The world's richest man, the first person in the world's private aerospace company, the founder of the world's number one car company, the king of electronic dance music, the new head of Twitter, the Iron Man of Silicon Valley... If possible, the prefix of Elon Musk's name can be longer than the "Dragon Mother" in "Game of Thrones"; in the same way, the storm caused by the Dragon Mother in Westeros, Musk has basically caused the same impact on the human world in the 21st century.

Writing a biography for strangers, especially a man as influential as Musk, feels somewhat thankless, because every move, decision and behavior of this "Silicon Valley Iron Man" is tracked and reported by global websites and media, not to mention the tens of thousands of tweets he left on Twitter (now renamed


"The Biography of Elon Musk" written by Walter Isaacson｜CITIC Publishing House

Of course, this may not be a problem for Walter Isaacson, the CEO of the Aspen Institute, the former chairman of CNN, and a well-known biographer, because the new book of this writer who was once appointed by Steve Jobs to write his own biography ("Jobs Biography"), the Chinese version of "Elon Musk Biography" was officially released in China by CITIC Publishing House on September 12.

After reading this biography of nearly 600 pages, the author only saw one question in it, a very core question that everyone wants to ask but is embarrassed or afraid to ask -Is Musk a lunatic??

Or, to take it a step further, if Musk is not a madman, why does everything he does - from crazy part-time job creation and management of several companies, embracing risks at all costs, firing people when he disagrees with him, and talking nonsense on Twitter - so like a madman (and is getting worse)?

And if Musk is indeed a madman, how did he achieve so many achievements at the beginning of the article?

Crazy or not crazy, that is the question.

01

There is a high probability that he is a crazy person.

There are too many examples of Musk being a lunatic.

And Peter Thiel, who later became a well-known investor, before PayPal became an army, Musk drove the former to pick him up to discuss cooperation. As a result, he kicked the car directly to the side of the road. Fortunately, Thiel was lucky and nothing happened even though he was not wearing a seat belt. If something goes wrong, it is estimated that there will be no PayPal in the future, let alone a series of companies such as SpaceX and Tesla.

After all, he later became the godfather of Silicon Valley investment. Thiel later commented that Musk's "risk threshold is very high." This sentence later came true repeatedly for Musk.

After PayPal was sold to eBay, Musk became a billionaire and finally had the opportunity to realize his boyhood dream of space - thus SpaceX was established. In order to inflate rockets, Musk and his friends went to Russia, which had just liberalized, to buy second-hand rockets. As a result, they were fed vodka without receiving any benefit from the fighting nation.

The Falcon 1 rocket shot three times and exploded three times, putting SpaceX on the verge of bankruptcy. At this moment, Musk has to focus most of his energy on Tesla. The latter's first model, the Roadster, is in a critical situation before mass production. The co-founder has been kicked out by Ma, and the team's salary has to be advanced by Musk and relatives and friends.

The book says that Musk was so stressed at the time that he couldn't sleep well at night and had to go to the bathroom to vomit when he got up in the morning. If the PayPal gang had not ignored the previous suspicion and provided help in times of crisis, it is very likely that the name of the world's number one company in the automotive industry would still be Toyota.

If these are the stress reactions of super entrepreneurs, then the core reason for Musk’s madness may be,He truly believes in his vision - SpaceX is about turning humans into an interstellar planetary species, Tesla is about realizing a transformation in human energy use, giving birth to a class of children with multiple women is about preventing human extinction..

A "prophet" who firmly believes in his mission is either God or... a sociopath.

It is this kind of self-confidence that allows Musk to stand in the factory production lines of SpaceX and Tesla, review each link where optimization is needed, speed up engineering mass production, and instantly fire engineers who dare to say "no" to him one after another.For him, compared to the company's failure and ruin, the delay in the vision of human progress is the more unbearable consequence..

Even after receiving a large contract from NASA, SpaceX has achieved initial victory, and can take a breath of relief, Musk often carries out "rectification", running to the launch site in the middle of the night to see who is not working overtime, and crazy PUA subordinates, so that the team can "maintain the hard-core" tradition. Later, this management method was also used on the acquired Twitter team, tossing the pampered Silicon Valley programmers to the point of crying for their parents.

Regarding this crazy behavior, family and friends unanimously commented on his behavior as-"Lack of empathy, inability to empathize”——The basic professional qualities of serial killers with antisocial personality.

Of course, people, as well as Isaacson, the author of this book, have found the source of Musk’s madness—Musk’s father, Errol, a man with a flexible mind, but a moody man with a history of domestic violence and infidelity. How crazy is "Daddy Ma"? When Musk was hospitalized with a concussion after being beaten by a classmate, his first reaction was to scold Musk angrily.

Darth Vader, the classic Darth Vader image in Star Wars, is used here as an image. By implication, Musk is Luke Skywalker who is determined to step out of his father's shadow. Unfortunately, like father, like son, as he gets older, "Luke" becomes more and more like "Anakin". In fact, people around Musk have the most stimulating words for him: "You are becoming more and more like your dad."

Luke is not Anakin after all, at least, not yet.

02

Some moments are not really crazy

Putting aside these crazy behaviors, Musk can show absolute calmness and rationality in some moments, which makes people doubt that this guy is usually "pretending to be crazy"!

As a person who "retaliates", what Musk likes to do most is to destroy his opponents mercilessly, even if the opponent begs for mercy. For example, because Bill Gates held a short position in Tesla, Musk insisted on arguing with Gates for many years, even though Musk had always been fond of Windows systems before, and he also favored Gates himself.

The wisest thing Musk did when he was young wasJust forgive the "PayPal gang" for betraying you.

When Musk's company merged with Peter Thiel, Musk took charge of the entire company without hesitation, but his dominance over the team and obsession with X.com eventually caused the entire team to "rebellion" and secretly subvert Musk's regime.

It was the second time he was expelled from the company he founded (the first time was the American Yellow Pages Zip2). With Musk's character, he would never let a "traitor" go lightly. But unexpectedly, Musk gave up "seeking revenge" and shook hands with Peter Thiel and others.

It later proved that without this "peaceful breakup", when Tesla was on the most dangerous edge in 2008,If FoundersFound, the founders fund created by Peter Thiel, had not generously provided $20 million in life-saving money, Musk might have become "American Jia Yueting", instead of the current richest man in the world.

Even though he was so crazy that he decided to acquire Twitter in just a few weeks, Musk was still sober enough to know who he could mess with and who he couldn't mess with.For example, you can criticize the President of the United States, but you have to be more modest when it comes to the boss of Apple..

After Musk took over Twitter, the platform's content policy changed drastically, so much so that advertisers fled and it was even rumored that it might be removed from the Apple App Store. Musk used "first principles" to deduce, why can't Apple talk about application sharing and data interoperability?

With these daring questions, Musk went to Apple to meet with Tim Cook. The latter said tactfully that the issue of division could be discussed later. As a company with a good reputation, Apple is more cautious about its advertising platform. At the same time, it gave him a reassurance that Twitter would not be removed from the shelves.

After the meeting, Musk sent a photo of Apple headquarters, saying that he had a good time shopping at Apple and got the results he wanted - you see, he is still sensible when dealing with some people. After all, before meeting Cook, Musk’s old friend Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, warned Musk, “Apple is the company you don’t want to be against".

Even at the busiest and craziest moment when he was in charge of Twitter, during the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Musk donated a large number of Starlink satellite communication systems for free in order to help Ukraine restore communications. But when Ukraine prepared to use Starlink satellites to destroy Russian buildings, Musk made a very clear judgment and immediately stopped Starlink services in Ukraine. It is one thing to help establish communications, but it is completely different when used for military purposes. Musk understands this clearly.

03

thin red line

There is an urban legend circulating in Silicon Valley: When Apple founder Steve Jobs passed away, he made a last wish to donate his property to a person who is similar to himself and can truly make history, and this person is Elon Musk.

To be honest, this "dress edict" is more like it was made up by Chinese people rather than straight-forward Americans.

If there is any intersection between Musk and Jobs, it is that Jobs did buy a Tesla Roadster and praised it from a product perspective. This is probably the highest courtesy for a hardware manufacturer. As for Tesla's subsequent "streamlined" product line and vehicle design, it has to be said that it did not live up to the praise of Gang Leader Qiao.

It is mentioned more than once in the book that Musk is indeed similar to Jobs. There is a "reality distortion field" that can turn PUA into a management art and allow the team to accomplish physically impossible things. However, there are still differences,Jobs was more focused on squeezing the team's creativity from the product design level; while Musk was more focused on product manufacturing and process levels, starting from first principles and optimizing the entire manufacturing process to the extreme to survive the production hell and save the day at critical moments..

It’s hard to imagine that Jobs would stand in the factory in Shenzhen, staring at the assembly line workers, calculating how much time each action could save; but Musk could indeed squat in the unfinished factories of SpaceX and Tesla, keeping an eye on every assembly step, calculating which actions and processes were unreasonable and could be overturned, just to save a few seconds.

"Tesla's most important product is actually the GigaFactory." Musk's words are not a joke.

Jobs' main focus was still on Apple, except for his brief experience with Pixar and NeXT. Musk started with SpaceX, and his energy has been continuously dispersed to Tesla, Boring, Neuralink, Twitter and later X.ai - each company has an important aspect related to the vision of the future of mankind, and each faces huge challenges.

During the "mass production hell" stage of Tesla Model 3, Musk once squeezed time to participate in a Southeast Asian entrepreneur forum. The moderator of the forum implored Musk to answer a question that many entrepreneurs present wanted to ask: "How to become the next Musk."

A tired Musk replied, "You don't want to be Musk, that would be too torturous.".

You have to be crazy enough to believe that you are the chosen one and only you can lead mankind to the stars; but you must not be so crazy that you fly too high and fall like Icarus.

There is only a thin red line in between, and that is the path Musk has been walking. And this road, currently, has no end.