WALTER: <\/a>A lot of rockets exploded. Tesla was virtually bankrupt, absolutely no money. I mean, he would stay up at night and just go to the bathroom and vomit. He was so stressed.\u00a0<\/pre>\n\n\n\nMusk remembers it like this on \u201c60 Minutes\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
MUSK: That was definitely the worst year of my life. Man, I never thought of myself as someone capable of a nervous breakdown. But this was the closest I\u2019d ever come. It seemed pretty\u2014pretty dark.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nMusk saved both companies by pushing himself to the brink of exhaustion\u2014to this day, he works seven days a week, long into the evening\u2014and micromanaging every operation. Or, as Musk calls it, nano<\/em>managing. <\/p>\n\n\n\nWalter Isaacson walked me through SpaceX\u2019s rocket factory, right next to the LA airport.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALTER: Both here and especially on the Tesla assembly line, there\u2019s a red light that flashes when there\u2019s any problem happening. And they call it \u201cwalk to the red,\u201d because you\u2019ll be walking along with Elon, he\u2019ll see a red light, and he\u2019ll head right to it. And not only does he want to talk to people on the assembly line, he wants the designers and the engineers to be right there so they feel the pain.\u00a0<\/pre>\n\n\n\nPOGUE: If you\u2019re the employee, your blood\u2019s gotta run cold when he comes by your station.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWALTER: You know, there are people who really try to avoid eye contact, because he can be brutal. He can get really mad. He can unload on people. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nYeah. Musk unloading on people comes up quite a bit in Isaacson\u2019s book. Musk comes across as a little bit\u2026dare I say it\u2026volatile?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
POGUE: What is Elon Musk like?<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWALTER: There\u2019s no single Elon Musk. He has many personalities. Almost \u2014<\/pre>\n\n\n\nPOGUE: Elon Musks.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWALTER: Yes, exactly. Almost multiple personalities. And you can watch him go from being very giddy and funny to being deeply in engineering mode. And then suddenly the dark cloud happens and he\u2019s in what his girlfriend \/ calls demon mode. And in demon mode, he can just be brutal to the people in front of him. It\u2019s almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When he goes back to being Dr. Jekyll, he hardly remembers what he did as Mr. Hyde.\u00a0<\/pre>\n\n\n\nPOGUE: When you were hanging out with him at these meetings and at the headquarters, did you ever witness this personality shift and the clouds coming?<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWALTER: Over and over again, I would see the personality shift. I\u2019d see the harshness and demon mode take over. You\u2019d be sitting at a conference table in Hawthorne for SpaceX, and suddenly boom, something triggers him. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nIf you\u2019re one of the employees, you either quit, or you rise to his challenge. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALTER: He drives them crazy, but drives them to do things they never thought they could do, or they fail. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nI can give you some great examples of people in that first category\u2014people who thrive working for Musk. There\u2019s Gwynne Shotwell, for example, who runs SpaceX; I interviewed her in 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GWYNNE: I love working for Elon. He\u2019s incredibly\u2013 he\u2019s so smart. He\u2019s funny. He\u2019s so dedicated. Like, just working for him makes you wanna work harder and better and be better. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nAnd a few weeks ago, I met Franz Von Holzhausen. He\u2019s Tesla\u2019s design chief. He designs all of Tesla\u2019s vehicles, including the radical stainless-steel Cybertruck and the humanoid robot known as Optimus. On the day we were there, he was celebrating his 15th<\/sup> anniversary of going to work for Elon Musk.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFRANZ: Sometimes it\u2019s not easy. You have to put some personal things aside and \u2014 but ultimately the reward\u2019s worth it.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nPOGUE: Let\u2019s say I\u2019m Elon, and I\u2019m saying, \u201cwe have to do it this way.\u201d And you, based on your entire career and wisdom, disagree.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nFRANZ: Those moments, you agree to disagree, but ultimately it\u2019s Elon\u2019s company. He\u2019s the boss.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nMusk is also famous for imposing insane deadlines. Here\u2019s Walter Isaacson again:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALTER: He\u2019s only happy when he\u2019s in a storm, when he\u2019s in a drama, when it\u2019s being pushed. He feels that if he\u2019s not in hardcore intensity mode, \u201csurging\u201d as he calls it, sleeping under his desk, creating dramas when there aren\u2019t dramas to be had, but he\u2019ll manufacture a drama. Like announce they have to have the rocket ship stacked by a month, or they have to have autonomy demonstration of a self-driving car. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nPOGUE: And they\u2019re frequently impossible deadlines, and everybody knows it.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWALTER: You know, he\u2019s able to turn the impossible into the merely late by setting these deadlines. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nElon Musk\u2019s companies miss so <\/em>many of his deadlines! The Cybertruck was supposed to have started shipping in 2020. SpaceX hoped to send its first mission to Mars in 2020. Teslas were supposed to have been fully self-driving by 2016!<\/p>\n\n\n\nI asked Gwynne Shotwell about this deadline-missing thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GWYNNE: We rarely make our dates, although we\u2019ve gotten a little more realistic.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nDP: Is there a psychological value, do you think, for the workforce to pick a target that\u2019s tough to attain to\u2013 to light a fire under everyone?\u00a0<\/pre>\n\n\n\nGWYNNE: In fact, I think that\u2019s part of our success is, we have such audacious goals with timelines that are seemingly impossible. People feel very motivated all the time. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nOh, and on the subject of getting things done: the dude can\u2019t stand <\/em>red tape. Rules and regulations make him crazy. <\/p>\n\n\n\nWALTER: He says, \u201cthe physics is the only rule that we have to apply. The rest are just recommendations.\u201d\u00a0<\/pre>\n\n\n\nHere\u2019s Musk at a Wall Street Journal conference:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
MUSK: The vast majority of rules and regulations live forever. So if more rules and regulations are applied every year, and it just keeps growing and growing, it eventually takes longer and longer and it\u2019s harder to do things. This hardens the arteries of civilization, where you\u2019re able to less and less over time. I really think the government should really be trying hard to remove rules and regulations. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nWalter Isaacson heard a lot of that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALTER: Every person who makes a requirement is just covering their butt. You know, they know that if they make a requirement, they\u2019re not gonna get in trouble. He\u2019s the one who says, \u201cthat\u2019s why we don\u2019t build things in America, is people make too many requirements that too many referees and not enough doers.\u201d<\/pre>\n\n\n\nThe other Musk golden design rule is, \u201cDelete, delete, delete.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALTER: He will walk up and down the assembly line, and his process is, delete, delete, delete. Just get rid of things. \u201cWhy do we need this heat shield? Why do we need this valve? Why do we need, uh, this part of the yoke of the steering wheel?\u201d<\/pre>\n\n\n\nPOGUE: There\u2019s this fantastic story in the book of this strip, along the edge of the battery pack on the floor of the Teslas that they were having trouble manufacturing\u2014<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWALTER: And he says, \u201cwhy is it there?\u201d and they say, \u201cbecause it\u2019s supposed to help for vibration\u201d. Then he said, \u201cwho required it?\u201d and they said, \u201cwell, I think maybe the sound people did.\u201d He said, \u201cFind me the name of the person. Find the person.\u201d They couldn\u2019t find the person. He said, \u201cDelete it. Take it out there and see if it makes any difference.\u201d He did that with so many things.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nTo prove that the vibration strip was an unnecessary part of the car, he demanded to hear audio recordings of the interior of the car with and without that strip installed. And sure enough: He couldn\u2019t hear any difference. They deleted the part. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
WALTER: And he says, if you aren\u2019t deleting a whole lot of things that you end up having to add back a few of them, then you haven\u2019t tried hard enough.\u00a0<\/pre>\n\n\n\nThe same doctrines of \u201cdelete, delete, delete\u201d made SpaceX a triumph, too. Especially deleting, deleting, deleting pointless regulations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There\u2019s this one anecdote from Isaacson\u2019s book that I just love. It\u2019s just\u2014so insane. Let me set the scene for you: It\u2019s late 2010, and SpaceX is about to attempt sending a capsule into space and returning it to earth. Only the US, Russian, and Chinese space programs had ever pulled that off before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the day before the launch, they\u2019re looking over the rocket, and they discover two small cracks in the second-stage engine skirt. The engine skirt is that nozzle, that cone, that all the fire comes out of. Here\u2019s a clip from the \u201cElon Musk\u201d audiobook that tells the story: <\/p>\n\n\n\n
NARR: \u201cEveryone at NASA assumed we\u2019d be standing down from the launch for a few weeks,\u201d says Garver. \u201cThe usual plan would have been to replace the entire engine.\u201d<\/pre>\n\n\n\n\u201cWhat if we just cut the skirt?\u201d Musk asked his team. \u201cLike, literally cut around it?\u201d In other words, why not just trim off a tiny bit of the bottom that had the two cracks? The shorter skirt would mean the engine would have slightly less thrust, one engineer warned, but Musk calculated that there would still be enough to do the mission.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nIt took less than an hour to make the decision. Using a big pair of shears, the skirt was trimmed, and the rocket launched on its critical mission the next day, as planned. \u201cNASA couldn\u2019t do anything but accept SpaceX\u2019s decisions and watch in disbelief,\u201d Garver recalls.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nI mean\u2026 \u201ca big pair of shears?!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
POGUE: Doesn\u2019t NASA say, \u201cbut that\u2019s dangerous?\u201d<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWALTER: There are times when there\u2019s pushback, when NASA is watching him do something and say, \u201cWait a minute, that\u2019s not following all the rules and requirements.\u201d He is very safe, very focused when it comes to humans going into orbit. But when it comes to testing his new rocket Starship, he\u2019s like, \u201cLet\u2019s try it this way. Let\u2019s try it without these valves. And yeah, it\u2019s going to blow up, but we\u2019ll see what we learn. You got to move fast, and occasionally rockets blow up.\u201d<\/pre>\n\n\n\nThat mission went off without a hitch, by the way. SpaceX became the first private company in history to send a capsule to space and then bring it home again safely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
POGUE: I mean, I guess he\u2019s done it dozens of times now, saving the taxpayer millions upon millions of dollars. If there\u2019s a \u2014 is an accident, if something does go wrong\u2014and I think he said it will\u2014would that set all this back?<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWALTER: Yeah. There\u2019s going to be accidents someday. There\u2019ll be accidents with self-driving Teslas. It will set things back. And Musk doesn\u2019t have a feel for how public reacts of these things. He says, \u201cwe\u2019re a nation of risk takers. People came over here on boats. People died coming over here, but that is why we\u2019re an adventurous nation. We\u2019ve lost the taste for that. We\u2019ve quit taking risks, that\u2019s why we can\u2019t get things done.\u201d\u00a0<\/pre>\n\n\n\nBut he\u2019s right! We\u2019re very risk-averse society. And the minute something goes wrong, people are going to be jumping on him, jumping on SpaceX because they took too many risks.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nPOGUE: I guess we<\/em> focus on the death of an individual. He\u2019s taking the bigger picture\u2014in all these enterprises, Tesla and SpaceX\u2014on society and humanity.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWALTER): He says, \u201cyeah, if we don\u2019t risk a few things and maybe even a few lives, then more lives will be lost. It\u2019ll be worse.\u201d<\/pre>\n\n\n\nPOGUE: And what\u2019s the urgency?<\/pre>\n\n\n\nWALTER: He feels there\u2019s an urgency for humans to become multi-planetary to get to Mars.\u00a0<\/pre>\n\n\n\nAs Musk put it on \u201c60 Minutes:\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
MUSK: A future where we\u2019re a space-faring civilization is inspiring and exciting, compared to one where we\u2019re forever confined to earth until some eventual extinction event. That\u2019s really why I started SpaceX.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nBy this point, I think you\u2019ve started to get a glimpse of what\u2019s going on inside Elon Musk\u2019s brain. But that doesn\u2019t mean you necessarily love it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After the ad break, we\u2019ll move on into the inevitable second phase of Elon Musk\u2019s career\u2014where people start to worry about him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n