Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster

November 2023

615 pages

Headline: Canada has played outsized role in Musk’s Martian ambitions

Blame Canada for Elon Musk. Or credit the Great White North with jump-starting Musk’s rise to prominence.

That’s one take-away from Walter Isaacson’s comprehensive biography of the billionaire technocrat whom people, journalists in particular, love or hate, or love to hate.

Isaacson’s book offers ample material to bolster the entrenched views of Musk fanboys and detractors alike. For mere mortals, it offers insights into what motivates Musk while revealing his strengths and weaknesses, warts and all.

An overarching message that shines through is that, adore Musk or despise him, people underestimate him at their peril — as those who shorted Tesla stock discovered.

Candid insights

Unlike many other journalists who write about Musk derisively in passing, Isaacson actually talked frequently and candidly with the man himself, as well as with many of those closest to him. Isaacson also observed Musk in action, observations woven throughout the narrative. It’s the kind of comprehensive access that few disinterested biographers ever attain.

Contrast that approach with what Crawford Kilian of The Tyeewrote recently. Kilian confidently predicted that billionaire Musk wouldn’t be able to survive on a desert island.

The Tyee columnist was imagining Musk as the hapless scion Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island and not Musk as the engineer that he is. Musk more resembles the Professor — except Musk would figure out how to build a craft to escape the island. Born and raised in South Africa, Musk attended that country’s notorious veldskool, a wilderness survival camp, in his youth. It’s like Outward Bound or Katimavik — if those programs expected participants to die on occasion. So, yeah, Musk would probably survive just fine on a desert island.

As Isaacson makes clear in the acknowledgements, Musk didn’t read the text in advance of publication, nor did he ask to read it. So this is a dispassionate and balanced account of what Isaacson perceives to be a historical figure, as he is making history. Considering that Isaacson’s other biographical subjects include Leonard da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein, it’s fair to presume that the author regards Musk as a significant player in the course of human events.

(Isaacson is no slouch either. Aside from authoring many books, he has been a Rhodes scholar, CEO and chairman of CNN, and the editor of Time magazine.)

Coming to Canada

As Isaacson soon reveals, Musk wasn’t exactly born into wealth. His father, Errol, was a sometimes successful businessman but just as often a business failure.

When Elon came to Canada as a teenager in 1989, he arrived with about $4,000, half each from his parents, who had divorced a decade earlier.

“Otherwise, what he mainly had with him when he arrived in Montreal was a list of his mother’s relatives he had never met,” Isaacson writes.

(A few years later, during one his successful streaks, Errol gave Elon and his younger brother Kimbal, who had also come to Canada, $28,000 to help finance their first business venture. Their mother, Maye, also chipped in $10,000 and let the boys use her credit card.)

Elon had originally planned to emigrate to the U.S. to seek his fame and fortune. But when he discovered that the U.S. immigration system was too daunting, he decided to come to Canada instead. Since his mother was born in Canada, Elon was able to apply for and quickly obtain Canadian citizenship (which he holds to this day, even though he is also now a citizen of the U.S. as well as of his native South Africa).

His mother had (and has) relatives across Canada. One of Elon’s first acts was to buy a $100 six-month bus pass and traverse the country to meet many of them. He even ended up Vancouver, where he got a job cleaning out boilers in a mill. (Isaacson says it was a lumber mill but what he describes rings more like a pulp mill. In any case, Musk told the biographer, “It was like a Dickensian steampunk nightmare…”)

Not long after the nightmare, Musk enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, where he forged one of his most enduring friendships, with Navaid Farooq. Musk also had his first taste of the business and financial world at Scotiabank, where Kimbal also got a summer job. Their boss was Peter Nicholson, then in charge of strategic planning for the bank.

Elon “came away with the impression that the bank was a lot dumber than it was,” Nicholson told Isaacson. “But that was a good thing because it gave him a healthy disrespect for the financial industry and the audacity to eventually start what became PayPal.”

Banking on Canadian advice

Shortly after his stint with Scotiabank, Musk called Nicholson for advice on whether to go to Stanford University or work with Kimbal on an interactive version of the Yellow Pages they called the Virtual City Navigator. Nicholson’s advice: “The Internet revolution only comes once in a lifetime, so strike while the iron is hot,” he reportedly told Musk as they strolled along the Lake Ontario shoreline.

The Musk lads eventually turned Virtual City Navigator into the startup Zip2. But not before the president of the Toronto Star, which published the city’s Yellow Pages, showed them what he thought of their idea by tossing a copy of the Yellow Pages at Kimbal. Two years later, 140 newspapers, including the Star, were licensing Zip2. And in January 1999, the Musk boys cashed out — $22 million for Elon, and $15 million for Kimbal.

As we all now know, that was just the beginning. (Isaacson recounts this windfall on page 64 of his 615-page tale.)

One indulgence of the nouveau riche Elon was a $1 million McLaren sports car. It would become a prop in one of the more telling anecdotes in the book. Musk was driving it with his future PayPal partner Peter Thiel in the passenger seat. Thiel asked “what can this car do?” and Musk proceeded to floor the accelerator. The result was a spectacular crash that shredded parts of the body. “Thiel, a practicing libertarian, was not wearing a seatbelt, but he emerged unscathed,” Isaacson wrote. Musk wasn’t hurt either.

Musk said later that it showed Thiel he wasn’t afraid to take risks. Thiel meanwhile realized Musk was “a little bit crazy.”

Musk, of course, didn’t start PayPal. Nor did he start Telsa, or even what would become SpaceX. But he did take those companies from small time to much bigger things.

The origin of X

PayPal was originally the person-to-person payment system of a company that Thiel and another partner had started and which was in competition with X.com, a company Musk had founded with a friend who had worked with him at Scotiabank.

Musk envisioned X.com as a way to disrupt the banking system, an idea he had pondered since that summer at Scotiabank. That’s just one of the eureka moments in Isaacson’s book. Musk changed the name of Twitter to X because he still has grand ambitions for X.com and is looking at the former Twitter platform to pursue them.

Of late, X looks more like a dumpster fire than a disruption of an entire industry. But those who are ready to write it off should recall the miscalculation of investors who shorted Tesla stock. Isaacson helpfully explains how they were short-sighted about Musk.

They were certain that Musk would miss key commitments to ramp up Tesla production because he wouldn’t have the time or resources to build the necessary facilities. What they didn’t realize is that Musk is a keen student of history. He knew that during the Second World War, the U.S. government ramped up production of bombers by setting up production lines in aerospace company parking lots. Musk tore that page out of the history book and set up a huge tent to ramp up Tesla production, catching the short sellers with their pants around their ankles.

(Musk still hates short sellers to this day. Indeed, as Isaacson recounts, when Bill Gates was trying to recruit to him join the club of billionaires who are pledging away their fortunes to good works, Musk wanted to know if Gates still held short positions on Tesla.)

No work-life balance

As a businessman, Musk is utterly ruthless, as Isaacson documents in detail.

“From the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager, contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance,” Isaacson writes.

Few people would want to work for such a martinet. That’s OK. Musk doesn’t want most people to work for him anyway. He is a workaholic who also wants his employees to put their work ahead of everything else.

“He scorned successful people who liked to vacations,” Isaacson writes.

Musk has no time for diversity, equity and inclusion, either. He’s all about the meritocracy. (Except for those cases of nepotism involving his brother and their cousins, although Elon also fired some of the cousins.)

Much has been made in the press about the massive layoffs he oversaw at Twitter. Isaacson reviews the methods behind that seeming madness once Musk discovered that most of Twitter’s software engineers weren’t writing much code at all.

“Let’s figure out who did a nontrivial amount of coding, then within that group who did the best coding,” Isaason quotes Musk.

So Musk had some trusted lieutenants weed out those who wrote the most code, also checking that it was of superior quality. He offered the best of those coders continued employment and gave the rest severance packages.

As Margaret Mead would say

In a perverse way, it’s a manifestation of anthropologist Margaret Mead’s aphorism, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” In fact, Isaacson quotes Musk as uttering almost precisely that: “I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated.”

In the case of Musk’s managers at SpaceX that has meant agreeing to a meeting every night, seven days a week. It’s a gruelling schedule that can and does lead to burnout.

But as one of his long-suffering employees, who quit Tesla because he was burned out only to return later to Musk’s employ, told Isaacson, “I decided I’d rather be burned out than be bored.”

One thing that can be said of Musk is that he isn’t boring, even if one of his more dubious (so far) ventures is called the Boring Company.

To say that Musk burns the candle at both ends is an understatement. Isaacson fails to explain when his subject sleeps. For when Musk isn’t working until all hours, he will find diversion in long bouts of video gaming.

Somehow, despite that and his admitted awkwardness in social situations, Musk has managed two marriages and other romantic relationships. He has fathered 11 children, all with Canadian women, and is a huge proponent of people having children, particularly if they’ll help populate Mars. Musk even told one of his youngest, a boy named X, that he will live on Mars one day as the toddler peered at the Red Planet through a telescope.

Musk is living in a science fiction novel of his own imagination and the rest of us are just characters in the story. Or so it can seem.

His Canadian children

Most of Musk’s children were conceived in vitro. One of the mysteries that Isaacson leaves unexplored is why? Given that Musk has fathered children with three different women, it might be fair, if impolite, to ask if he has the fertility problem.

His romantic partners and children feature a lot of Canadian content. Canadian author Justine (Wilson) Musk is mother of his first six children, including the eldest who succumbed to sudden infant death syndrome. Canadian singer Grimes is the mother to three of Musk’s children, including one who was delivered by a surrogate. The latter occurred at almost the same time as another Canadian woman, Shivon Zilis, birthed twins, also fertilized in vitro.

Musk thinks there should be more humans in the universe and he is doing his part to stimulate that. He obsession is to send humans to Mars, which is the singular focus of SpaceX.  From a distance, it can look like a narcissistic vanity project. That doesn’t mean, it won’t succeed. Again, underestimate Musk at your peril.

“My biggest concern is our trajectory,” Isaacson quotes Musk. “Are we on a trajectory to get to Mars before civilization crumbles.”

His progressive proclivities

While as a boss Musk exhibits all the traits of an autocrat, it’s inaccurate to portray him as a far-right lunatic. He characterizes Donald Trump as “the world’s champion of bullshit,” even if he did agree to let him return to Twitter. But Musk draws a free-speech line somewhere. And that line is one he won’t allow Sandy Hook massacre conspiracy theorist Alex Jones to cross.

“My firstborn child died in my arms,” Isaacson quotes from a Musk tweet in one of the book’s most poignant passages. “I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.”

That quote alone shows that Musk has at least a bit more humanity than most of his critics give him credit. Isaacson provides ample evidence that Musk isn’t just a money-grubbing billionaire. He did once own a $32 million mansion and other homes but he sold them in 2020 — primarily to show that money isn’t that important to him. He mostly rents homes now, or even with friends. However, since he has such a huge family, he often has to stay somewhere spacious, such as an 8,000 square foot home owned by a former PayPal colleague. At other times, he’ll stay at one of the homes owned by fellow billionaire tech bro Larry Ellison.

Musk didn’t exactly take a vow of poverty, although he did tell podcaster Joe Rogan, “I think possessions weigh you down and they’re an attack vector,” Isaacson recounts.

Musk critics often write about the occasions when his companies, especially during their formative stages, paid little or no income tax. But Isaacson reports that Musk once paid the largest income tax bill of all time — $11 billion.

Not a big tax fan

Not that Musk likes paying taxes. He’s libertarian enough to believe that governments, and charities, don’t always spend their money wisely.

More recently, after publication of Isaacson’s book, Musk was in the news again when a judge voided a $56 million pay package for him from Tesla.

“The incredible size of the biggest compensation plan ever — an unfathomable sum — seems to have been calibrated to help Musk achieve what he believed would make 'a good future for humanity'," Judge Kathaleen McCormick wrote in her 201-page opinion, according to Reuters news agency.

That would jive with an overarching theme of Isaacson’s book: that nobody — not the government or company shareholders — knows how to spend money more wisely than Musk for the sake of mankind’s future.

Musk’s political outlook, though, isn’t just that of a skinflint conservative. He favors, for example, a universal basic income when artificial intelligence ends up doing almost all the work. Of course, his ideas about AI are that we should tread carefully along that path and are at odds with the opinions of the likes of Google’s Larry Page.

Musk favors transgender rights. That’s understandable. His eldest surviving child transitioned from male to female. They’re estranged, though, not because of the gender transition but because she has become a woke hater of billionaires. It’s something Musk attributes in part to the “progressive woke indoctrination that pervaded the Los Angeles private school she attended,” Isaacson writes.

Musk isn’t a climate change denier either. That’s why he’s building electric cars, after all. And, he has a clear vision for the human race — to become a multi-planetary species. If Musk can steer SpaceX into accomplishing that goal, future historians will surely read Isaacson’s book to gain insights into how that happened.

The literal father of Mars

Should humans colonize Mars, it’s conceivable that, in a millennium or so, every Martian will be a direct descendent of Elon Musk. (That only sounds absurd. It turns out that almost everyone of European descent can trace their ancestry back to the Frankish king Charlemagne. Like Musk, Charlemagne produced issue in the double digits, spreading his seed to eternity.)

That means future Martians will also trace their roots through Canada.

As a businessman, Musk can come across as uncaring about the people who toil for his companies. A boss cannot be a nice guy, he says.

“One of his maxims is that managers should not aim to be liked,” Isaacson writes.

And Musk is the ultimate boss, an alpha dog, a control freak. He has dozens of direct reports at his various companies — at least 15 at SpaceX, about 20 at Tesla, and more than 20 at Twitter. How he keeps things straight in his head is a mystery or a miracle.

“It’s hard to change destiny. You can’t do it from nine to five,” Isaacson quotes Musk.

His algorithm rules all

At the heart of Musk’s business thinking is “the algorithm.” Among its precepts are “delete, delete, delete,” and be prepared to restore at least 10 per cent of those deletes because if you don’t have to do that then you didn’t delete enough in the first place.

“The algorithm” also involves questioning every specification. If necessary, that means finding the individual who wrote the spec and having that person explain why it exists. One of Musk’s great realizations is that specifications aren’t pronounced from on-high but are the product of fallible human minds. At other times, finding that answer can mean resorting to first principles to create a spec from scratch.

“All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed,” Isaacson writes. “The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.”

Application of “the algorithm” has enabled his companies to reduce the costs of space ships and electric cars. The rocketry savings proved relatively easy. NASA had fostered a bloated and highly risk-averse industry where Musk discovered it was possible to replace a $120,000 actuator, which resembled a garage door opener, with a part his engineers could craft for $5,000. Another time, his engineers modified a bathroom stall latch that they bought for $30 to replace a $1,500 NASA latch.

Even in the automotive sphere, Musk improved upon the assembly-line innovations of Henry Ford and the lean manufacturing techniques of Toyota to make EVs more affordable.

Another innovation that Musk refined was to bring designers and engineers together, as Steve Jobs had done at Apple. Rather than have designers sketch machinery that defied the laws of physics and bamboozled the engineers, the engineers would deflect those design flights of fancy before they melted in the sun. Yet at the same time, the designers would also the nudge the engineers right to the edges of what is physically possible.

“In some ways, Musk was like Steve Jobs, a brilliant but abrasive taskmaster with a reality-distortion field who could drive his employees crazy but also drive them to things they thought were impossible,” writes Isaacson, who had earlier written a biography of Jobs.

Humorous hubris

Sometimes “the algorithm” proves fallible, though. One humorous bit of hubris occurred shortly after Musk acquired Twitter. He wanted to move the Twitter servers to a new location to save money but senior Twitter engineers advised him that it would be a complicated, time-consuming and costly undertaking. Musk dismissed those warnings, figuring it would be a lot cheaper to hire a “motley” moving company and augment that with his own muscle and that of some of his cousins.

The move was cheaper, but only to a point. It turned out that the rough handling of the servers destroyed critical systems and data that couldn’t be recovered. Oops. At least Musk did ultimately confess that he had made a mistake.

“Musk has an intuitive feel for engineering issues, but his neural nets have trouble when dealing with human feelings, which is what made his Twitter purchase such a problem,” Isaacson writes.

Twitter managers also hadn’t figured out how to deal with the mercurial Musk, unlike those in key roles at his other companies who had “learned ways to deflect his bad ideas and drip-feed him unwelcome information,” Isaacson notes.

Musk himself isn’t entirely oblivious to his own shortcomings. “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,” he told Isaacson.

The last word is physics

It’s fun, particularly for billionaire-hating journalists, to watch Musk self-inflict such wounds. But the man himself, like him or not, just shrugs it all off. A better Musk quote from Isaacson that captures his essence is this one: “Physics doesn’t care about hurt feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right.”

History will judge how Musk succeeds in that effort.