Asking The Right Questions About Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson’s biography focuses on Elon’s “asshole” personality, but aren’t there bigger concerns to be had about the world’s richest man?
This Christmas, I was given a copy of Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk. It spends over 600 pages tracking the successes, failures, and bizarre outbursts of Musk, endlessly pursuing a single question: Do Musk’s engineering feats compensate for the fact that he’s “an asshole” a lot of the time? When chronicling the world’s richest man, this seems like one of the most facile questions one could put forth, and it’s made worse by the narrowness with which Isaacson pursues the question.
Throughout the book, Isaacson chronicles Musk’s endless mood swings. Musk attributes these to his self-diagnosed Aspergers; his ex-wives call it his “demon mode”; several close to Musk find them reminiscent of his father’s awful behavior. Isaacson provides several scenes of Musk berating low-level employees, bullying colleagues, and making stupid impulsive posts on Twitter—like tweeting that he may take Tesla private for $420 per share and calling a British cave diver a “pedo guy.” We’re reminded endlessly that Musk has a “conspiratorial mindset” and is “an asshole.” These might seem like damning criticisms, but they’re always padded with twice as much praise. Isaacson pushes his readers to believe that Musk’s genius is somehow “woven together” with his bad behavior. That said, we get a few scarce scenes of Musk being a loving dad, decent husband, and affable nerd.
But the major redeeming factor of Musk is his engineering prowess. Isaacson illustrates how Musk saved Tesla’s “factory hell” from ruin in Fremont; how Musk grew to appreciate the vast amount of data he purchased on Twitter and its usefulness in the context of AI; and how Musk tweaked parts and accepted last-minute risks when driving down the costs of his SpaceX rockets, eventually winning a $1.6 billion NASA contract. Isaacson doesn’t shield us from when Musk’s tinkerings blow up (sometimes literally), but when they are successful they are massively so, allowing Musk to reduce the costs of parts of his rockets and cars by as much as 90 percent. By pushing back against unnecessary regulations, questioning every rule, and being a taskmaster, Musk has achieved feats others deemed implausible—like privately launching a rocket (Falcon 1) from the ground into orbit and getting Tesla to produce 5,000 cars per week— while also revolutionizing the cost structure of several industries.
The other prime virtue of Musk is what Musk himself describes as his “hardcore” ethos. Musk believes in working with a small, generalist, extremely dedicated team. He sleeps at his work sites, doesn’t believe in vacations, and will work endlessly for weeks to meet the seemingly impossible deadlines he sets (and sometimes meets.) With this rigorous schedule and his high tolerance for risk, Musk aims to make electric vehicles commonplace, human civilization multiplanetary, and “a social network that would disrupt the banking industry.” In recent years, the more loosely defined goals of protecting free speech and promoting the ethical use of AI have been added to his repertoire.
Isaacson portrays Musk’s risks as personal, and to an extent they are. Musk is putting up a lot of money in these endeavors. But Isaacson all but ignores the risks everyone else faces from Musk’s impulsive and sometimes foolhardy projects. Musk’s decisions to allegedly ignore FAA rulings, violate SEC regulations, and flout COVID protocols are treated as personal impulses, rather than decisions with consequences borne by many people downstream of Musk. When the Tesla Autopilot was found responsible for a fatal crash, Isaacson, likely echoing Musk, laments that “Nobody was tallying the accidents prevented and lives saved by Autopilot.” In fact, Isaacson later noted a study from 2021 that found “273 accidents by Tesla drivers using some level of driver-assist systems, five of which resulted in deaths… [and] eleven Tesla crashes with emergency vehicles.” Isaacson does not bother trying to compare these self-driving car deaths to other driving deaths, but the empirical evidence on the safety of self-driving vehichles is mixed for now. The same tendency to ignore the risk borne by others is prevalent in Isaacson’s writing about Musk’s AI projects. He quotes Musk calling AI “Our biggest existential threat” and bemoaning Larry Ellison’s anti-human approach to the technology, but Musk’s approach seems just as concerning. He tells Isaacson,
If we can find good commercial uses to fund Neuralink…then in a few decades we will get to our ultimate goal of protecting us against evil AI by tightly coupling the human world to our digital machinery.
Being tightly coupled with digital machinery —that could be prone to all sorts of security threats, meddling, and a CEO not terribly concerned with his customers’ right to privacy— does not seem like a particularly pro-human innovation to me.
The only time when the risks of Musk’s projects to people other than Musk are pointed out is in a brief statement where Isaacson notes that Tesla’s fast-paced work environment is not without consequences. He briefly notes that “Tesla’s injury rate was 30 percent higher than the rest of the industry.” The story ends here for Isaacson, but it’s worth noting that Tesla workers have attempted to unionize to prevent these sorts of outrages and that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has determined that Musk has broken labor laws multiple times in his efforts to sabotage unionization efforts. As of this week, Musk is now suing to destroy the NLRB, claiming its structure amounts to “the very definition of tyranny.”
All of this is not to mention the other risks Musk’s projects force us to face: the threats his failed rocket launches pose to the environment and local ecosystems; the threats to privacy his data-mining poses; and the threats generally posed by the creation of humanoid robots like his Optimus which he aims to have displace human labor. In fairness, even if there was no Elon Musk, capitalists would take these risks if they believed they could make them profitable. Much like Musk’s robots, his human face obscures the greater system of which he’s just a part.
Another trend in Isaacson’s biography is Musk’s growing comfort in being a part of the economic establishment. This is a transition made by everyone who’s reached Musk’s level of economic success but is noteworthy nonetheless from a figure constantly contrasting himself from the elites through his bigoted Twitter feed, weed jokes, and love of video games. Admittedly, Musk was never as small and helpless as he wants to seem —He gets upset if you mention his parents’ wealth or all the help they provided him— but he did populate the ranks of techie entrepreneurial upstarts for some time. For instance, in his earlier years, Musk was upset with NASA’s no-bid contracts with rival rocket companies and announced “fuck oil” at his Fremont factory after Telsa’s IPO. However, Isaacson shields us from a lot of his more insidery behavior. He never mentions the billions in subsidies and tax breaks Musk managed to squeeze from Texas for SpaceX and Nevada for Tesla’s Gigafactory. The only subsidy given to Musk, noted by Isaacson, is a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy. All of the lobbying done by Tesla and SpaceX is also ignored, along with Musk’s own hypocritical whining about government subsidies in Biden’s infrastructure bill. Isaacson also ignores Musk’s 2022 comments that he “think[s] we actually need more oil and gas, not less,” “we need to increase oil & gas output immediately,” and that “civilization will crumble” without oil and gas. Sometimes the changes in Musk’s behavior are presented but left unexplained. Isaacson presents Tesla as a strong domestic producer that “make[s] its own key components rather than piecing together a car with hundreds of components from independent suppliers.” Yet, not long after, we learn that Tesla has outsourced over half of its vehicle manufacturing to China with no explanation as to why.
Isaacson is also reluctant to state the full extent of Musk’s false promises. He notes that “Almost every year, Musk would make another prediction that Full Self-Driving was just a year or two away.” But it never came. The Verge has documented several other Musk promises that never came to fruition, that Isaacson doesn’t touch. Musk sold more shares of Tesla after promising he wouldn’t; he claimed one of his cars was “driving by itself” when it wasn’t; he said he’d make Twitter’s algorithm open source and didn’t; and he claimed he’d have humans on Mars in ten years (in 2011). Isaacson constantly uplifts Musk’s goal of making us a multiplanetary civilization, but in private, Isaacon records Musk's true thoughts that this interplanetary travel is really for a small elite. Speaking at an Explorers Club black-tie dinner, Musk admits that the cost of taking a person to Mars could one day be as low as $500,000; sure, most people won’t be able to make the trip “but I suspect there are people in this room who would,” Musk tells his audience.
In one way, Isaacson is right to focus on Musk’s vision and vicissitudes. After all, that’s what’s made him the world’s richest man. His wealth was not accumulated as a result of his engineering talents or his abilities as a boss. His sales only explain a small fraction of the story; Tesla’s Model 3 did temporarily outsell “all competitors combined -gasoline or electric- in the luxury car category, and it was the highest-selling by revenue of any car in the U.S,” Isaacson notes. But this doesn’t explain how “Tesla sales had grown 71 percent in the past twelve months, without spending a penny on advertising. Its stock had gone up fifteen-fold in five years, and it was now worth more than the next nine auto companies combined,” reaching a $1 trillion valuation. Instead, Musk got rich because millions of investors bought into the vision he put forth, a techno-optimistic future with Musk as its leading pioneer. Thanks to those investors, the risky package of stock options Musk accepted for compensation as Tesla CEO paid off remarkably well. As the Wall Street Journal recently reminded investors:
Tesla’s stock is unusually dependent on distant and somewhat vague growth prospects rather than the profit outlook. Last year its share price more than doubled even as the consensus earnings-per-share estimate for 2023 fell 45%.
In a similar vein, SpaceX was recently given a valuation of $180 billion by investors. That’s more than the estimated value of both Boeing and Verizon, for a company that sells no product directly to the public aside from Internet access through Starlink, which reported only $1.4 billion in revenue in 2022. Investors are betting on Musk’s ability to stay alive by winning more government contracts and to one day thrive by achieving Musk’s (and his supporters’) wildest sci-fi-inspired dreams.
Musk’s politics are spread throughout the book, with Isaacson sparing us some of his most detestable comments, while clearly finding many of his antics juvenile. Isaacson paints Musk as primarily apolitical for most of his life, despite his millions of dollars in political donations, though he did seem less polarized. Isaacson notes that Musk resigned from Trump’s CEO roundtable once the former president withdrew from the Paris Accords. He notes Musk’s growing concern for free speech and opposition to wokeness, both of which are never clearly defined, neither by Isaacson nor Musk. For instance, Musk appears outraged at the shadowbanning of some hateful content on Twitter, covered in the Twitter Files, but then approves of “visibility filtering” for the same sort of content. He contends that “It’s not free speech to subvert democracy,” when justifying his decision to keep Alex Jones banned, though he’d later unban Donald Trump and Jones himself. Despite claiming his decisions to change moderation were some noble campaign for free speech and the defense of our democracy, the first two accounts he appealed to revive were those of The Babylon Bee and Jordan Peterson, both of which were axed for mocking transgender people—hardly the sort of democracy-preserving speech we couldn’t survive without. In a direct letter to advertisers, he noted that “Twitter obviously cannot be a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!” Soon after, he retweeted conspiracy theories about Paul Pelosi being attacked by a scorned lover and arbitrarily banned journalists who reported on his Elonjet controversy. All of this is so contradictory, that Isaacson (and everyone around Musk that he talks to) sees it as a mess, a distraction from Elon’s more important work, and even an embarrassment. Isaacson chalks Musk’s political whims up to his estranged relationship with his transgender daughter, his biological inheritance from his similarly erratic father, and his frustration that President Biden didn’t do more to recognize Tesla as an innovative green technology company.
At a revealing point in the biography, Musk struggles with his status as a billionaire, opting to sell many of his possessions. He explains the decision to podcaster Joe Rogan thusly:
In recent years ‘billionaire’ has become pejorative, like a bad thing. They’ll say ‘Hey, billionaire, you’ve got all this stuff.’ Well, now I don’t have stuff, so what are you going to do?
Musk does not seem to understand that most people who take umbrage with his status as a billionaire do so not because of the luxury consumer goods he can surround himself with, but because of the great degree of power and influence it allows him to wield over society. Based on the biography he’s written, Isaacson doesn’t realize this either. Isaacson never reflects on whether a capricious “asshole” like Elon Musk should be able to milk the government for benefits, destroy companies at a whim, or subject us all to his eccentric ideas of “risk” and “safety.” Musk’s engineering triumphs and personal failings are headline-grabbing but they are merely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what’s important about him and his story.
You would think the Starlink situation in Ukraine would/should have been a turning point for most people to ask if any one person should have this level of power, particularly one that none of us elected to that role.
Musk’s engineering prowess? He
If anything he knows how to be an entrepreneur, but I know of know of no engineering feats of genius or publications so I doubt that he has prowess. Some training perhaps. Can anyone corroborate?