Elon Musk

This followed the principle that Steve Jobs and Jony Ive had instilled at Apple: design is not just about aesthetics; true industrial design must connect the looks of a product to its engineering. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer,” Jobs once explained. “Nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamenta

He processed in silence for two minutes, and when he emerged from his trance, 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 t

The Twitter managers again tried to explain the constraints. Musk interrupted. “Can you have someone go to our server centers and send me videos of the insides?” he asked. It was three days before Christmas, and the manager promised the video in a week. “No, tomorrow,” Musk ordered. “I’ve built server centers myself, and I can tell if you could put

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

Altman was pained. Unlike Musk, he is sensitive and nonconfrontational. He was not making any money off of OpenAI, and he felt that Musk had not drilled down enough into the complexity of the issue of AI safety. However, he did feel that Musk’s criticisms came from a sincere concern. “He’s a jerk,” Altman told Kara Swisher. “He has a style that is

“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

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

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

I didn’t mention this to Musk when I talked to him later that day, because Shotwell told me it was confidential, but I did ask him whether he thought he was too harsh with Hughes. Musk stared a bit blankly, as if he wasn’t sure what I was referring to. After some silence, he answered in the abstract. “I give people hardcore feedback, mostly accurat

As the Model S production line ramped up, he spelled out his creed in a quintessential email to employees, titled “Ultra hardcore.” It read, “Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before.