Book notes: Elon Musk

Rockets <3 <3

Musk tried to buy rocket from russians and did not suceed, he then deceided to build the rocket.

Chapter 15: Rocket Man: SpaceX, 2002 Musk, who was holding his head up with his hand, passed out, and his head slammed into the table. “I don’t think I impressed the Russians,” he says.

Due to his childhood, he can be cold

Chapter 26: Divorce: 2008 bear,” Justine told Esquire’s Tom Junod. “He can be playful and funny and romp around with you, but in the end you’re still dealing with a bear.”

It’s not easy to lead a company, even for Musk

Chapter 29: On the Brink: Tesla and SpaceX, 2008 Talulah watched in horror as, night after night, Musk had mumbling conversations with himself, sometimes flailing his arms and screaming. “I kept thinking he was going to have a heart attack,” she says. “He was having night terrors and just screaming in his sleep and clawing at me. It was horrendous. I was really scared, and he was just desperate.” Sometimes he would go to the bathroom and start vomiting. “It would go to his gut, and he would be screaming and retching,” she says. “I would stand by the toilet and hold his head.” Musk’s tolerance for stress is high, but 2008 almost pushed him past his limits. “I was working every day, all day and night, in a situation that required me to pull a rabbit out of the hat, now do it again, now do it again,”

He loves Polytopia and i do not blame him

In 2021, he became obsessed with a new multiplayer strategy game on his iPhone, Polytopia. In it, players choose to be one of sixteen characters, known as tribes, and compete to develop technologies, corner resources, and wage battles in order to build an empire. He became so good he was able to beat the game’s Swedish developer, Felix Ekenstam. What did his passion for the game say about him? “I am just wired for war, basically,” he answers. Shivon Zilis downloaded it onto her phone so they could play together. “I just fell down a fucking rabbit hole, and there’s so many life lessons you learn, so many weird things about yourself and your opponents,” she says. One day in Boca Chica, after a tense argument with some engineers over the need for the safety chains being used when moving the Starship booster, Musk retreated to sit on a piece of equipment on the edge of the parking lot and played two intense games of Polytopia on his phone against Zilis, who was in Austin. “He just absolutely crushed me both games,” she says. He also convinced Grimes to download the game. “He doesn’t have hobbies or ways to relax other than video games,” she says, “but he takes those so seriously that it gets very intense.” During one game when they had agreed to be a united front against other tribes, she surprise-attacked him with a flame ball. “It was one of our biggest fights ever,” she remembers. “He took it as this deep betrayal

Not easy to be CEO

Chapter 30: The Fourth Launch: Kwaj, August–September 2008 Despite his stony appearance, Musk’s stomach had been wrenched during the launch, almost to the point of throwing up. Even after the success, he had trouble feeling joy. “My cortisol levels, my stress hormones, the adrenaline, they were just so high that it was hard for me to feel happy,” he says. “There was a sense of relief, like being spared from death, but no joy. I was way too stressed for that.”

TIL

Chapter 47: Open-Loop Warning: 2018 One rule for public companies is that executives must warn the stock exchange ten minutes before any announcement that might cause market volatility.

Ouch

Chapter 48: Fallout: 2018 “Elon Musk Details ‘Excruciating’ Personal Toll of Tesla Turmoil,” the headline read. The story reported how he had choked up during the interview. “Mr. Musk alternated between laughter and tears,” Gelles and his colleagues wrote. “He said he had been working up to 120 hours a week recently… [and] not taken more than a week off since 2001, when he was bedridden with malaria.”

He is a bit autistic

When X was born, Musk took a picture of Grimes having a C-section and sent it around to friends and family, including her father and brothers. Grimes was understandably horrified and scrambled to get it deleted. “It was Elon’s Asperger’s coming out in full,” she says. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset.”

Title: Elon Musk Author: Walter Isaacson ISBN10: 1982181281 ISBN13: 9781982181284