‘Elon Musk’: Purge and Surge

Steve Sailer

September 27, 2023

by Walter Isaacson biography Elon Musk it’s as strong as you’d expect from the author of the huge 2011 best seller Steve Jobs.

The subject of Isaacson’s last book The code breaker, Jennifer Doudna, the co-inventor of the CRISPR gene-editing method, served as a reasonable proxy for how much women have contributed to the life sciences in recent decades. But Isaacson’s forte is unreasonable men, like Musk, Jobs and Doudna’s mentor, James D. Watson, who ended up dominating. The code breaker from its supporting role.

Of these three big men, Musk might be the most energy draining.

He made his first two fortunes with mainstream software startups Internet Bubble, the city guide Zip2 and the online financial services company X.com. (Musk is obsessed with the letter “X.” He also bestowed it on his rocket company, SpaceX, in addition to his favorite of his nearly countless children, X Musk; and recently rechristened his 2022 acquisition on Twitter as to X.)

I remember getting $100 from Musk’s first X back in 1999 just for opening an account with them, even though I didn’t do anything at X other than transfer my reward to my actual bank account. As silly as it seemed to me at the time, this “network effectThe war between X and Peter Thiel’s PayPal to outdo each other paid off when the more profit-focused Thiel finally persuaded Musk to merge X with PayPal to end their war .

Given how easy it had been to make money from Internet companies, it was surprising that Musk would target not just hardware, but two of the most iconic American heavy industries of the 20th century (but also among the most sclerotic and apparently less likely). to be interrupted). He invested in a boutique car company, Tesla, and started his own rocket company, SpaceX.

He had been fascinated by rockets since his unhappy childhood in South Africa, where he had no friends (but he had a brother and three cousins ​​who lived next door and who were the genetic equivalent of siblings because their mother was the identical twin of his mother).

Like his rival in the rocket business, Jeff Bezos, Musk had grown up reading hard science fiction Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. (In this century, science fiction has become much more woke and self-pitying. Will it nurture as many successes as Musk and Bezos in the future?)

Talking to the sci-fi movie director James Cameron at a charity dinner in 2002, Musk heard the reason why he should indulge his passion for rockets. Cameron told him that it was too risky for humanity to have all its eggs in one planetary basket: We needed a surviving colony on Mars just in case. Hammer of Lucifer ended the Earth. (Musk is highly empathetic toward humanity as a whole, but less so toward individual humans, such as his direct reports, which he attributes to Asperger’s syndrome.)

But many millionaires have invested money in high-end cars and even outer space without making a noticeable difference.

Even Jobs had focused on designing stylish and useful products, but he let Tim Cook deal with outsourcing their manufacturing to China. Instead, Musk followed Henry Ford’s example by focusing on building giant factories to make previously exotic products. in America on a massive scale. At a time when American manufacturing seemed dead in the water, Tesla proved that American workers could still compete. Tesla now has nearly a 4 percent share of the vast auto market in the US and 3 percent in Europe. Its market capitalization is 774 billion dollars.

And SpaceX revolutionized the traditional cost more rocket business by adopting mass production methods of automobiles to make launching satellites into orbit much cheaper. The Wall Street Journal reported in July: “Elon Musk’s SpaceX now has ‘de facto’ monopoly on rocket launches”.

As Isaacson described after two years of following Musk around, the businessman’s methods remind me of Stalin’s methods for growing the Soviet steel industry: purge and augment. Periodically, Musk somewhat randomly fires some employees to cheer others up, then leads the gung-ho survivors on a Stakhanovite drive higher production for a couple of months. Then he disappears to one of his other companies, until he suddenly reappears with a crazy new deadline.

One difference (besides not sending wreckers to Siberia, of course) is that Musk has the capitalist pricing system to direct his fury to streamline his assembly lines in effective directions. While Stalin made the Soviet economy more tons of steel, Communism was useless at producing complex desirable consumer goods such as Tesla electric cars.

Instead, Musk obsesses over the cost of each part, endlessly asking his subordinates in waves why they can’t make each item simpler. Musk is convinced that the modern world is a victim of its own success, as rules about how to do every little thing are piled on top of other rules:

“This is how civilizations decay. They stopped taking risks. And when they stop taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer people in charge”. This is why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets to the moon. “When you’ve been successful for too long, you lose your appetite for taking risks.”

That’s why the 2022 culture clash between Musk and Twitter’s nearly 8,000 employees (which he almost immediately whittled down to just over 2,000, causing some very loud but not fatal problems) was so entertaining. (Perhaps Musk’s favorite movie line is from gladiator: “Are you not entertained?”) Isaacson writes:

Twitter prided itself on being a friendly place where pampering was considered a virtue. “We certainly had great empathy, very concerned about inclusion and diversity; everyone should feel safe here,” says Leslie Berland, who was chief marketing and people officer until he was fired by Musk. The company had instituted a permanent work-from-home option and allowed a “day of mental “rest” each month. One of the buzzwords used at the company was “psychological safety.”… Musk let out a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase “psychological safety.” It set him back. He considered it the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital speed. His favorite buzzword was “hardcore.” Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency.

When Musk made his $44 billion bid for Twitter in April 2022, after 11.5 years on Twitter, he had just 40,000 followers. Now, less than 18 months later, I’m at over 100,000.

Thanks, Elon.

Presumably, Twitter’s previous management had applied “visibility filter”, treating me a bit like how Stalin treated Mikhail Bulgakov, author of the satire on Communism The Master and Margarida: I like you, so I won’t shoot you. But I won’t let you prosper either.

Isaacson, the former editor of timepresident of CNN, and now head of the elite Aspen Institutewrite:

During Watergate and Vietnam, journalists generally viewed the CIA, the military, and government officials with suspicion, or at least with a healthy skepticism… But beginning in the 1990s and accelerating after 9/11 By September, established journalists were increasingly comfortable sharing information and cooperating with key figures in the government and intelligence communities. This mindset was replicated at social media companies, as evidenced by all the briefings held by Twitter and other tech companies. “These companies seem to have had little choice to become key parts of a global information surveillance and control apparatus,” [Matt] Taibbi wrote, “although the evidence suggests that their Quislingian executives were mostly all happy to be absorbed.”

Isaacson wryly observes:

I think the second half of his sentence is truer than the first.

The biographer offers several explanations for Musk’s shift from the center to the right in recent years.

He sent one of his many sons to Cruïlla, a 50,000 dollars-progressive school for a year in Santa Monica, where the child declared that she was a girl and a communist, and that she hated her father. So, the first Twitter account that Musk restored after buying the social media company was The bee of Babylonthe Christian satire site that had been banned for “misgendering” Admiral “Rachel” Levine naming the Biden administration official its Man of the Year.

Also, while Musk was impressed by Barack Obama, who bet big on SpaceX, he thinks Joe Biden is dope. I suspect much of the personal bad blood between Biden and Musk stems from the fact that Biden was a working-class Democrat from the 1970s, marching this week on a picket line from the United Auto Workers, who dislike Tesla for not being unionized.

But the American union system, with the rights it gives unions to block productivity improvements not negotiated in the contract, would be fatal to Musk’s often manic drives to increase productivity. The American system seems peculiarly poorly designed compared to, say, the Swedish or German systemsthat manage to reconcile the workforce with high quality.

One incident Isaacson doesn’t mention is the 2021 discrimination lawsuit against Tesla in which a jury awarded a black elevator operator who worked at the Fremont plant for 11 months. 137 million dollars to be rejected by fellow Hispanics.

Tesla managed to reduce the payment to $3 million on appeal in 2023. Musk he tweeted:

Had we been allowed to introduce new evidence the verdict would have been zero imo.

The jury did the best they could with the information they had. I respect the decision.

Culturally, Isaacson, 71, a stunning example of the best kind of Establishment baby boomer, sometimes seems baffled by the generational gap between himself and Musk, 52, who remains addicted to computer strategy games . (Recent favorite: The Battle of Politopia.) Why Musk is so good at both games Civilization and business? “I’m wired for war,” says Musk.

There really weren’t that many nerds in Isaacson’s day. Unlike Musk, Jobs was an Italian Renaissance cardinal who commissioned the best artists.

Isaacson sums it up in his last paragraph for his kind readers offended by Musk’s tweets (or X or whatever he calls them these days):

But would a restricted Musk achieve as much as an unfettered Musk? Is not filtering and detaching an integral part of who he is? Could you put rockets into orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting every aspect of it, articulated and disarticulated? Sometimes the great innovators are risk-seeking boys and men who resist potty training. They can be reckless, disgusting, sometimes even toxic. They might as well be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.