The Complexity of the Human Condition, Takeaways from "Elon Musk" by Walter Isaacson.

I debated on whether or not to write this, as it is a publicly available book that anyone can purchase and read. Then I reminded myself that just because people can do things does not mean they exercise that ability.

Additionally, I find the takeaways of others fascinating and always appreciate getting a used copy of someone’s book with their notations and marks. So it is with those things in mind that I offer my quoted passages, takeaways, and highlights of Isaacson’s nearly 700-page monster of a publication. 

I hope you find them as useful, perplexing, thought-provoking, and downright fascinating as I did. 

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1st principles thinking and manufacturing breakthroughs: 

“First-principles thinking, drilling down to the basic physics of the situation and building up from there. This led Musk to develop what he called an ‘idiot index,’ which calculated how much more costly a finished product was than the cost of its basic materials. 

If I product had a high idiot index, its cost could be reduced significantly by devising a more efficient manufacturing technique.”

Learning by failing: 

“Move fast, blow things up, repeat. ‘It’s not how well you avoid problems, it’s how fast you figure out what the problem is and fix it.’ A pattern was set: try new ideas and be willing to blow things up.”

Responding in the face of failure, out of money for both Tesla and SpaceX, after blowing up 3 rockets in a row: 

“Musk told them there were components for [a fourth and final] rocket in the Los Angeles factory. Build it, he said, and transport it to Kwaj (a remote atoll in the South Pacific) as soon as possible. He gave them a deadline that was barely realistic: launch it in 6 weeks. A jolt of optimism spread through HQ. ‘I think most of us would have followed him into the gates of hell carrying sun tan lotion after that.’”

The philosophy of designer/engineer integration:

“‘At other places I worked,’ Von Holzhausen says, ‘there was this throw it over the fence mentality, where a designer would have an idea and then send it to an engineer, who sat in a different building or in a different country.’ Musk out the engineers and designers in the same room. ‘The vision was that we would create designers who thought like engineers and engineers who thought like designers.’”

Living in the moment and finding the gift: 

“Shortly after liftoff, one of the three engines malfunctioned and the rocket exploded. After a few moments of silence, Musk reverted to his adventure boy mode. He told the site manager to get in the van so they could drive over the smoldering debris. 

‘You can’t,’ said the manager. ‘Too dangerous.’ ‘We’re going,’ Musk said. ‘If it’s going to explode, we might as well walk through burning [rocket] debris. How often do you get to do that?’ 

Antonio Gracias tried to cheer everyone up by saying how the best lessons in life come from failures. ‘Given the options, I prefer to learn from successes,’ Musk said.”

Achieving maximum efficiency:

“‘Step one should be to question the requirements,’ Musk says. ‘Make them less wrong and less dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.’”

Musk with an example of how he executives this as he walked the Tesla production floor…

“’ Who specified this requirement,’ he asked. The factory team scrambled to find out, but they weren’t able to come up with a name. ‘So delete them,’ Musk said. They did, and it turned out they never had a problem with bent pins.”

The value of decisiveness (and the awareness to backpedal when wrong):

“Musk calculated that on a good day, he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the factory floor. ‘At least twenty percent are going to be wrong, and we’re going to alter them later.’ ‘But if I don’t make decisions, we die,’ Musk said.”

Musk’s algorithm, lessons learned during “production hell surges” for Tesla:

1. Question every requirement. Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a requirement came from a department, such as from "the legal department or "the safety department.” You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. 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. Always do so, even if the requirement came from Musk himself. Then make the requirements less dumb.
2. Delete any part or process you can. You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10% of them, then you didn't delete enough.
3. Simplify and optimize. This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part of a process that should not exist.
4. Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be sped up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.
5. Automate. That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that Musk began by trying to automate every step. He says they should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processes deleted, and the bugs were shaken out.

Ideas on management and leadership:

“Never ask your troops to do something you are unwilling to do yourself. When hiring, look for people with the right attitude. Skills can be taught. Attitude changes require a brain transplant.”

Elon’s rule for manufacturing and scaling: 

“One of Elon’s rules is ‘Go as close to the source as possible for information.”

The complexity of human belief systems, civil discourse, and avoiding vilifying anyone too quickly:

“Christiana insists that Elon is not prejudiced against gay or trans people. The rift with Jenna (Elon’s trans daughter), she says, was caused more by her radical Marxism than her gender identity. Christiana speaks from some experience. She was at times estranged from her own billionaire father, and before marrying Kimbal she was married to the Black female rock star Deborah Anne Dyer, known as Skin. ‘When I was still with my ex-wife, Elon tried to convince us to have children,’ she says. ‘He has no biases about gay or trans or race.’”

Ideation and the value of a large network: 

“Despite all these advances, the input-output between humans and machines remained crushingly slow. On a trip in 2016, Musk was typing on his iPhone with his thumbs and began complaining about how long it took to type, allowing information to flow from our brains into our devices at only about a hundred bits per second. 

‘Imagine if you could think into the machine,’ he said, ‘like a high-speed connection directly between your mind and your machine.’ He leaned over to Sam Teller, who was riding in the car with him. ‘Can you get a neuroscientist who can help me understand the computer-brain interface?’ he asked.”

The day Neuralink, a five billion dollar company, was born. 

The value of spending time around the right people: 

“’I noticed that I learned more unique lessons from Elon per minute than any other human I’ve ever met,’ Shivon Zillis said. ‘It would be dumb not to spend more of your life with such a person.’”

Betting on yourself, the complexity of wealth, and unfathomable amounts of money:

“Under the extraordinary compensation bet he had made with his Tesla board in February 2018, amid Tesla's worst production problems, he got no guaranteed salary. Instead, his compensation would depend on hitting very aggressive revenue, profit, and market value targets, which included Tesla's market valuation increasing tenfold to $650 billion. 

News articles at the time predicted that most targets would be impossible to achieve. 

But in October 2021, Tesla became the sixth company in U.S. history to be worth more than $1 trillion.

Its market value was greater than its five biggest rivals - Toyota, Volkswagen, Daimler, Ford, and GM-combined. 

And in April 2022, it reported a profit of $5 billion on revenue of $19 billion, an 81 percent increase from the year before. The result was that Musk's payout from the 2018 compensation deal was around $56 billion and his net worth at the start of 2022 increased to $304 billion.

Musk was angered by the public attacks on him for being a billionaire, a sensitivity exacerbated by the fact that his newly transitioned daughter Jenna, a fervent anti-capitalist, would no longer speak to him. 

He had sold all of his houses and he believed that he should not be criticized if he kept his wealth deployed in his companies rather than spending it on his lifestyle. However, he continued to be criticized because, by taking no salary and leaving his money invested in the company, he did not reap any capital gains and paid little tax.

In November 2021, he conducted a Twitter poll to see if he should sell some Tesla stock in order to realize some of the capital gains and pay tax on it. There were 3.5 million votes, with 58 percent voting yes.

As he already was planning to do, he exercised options that he had been granted in 2012 and were due to expire, which caused him to pay the largest single tax bill in history: $11 billion, enough to fund the entire budget of his antagonists at the Securities and Exchange Commission for five years.

‘Let's change the rigged tax code so the Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else,’ Senator Elizabeth Warren tweeted at the end of 2021. Musk shot back, ‘If you opened your eyes for 2 seconds, you would realize I will pay more taxes than any American in history this year. Don't spend it all at once…oh wait you did already.’”

Think in decades not in days: the absurdity of Elon’s achievements from 1999-2021: 

“In 2021, he became the richest person in the world, SpaceX became the first private company to send a civilian crew into orbit, and Tesla reached a trillion-dollar market value by leading the world’s auto industry in a historic shift into the era of electric vehicles.

‘I’m just trying to get people to Mars, and enable freedom of information with Starlink (satellite internet), accelerate sustainable technology with Tesla, and free people from the drudgery of driving,’ Musk said.”

The importance of standing by your decisions:

“When California issued a stay-at-home order later in March, just when the Fremont factory was starting to produce the Model Y, he became defiant. The factory would remain open. He wrote in a company-wide email, ‘I’d like to be super clear that if you feel the slightest bit ill or even uncomfortable, please do not feel obligated to come to work," but then he added, ‘I will personally be at work. My frank opinion remains that the harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself.’

After county officials threatened to force the plant to shut down, Musk filed suit against the orders. ‘If somebody wants to stay in their house, that's great," Musk said. "But to say that they cannot leave their house, and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom.’ He kept the plant open and challenged the county sheriff to make arrests. "I will be on the line with everyone else,’ he tweeted. ‘If anyone is arrested, I ask that it only be me.’”

Elon’s lessons from playing the game Polytopia: 

1. Play life like a game. ‘I have this feeling,’ Zilis once told Musk, ‘that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn't notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.’
2. Do not fear losing. ‘You will lose,’ Musk says. ’It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.’ You will be more fearless, and take more risks.
3. Be proactive. "I'm a little bit Canadian pacifist and reactive," Zilis says. "My gameplay was a hundred percent reactive to what everyone else was doing, as opposed to thinking through my best strategy." She realized that, like many women, this mirrored the way she behaved at work. Both Musk and Mark Juncosa told her that she could never win unless she took charge of setting the strategy. 
4. Optimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to optimize each one. ‘Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in life,’ Musk says, if we let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.’
5. Double down. ‘Elon plays the game by always pushing the edge of what's possible,’ Zilis says, ‘And he's always doubling down and putting everything back in the game to grow and grow. And it's just like he's just done his whole life.’
6. Pick your battles. In Polytopia, you might find yourself surrounded by six or more tribes, all taking swipes at you. If you swipe back at all of them, you're going to lose. Musk never fully mastered that lesson, and Zilis found herself coaching him on it. ‘Dude, like, everyone's swiping at you right now, but if you swipe back at too many, you'll run out of resources,’ she told him. She called that approach ‘front minimization.’ It was a lesson she also tried and failed to teach him about his behavior on Twitter.
7. Unplug at times. ‘I had to stop playing because it was destroying my marriage,’ Kimbal says. Shivon Zilis also deleted Polytopia from her phone. So did Grimes. And, for a while, Musk did so as well. ‘I had to take Polytopia off my phone because it was taking up too many brain cycles,’ he says. ‘I started dreaming about Polytopia.’ But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the game back onto his phone and was playing again.

Your obligation to help should increase as your resources increase: 

“An hour before Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, it used a massive malware attack to disable the routers of the American satellite company Viasat that provided communications and internet to the country. 

The command system of the Ukrainian military was crippled, making it almost impossible to mount a defense. Top Ukrainian officials frantically appealed to Musk for help, and the vice prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, used Twitter to urge him to provide connectivity. ‘We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations,’ he pleaded. Musk agreed. 

Two days later, five hundred terminals arrived in Ukraine.

‘We have the US military looking to help us with transport, State has offered humanitarian flights and some compensation,’ Gwynne Shotwell emailed Musk. ‘Cool,’ Musk responded. ‘Sounds good.’ He got on a Zoom call with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and discussed the logistics of a larger rollout…

…Lauren Dreyer, SpaceX's director of Starlink business operations, began sending Musk updates twice a day.

The next day SpaceX sent two thousand more terminals via Poland. But Dreyer said that the electricity was off in some areas, so many of them wouldn't work. ‘Let's offer to ship some field solar + battery kits,’ Musk replied. ‘They can have some Tesla Powerwalls or Megapacks too.’ The batteries and solar panels were soon on their way.

Within days, six thousand more terminals and dishes were shipped, and by July there were fifteen thousand Starlink terminals operating in Ukraine.”

The people who change the world are the ones who believe they can:

“In April 2022, things were going surprisingly well for Musk. 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. 

Musk’s fierce browbeating of microchip suppliers meant that Tesla, unlike other manufacturers, had survived the supply-chain dislocations caused by the pandemic, allowing it to achieve record deliveries in the first quarter of 2022.

As for SpaceX, in the first quarter of 2022, it launched twice as much mass into orbit as all other companies and countries combined. In April it sent up its fourth manned mission to the International Space Station, carrying three astronauts for NASA (which still didn't have its own launch capability) and one for the European Space Agency. 

It also that month sent into orbit another batch of Starlink communications satellites, bringing to twenty-one hundred the number in the Space constellation that was by then providing internet connectivity to 500,000 subscribers in forty countries, including Ukraine. No other company or country had been able to land orbital rockets safely and reuse them.

‘The super-weird thing is that Falcon 9 is still the only orbital booster to land or re-fly after all these years!’ Musk tweeted.”

In 2022, the value of the four companies Musk had initially funded and built were:

Tesla: $1 trillion

SpaceX: $100 billion

The Boring Company: $5.6 billion

Neuralink: $1 billion

The value of serendipity and showing up in person:

“It was Thursday, October 27, the day Musk was rushing toward the surprise flash-close of his takeover, but he found an hour to break away from his meetings to discuss with his cousins how to cull Twitter's engineering ranks. Joining them was another young engineer from the Autopilot team, Dhaval Shroff, who had been one of the presenters on AI Day 2.

His plan was to lay off most of the engineers while retaining the really good ones. "Let's figure out who did a nontrivial amount of coding, then within that group who did the best coding, he said. 

James had an idea. He and Dhaval had met a young Twitter software engineer at a conference in San Francisco a few days earlier. His name was Ben. James called his number, put him on speakerphone, and started peppering him with questions.

‘I have the list of everyone's insertions and deletions,’ Ben said. "Can you send it?" James asked. They spent time figuring out how to use a Python script and pruning techniques to get it to transfer faster. Then Musk broke in. ‘Thanks for helping, man,’ he said.

There was a long pause. ‘Elon?’ Ben asked. He seemed a little awed that his incoming boss was spending time digging through the source code on the day they were rushing to close the deal.

Hearing his French accent, [Isaacson] realized he was the same Ben— Ben San Souci — who had asked Musk about content moderation at the coffee bar visit. An engineer by demeanor, he wasn't a natural networker, but he was suddenly being swept into the inner circle. It was a testament to the value of serendipity and of showing up in person.”

Battlefield management and building camaraderie: 

“[Musk] decreed that they and the most dedicated engineers should all work in a huge open workspace on the tenth floor, where he would deal with them directly each day and night. 

‘I’m a big believer that a small number of exceptional people who are highly motivated can do better than a large number of people who are pretty good and moderately motivated,’ Musk said.

If he wanted the survivors at Twitter to be hardcore, he was going to have to show them how hardcore he could be. He had slept on the floor of his first office at Zip2 in 1995. He had slept on the roof of Tesla's Nevada battery factory in 2017. He had slept under his desk at the Fremont assembly plant in 2018. 

Now it was time for him to sleep at Twitter headquarters.

When he arrived back from a weekend trip to Austin late on the night of Sunday, November 13, he went straight to the Twitter office and commandeered a couch in a seventh-floor library. Steve Davis, his fix-it chief, had come to Twitter to oversee cost-cutting. Along with his wife Nicole Hollander and two-month-old baby, Davis moved into a conference room nearby. 

Twitter's cushy headquarters had showers, a kitchen, and a game room. They joked that it was all quite luxurious.”

The value of radical transparency: 

“‘You want me to whistle-blow on your own company?’ the journalist Matt Taibbi asked Musk somewhat incredulously. ‘Go to town,’ Musk replied. ‘This is not a North Korean guided tour. You can go wherever you want.’ 

Over the years, Twitter's content moderators had become increasingly active in banning what they considered harmful speech. 

Depending on your outlook, there were three ways to view this: 

(1) as a laudable effort to prevent the spread of false information that was medically dangerous, undermined democracy, provoked violence, stirred up hate, or perpetrated scams; 

(2) as an effort that was originally well-intentioned but had now gone too far in repressing opinions that dissented from the medical and political orthodoxy or offended the hair-trigger sensitivities of Twitter's progressive and woke staff; or…

(3) as a dark collusion between Deep State actors conspiring with Big Tech and legacy media to preserve their power.

Musk was generally in the middle category.”

Right time, right place, questioning the rules, and being willing to do it yourself:

“It was late at night on December 22, and the meeting in Musk’s tenth-floor Twitter conference room had become tense. He was talking to two Twitter infrastructure managers who had not dealt with him much before, and certainly not when he was in a foul mood.

The data services company that housed one of Twitter's server farms, located in Sacramento, had agreed to allow them some short-term extensions on their lease so they could begin to move out during 2023 in an orderly fashion.

‘But this morning,’ the nervous manager told Musk, ‘they came back to us and said that plan was no longer on the table because, and these are their words, they don't think that we will be financially viable.’

‘We can't get out safely before six to nine months,’ she said in a matter-of-fact tone.

‘Sacramento still needs to be around to serve traffic.’

Over the years, Musk had been faced many times with a choice between what he thought was necessary and what others told him was possible. The result was almost always the same. 

He paused in silence for a few moments, then announced, ‘You have ninety days to do it. If you can't make that work, your resignation is accepted.’”

One night while on a plane back to the Tesla factory, Musk and a number of key employees and their wives were on a plane returning home from a 2 day Christmas getaway. One of them suggested moving the data servers that night, and Musk agreed. 

Musk diverted the plane to the Sacramento data center.

“The only rental car they could find when they landed was a Toyota Corolla. Musk’s chief security guard drove, Grimes sat on Elon’s lap in the passenger seat, and others crammed into the back. 

They were not sure how they would even get inside the data center at night, but one very surprised Twitter staffer, a guy named Alex from Uzbekistan, was still there. He merrily let them in and showed them around.

The facility, which housed rooms of servers for many other companies as well, was very secure, with a retinal scan required for entry into each of the vaults. Alex the Uzbek was able to get them into the Twitter vault, which contained about 5,200 refrigerator-size racks of thirty computers each. ‘These things do not look that hard to move,’ Elon announced. It was a reality-distorting assertion since each rack weighed about 2,500 pounds and was eight feet tall.

‘You'll have to hire a contractor to lift the floor panels,’ Alex said.

‘They need to be lifted with suction cups.’ Another set of contractors, he said, would then have to go underneath the floor panels and disconnect the electric cables and seismic rods. 

Musk turned to his security guard and asked to borrow his pocket knife. Using it, he was able to lift one of the air vents in the floor, which allowed him to pry open the floor panels. He then crawled under the server floor himself, used the knife to jimmy open an electrical cabinet, pulled the server plugs, and waited to see what happened. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to be moved.

The next day, Christmas Eve, Musk called in reinforcements. He sent Ross Nordeed to pick up items necessary for the move…

• $2,000 to buy out the entire stock of Air Tags so the servers could be tracked 
• $2,500 on wrenches, bolt-cutters, headlamps, and tools needed for the seismic bolts

Steve Davis got someone from The Boring Company to procure a semi-truck and line up moving vans. Other enlistees arrived from SpaceX.

The server racks were on wheels, so the team was able to disconnect four of them and roll them to the waiting truck. This showed that all fifty-two hundred or so could probably be moved within days.

At 3 p.m., after they had gotten four servers onto the truck, word of the caper reached the top executives at NTT, the company that owned and managed the data center. They issued orders that Musk's team halt. Musk had the mix of glee and anger that often accompanied one of his manic surges. 

He called the CEO of the storage division, who told him it was impossible to move server racks without a bevy of experts. ‘Bullshit,’ Musk explained. ‘We have already loaded four onto the semi.’ 

The CEO then told him that some of the floors could not handle more than five hundred pounds of pressure, so rolling a two-thousand-pound server would cause damage. Musk replied that the servers had four wheels, so the pressure at any one point was only 500 pounds. ‘The dude is not very good at math,’ Musk said.

The moving contractors that NTT wanted them to use charged $200 an hour. So James went on Yelp and found a company named Extra Care Movers that would do the work at one-tenth the cost.

The owner had lived on the streets for a while, then had a kid, and he was trying to turn his life around. He didn't have a bank account, so James ended up using PayPal to pay him. On the second day, the crew wanted cash, so James went to a bank and withdrew $13,000 from his personal account. Two of the crew members had no identification, which made it hard for them to sign into the facility.

But they made up for it in hustle. "You get a dollar tip for every additional server we move," James announced at one point. From then on, when they got a new one on a truck, the workers would ask how many they were up to.

The servers had user data on them, and James did not initially realize that, for privacy reasons, they were supposed to be wiped clean before being moved. 

Elon recommended that they lock the trucks and track them.

So James sent someone to Home Depot to buy big padlocks, and they sent the combination codes on a spreadsheet to Portland so the trucks could be opened there. ‘I can't believe it worked,’ James says. ‘They all made it to Portland safely.’

By the end of the week, they had used all of the available trucks in Sacramento. Despite the area being pummeled by rain, they moved more than seven hundred of the racks in three days. The previous record at that facility had been moving thirty in a month.”

Musk was told it would take 6 to 9 months to move. Within 35 days, they moved all 5,200 server racks.

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I have always found the idea that human beings are mostly “un-boxable” to be true. We are exceedingly complicated in our nature, beliefs, wiring, and upbringing among other things. 

As I have grown older, where I used to get impatient, I now more often find myself sad when we try to categorize our fellow humans. People don’t exist in black and white, they exist on a spectrum, everything, and everybody. 

Bad people are capable of doing good deeds, and vice versa. Books like this fascinate me because they cover the life and trials of someone who is always being boxed by someone. That’s the nature of being in the public eye, I suppose.

Two examples featured in this book…

The people who look at Joe Rogan, who is a pot-smoking, mushroom-eating, jiu-jitsu, and ice bath connoisseur, “live and let live” champion, and come away saying, “That’s a right-wing conspiracy theorist if I’ve ever seen one.”

The people who look at Bari Weiss, a bisexual and outspoken journalist, who vilifiy her for her opinions on Brett Kavanaugh and the COVID reaction and label her a “conservative Anti-vaxxer.”

The reality is, that people are more complicated than that.

Yes, Elon Musk might be a rich asshole. He may be unfiltered and untethered, and at times unhinged…and, on top of all that, he is probably doing more for the preservation of humanity than any company or country on earth.

Elon Musk belongs to a list of approximately 8 billion people who are more complicated than we could possibly imagine because that is the human condition. 

In his own words, Musk says “Human consciousness is a small candle in the vast black of the universe, and I think that should be protected.”

Perhaps we should not only strive to protect it, but understand it, and on the way to understanding it maybe we can all be a little more patient with each other.

All credit to Walter and his team, for the work that they created and fascinating me at length on many flights over the past 2 months.

Thanks for reading,

- A complex human