《埃隆马斯克传》-en

I just finished Elon Musk. It suddenly hit me that I barely read any extracurricular books in the second half of last year, and my year-in-review post was pretty perfunctory (on me…) The book is long; I read a bit each night and finished in about two weeks. With ebooks you lose your sense of length—only the percentage in the corner tells you how far you are—and reading in short nightly chunks instead of continuously makes that even worse.

First, a quick timeline of Musk’s ventures:

  • 1995 — Founded Zip2 with his brother; company acquired in 1999.
  • 1999 — Co-founded online bank X.com; 2000 — X.com merged with Confinity to become PayPal.
  • 2002 — Founded SpaceX.
  • 2004 — Joined electric-car maker Tesla.
  • 2006 — Helped start solar company SolarCity (later folded into Tesla as Tesla Energy).
  • 2015 — Co-founded OpenAI.
  • 2016 — Co-founded Neuralink (brain–machine interfaces); founded The Boring Company (hyperloop-related tunnel work).
  • 2022 — Acquired Twitter.

Now the main thread.

I first heard about Musk in middle school from a close friend who admired him—Silicon Valley Iron Man, Tesla, SpaceX (I don’t remember whether SpaceX came up; I had no real picture of any of it then).

In college I started using Twitter. During the acquisition I was pretty active on Twitter (like most people who might read this). Those weeks felt chaotic—random bugs, pages crashing, later the API lockdown—and I came away with a terrible impression of him. As the book says, Twitter amplified his personality flaws and quirks. I joined the exodus to the Fediverse, settled on one “island,” and gradually made friends there. Reading the Twitter chapters felt like yesterday, but it’s already been more than a year.

Still, finishing the book, I genuinely respect his life’s ambitions and what he’s built—and the effort and cost are beyond what I can imagine.

Before reading, I’d seen him praise WeChat and say he wanted Twitter to become a broader financial services and payment platform; I wondered if WeChat was the inspiration. The book shows that as far back as the PayPal days he wanted a social network that could upend banking—that was the early 2000s.

In the exchange with Gates about philanthropy, this line:

How can you say you care deeply about climate change and then cut overall exposure to the company that contributes the most to that fight? That’s hypocritical! If a sustainable-energy company fails, are you going to profit from that?

—makes it clear to me he’s a thoroughgoing idealist in his own way.

I also noted his five-step workflow. I’m copying it here:

  • Question every requirement. Each requirement should come with the name of the person who made it. Never accept a requirement from a “department” (e.g. “Legal” or “Safety”) without a human owner. Then challenge it, no matter how smart they are—smart people’s requirements are the most dangerous because nobody questions them. Keep doing this even if the requirement is from Musk himself. After questioning, refine the requirement so it’s less dumb.
  • Delete every part and process you can. You may have to add some back later. If you end up adding back less than 10% of what you removed, you didn’t delete enough. (When I saw this tweet from Manjusaka, my first thought was this step.)
  • Simplify and optimize—only after step 2. A common mistake is optimizing something that shouldn’t exist.
  • Accelerate cycle time. Every process can be sped up—but only after the first three steps. At Tesla I wrongly spent energy speeding up production before realizing some steps should have been removed entirely.
  • Automate. A big mistake at Nevada and Fremont was trying to automate every step first. You should question everything, delete needless steps, surface and fix problems, then automate.

Corollaries he also lists:

  • Every technical manager must stay hands-on—e.g. engineering leads should spend at least 20% of time coding; solar-roof managers should spend time on actual installs. Otherwise it’s a cavalry captain who can’t ride or a general who can’t use a sword.
  • “Kumbaya” culture is dangerous—people stop challenging each other’s work. The urge not to push a friend off the boat is natural; you have to fight it.
  • Mistakes are fine; refusing to admit them is not.
  • Never ask your team to do what you wouldn’t do yourself.
  • When there’s a problem, don’t talk only to your direct reports—go down the chain and talk to their reports.
  • Hire for attitude. Skills can be taught; fixing attitude is like “replacing someone’s brain.”
  • Relentless urgency is how the company runs.
  • The only hard rules are what physics allows—everything else is a suggestion.

From the Low Poly War “life lessons” in the book, the core ideas included:

  • Empathy is not a corporate asset—it gets in the way of business.
  • Treat life like a game.
  • Don’t fear failure—once you’re used to failing, you bring less baggage to each round. Bolder people take bigger risks.
  • Take initiative—if you don’t set strategy, you can’t win.
  • Optimize each turn’s strategy.
  • Double down when it makes sense.
  • Allocate resources for battle (time, money, etc.).
  • Know when to stop playing.

We can’t copy his personality or biography, but we can borrow pieces of the methodology.

His obsession with detail and doing the work himself also stuck with me. During last year’s China visit the memes wrote themselves—Musk on the floor with workers versus… everyone knows the rest.

His romantic history and which kids are with whom aren’t what I’m interested in, so I’ll skip that in these notes.

His political leanings—anti-“woke,” right-coded discourse, etc.—are outside what I know or care to dig into right now, so I’ll leave that aside too.

That’s about it for this reading note—the biography made my picture of him more three-dimensional. I’ll close with Gates’s line and the book’s last line:

You can think whatever you want about Elon’s approach, but in our time, no one has done more to push the frontiers of science and innovation. — Bill Gates

Sometimes the great innovators are the kids dancing with risk—refusing to be tamed. They can be reckless, awkward, even crisis-prone; maybe they’re also just crazy enough to think they can change the world.

Thanks for reading—though probably nobody will.

Timeline cribbed from Wikipedia (too lazy to flip through the ebook again): Elon Musk (Chinese Wikipedia).