tesla to build an extremely efficient gasoline generator, integrated into larger vehicles to provide a long-range charger-free option, an existing technology called an extended range electric vehicle (interestingly, these are more efficient using gasoline since their generators can be optimized for a single use state, i.e. charging the battery at an optimal, single gear ratio and RPM). With 99% self-driving capability and the option to avoid charging stations away from home, I would very much consider something like the Cybertruck as my primary vehicle, or a Cybertruck-based SUV for a family hauler.
The Algorithm
Musk is strongly opinionated but learns from risk-taking. After over-automating Tesla factories, he learns the errors of his ways and focuses on eliminating waste first before optimizing processes.
His hyper-specific “algorithm” from his lessons at Tesla are a useful, detailed appendix to applying the lessons of The Goal, my favorite business book. It is the single most useful takeaway from Musk’s career for those operating any kind of business.
On Mars
Musk’s behavior aligns with a very simple, and to all appearances, sincere utility function: U(x) = 1 if humanity becomes a multi-planetary species, U(x) = 0 if not.
Given the scope of his ambitions, I wonder if the true purpose of Tesla is not to save the planet per-se, but rather to preserve the world’s hydrocarbons for spacefaring. The laws of physics, the only laws Elon respects, seem to absolutely rule out an electric rocket. The batteries we have today are already at over 50% of their theoretical maximum energy density, which is dictated by the stoichiometric arithmetic of their chemistry.
I’m extremely skeptical that colonization of Mars is possible. Perhaps Elon’s done the dimensional analysis and determined that it’s possible to terra-form it. I wouldn’t bet against that. It would be a natural home, a new frontier, for a cold-adapted human subspecies, which would likely converge, under Mars’ 60% gravity, to be extremely tall and physically weaker than Earth-based humans. Weaker gravity might allow the evolution of larger heads and brains as well.
Interestingly, SpaceX, which is the core of his life’s purpose and his potentially most profitable company, which may soon disrupt the global cell phone market (Starlink now approaches a 20 ms latency functionally equivalent to terrestrial providers; as a customer, I can confirm the service is excellent and much “better than nothing” per their cheeky slogan), is private and shares are not offered to the public.
On Musk
One of my daughters is reading the book after me and I have pointed out to her the simplicity of men, especially the comical feud between Musk and Jeff Bezos in their space ventures. My car goes faster than yours, my rocket goes higher than yours. Sure, there’s the aspirational side of it, but the fun part is the competition.
Working for Musk is all about the mission. He’s definitely not a Simon Senek acolyte concerned with people feeling safe at work. Forget a meaningful family life, as he wants everyone to be “super hardcore” like he is, and he tends to burn out and cycle through people very quickly. As I tell my employees, nice profit margins, and cumulatively preserving them through proper bet sizing, controlling costs, and avoiding winner-take-all high-risk ventures, are how we have nice things, like cash bonuses, a 40-hour work week, and employment stability. Musk’s companies operate at the very edge of profitability and technical feasibility.
Musk has learned that “attitude” is the differentiating quality in employees. He assumes some baseline of high competence and recruits accordingly. But he needs people of generally positive affect and high positive emotions to handle his demands for the near-impossible. This strikes me a a key insight of something he has learned against his likely pre-existing biases towards raw technical ability. This seems to make sense. Most things most employees do all day don’t require running their CPU at 100%, but low mood and motivation can kill normal productivity. IQ and smarts are subject to a diminishing marginal returns curve like anything else. If someone’s smart enough, their attitude will matter more.
Reading between the lines, Musk’s family and background are, to put it delicately, that of the hard right wing of South African politics. His biographer, Isaacson1, tries to de-emphasize this and insulate Elon himself from such an association, likely to maintain his future access to him but also because publicizing that the world’s richest and arguably most talented human, and one of its most powerful, might at least tolerate such views is dangerous.
Having seen the tragic trajectory of South Africa as a young man, Elon probably thinks it’s possible that there is only a small window for humanity to leave the planet. I am reminded of the scene from First Man where, at the end of the 1960s, as Western men, farmboy test pilots and Paperclipped rocket scientists, embark on their seminal, still unmatched accomplishment of visiting another world, left-wing activists protest Neil Armstrong as “Whitey On the Moon,” before the camera cuts, both picture and sound, from the rhythmic protest song to an ethereal orchestral hit and the gigantic Saturn V rocket. Elon observes the subsequent cultural collapse from that moment, along with the collapse in birthrates among intelligent people, and realizes that the talent base and civilizational supports to successfully exit the planet may only exist for a brief time into the future, before mankind and the West, drunk on one of its periodic moral panics, slips back to the historical norm of a Malthusian, zero-sum existence.
Musk’s life is dominated by an overwhelming sense of urgency to accomplish his goals, not animus towards others. Elon, like most founders, holds shadows of these views somewhat contingently — strong opinions, lightly held in the face of evidence. He loves brinksmanship as a strategy to get what he wants. If the regime allows him to leave the planet and does not disrupt his ambitions, he will leave them in peace. If they do not, he will destroy them by, among other things, publicizing the lies upon which the regime is built. His two-steps-forward, one-step-back repeated bit on Twitter demonstrates both his willingness to burn the regime to the ground, but also work with them if they leave him alone. After all, replacing the regime as a Red Caesar would push his Mars timeline back significantly. According to the algorithm, it’s best to eliminate that step unless absolutely necessary. SpaceX began with Elon attempting to buy used Russian ICBM’s, and in less than 20 years he has exceeded even the mighty Saturn V, with a smaller team and less money, creating the most powerful machine in world history:
The regime should not underestimate his pitiless determination if they get in his way.
Isaacson may be sensitive to this as he is of New Orleans Jewish descent, a particular community with its own racial skeletons in the closet. Fully accepted among Louisiana’s polyglot elite, the largely antebellum Sephardic community prospered as merchants in the Big Easy, distributing the agricultural plenty of the Americas in the hemisphere’s largest port, and as privileged elites were politically conservative in the region. Jewish families were more likely to own slaves than other Louisianans, and were among the most enthusiastic supporters of the Confederacy, especially its ambitions, in victory, of building a new mercantile Rome centered around the Caribbean. Louisiana and Florida were the two states who first elected, through their legislatures, Jewish US Senators in the mid-1800s, and Louisianan Judah Benjamin was the first Jewish person to serve in an American president’s cabinet, in three different roles, as Jefferson Davis’ Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Secretary of War, and widely seen as Davis’ second-in-command in the war effort. Suspected as a conspirator in Lincoln’s assassination, the colorful Benjamin fled to England after the war where he became a recognized expert on English law. Musk’s penchant for breaking rules, operational focus, and will-to-power reminded me of one of my favorite infamous Louisiana characters, Jewish fruit entrepreneur and patron of Tulane University, Sam “The Banana Man” Zemmuray (subject of an amazing rags-to-riches biography). His United Fruit Company raised an army among the ruffians of the French Quarter, including the larger than life mercenary Lee Christmas of Livingston Parish, to invade and conquer Central American governments hostile to his property rights, giving us the idiom “banana republic.”