The explosion of Starship was emblematic of Musk, a fitting metaphor for his compulsion to aim high, act impulsively, take wild risks, and accomplish amazing things—but also to blow things up and leave smoldering debris in his wake while cackling maniacally. His life had long been an admixture of historically transforming achievements along with

he was philosophical. “This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers.” That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the moon. “When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire

Musk assigned Babuschkin and his team three major goals. The first was to make an AI bot that could write computer code. A programmer could begin typing in any coding language, and the X.AI bot would auto-complete the task for the most likely action they were trying to take. The second product would be a chatbot competitor to OpenAI’s GPT series,

The ability to collect and analyze vast flows of real-time data would be crucial to all forms of AI, from self-driving cars to Optimus robots to ChatGPT–like bots. And Musk now had two powerful gushers of real-time data, the video from self-driving cars and the billions of postings each week on Twitter.

Shroff’s project involved the latest machine-learning frontier: devising a self-driving car system that would learn from human behavior. “We process an enormous amount of data on how real humans acted in a complex driving situation, and then we train a computer’s neural network to mimic that.”

Musk has an intuitive feel for engineering issues, but his neural nets have trouble when dealing with human feelings, which is what made his Twitter purchase such a problem. He thought of it as a technology company, when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships.

He had privately come to the conclusion that Twitter’s biggest competitor was going to be Substack, the online platform that journalists and others were using to publish content and get paid by users.

Musk said he liked the idea of having easy small payments a user could make to watch video or read a story.

Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase “psychological safety.” It made him recoil. He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was “hardcore.” Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, flower-smelling, work-life