Just finished reading Elon Musk. I suddenly realized I didn't read a single extra book in the second half of last year, and my year-end recap was pretty half-assed too (my fault...)... The book is fairly long. I carved out some time at night and took about two weeks to finish it. I feel like reading e-books makes you lose your sense of length — while reading, the only way to judge progress is the percentage in the bottom-right corner. Plus this time I only read a bit each night, not continuously, so I lost even more of a grip on how long it actually was.
Let me first lay out Musk's career, in order:
- 1995, founded Zip2 with his brother; the company was acquired in 1999.
- 1999, co-founded the online bank X.com, in 2000 X.com merged with Confinity into PayPal.
- 2002, founded SpaceX.
- 2004, joined electric-car maker Tesla.
- 2006, helped found the solar company SolarCity, which later became Tesla subsidiary Tesla Energy.
- 2015, co-founded OpenAI.
- 2016, co-founded the neurotech company Neuralink, focused on brain–computer interfaces.
- 2016, founded The Boring Company, to develop Hyperloop.
- 2022, acquired Twitter.
Alright, on to the actual point.
The first time I heard of Musk was a middle-school friend talking him up in my ear. He really worshipped Musk, and in chat he'd tell me his stories — Silicon Valley Iron Man, Tesla EVs. Whether he mentioned SpaceX I honestly don't remember, because I had no concept of any of that at the time.
Then came university, and I started using Twitter. When Musk acquired Twitter I was active on it (I believe most of you who can see this post were too). That period on Twitter could fairly be called panic. Random bugs, pages crashing now and then, then later locking down the API — it left me with an extremely bad impression of him. I think, as the book says, Twitter is an amplifier of Elon Musk's personal character flaws and quirks. I joined the wave of people fleeing Twitter, made an account on the Fediverse, and gradually got comfortable on a little Fediverse island, made some internet friends. When I read the Twitter part of the book, those things felt like they happened not long ago — but somehow it's already been more than a year.
And yet, reading the whole book, I also genuinely admire Musk's lifelong ideals and what he's achieved. Of course the effort and the price he paid are also beyond what I can imagine.
Before reading this book I'd already seen Musk praise WeChat, and mention that he wanted to turn Twitter into a broader financial-services and payments platform. I figured maybe WeChat had inspired him. Then I read the book and found out that as early as the PayPal days he already wanted to build a social network that could upend the entire banking system — and that was the early 2000s...
In Musk and Gates's exchange about philanthropy, this line
How can someone say he cares a lot about climate change, and then go cut overall investment in the companies that contribute the most to it? That's so hypocritical! If a company that runs sustainable energy fails, are you really going to profit off that?
is enough to show Musk is a pure idealist.
What also stuck with me is the five-step work method Musk preaches. I'll copy it down here:
- Question every requirement. Any requirement should come with the name of the person who made it. Never accept a requirement that comes from a department, like "Legal" or "Safety." You have to know the name of the person who made it. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Keep doing this, even if the requirement comes from me, Musk. After questioning, everyone should improve the requirement so it's less stupid.
- Delete every part and process in the requirement that you can, even though you may have to add some back. In fact, if you end up adding back less than 10% of what you deleted, that means you didn't delete enough. (When I saw senior manjusaka's tweet, my first thought was this one...)
- Simplify and optimize. This should come after step 2, because a common mistake is simplifying and optimizing a part or process that shouldn't exist in the first place.
- Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be sped up, but only after the first three steps. At the Tesla factory, I wrongly spent a lot of energy speeding up production processes, and only later realized some of those processes should have been removed.
- Automate. A big mistake at the Nevada factory and the Fremont factory was that I tried to automate every step from the start. We should have first questioned every requirement, deleted unnecessary parts and processes, filtered out and dealt with the problems, and only then pushed automation.
I also copied down the corollaries of this method:
- All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, software-team managers must spend at least 20% of their time coding; solar-roof managers must spend time on roofs doing installs themselves. Otherwise it's all talk — they're like cavalry captains who can't ride, generals who can't use a weapon.
- "I'm okay, you're okay, everyone's okay" is dangerous; people stop questioning colleagues' work. People naturally don't want to kick a buddy off the boat, and that dangerous tendency has to be avoided.
- It's okay to be wrong; what's not okay is being wrong and refusing to admit it.
- Never ask your team to do something you wouldn't do yourself.
- Whenever there's a problem to solve, don't only talk to the person who reports directly to you. Going deep means talking across levels — go talk to your reports' reports.
- Hire for the right attitude. Skills can be taught, but turning someone's work attitude around is exhausting — you'd have to "swap their brain."
- A maniacal sense of urgency is the operating law of our company.
- The only rules to follow are the ones you can derive from the laws of physics. Everything else is just a suggestion.
And in the little life class from the game The Battle of Low-Poly, the core of the course includes:
- Empathy is not a company asset: empathy is bad for doing business.
- Play life like a game.
- Don't fear failure: once you're used to failing, you play each game with less negative emotion. More fearless people are willing to take bigger risks.
- Take the initiative: unless you actively make a strategy, you can never win.
- Optimize the strategy each round.
- Double down.
- Allocate resources for the fight (most commonly, reasonably allocating time and money).
- Don't overdo the game.
We can't obtain Musk's personality and life history, but we can still learn a bit from his methodology.
His going-into-the-details, hands-on attitude also left a deep impression. I remember last year when Musk visited China, a lot of memes went around — one side Musk mixing it up with workers, the other side...
Things everyone already knows, I won't belabor.
Musk's romantic history and which kids he had with whom isn't what I'm interested in, so I won't put that in this review.
As for his ideological leanings, anti-woke and right-wing thought and so on — that's honestly beyond my knowledge, and I currently have neither the interest nor the energy to look into it, so I'll skip that topic for now.
So this review is pretty much done. Reading this biography made my picture of Musk more three-dimensional. Finally, allow me to quote Gates and the last lines of the book as the ending
You can think whatever you want about how Elon does things, but in our time, in pushing the boundaries of science and innovation, nobody has done more than him. --Bill Gates
Sometimes the great innovators are just kids dancing with risk, who refuse to be disciplined. They can be rash, socially awkward, sometimes even cause a crisis, but maybe they're also crazy — crazy enough to believe they really can change the world.
Thanks for reading, though probably nobody will.
Musk's career timeline is from Wikipedia (too lazy to flip through the e-book, so I just copied Wikipedia...): https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/埃隆·马斯克