by Ashlee Vance
The communications departments of SpaceX and Tesla have witnessed the latter forms of behavior more than any other group of employees. Musk has burned through public relations staffers with comical efficiency. He tends to take on a lot of the communications work himself, writing news releases and contacting the press as he sees fit. Quite often, Musk does not let his communications staff in on his agenda. Ahead of the Hyperloop announcement, for example, his representatives were sending me e-mails to find out the time and date for the press conference. On other occasions, reporters have received an alert about a teleconference with Musk just minutes before it started. This was not a function of the PR people being incompetent in getting word of the event out. The truth was that Musk had only let them know about his plans a couple of minutes in advance, and they were scrambling to catch up to his whims. When Musk does delegate work to the communications staff, they’re expected to jump in without missing a beat and to execute at the highest level. Some of this staff, operating under this mix of pressure and surprise, only lasted between a few weeks and a few months. A few others have hung on for a couple of years before burning out or being fired.
The granddaddy example of Musk’s seemingly callous interoffice style occurred in early 2014 when he fired Mary Beth Brown. To describe her as a loyal executive assistant would be grossly inadequate. Brown often felt like an extension of Musk—the one being who crossed over into all of his worlds. For more than a decade, she gave up her life for Musk, traipsing back and forth between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley every week, while working late into the night and on weekends. Brown went to Musk and asked that she be compensated on par with SpaceX’s top executives, since she was handling so much of Musk’s scheduling across two companies, doing public relations work and often making business decisions. Musk replied that Brown should take a couple of weeks off, and he would take on her duties and gauge how hard they were. When Brown returned, Musk let her know that he didn’t need her anymore, and he asked Shotwell’s assistant to begin scheduling his meetings. Brown, still loyal and hurt, didn’t want to discuss any of this with me. Musk said that she had become too comfortable speaking on his behalf and that, frankly, she needed a life. Other people grumbled that Brown and Riley clashed and that this was the root cause of Brown’s ouster.* (Brown declined to be interviewed for this book, despite several requests.)
Whatever the case, the optics of the situation were terrible. Tony Stark doesn’t fire Pepper Potts. He adores her and takes care of her for life. She’s the only person he can really trust—the one who has been there through everything. That Musk was willing to let Brown go and in such an unceremonious fashion struck people inside SpaceX and Tesla as scandalous and as the ultimate confirmation of his cruel stoicism. The tale of Brown’s departure became part of the lore around Musk’s lack of empathy. It got bundled up into the stories of Musk dressing employees down in legendary fashion with vicious barb after vicious barb. People also linked this type of behavior to Musk’s other quirky traits. He’s been known to obsess over typos in e-mails to the point that he could not see past the errors and read the actual content of the messages. Even in social settings, Musk might get up from the dinner table without a word of explanation to head outside and look at the stars, simply because he’s not willing to suffer fools or small talk. After adding up this behavior, dozens of people expressed to me their conclusion that Musk sits somewhere on the autism spectrum and that he has trouble considering other people’s emotions and caring about their well-being.
There’s a tendency, especially in Silicon Valley, to label people who are a bit different or quirky as autistic or afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s armchair psychology for conditions that can be inherently funky to diagnose or even codify. To slap this label on Musk feels ill-informed and too easy.
Musk acts differently with his closest friends and family than he does with employees, even those who have worked alongside him for a long time. Among his inner circle, Musk is warm, funny, and deeply emotional.* He might not engage in the standard chitchat, asking a friend how his kids are doing, but he would do everything in his considerable power to help that friend if his child were sick or in trouble. He will protect those close to him at all costs and, when deemed necessary, seek to destroy those who have wronged him or his friends.
Musk’s behavior matches up much more closely with someone who is described by neuropsychologists as profoundly gifted. These are people who in childhood exhibit exceptional intellectual depth and max out IQ tests. It’s not uncommon for these children to look out into the world and find flaws—glitches in the system—and construct logical paths in their minds to fix them. For Musk, the call to ensure that mankind is a multiplanetary species partly stems from a life richly influenced by science fiction and technology. Equally it’s a moral imperative that dates back to his childhood. In some form, this has forever been his mandate.
Each facet of Musk’s life might be an attempt to soothe a type of existential depression that seems to gnaw at his every fiber. He sees man as self-limiting and in peril and wants to fix the situation. The people who suggest bad ideas during meetings or make mistakes at work are getting in the way of all of this and slowing Musk down. He does not dislike them as people. It’s more that he feels pained by their mistakes, which have consigned man to peril that much longer. The perceived lack of emotion is a symptom of Musk sometimes feeling like he’s the only one who really grasps the urgency of his mission. He’s less sensitive and less tolerant than other people because the stakes are so high. Employees need to help solve the problems to the absolute best of their ability or they need to get out of the way.
Musk has been pretty up front about these tendencies. He’s implored people to understand that he’s not chasing momentary opportunities in the business world. He’s trying to solve problems that have been consuming him for decades. During our conversations, Musk went back to this very point over and over again, making sure to emphasize just how long he’d thought about electric cars and space. The same patterns are visible in his actions as well. When Musk announced in 2014 that Tesla would open-source all of its patents, analysts tried to decide whether this was a publicity stunt or if it hid an ulterior motive or a catch. But the decision was a straightforward one for Musk. He wants people to make and buy electric cars. Man’s future, as he sees it, depends on this. If open-sourcing Tesla’s patents means other companies can build electric cars more easily, then that is good for mankind, and the ideas should be free. The cynic will scoff at this, and understandably so. Musk, however, has been programmed to behave this way and tends to be sincere when explaining his thinking—almost to a fault.
The people who get closest to Musk are the ones who learn to relate to this mode of thinking.22 They’re the ones who can identify with his vision yet challenge him intellectually to complete it. When he asked me during one of our dinners if I thought he was insane, it was a test of sorts. We had talked enough that he knew I was interested in what he was doing. He had started to trust me and open up but wanted to make sure—one final time—that I truly grasped the importance of his quest. Many of his closest friends have passed much grander, more demanding tests. They’ve invested in his companies. They’ve defended him against critics. They helped him keep the wolves at bay during 2008. They’ve proven their loyalty and their commitment to his cause.
People in the technology industry have tended to liken Musk’s drive and the scope of his ambition to that of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. “Elon has that deep appreciation for technology, the no-holds-barred attitude of a visionary, and that determination to go after long-term things that they both had,” said Edward Jung, a child prodigy who worked for Jobs and Gates and ended up as Microsoft’s chief software architect. “And he has that consumer sensibility of Steve along with the ability to hire good people outside of his own comfort areas that’s more like Bill. You almost wish that Bill and Steve had a genetically engineered love child and, who knows, maybe we should genotyp
e Elon to see if that’s what happened.” Steve Jurvetson, the venture capitalist who has invested in SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, worked for Jobs, and knows Gates well, also described Musk as an upgraded mix of the two. “Like Jobs, Elon does not tolerate C or D players,” said Jurvetson. “But I’d say he’s nicer than Jobs and a bit more refined than Bill Gates.”*
But the more you know about Musk, the harder it becomes to place him among his peers. Jobs is another CEO who ran two, large industry-changing companies—Apple and Pixar. But that’s where the practical similarities between the two men end. Jobs dedicated far more of his energy to Apple than Pixar, unlike Musk, who has poured equal energy into both companies, while saving whatever was left over for SolarCity. Jobs was also legendary for his attention to detail. No one, however, would suggest that his reach extended down as far as Musk’s into overseeing so much of the companies’ day-to-day operations. Musk’s approach has its limitations. He’s less artful with marketing and media strategy. Musk does not rehearse his presentations or polish speeches. He wings most of the announcements from Tesla and SpaceX. He’ll also fire off some major bit of news on a Friday afternoon when it’s likely to get lost as reporters head home for the weekend, simply because that’s when he finished writing the press release or wanted to move on to something else. Jobs, by contrast, treated every presentation and media moment as precious. Musk simply does not have the luxury to work that way. “I don’t have days to practice,” he said. “I’ve got to give impromptu talks, and the results may vary.”
As for whether Musk is leading the technology industry to new heights like Gates and Jobs, the professional pundits remain mixed. One camp holds that SolarCity, Tesla, and SpaceX offer little in the way of real hope for an industry that could use some blockbuster innovations. For the other camp, Musk is the real deal and the brightest shining star of what they see as a coming revolution in technology.
The economist Tyler Cowen—who has earned some measure of fame in recent years for his insightful writings about the state of the technology industry and his ideas on where it may go—falls into that first camp. In The Great Stagnation, Cowen bemoaned the lack of big technological advances and argued that the American economy has slowed and wages have been depressed as a result. “In a figurative sense, the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies,” he wrote. “Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there. We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think. That’s it. That is what has gone wrong.”
In his next book, Average Is Over, Cowen predicted an unromantic future in which a great divide had occurred between the Haves and the Have Nots. In Cowen’s future, huge gains in artificial intelligence will lead to the elimination of many of today’s high-employment lines of work. The people who thrive in this environment will be very bright and able to complement the machines and team effectively with them. As for the unemployed masses? Well, many of them will eventually find jobs going to work for the Haves, who will employ teams of nannies, housekeepers, and gardeners. If anything Musk is doing might alter the course of mankind toward a rosier future, Cowen can’t find it. Coming up with true breakthrough ideas is much harder today than in the past, according to Cowen, because we’ve already mined the bulk of the big discoveries. During a lunch in Virginia, Cowen described Musk not as a genius inventor but as an attention seeker, and not a terribly good one at that. “I don’t think a lot of people care about getting to Mars,” he said. “And it seems like a very expensive way to drive whatever breakthroughs you might get from it. Then, you hear about the Hyperloop. I don’t think he has any intention of doing it. You have to wonder if it’s not meant just to be publicity for his companies. As for Tesla, it might work. But you’re still just pushing the problems back somewhere else. You still have to generate power. It could be that he is challenging convention less than people think.”
These sentiments are not far off from those of Vaclav Smil, a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba. Bill Gates has hailed Smil as an important writer for his tomes on energy, the environment, and manufacturing. One of Smil’s latest works is Made in the USA, an exploration of America’s past manufacturing glories and its subsequent, dismal loss of industry. Anyone who thinks the United States is making a natural, clever shift away from manufacturing and toward higher-paying information-worker jobs will want to read this book and have a gander at the long-term consequences of this change. Smil presents numerous examples of the ways in which the manufacturing industry generates major innovations and creates a massive ecosystem of jobs and technical smarts around them. “For example, when some three decades ago the United States stopped making virtually all ‘commodity’ consumer electronic devices and displays, it also lost its capacity to develop and mass-produce advanced flat screens and batteries, two classes of products that are quintessential for portable computers and cell phones and whose large-scale imports keep adding to the US trade deficit,” Smil wrote. A bit later in the book, Smil emphasized that the aerospace industry, in particular, has been a huge boon to the U.S. economy and one of its major exporters. “Maintaining the sector’s competitiveness must be a key component of efforts to boost US exports, and the exports will have to be a large part of the sector’s sales because the world’s largest aerospace market of the next two decades will be in Asia, above all in China and India, and American aircraft and aeroengine makers should benefit from this expansion.”
Smil is consumed by the United States’ waning ability to compete with China and yet does not perceive Musk or his companies as any sort of counter to this slide. “As, among other things, a historian of technical advances I simply must see Tesla as nothing but an utterly derivative overhyped toy for showoffs,” Smil wrote to me. “The last thing a country with 50 million people on food stamps and 85 billion dollars deeper into debt every month needs is anything to do with space, especially space with more joyrides for the super rich. And the loop proposal was nothing but bamboozling people who do not know anything about kindergarten physics with a very old, long publicized Gedankenexperiment in kinetics. . . . There are many inventive Americans, but in that lineup Musk would be trailing far behind.”
The comments were blunt and surprising given some of the things Smil celebrated in his recent book. He spent a good deal of time showing the positive impact that Henry Ford’s vertical integration had on advancing the car industry and the American economy. He also wrote at length about the rise of “mechatronic machines,” or machines that rely on a lot of electronics and software. “By 2010 the electronic controls for a typical sedan required more lines of software code than the instructions needed to operate the latest Boeing jetliner,” Smil wrote. “American manufacturing has turned modern cars into remarkable mechatronic machines. The first decade of the twenty-first century also brought innovations ranging from the deployment of new materials (carbon composites in aviation, nanostructures) to wireless electronics.”
There’s a tendency among critics to dismiss Musk as a frivolous dreamer that stems first and foremost from a misunderstanding of what Musk is actually doing. People like Smil seem to catch an article or television show that hits on Musk’s quest to get to Mars and immediately lump him with the space tourism crowd. Musk, though, hardly ever talks about tourism and has, since day one, built up SpaceX to compete at the industrial end of the space business. If Smil thinks Boeing selling planes is crucial to the American economy, then he should be enthused about what SpaceX has managed to accomplish in the commercial launch market. SpaceX builds its products in the United States, has made dramatic advances in aerospace technology, and has made similar advances in materials and manufacturing techniques. It would not take much to argue that SpaceX is America’s only hope of competing against China in the next couple of
decades. As for mechatronic machines, SpaceX and Tesla have set the example of fusing together electronics, software, and metal that their rivals are now struggling to match. And all of Musk’s companies, including SolarCity, have made dramatic use of vertical integration and turned in-house control of components into a real advantage.
To get a sense of how powerful Musk’s work may end up being for the American economy, have a think about the dominant mechatronic machine of the past several years: the smartphone. Pre-iPhone, the United States was the laggard in the telecommunications industry. All of the exciting cell phones and mobile services were in Europe and Asia, while American consumers bumbled along with dated equipment. When the iPhone arrived in 2007, it changed everything. Apple’s device mimicked many of the functions of a computer and then added new abilities with its apps, sensors, and location awareness. Google charged to market with its Android software and related handsets, and the United States suddenly emerged as the driving force in the mobile industry. Smartphones were revolutionary because of the ways they allowed hardware, software, and services to work in unison. This was a mix that favored the skills of Silicon Valley. The rise of the smartphone led to a massive industrial boom in which Apple became the most valuable company in the country, and billions of its clever devices were spread all over the world.
