Elon Musk

I was concerned that if I didn’t study business, I would be forced to work for someone who did

They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.

It was a pleasing concept: an impulse-control button that could defuse Musk’s tweets as well as all of his dark impulsive actions and demon-mode eruptions that leave rubble in his wake. But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic.

One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth. As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex. Even the best people, he wrote, are “molded out of faults.”

That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.”

Barbra Streisand effect, named after the singer sued a photographer for posting a photo of her home, thus causing the photo to get a thousand times more attention.

Two days before AI Day, Musk held a prep meeting with the Tesla team virtually from Boca Chica. That day also included a meeting with the Texas Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office to get support for Starship launches, a Tesla finance meeting, a discussion of solar roof finances, a meeting about future launches of civilians, a contentious walk through the tents where Starship was being assembled, an interview for a Netflix documentary, and his second late-night visit to the tract houses where Brian Dow’s team was installing solar roofs. After midnight, he got on his plane and headed for Palo Alto.

He admitted there was a reasonable chance that it would not work, but it was better to try and fail rather than analyze the issue for months. “If you make this thing fast, you can find out fast. And then you can fix it fast.” He eventually succeeded in converting most of the parts into stainless steel.

On that October night during his work binge at the Cape, when Musk asked to speak to Dontchev, the engineer had just gotten home after three straight days of work and cracked open a bottle of wine. At first he ignored the unknown number on his phone, but then one of his colleagues called his wife. Tell Kiko to get back to the hangar right away. Musk wants him. “I’m like super tired, half-drunk, haven’t slept in days, so I got in the car, bought a pack of cigarettes to get me going, and made it back to the hangar,” he says. “I worried about getting pulled over for drunk driving, but that seemed less of a risk than ignoring Elon.”

Ren’s big challenge was to find a way to do manufacturing in China. He could either wear down Musk’s resistance and have Tesla form a joint venture, which is what every other car company had done, or he could convince China’s top leaders to change a law that had defined Chinese manufacturing growth for three decades. He discovered that the latter was easier.