Elon Musk

After Paul Pelosi, the husband of the Speaker of the House, was attacked in his home, Musk tweeted out a conspiracy theory about the attack. Roth warned Musk’s lawyer that the tweet would not go over well with advertisers. After Musk had taken over Twitter, Twitter’s ad revenue began tumbling.

Starting in early November, some online activists called for a boycott of brands that continued to advertise on Twitter. As a result, advertisers continued to withdraw from Twitter. Musk grew enraged and threaten to come after these advertisers. He tried to order Roth to stop the users who were calling for the boycott because he believed that they were engaging in blackmail.

Musk conceived a new usage of Twitter’s blue check marks, which normally indicated the accounts of celebrities and officials. The new program, Twitter Blue, would allow people to pay a monthly fee to receive an authentication badge. However, before the launch, the team realized that pranksters would use this new system to impersonate people. They delayed the launch until after the US midterm elections. After the launch, there was “a tsunami of fake accounts” impersonating individuals as well as advertisers (541).

Musk declared that all remaining employees would need to return to the office and that remote work was no longer allowed.

For the next rounds of firings, Musk wanted to determine employee loyalty. He had his three musketeers trawl through the Slack messages and social media posts of employees, and they fired those who had expressed dissent.

Next, Musk wanted to filter for those with a “hardcore” work ethic. They sent out a form to employees, telling workers that if they did not opt in to the “new” Twitter by the following day, then they would be let go with severance—69% of employees opted in.

Twitter reinstated the accounts of Jordan Peterson, the Babylon Bee, and the comedian Kathy Griffin, who had parodied Musk on an account impersonating him. Musk did not reinstate Alex Jones, who had spread conspiracy theories about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. He also banned Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, from the platform. Musk put out a poll on his own Twitter account, asking users if Donald Trump should be reinstated, and they voted yes, so Musk reinstated Trump’s account.

Musk told employees that there would be no more layoffs, then fired people. He argued that these were not layoffs but rather firings for cause, due to what he perceived as the poor quality of employees’ work.

Musk decided to open a Neuralink facility in Austin, Texas. He started to push the team to use Neuralink to enable paralyzed people to use their limbs again, because he thought that that would impress people and get them excited about the technology. The head engineer also suggested that they work on enabling deaf people to hear and blind people to see.

Musk declared that on November 30, 2022, Neuralink would hold a presentation on their progress. There, Musk spoke about his short-term goals as well as his long-term vision, which would be to ensure that humans kept up with the development of AI, rather than being overtaken by it.

Musk invited the journalist Matt Taibbi, and later the journalist Bari Weiss, to come to Twitter to work on an exposé that became known as the Twitter Files. According to Isaacson, both journalists were “not easy to categorize ideologically,” though both were opposed to “progressive wokeness that produced a censorious cancel culture” (568). While at Twitter, Musk and his loyalists gave the journalists access to Twitter’s archive of Slack messages and emails. Weiss claimed to find that Twitter overly suppressed right-wing tweets and voices that contradicted official pronouncements about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yoel Roth resigned from the company. Musk attacked him on Twitter and insinuated that Roth was a pedophile, which led to an onslaught of homophobic and antisemitic attacks from “Pizzagate-style conspiracists” (579). Roth was doxed (his personal information was leaked on the internet), causing him to go into hiding.

Musk wanted to save money by moving Twitter’s Sacramento servers to a site in Portland. Managers told him that they would need six to nine months to safely move the servers, but Musk was enraged at this timeline. He said that they should be able to move them in two weeks.

On December 23, 2022, James and Andrew Musk were flying with Elon and his family on Elon’s private jet, headed to a Christmas vacation. James suggested that they move the servers right then, and Musk had the plane turn around and land in Sacramento.

Musk and his team hired movers who charged only $20 per hour, rented out all the moving vans in Sacramento, and improvised every part of the move so that they could act as quickly as possible. The facility contained about 5,200 racks that each weighed about 2,500 pounds and that normally needed to be moved carefully in order not to cause damage and that needed to be wiped beforehand to comply with privacy regulations. Musk ignored these rules. James encouraged the movers to move faster by telling them that they would receive a $1 tip for every extra rack they moved. Meanwhile, James had been promised a $1 million bonus for the move.

The Tesla team conceived an idea for a self-driving car that learned from human behavior, based on analyzing footage from Tesla drivers. Musk test drove this version of the car in April 2023 and was impressed with how it outperformed the software that had only used rules-based code.

In March 2023, OpenAI released Chat GPT-4 to the public. After Musk had split with Altman, Altman had formed a for-profit arm of OpenAI and received a significant investment from Microsoft.

Musk believed that he needed to introduce a third competitor to rival OpenAI and Google. He was worried that AI systems could become “infected by what he called the woke-mind virus” (601). He called his new company X.AI. He believed that, thanks to the billions of frames of real-word data that Tesla had from its cars’ cameras, Musk and his team had an edge on other companies when it came to building machines that could operate in the real world like humans could. This brought them closer to developing artificial general intelligence.

The experimental launch of Starship was scheduled for April 2023. Before launch, Musk was briefed on an issue that had been detected, but he declared that it would not be an actual risk. The countdown proceeded and the launch seemed to go smoothly. However, 30 seconds into the flight, some of the rocket’s engines began to blow out. Protocols required that they blow up the rocket over water because it was clear that it would not get into orbit, so the launch director sent a destruct signal to the rocket. Musk still considered it a success because the rocket had risen high enough to blow up out of sight and it had provided the team with new data.

Isaacson ends the book by recounting the successes of Musk’s businesses and suggesting that his “bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness” cannot be divorced from his innovative contributions, because “[s]ometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training” (615).