The Only Word You Need To Know From The Walter Isaacson Musk Biography

And he's been saying it a lot lately.

I’ve read a couple of books on Elon Musk over the years, starting with Ashlee Vance’s bio from 2017. I put off reading Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk for a while, partly because I wanted to finish his Steve Jobs book first. I’m not sure it’s important to understand the two as any sort of matched set, but there are similarities, most of them to do with cruelty and a casual disregard for anyone else’s humanity.

What they share is a nearly unbelievable capacity for risk and failure. The type of brain that can conceive what doesn’t exist and then make it happen must believe they can accomplish it. It’s nothing as squishy as self-love, more an ability to push relentlessly.

Where they differ may be a question of upbringing, not just Musk’s abusive and cruel father, but a question of the era in which they were raised. I’m going to sound like an old woman shouting at clouds, but I believe video games, like much pornography today, teach a sort of dehumanization, an ability to see people as usable and disposable. Musk credits games with teaching him certain management skills but they also teach a winner-take-all mentality.

Isaacson has been accused of being too favorable to Musk. I’m not sure that’s completely accurate. It’s a sanitized version perhaps, one that doesn’t really focus on the impact of what it’s like to be on the other side of a Musk rant. There are many people in his life who believe that the mission or the man are worth whatever abuse is thrown their way, many others have walked away.

But with his widening influence in the government it’s important to understand one thing. Musk’s favorite word might just be delete. In the book there are multiple times he has deleted assembly lines, robots, people, whatever it takes to streamline and get the job done.

There are plenty of mistakes on this path: destroyed rockets, botched processes, the time he nearly destroyed Twitter by pulling out its servers in Sacramento. Musk has no fear of failure or of backtracking but his default action is to remove. Remove whoever or whatever stands in his way to make things move more quickly. Can he do this in government? An unstoppable force is meeting an immovable object.