Elon Musk

0:00 A new book about Elon Musk just came out earlier today. It's over 20 hours, listening if you get it from Audible, for example, or it's a TikTok if you want to read it. So while you're doing that, here's a room where we can discuss about it and the thoughts you're getting along the way while going through the Elon story. And if you want to get a little bit of a tease and it's only 2 hours listening, here, it's a interview with books right about Axon, where he talks with Lex Friedman, and that's a good tease for the content. And obviously there's a lot of interviews and takes from the book in the media, in order not to spoil the store photos who haven't yet read the book. Maybe we can try to keep the conversation more in the ideas.

0:53 It provokes and things around. So it's more like inspiration from the book than spoiling the whole content of the book. But if you have an inclination to do that, Maybe just say a spoiler aloud in the beginning. So people can skip it if they haven't read it yet. Listening to it, childhood of Elon Musk and what he went through and how he was as a child and while he was growing up. I couldn't help to think about Warren Buffett. how he was so obsessed with numbers and reading things, children and kids don't usually get entertainment from like, uh, really going to the stocks and company annual reports. So is that what it takes to become a billionaire nowadays.

1:48 You really have to be going to the extremes in order to be successful. Obviously, there are a lot of billionaires who are not, but that's a thought. They're staking all in attitude, didn't start with Elon. Apparently, it has been going for generations in his family. And that's some of the fascinating things as well as the flying. And yeah, there's a lot of episodes about flying in the book as well. How, well, that's also really adventurous, but also quite dangerous things. What you can do with flying and yeah, stuff happens. Some of those other tweets, Musk has been sending out start to make sense when you get the context with the book. It was like why he tweeted about that person, something which is a bit off, and then you realise that, okay, it happened at that moment.

2:45 Novel necessity that it's better for to have a good conversation. So spoilers are right. So we want, here's the 1st one. This came out 2022 when Elon Musk learned that Bill Gase was shorting his companies. And yeah, the title is in case you want to lose the bona fast and obviously that's a little bit of a odd pulp, but now it makes sense. He was furious about Bill Gates action at the time, especially because he was also trying to get Elon to donate to his charitable costs, his billions. Hi, Patrick, this is an interesting one. I'm actually going to start reading the book very soon. But I did listen to that podcast with Lex Friedman and Walter Isaacson, and I enjoyed it. I mean, I love Elon.

3:36 He's my dude. So I'll definitely be sharing some of the stuff that I'm thinking or that come up as I read. But the thing that like I like is hard work. He has inspired my children with those rockets, I mean, we watched, you know, them taking off and lending again, it was the most exciting time in my house, like truly inspirational. The thing that gets to me. is how he treats people. I cannot get over that stuff, man. It really gets to me. But everything else I love. So I guess, you know, that's the bone I have to spit. This is not to say that I believe that people should be treated like fragile, you know, little puppies, uh, and then everyone should be all sweet. I think it's possible to drive and spy and get people fired up and get people committed while keeping their dignity while being a respectful person while, you know, making them aware that you're challenging their ideas, you challenge their strategy, but not their humanity. But there's something about the way he does it, the way he fires people, that makes me feel like they're just a list in Stalin's, you know, book.

4:42 Just take them out. And I don't like that. Um, because the little experience that I've had managing people. And of course, I'm not lending rockets. But it is possible to get people fired up, to get people excited, to challenge them and to make sure that they're not bored while also keeping the human dignity. And dumb fuck is a term Mark Zuckerberg called his customers early. Yes, in Facebook. So this fight and all in sweets of the risk mode and this, what is described in the book also as an immediate sweetsies in modes like being in a complete fire everyone mode and then let's talk about this funny cat video meme mode sweet seas. So the beast mode in Tesla is probably a metaphor something as well.

5:39 This seems to be coming from his dad and childhood, but it was really fierce. And the book gives a bit of ideas that that's the modos operandi of mosque. He needs always these new fights that needs to be drama in his life and also his personal life being full of drama. It's so funny to hear them calling it Veld School. Because it's Afrikaans, it's felt school. And, um, um, but that's a terrible experience that he went through there and I can empathise with what he went through and, you know, how it has influenced his, who he has become as an adult. Um, and I feel, I feel sad for that. Um, I just don't like that result.

6:28 Ooh, it's just, but um, I empathise. Musk is so used to fighting that he does it all the times. He's in his business. He's been challenging people to wrestle about some argument about some business disease or product or even his personal life with his wife. They were public and they were really loud shouting and people were confused around what's happening here. The similar thing with the non-existing fight between Chuck and Musk is probably along those lines that settling an argument, winning with physical confrontation is just part of his childhood and he just keeps on doing that. At the time they had a similar amount of users.

7:21 So was he ironic? Was he choking? Maybe he was serious in the beginning of the sentence and then at the end he switched to different mode. But nevertheless, that's Il Musk. It was said at the time that Tesla had a visualisation capabilities in a level that he could build the 3D models of the ensign parts and see them moving and he didn't need to do any reduce, everything was done in his head. And when he was completely, fully satisfied with the outcome, then he would finally produce the machine and it would work. And this is something, the visualisation, which is also very familiar to Elon Musk. Petrie, this is so satisfying to listen, and I love not, I love this form of like a book club summary, just like getting to hear you recount the stories.

8:19 It feels a lot like bedtime stories and, um, I really enjoy it. Thank you so much. The history of Tesla is really interesting from the founder's perspective and how there's a person who comes a bit late on. Yes, he funds, comes to the board meetings, becomes the, because the single investor then gradually starts to take over tasks and suddenly realise that, yeah, he's actually running the company. When there was some internal fighting between the key people in Tesla. That was the time when Elon started to take more hands-on interest on the company and this is basically when the things started to go south for the original founders. Bartley must create some problems, for example, with the original Tesla model.

9:15 It became so overpatched because of his changes, and that caused a lot of funding issues and troubled fault in his whole stages of the company, which he later recredited and said that they should have started to stick with the Lotus elite specifications in order to move fast and save costs, but this seems to be his model. He gets on things and of course, his design and his ideas. A lot of them were exactly onto money and that lead to the success of the company. But there was also a lot of issues which were caused by him. If you check his arguments, they're not really that strong. What's the point if you've been interested of electric vehicles for 2 decades or even 200 years.

10:09 It has nothing to do with Tesla and Tesla's founders. He mentioning also really specific items like the headlights and a few of these things, those vapour policy things he was doing in those monthly meetings or a few meetings a month, and that's from that time period. Over the years, there has been a lot of back and forth between bezos and mosque and it's really about the rockets. Oh, it's not really about the rockets, but who gets who gets where and why and there's a lot of episodes where they are really picking on each other and it's somewhat the competition, but I think it goes to the personal level as well. Musk was concerned about AI's safety that he was the founding member of and he wanted to counteract the Kukles do know evil. And that's where the beginning of the open AI with some Altman.

11:08 And this went on for a while, but as you already know what's going to happen next, yes, the next episode of it. A little bit of luck doesn't hurt, but the mission also makes it easier to integrate and in retrospect, it's easy to see why these multitude of companies is having having some common threats and they can have some synergies in a wavy going to the future and how it's helping his mission. And because of the mission, sometimes you don't need to like Henry Ford, you don't really do this type of things. I don't do focus groups. This concludes the book, but I have now finished it. There were obviously a lot of sections. I didn't mention or take anything.

11:58 I, on purpose, omediate everything, which was already more or less mentioned widely and extensively in the media like the Ukraine, Zalink, and a lot of the other topics which came already at the time like the Twitter files. Also, some other episodes, which I don't think we're that relevant. And anyways, it's good that other people can also take their insights and set them with people. Side chat is an excellent place to have a discussion about those specific topics. altogether. I think there's probably less than 100 shits, but hopefully there's enough material to get conversations going. There are similarities between steep shops in our compra and a lot of other really famous and successful entrepreneurs.

12:58 Obviously, the production process, 1st principles, knowing everything, to the tiniest details, that's something, which I somehow connects with England Gump product. He was really good with numbers. He knew everything, what was happening in his companies. He was very well connecting and integrating the supply chain early and early on. So he was probably one of the grandfathers of these things for a lot of the current entrepreneurs because he was there doing it after the World War II and inventing a lot of things as well. Compared started always with the final price, what can it cost and then the design and the functions and the production process came in reverse. Similarly, Steve Jobs was really focussed on the design and the user experience, and Musk has these traits, and he's doing that in a field, which is really heavily manufactured, manufacturing based like these 2 other founders as well.

14:11 Thanks for putting this room together, Petri. And I just having to finish the audiobook today. After a fun little immersion this weekend, and I have a few meta questions, I guess, which are probably consistent ones that came through the course of the complete exploration. I see 3 primary things that Elon contributed to his companies and projects. One is that mission and true north and direction that was able to galvanise a bunch of people to move in that direction. 2 is the ability to create a very significant urgency.

15:06 And 3 is to push people beyond what they think they were capable of doing or achieving. So perhaps the same question that was asked at the end of the Steve Jobs bio, is that did Elon have to be such a mean person to personally attack and be so cold and ruthless and heartless to achieve those 3 things? One of the surprising revelations from this book was how deep seated from his childhood, and family background, is his desire for chaos and drama and the storm, being his desired natural state versus peace. One of the other underlying themes in the book, it appears, is Elon's inability to receive that fully unconditional love from his parents, and how that was manifested in other ways, including seeking that from women and ultimately as kids. And isn't that such a common theme for the human experience and connection, love, belonging, underlying almost all?

16:19 behavioural aspects. And all those 3 outcoming from his belief and conviction about humanity. And the curious thing is that whether it's coming from a positive place or out of fear, or was it just something which he came up early on his life, and then he just keeps on doing it. Also, because he puts the mission as his destiny in life. And also, it's pretty clear, and I think he probably has stated it as well. He's putting everything online for the mission, even himself. He's working too hard and he realises that, and he sees that he doesn't need to go to math.

17:12 He's not taking some of the crazy risks like doing it orbits like the other billionaires. Maybe there's something else into it, but he clearly says that if he doesn't do it, then properly humanity doesn't go to mass. So that makes him extremely dangerous as well. Because it's almost like a Tesno price too high to pay in order to do that. So if he needs to agree with Chinese, or side with Russia, that's just the cost of the mission. I'm not sure that you can take that out of the big and still have the same results and the same outcomes. Obviously, it's not justifiable at any rate.

18:04 Probably part of it is because of his childhood and what he's been through and he hasn't processed that, then maybe there's also the medical conditional description for that as well. So it's just his type of personality, lack of empathy and understanding the emotional aspects of humanity. And then it's the urgency, the so rapid context switching that he just don't see the time or even the interest to do that, to soften or follow up things, which that would obviously require. And then finally, it's the mission. It's mission critical device, so he thinks that in order to get the job done, it's probably better even for himself to isolate and to consider people that way in order to get to the mass and do the mission in time.

19:06 We shows that how different our backgrounds can be and how the behaviour can still be the norm, even though you realise it, the better the devil, you know, and how deeply rotate all these emotional attachments and damage done in the past, in the childhood really is, and how hard work it is to get rid of it, even if you're the richest man in the world. You're still battling with your demons. I noticed this the other day when he was meeting the president of Turkey and noticed the handholding on the very far left on the pixel. The society we have is just reflection and expression of the morality and values of the humanity.

20:02 So just stating something doesn't make it. So, look at the Russian invasion and ten aside at the moment. How many people are ignorant, how many people are still buying products and even openly supporting Russia. And how many even heads of countries are still siding with Russia or they are not condemning, condemning or helping, supporting Ukraine. I think that states quite a lot. So in that sense, companies don't do anything, that is the reflection of the people who are owning those companies buying their products. Yeah, it's really impractical to source everything and wet and check.

20:59 What are you doing as a consumer? But we can all do better decisions, we can stop feeding those who are doing the wrong things from our perspective. So I think the responsibility is not with the politicians, the responsibility is with everyone who is investing, everybody who's consuming, everybody who is acting and non-acting is also an act. I have so many questions that have arisen in me as a result of digesting this book and I feel compelled to share them as they come up. And one of them, I feel, is the question of how critical it is for management, a leader, a founder, a CEO, to be obsessive with and immersed in the minutiae and product specific engineering details. In other words, how critical is it as Elon Krams to be completely immersed in every microscopic, nuanced detail at the engineering level.

22:12 There seem to be a couple contrasting styles highlighted in the book between Jeff Bezos and Elon, Jeff making fun of Elon by getting bogged down with too many details on Elon making fun of Jeff for being a quote, dilettante. It seems that Bill Gates, famous code reviews, even Steve Chobs, obsession with product, probably more than engineering, um, and being, I guess, a bit less technical than Elon, are more on one side of the camp, and that would be a neat question to hear from others on, is, how involved is being too involved in the minor shine details? Another question that's come up is that of culture, and I reference in site and Horowitz's definition of that, a culture is not your values. It's actually your collection of actions, and what is it that someone does?

23:12 When no one's looking. And what are those actions that define the collective effort of an organisation? Or precisely, the question about culture is, did Elon create more of a net positive or a net negative impact through his actions and how he established a culture in SpaceX and Tesla, especially having the longest lifespans of the different companies highlighted. in how the people act when he's not around. By treating people as dispensable not being human relationship centric. Does that perpetuate a lot of the same behaviour, even though that may come with hating performance, benchmarks and milestones and shipping and creating value?

24:19 Towards the end of the story, I found myself feeling quite sad for Elon in understanding his behaviours and seeking so many things externally driven and also being so wedded to the identity of his mission. And one of the analogies that comes up is when someone goes through a career change after being at a specific type of work or company for a long period of time, it can be very unnerving to go through an identity crisis. And I often wonder, what would Elon be without that core root identification of his mission? What if it's not what, but how? Steve Chops was really obsessed with the details, but in order for the user experience to be good and the device be functional and it was really demanding. But I understood that he also was listening people.

25:21 It was more about picking the right people and then being detailed oriented for the sake of the product. I don't think he was, um, micromanaging for the reason of micromanaging. It was for the good of the product and he was willing to change his mind at times at least. Bill Gates was also drilling down to the nitty-critty details. But I think in his case, he was just checking whether people have really thought it through when they're doing a good job. Once again, it's not about wanting to do all the decisions, but just checking that people are actually awake and they are really putting their best effort and that kept the people around him tipped out in a way that they did their job. In Musk case, it's just tuned to the extreme and it seems to be that.

26:19 For him, it's more about the mission, or it's always about the mission, but it's also about the chaos, monkey type of behaviour where he just needs the drama at times and he just stirs up things and he doesn't really care and because he's been getting away with it long enough. He just don't even consider it anymore. It's his kingdom. He does what he does. So in his case. Yeah, it's about the details and probably he knows more and he's more passionate. So he's impatient for the people who don't get it, which is so obvious, but he has the experience others don't have and the commitment only entrepreneurs have. So it's that aspect there of the impatience as well, but it never justifies the root behaviour. That we serve a farm move, which he admitted was just completely a disaster and should not have been done.

27:19 was, I think, a case in point that he just allowed to shake things up and break the rules and that's like teenage boy, one thing to just cause havoc type of behaviour and also the way he did it, was just about being really like counterculture, showing to the others that we can do these things and, you know, this is not really that difficult and hard. And we don't need to think about the consequences, which obviously he realised late. So it sounded and the way he did it and he should know better. So it probably wasn't ever about moving the service. It was just about something else.

28:09 It was just a totally reckless way he did it. And for some companies, the legacy is already here, like in Apple. Also, Bill Gates has been or from his company for a long time, Amazon already, mostly without Bezos. I guess he's still a little bit around or maybe not. So IKEA, for example, is a really good example of that, they are still driving. So what's the cult, what type of people, what type of values you are people are capable of having and putting to the organisational structure and well, into culture. And I think that's the real testament and it will come in the decades.

29:00 And whether the company still can be a market leader and innovate. That's the true. Like I say, if you want to build that type of company and not just cash out or do your own project then you don't care. There are some hints and cues in the book that people understand that this is so consuming, the work for him, at least in a certain level, that where you're exposed to him, that you cannot have life and you'll probably will burn out in a few years. So either you are that type of utterly chunk and you love it or you just cannot do it if you plan to have a family as a other life. The roadmark painting episode and some of the other ones where people are just adjusting to him and doing things because he's asking for those things. So they are not really building the product.

29:56 They are just pleasing and trying to cope with Elon and these are obviously traits. Uh, which are not for the good of the product or the consumer or for the for the company. But more interestingly, when Elon is hiring people and it's people they hire and people they hire and all the way down to the turtles, what type of people they are hiring. What type of cult, can it be healed? Is it possible that they are layers in the company, which are not so affected by Elon, that work more like in a sustainable way, and can achieve things? I think in a Space X situation, at least in the beginning. That was the only company, probably in the world, if you wanted to do great things with space, you needed to go there.

30:58 That was the dream come true. There was nothing else. So in that way people didn't have even an alternative, if they wanted to be part of the space exploration, future, SpaceX was the only place. I don't know about Tesla. Probably that's not the case. And if you're really that passionate, but you have some values and you don't want to do all the things you probably need to sign up for is Elon's company something for you. I just cannot say Musk doing something else than his companies. I just cannot say that he would retire. Well, maybe I'm wrong, but he seems to be like a person, maybe the missing takes long enough that he really needs to drive till the end.

31:54 Let's hope not, but uh, uh, it's uh, in a way it's also an event ending mission. If you want to have a through driving and self-sustaining system in mass. That's probably beyond his timeline anyways.