Finished on 8.22.25

This was an interesting read! It focuses on the most recent few years in Musk’s timeline, and mostly his work with Tesla and Twitter. This was all stuff that made news at the time, but it was interesting to see it synthesized and combined in this way.

I will say that the book could have used some stronger editing—I had this thought several times when I was reading, but one specific example is that the author referenced specific car crashes involving Teslas several different times in such an oblique way that I couldn’t tell if he was referring to new examples or ones he had mentioned before.

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My favorite quotes:

“When Compaq bought Zip2 for more than $300 million, Musk netted more than $20 million, around $10 million of which he’d pour into his next venture, an online payments service that had started as X.com…” (This just made me think about how I would have taken that $20 million and never been heard from again, personally.)

“As Musk’s behavior grew more erratic, messages poured in from friends and close confidants who echoed at least one constant refrain: For the love of God, don’t tweet.”

“Musk was slowly learning why every new American auto company since Chrysler had failed.”

“Almost immediately, the fact that this was a shitstorm of his own making seemed to dawn on Musk.”

“However, while human drivers are far from infallible, they break down the task of driving into a series of subtle judgments, such as how smoothly to follow the lane lines, how hard to tap the brakes, or how far to ‘creep’ out into an intersection and peek at the traffic before making a turn. Self-driving cars, by contrast, were like computers—binary in their thinking, with a tendency to commit. This made them susceptible to dramatic false positives—they might come to a screeching halt to avoid colliding with an imagined obstacle—or worse, false negatives—where they might fail to detect actual ones, putting the occupants at risk.”

“Within hours, Tesla canceled the update—for those who hadn’t downloaded it yet—or reverted the software to the earlier version. Within two days, it decided it had to issue a formal recall, which it filed on October 29. It was a textbook example of the perils of the new connected car era: how an overnight remote update from central command could subject Tesla owners to unanticipated risks.”

“When Qazi asked Musk what he thought about those who considered in-person work an ‘antiquated concept,’ Musk replied, ‘They should pretend to work somewhere else.’”

“Musk had pledged massive amounts of his Tesla stock—at times, more than half—as collateral to secure loans. That tied his fate to Tesla’s stock performance in more ways than one and put him in a bind when it came to dipping into his ‘crown jewel,’ as one analyst put it to me for a Post story, to make the Twitter purchase possible.”

“As Musk brought in trusted deputies from companies including Tesla, Neuralink, and The Boring Company, one former employee recalled that he had never seen anything like it.
‘Do they have a day job?’ he remembered thinking. It ‘doesn’t seem to be right that they can just come in from a different company and have that authority.’”

“The ‘free speech’ philosophy that drove Musk’s initial pursuit of Twitter was increasingly at odds with his desire for control over the platform’s discourse.”

“Half a decade later, Musk’s offense in the ‘Funding secured’ saga seemed almost tame in light of his indiscretions in the years that followed.”