Who is Elon Musk, exactly?
A recent book provides an incredibly well-crafted answer to that question.
Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson, is enlightening, revealing and brilliant. It came out on September 12, and I’m already about halfway into the book, which clocks in at a hefty 688 pages.
I won’t spoil any revelations from the book if you plan to read it, especially the parts about his family dynamics or the early chapters about his life before becoming the richest person in the world. I usually get bored with any biography that dwells on early family life too much. You want to read about “the good stuff” that made someone famous. With this book, from the opening chapter onward, you get an inside peek into Musk’s formative years.
The book is incredibly detailed when it comes to his inner world — you start to understand what makes him tick. There are well-placed quotes by friends, family and Musk himself sprinkled throughout the book that put a stamp of authenticity on the described events, but what really holds your attention is just the psychology of the most famous entrepreneur on the planet. The guy is a genius, of course. Yet, what really struck me is how random he can be, according to Isaacson.
One story in the book covers the history of SpaceX and how the company started testing its rockets. It used launchpads in California initially, but then Musk suddenly decided he didn’t want to wait for the federal government to finish its own launches. He shipped rockets to the Kwaj Atoll, which proved to be a mistake due to the remote location and other factors.
I had to stop and think about that for a moment. You start a massive company called SpaceX, and due to what Isaacson calls impatience, you suddenly decide to launch rockets halfway across the globe instead. At the time, everyone around Musk questioned the decision.
I made a quick jump to the present day. According to the Wall Street Journal, Musk has made several sudden decisions about Twitter. He fired a bunch of people, he changed the name, now he might start charging everyone a monthly fee to use the app. Isaacson paints a picture of someone who is incredibly random, and how that’s frustrating to everyone around him. He’s abrupt and makes rash decisions on a dime, like moving those rockets.
And yet.
Isaacson also covers the first successful SpaceX launch and hints at greater things to come. I haven’t read far enough to know this from the book, but obviously Musk also turned Tesla into a dynamo.
This all has made me rethink his master plan for X, the company that used to be called Twitter. Like the tech geniuses before him, Musk is stirring the pot as much as possible. He seems to like it that way. When there’s a smart decision to be made about retaining brand integrity with Twitter, he does the opposite and randomly decides to dump the brand. When most of us would never pay to use social media, he suddenly makes a snap decision to charge us for the app. He isn’t going to wait to build X into something worth a subscription.
I honestly don’t think any of this will work. X is bleeding users right and left. It’s almost like Musk prefers to fail as much as possible and then see what happens.
Many of those early rockets exploded. Twitter itself is also imploding. Maybe that was the goal all along? Maybe disruption and innovation, at this scale, always has intense drama.
I’m rethinking everything about his strategy. He is purposefully blowing up Twitter, maybe as a way to see what’s left and who is still interested. As I discovered in the book, he’s someone who likes to create chaos and confusion and then see what’s still standing, and he always has.
It worked before. I wonder if it can work again. We shall see.
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