Recently I read four books about businessman Elon Musk and his companies. Two were biographies by Ashlee Vance (2015) and Walter Isaacson (2023), and two – Eric Berger’s Liftoff (2021) and Reentry (2024) – covered the rocket company SpaceX. When I say “read”, I actually mean “listened to”, so everything that follows is subject to recall error.

There are some minor discrepancies. Notably, one of the anecdotes I considered most damaging from Vance’s 2015 book – firing his personal assistant after determining he could do her job – wasn’t repeated by Berger and Isaacson. According to Isaacson, Musk said moving SpaceX launches to the middle of the Pacific was “a mistake”, which seems quite important, but isn’t reported by Berger. Isaacson also says that SpaceX tried a new method of unblocking a valve just before docking with the International Space Station, which sounds more dangerous than Berger and Vance’s report that it was a software change to ignore glare.

Anyway, all four books are very good (despite falling into the modern trend of using profanity in the narrative), and worth reading. If you are most interested in spaceflight, Berger’s books are obviously the place to start. For a quicker read that has a number of interesting anecdotes the other books lack, go with Vance. For more detail on Musk’s childhood, personal life and the Twitter saga, Isaacson. The story is certainly dramatic, particularly 2008, when Musk appeared forced to choose between saving SpaceX and Tesla, split his money between both, and was saved by a successful rocket launch on the final attempt.

Isaacson’s book tries to answer the question, could Elon Musk have kept his positives (his vision, drive, and transformational business successes) without his negatives (lack of compassion)? It concludes that the former don’t excuse the latter, and would be hard to disentangle. Sounds about right. I however went in with a more prosaic question: just how does Musk do so much? He is running half a dozen billion-dollar companies that are trying to change the world with low emission transport and reusable rockets. I, meanwhile, have gone more than a year without fixing my bathroom cabinet.

The books didn’t really answer my question. If anything they made it worse. Musk’s meetings wander on long tangents, he looks after numerous children (at least sometimes), plays video games all night, does his own scheduling, and has sent 18,000(!?) tweets. Even after sacrificing sleep and exercise, it’s hard to reconcile this with 100-hour work weeks, but apparently it’s possible.

I think the answer to Musk’s productivity is in part: (a) making decisions quickly, (b) multiplying his efforts by requiring his employees to work around the clock too, and (c) sheer unexplainable brilliance. There is not much one can do about (c). (a) and (b) both come under Musk’s mantra “a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle” and have pluses and minuses.

For (a), there are big decisions and small decisions. For the big decisions, Musk is driven by his vision of the future. Electric cars must be made from aluminium to be lighter; rocket fuel must be cooled and densified to eke out the extra efficiency that allows reuse. Musk always has one eye on the future, even during a rocket launch; Isaacson describes this as a stress response.

For small decisions, Musk makes decisions on the spot, enabling his managers to act without the liability of taking responsibility. After implementing a decision they discover through experience whether it was right or not – and more often than not it is right, because, through reading and conversations, Musk evidently has an excellent grasp of materials and applied physics. Musk’s companies insource production wherever possible, particularly where a component has a high ‘idiot index’ (price of component divided by price of raw material), so it’s usually possible to implement these decisions rapidly.

Where he does get things wrong, Musk is not averse to changing course when presented with evidence, such as re-introducing a screw he tried to get rid of. Sometimes his decisiveness veers into rashness and comes at a multi-billion-dollar cost, such as agreeing to buy Twitter (and at too high a price). But quick and decisive decision-making is an important part of his strategy: he wants to make progress and learn from mistakes, rather than sit and ponder. Berger notes that whenever Musk is away from SpaceX for too long, it begins to lose its scrappy-startup-ness and the work slows down.

I was less impressed by (b), the pressure on his employees. Certainly, working for Musk’s companies, and particularly SpaceX, is more of a lifestyle than a job. Employees get rapid responsibility, quick learning, and exciting rocket launches, in return for devoting themselves to the company. I imagine it’s an acceptable trade-off for many people, particularly single 20-year-olds, but I was saddened to hear of the broken families – pretty much everybody in the story seemed to get divorced. One Turkish engineer went home to see his mother only once in five years.

But back to more positive topics. Musk is relentless at increasing speed and slashing costs. One of the most impressive chapters described how Musk increased production at the Tesla factory. It was widely thought to be impossible – and not just by cheap-talking newspaper columnists, but by well-resourced short sellers who put millions of dollars on the line and buzzed the factory with drones to get the latest intel. Musk proved them all wrong, not through a single magic bullet, but by a series of incremental improvements. He converted a car park into extra floorspace, and walked the production line, replacing slow machines with workers, changing machine settings, and eliminating all unnecessary tasks.

I found it notable how Musk cares what his workspaces look like. For example he told one manager that rocket production should look like “a [expletive] beehive” and, even while strapped for cash, he found enough in the budget to paint the Tesla factory red and white.

White and red Tesla factory (image source)

Isn’t functionality more important than form? Maybe it’s not that simple. Although a futuristic factory won’t necessarily make futuristic cars or rockets, perhaps futuristic cars or rockets can only be made by a futuristic factory. It needs to look the part. Chasing form can lead to functionality as a by-product. And the environment inspires the workers and designers, and no doubt Musk himself.

It makes me wonder if offices are unwise to run a clear-desk policy. No doubt it’s easier for security and cleaning, but maybe something is lost by looking generic, and not having physical documents to hand. And maybe this also extends to houses. Musk doesn’t seem to have a real home. At one point he hired a famous architect, Isaacson pointed out he seemed to be building an art installation more than a home, and Musk agreed and gave up. Might Musk’s personal life have been more stable if he had a house that looked like a home? One can only speculate.

Overall, Musk’s companies are very impressive. For a fresh graduate in America, they could be a fascinating place to work for a few years, but anyone else should think carefully. My main takeaways are to make faster decisions and correct mistakes later, to work with short timelines, and to make my work environment – and home – look the part. Even if it starts with fixing that cabinet.