Everybody already is aware of the define of the story: Elon Musk beloved tweeting, noticed his web price in two years quintuple to US$250-billion from the booming worth of Tesla and SpaceX, casually purchased 9% of languishing Twitter inventory in April 2022, agreed to hitch the board, received aggravated by the board, irritably made a suggestion (with a weed-joke value) to take the corporate non-public, tried to not purchase the corporate when he realised he paid an excessive amount of, purchased the corporate when he realised he needed to, made statements about his possession being crucial for the way forward for free speech, walked into Twitter headquarters carrying a sink, fired most of its staff, bumped into the identical outdated issues of content material moderation, turned far more right-wing, and gave us a platform much less advertised-on, much less used, extra buggy — and in the end not Twitter in any respect however X.com.
Books a couple of story so broadly lined in actual time have the problem of offering greater than this define. Additionally they face the central query that every one customers of Elon Musk try to reply: how may a genius be this dumb?
Three books this yr current themselves as as much as the problem: Character Restrict by New York Occasions reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger, Extraordinarily Hardcore by Zoë Schiffer, and Battle for the Chicken by Bloomberg’s Kurt Wagner. Every e book has its strengths: Schiffer has essentially the most anger, with the fullest portraits of individuals working at Twitter when the Musknado hit; Wagner has essentially the most feeling, centered on Musk and the Zen weirdo management of Jack Dorsey and what Twitter may have been; Conger and Mac have essentially the most entertaining finance gossip, like Marc Andreesen texting Musk that Andreesen Horowitz would put money into Twitter with “no further work required” or a gobsmacked Twitter board approving Wachtell Lipton’s $95-million “success price” for 4 months of labor on the chancery courtroom case that Musk unilaterally dropped.
Grim enjoyable
There may be grim enjoyable all through the books, if no twisting plot: issues began out dangerous, after which received worse. Character Restrict particulars stunning scenes of Musk’s mates and hangers-on, with none clear titles at Twitter and even clearly working at Twitter, making calls for of its staff on calls and conferences. (Probably the most ubiquitous posse member was two years outdated: Musk’s son, additionally named X.) All three books are Tarantino films of downsizing, from an preliminary sloppy purge of about 3 000 staff and 4 000 contractors to Musk firing staffers at point-blank vary as a result of he didn’t like, as an illustration, knowledge introduced on the declining recognition of his tweets.
It’s nonetheless flabbergasting how a $44-billion acquisition, with recommendation from Morgan Stanley and funding from straightlaced establishments like Constancy, could possibly be so slapdash in execution and construction. Musk and his crew waived all diligence on Twitter, offered as the customer a seller-friendly buy settlement earlier than even being requested, and put $13-billion of debt on an organization that had made $36-million of Ebitda the final quarter it was publicly traded. Bloomberg estimates that Musk’s $25-billion-plus private funding in Twitter is now price underneath $6-billion.
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What was he considering? The Twitter books all dribble out theories, primarily on the floor. “Musk had come to like Twitter,” Conger and Mac write, “and he believed that the individuals who had run it had led it astray. He was going to make them pay.” The books depart it to the reader to attribute this vengeful like to some mixture of psychology, pharmacology, hubris and cash. Extra not too long ago, most readers would add a political clarification: in accordance with an evaluation by the Wall Avenue Journal, Musk posted a mean of 61 occasions per day this yr, a lot of it in assist of Donald Trump.
But the books, for essentially the most half, reject a Nice Man principle of Musk as a historic determine. Musk appears extra like Napoleon in Struggle and Peace, wherein Tolstoy revels in making him small and delights within the ironies of the bounds of his energy. The Twitter acquisition appears to be Musk’s march right into a Moscow winter: everybody on the firm is aware of this or that or the following Musky factor is a nasty concept. Nothing he tries appears to work. That is satisfying on many ranges. However it additionally makes it tougher to grasp how genius could possibly be this dumb when you current Musk as all dumb, with no genius.
So we should look to the Nice Man of Historical past biographies about Musk: Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk from 2023 and within the 2015 Elon Musk, by Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance. Neither e book declares Musk an excellent man of historical past, for certain, nor defends his most indefensible actions. However each authors clearly admire Musk’s pressure and genius. And so they remind us why we’re even fascinated by Elon Musk: his accomplishments earlier than Twitter; his life earlier than the Tesla compensation package deal opened up the world in a approach solely a quarter-trillion {dollars} can; what has made him succeed.
Crucially, each books element the physicality of Musk’s successes. They’re rooted in materials science, coping with the physics of automobile elements and rockets and robots and neural pathways. Each books return to a major theme: Musk’s cruel price engineering, his efforts to “delete, delete, delete” pointless elements and acquired knowledge and risk-averse inertia. That is what allowed him to create large manufacturing winners — within the US of all locations — in extremely regulated, stodgy industries. His corporations pushed by way of near-death moments due to Musk’s soldier-general’s bodily management, firing the lollygaggers, strolling the meeting line, enduring ache with the troops by sleeping on that line, rallying them together with his acceptance of danger — of 1 determination, of shedding all of it.
The true secret
Isaacson described Musk at Tesla’s sub-optimised Fremont manufacturing unit in 2018: “Sooner or later, after standing silently in entrance of the balky robotics for a couple of minutes, Musk tried doing the duty together with his personal arms. It was straightforward for a human. He issued an order: ‘You’ve gotten 72 hours to take away each pointless machine.’” Ashlee Vance, satisfied of Musk’s virtually unparalleled relentlessness and “strength of mind”, quotes Musk close to the top of his e book: “What issues to me is profitable, and never in a small approach.”
In each views, we see Musk’s embodied genius as akin to that of a generational athlete — a Caitlin Clark or a LeBron James — as to a Steve Jobs. In an essay 30 years in the past on tennis prodigy Tracy Austin, David Foster Wallace mused on the “actual thriller” of nice athletes and “whether or not such an individual is an fool or a mystic or each and/or neither”. Foster Wallace concluded: “Those that obtain and act out the reward of athletic genius should, perforce, be blind and dumb about it — and never as a result of blindness and dumbness are the value of the reward, however as a result of they’re its essence.”
We wish to attribute forethought to Musk’s shopping for Twitter — to root in opposition to it, or for it. But that is probably not the kind of genius we’re coping with. “The true secret behind prime athletes’ genius,” Foster Wallace hypothesised, “could also be as esoteric and apparent and boring and profound as silence itself. The true, many-veiled reply to the questions of simply what goes by way of an amazing participant’s thoughts as he stands on the centre of hostile crowd noise and features up the free-throw that may determine the sport would possibly effectively be: nothing in any respect.”
Musk is a genius and a Nice Man of Historical past, however maybe when he tersely texted Twitter’s CEO that he wished to take the corporate non-public — from Larry Ellison’s Hawaiian island simply previous 5am after a sleepless evening — he was considering nothing in any respect. And possibly the first motive his free throw went so huge of the mark is due to a central irony, a Tolstoyan irony: Elon Musk, a genius of the bodily world, purchased an organization constructed for phrases. — (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP
