Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

What drove me to read this book was Isaacson's work on the Steve Jobs biography. Isaacson did such a great job bringing out who Jobs was, the good, the bad, and why his story was so inspirational. Enjoying that book made me want to read how Isaacson portrayed another interesting innovator.

I think what makes Isaacson's biographies so interesting is his approach. For this book he spent roughly 3 years shadowing Musk with what I believe was, or close to, full access. Isaacson mentions in the beginning of the book this was the deal he struck with Musk but I find this hard to believe based on Musk's schedule and how much he jet sets around the country and world. It would be hard for anyone to keep up with him. What I can say is there is enough in the book that captures all sides of Musk and enough for you to form your own opinion.

What intrigued me the most was Musk's motivation for the companies he started (or acquired). Like other innovators (i.e., Jobs, Gates, Bezos) Musk had a vision for each one. His primary vision (SpaceX) is for people on earth to be an interplanetary species. He is of the opinion earth will not be able to handle what the human race is doing to it and the only long term solution is to settle Mars - I'm paraphrasing a little there. His secondary vision (Tesla along with some subsideratires) is to buy time to reach his primary vision by moving to a renewable energy. He also has several tertiary visions that sort of support the others in one way shape or form. All in all his company visions seem like he wants to do good, that is until he bought Twitter - now called X.

Musk as a person is...well interesting is what I will go with. His work ethic isn't human and he expects nothing but from the people that work for him. He is not your ordinary Chairmen of the board and CEO insisting on being involved with every part of the business including working the assembly line. He is especially partial to engineering and is very involved in the design process. There are so many instances in the book where he is on the front line of difficult engineering troubleshooting and is surprisingly good at it. There are also many engineering decisions he has made that didn't work out - his response is, and I paraphrase, ok that didn't work let's try something different. Musk is very entrepreneurial in that way, even when SpaceX was blowing up rockets.

One thing that was clear is Musk can be very moody. Several of his moods are discussed but the one people fear the most is described as his dark mode. One of the many outcomes of this mood is what people call a surge. A surge is when Musk wants something done based on unrealistic deadlines. It is an all hands on deck and nobody goes home until it is, this could be days, weeks, or months. This includes him. What amazed me is how often this works and oddly enough regardless of how hard it is for the team to achieve everyone gets stoked by the results. If I haven't said it, it takes a particular kind of person to thrive in this environment. The downside is those people eventually get burned out and have to move on after a while.

Musk is a master of what I will call product simplification. The driver is to lower the cost and the time it takes to make. He likes to break things down to the simplest form and states the only rule he needs to follow is the law of physics. His philosophy is "delete it". He applies this to engineering the most asking "why do we need that?" and will track down the requirement all the way back to the engineer and sometimes to the legal department. Interestingly another area he challenges is production line automation. If he observes a human can do something faster then the machine he will tear out the machine - there is a good example of this related to the Tesla car manufacturing. This philosophy gets challenged by governing parties all the time, especially with SpaceX, but Musk doesn't care and fights it to the best of his ability. And finds more success than failure.

Whether you're fan of Musk or not this book is a good read if you're interested in innovators and the process of innovation. There is no doubt he is an interesting but controversial person. He says it best in the monologue when he hosted SNL "I re-invented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship, did you also think I would be a chill normal dude".