Elon Musk

“We had worked on many possible new features for years, but no one ever made decisions about them,” he said later. “Suddenly, we had this guy making rapid decisions.”

“I was pretty mad, and when I get mad I try to reframe the problem.”

“Wokeness wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool,” he contended. “Trying to shut down David Chappelle, come on, man, that’s crazy. Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate and no forgiveness? At its heart wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel

First he approached Sequoia Capital, which had become king of the valley by being early backers of Atari, Apple, and Google. It was run by Michael Moritz, the wry and literate Welsh-born former journalist who had helped guide Musk and Thiel on the tumultuous ride of PayPal. Musk took him for a drive in a mocked-up Lotus prototype. “It was an absolu

At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurp

Throughout the spring and early summer of 2018, he prowled the factory floor, like he had in Nevada, making decisions on the fly. “Elon was going completely apeshit, marching from station to station,” says Juncosa. Musk calculated that on a good day he made a hundred command decisions as he walked the floor. “At least twenty percent are going to be

Whenever one of his engineers cited “a requirement” as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering “The military” or “The legal department” was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. “We would talk about how we were going to qualify

James, Andrew, Ross, and Dhaval began meeting with Twitter’s managers and asking them to meet Musk’s targets of getting rid of up to 90 percent of their employees. “They were pretty unhappy,” Dhaval says. “They argued that the company would just crash.” He and the other musketeers had a standard response: “Elon has asked for this, and this is how h

Musk eventually bought an old aircraft hangar next to the SpaceX factory to house von Holzhausen and his studio. He would drop by to talk almost every day, and he would spend an hour or two every Friday in an intensive design review session. Gradually a new version of the Model S took shape.

“When Elon gets upset, he lashes out, often at junior people,” says Jon McNeill. “Gage’s story was fairly typical of his behavior where he just couldn’t really process his frustration in a productive way.” JB Straubel, Musk’s kinder and gentler cofounder, cringed at Musk’s behavior. “In retrospect it may seem like great war stories,” he says, “but