How should we understand the contradictions of Elon Musk?
Elon Musk doesn’t so much attract chaos as court it. One need only think of his recent storming of the US federal government or his rapid-fire restructuring of X (otherwise known as Twitter) to see the mayhem so often left in his wake.
His sometime partner, Claire Boucher (otherwise known as the artist Grimes) calls these frantic gusts of activity “demon mode”. “Demon mode”, Boucher told Walter Isaacson, Musk’s biographer cum court stenographer, “is when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain”, a rather tame euphemism for lashing out at whoever is closest to him in the pursuit of some inhuman, and inevitably self-imposed, goal. Chaos, for Musk, is one tool among many that he can use to achieve his aims. Humans, it seems, are another.
“Demon mode causes a lot of chaos”, Boucher says, “but it also gets shit done.” At its most productive, this approach can lead to the kind of creative destruction to which Musk has repeatedly subjected his companies, or in his words: “Extruding shit out of the system.” Most biographies and profiles of Musk are padded with the same stories of him walking production lines late into the night in an apparently endless quest to find efficiencies. Tesla’s Nevada Gigafactory, the giant facility east of Reno where the company’s batteries and components are produced, has frequently been the site of such episodes. In July 2017, the company was straining to reach Musk’s apparently impossible production target of 5,000 Model 3s per week. As Isaacson reports, while walking the line, Musk spotted an expensive robot that was being used to awkwardly glue a fiberglass strip to the battery packs, slowing down the batteries’ assembly. This episode launched a mission to find out not only why the robot was being used when a human worker could complete the same task more quickly and efficiently, but also to discover what the strips were for. “Step one should be to question the requirements,” Musk intones. “Make them less wrong and dumb, because all requirements are somewhat wrong and dumb. And then delete, delete, delete.”