Elon Musk: Crazy Enough to Change the World
Elon Musk (U.S. Air Force / Wikimedia Commons)
By John W. Childs
This review appears in the Summer 2024 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of the print issue.
Elon Musk
by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2023)
Walter Isaacson has become the biographer laureate of the greatest American entrepreneurs. His recent works have chronicled the lives of Steve Jobs of Apple fame; Jennifer Doudna, discoverer / inventor of gene editing; and, most recently, Elon Musk, arguably the greatest of all.
Musk has built two revolutionary businesses, Tesla and SpaceX, each now valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Tesla has basically invented a commercially viable electric vehicle business. SpaceX has rebuilt the American space industry, showing that it is far more efficient and successful in private hands than it ever was as the government monopoly labeled NASA. It took that powerful force of nature, the profit motive of private ownership, to come up with that ingenious money saver: the reusable booster rocket. And as Isaacson describes time and again, Musk is fanatical about saving money.
DELETE, DELETE, DELETE
It’s hard to imagine the CEO of GM or Ford spending time on the factory floor focused on reducing the number of parts used in some discrete step of the manufacturing process. But Musk famously slept on the factory floor. He preached the gospel of “deletion.” Isaacson quotes Musk on assembly and manufacturing: “Step one should be to question the requirements. Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.” If you didn’t need to reinstate at least 10 percent of what you had experimentally removed, you weren’t deleting enough.
Deletions were designed to save money and time, two factors of creation Musk treasured. They were critical ingredients in what Isaacson calls his “ultimate goal”: getting to Mars, affordably and in his own lifetime. At SpaceX, Isaacson notes, “every week, amid all the technical meetings on engine and rocket design, [Musk] held one very otherworldly meeting called Mars Colonizer. There he imagined what a Mars colony would look like and how it should be governed.”
In Musk’s case, demanding the impossible has worked pretty well, though it probably won’t be taught at Harvard Business School.
JOKING ABOUT ASPERGER’S
Isaacson describes Musk’s early life in occasionally cruel detail. He came from a broken home, was the victim of violent, sometimes disfiguring bullying, and frequently relocated. He didn’t fit in. Isaacson writes, “Musk would later talk about—even joke about—having Asperger’s, a common name for a form of autism-spectrum disorder that can affect a person’s social skills, relationships, emotional connectivity, and self-regulation.” Yet Musk formed a lasting friendship with his brother, Kimbal, through many later endeavors his constant, though not particularly gifted, companion.
The book suggests that the adversities of childhood molded Musk. Maybe. But more likely he was just a freak of nature, like Jobs or Einstein, who, luckily for us, comes along from time to time to change our world. If you asked Musk who his role model was, he would say: “me.”
DEMANDING THE IMPOSSIBLE
To say Musk is a demanding boss would grossly understate the case. The concept of work-life balance is foreign to any Musk enterprise, an utterly ridiculous idea. Isaacson writes that from the beginning, Musk has driven himself “relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations”—and has “expected others to do the same.”
A favorite Musk management tactic, Isaacson says, is to “set an insane deadline and drive colleagues to meet it.” Many of the seemingly impossible goals Musk set for his employees were in fact achieved. The result, in the case of SpaceX, was a company that could put a payload in orbit twice a week during 2023, while slashing costs. The company projected 144 launches in 2024.
In Musk’s case, demanding the impossible has worked pretty well, though it probably won’t be taught at Harvard Business School.
Musk achieved similar astronomical results at Tesla—and we are not referring to the electric vehicle he launched into orbit around the sun. Even after Tesla’s stock fell below half its all-time high, the company’s market capitalization still exceeded that of Toyota, Ford, and GM combined. Tesla remains the only company turning a profit on EVs.
ISAACSON’S ACHIEVEMENT
It would be hard to write a boring book about Elon Musk. But Isaacson’s account of this creative freak of capitalism is a great page turner. After practicing on Steve Jobs, Isaacson has perfected the art of the entertaining business biography with Elon Musk.
As Jobs said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
Not a bad summary of the life of Elon Musk…so far.
John W. Childs is the founder and chairman of J. W. Childs Associates, LP, a private equity and special situation investment firm.