“One of Elon’s greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven.”

Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an asshole? The answer is no, of course not. One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can

The experience became a lesson that would become part of Musk’s production algorithm. Always wait until the end of designing a process—after you have questioned all the requirements and deleted unnecessary parts—before you introduce automation.

When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.

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

When I was reporting on Steve Jobs, his partner Steve Wozniak said that the big question to ask was Did he have to be so mean? So rough and cruel? So drama-addicted? When I turned the question back to Woz at the end of my reporting, he said that if he had run Apple, he would have been kinder. He would have treated everyone there like family and not

While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view.

From the very beginning, he saw the potential that Twitter could become what he had envisioned for X.com, a social network that supported financial transactions.

That prospect, like all hellish dramas, seemed to fill him with dark energy. “I look forward to working alongside you journeying through hell,” he told his startled audience. “As the saying goes, if you’re going through hell, just keep going.” He was. And he did.