What’s going on inside Elon Musk’s head?
He’s a billionaire with grand ideas and the itchiness of a video game addict – and he’s backing Donald Trump,
Billed as the “biggest interview in history”, Elon Musk’s livestreamed conversation with Donald Trump was more of a love-in between two billionaires who had decided to abandon their feuding.
Musk said that the chat on Twitter/X would not be adversarial; he was aiming to “catch a vibe”. And once they started rambling he and Trump appeared to be in sunny agreement on many things. “You are the path to prosperity and Kamala is the opposite,” Musk told Trump, and said his “courage under fire” during the assassination attempt inspired him to endorse the former president.
It was all a long way from Musk’s 2022 claim that it was time for Trump to “sail into the sunset”. Trump used to rail against electric cars and claimed that Musk lied to him by saying he had voted for him and later saying he had never voted Republican.
“You can actually have a conversation with you,” Musk told him on Monday. “You can’t have a conversation with Biden or Kamala. It’s not possible.”
Was this entrepreneur, who likes to dream big about humanity’s future on other planets, really there for Trump’s stimulating conversation? Or was he in it, perhaps, for the chance to lobby Trump on the need to deregulate US industry and to offer to advise him in the White House on government efficiency? (“I’d love it,” purred Trump, praising Musk as “the greatest cutter”.)
More pressing, for both of them, it seemed, was the need to be together on Twitter/X. In the name of free speech, Musk restored Trump’s access to the social media site in 2022, after he was dumped by the previous management for championing those who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, during the certification of Biden’s victory.
Until now Trump had only posted his mugshot from his arrest last year. A full return of the Trump noise on X would be good for traffic as Musk battles disappearing advertisers and critics of his incendiary posts. The latter include Sir Keir Starmer, who took him to task for his suggestion that the disorder that followed the Southport killings showed that civil war was inevitable in Britain.
As Trump seeks to re-energise his campaign, now that Kamala Harris has given Democrats fresh hope that he can be defeated in November, he may embrace the opportunity to return to the site that was so important for him when he first ran for president, and enjoy a greater reach than he has on his smaller platform, Truth Social.
Musk is nothing if not unpredictable and the Musk mind is a fertile place where surprising ideas grow. It is this that has enabled him to be a pioneer in electric cars, spacecraft and satellites and still find time to worry about the future of AI and decide to take over the internet’s town square and start yelling at people.
Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Musk (for which he was given enormous access by his subject) wrote that in 2022 the success of Tesla, SpaceX and his satellite business meant the future looked glorious. “If only Musk could leave well enough alone. But that was not in his nature,” he writes in his bestseller Elon Musk, published by Simon & Schuster.
Musk was starting to think about Twitter, and Isaacson writes that Shivon Zilis, who manages Neuralink (another of Musk’s companies, which is working on brain-computer interfaces) and with whom Musk has twins, said she noticed he had “the itchiness of a video game addict who has triumphed but couldn’t unplug”.
She told him: “You don’t have to be in a state of war at all times. Or is it that you find greater comfort when you’re in periods of war?” He replied that it was part of his “default settings”, and told Isaacson: “I guess I have always wanted to push my chips back on the table or play the next level of the game.”
Musk asked Twitter users if he should buy it, before making an offer, then trying to back out of it, before finally going through with the deal.
“The way that Musk blustered into buying Twitter and renaming it X was a harbinger of the way he now runs it: impulsively and irreverently,” Isaacson writes.
“It is an addictive playground for him. It has many of the attributes of a schoolyard, including taunting and bullying. But in the case of Twitter, the clever kids win followers; they don’t get pushed down the steps and beaten, like Musk was as a kid. Owning it would allow him to become king of the schoolyard.”
When he bought Twitter, Musk was concerned with, as he saw it, helping to “save free speech”. Also, according to Isaacson, he had a growing concern with the dangers of what he called the “woke mind virus” that he believed was infecting America.
“Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilisation will never become multiplanetary,” he told Isaacson gravely.
“Musk’s anti-woke sentiments were partly triggered by the decision of his oldest child, Xavier, then 16, to transition. ‘Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,’ she texted the wife of Elon’s brother. ‘Don’t tell my dad.’
“When Musk found out, he was generally sanguine, but then Jenna became a fervent Marxist and broke off all relations with him. ‘She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,’ he says.
“The rift pained him more than anything in his life since the infant death of his firstborn child Nevada. ‘I’ve made many overtures,’ he says, ‘but she doesn’t want to spend time with me,’” Isaacson writes.
At Twitter HQ in San Francisco, he found “Gender diversity is welcome here” signs on the toilets and cabinets filled with stashes of Twitter-branded T-shirts emblazoned with the words ”Stay woke“, which he waved around as an example of the mindset.
“Between Twitterland and the Muskverse there was a radical divergence in outlook,” Isaacson says. “Twitter prided itself on being a friendly place where coddling was considered a virtue ... The company had instituted a permanent work-from-home option and allowed a mental ‘day of rest’ each month.
“One of the commonly used buzzwords at the company was ‘psychological safety’.
Musk let loose a bitter laugh when he heard the phrase ‘psychological safety’ ... He considered it to be the enemy of urgency, progress, orbital velocity. His preferred buzzword was ‘hardcore’. Discomfort, he believed, was a good thing. It was a weapon against the scourge of complacency. Vacations, work-life balance and days of ‘mental rest’ were not his thing.”
He also disliked the Twitter logo and it wasn’t long before he changed the company’s name to X. He had started X.com two decades earlier and had hoped to turn it into an “everything app” before it merged with PayPal. He wanted to keep X for the merged company but others did not like the adult connotations and he was ousted.
At times during his exploration of a bid for Twitter, he was “in a manic mood, and he was acting impetuously”, Isaacson says. “As was often the case, his ideas fluctuated wildly with his mood swings.” While pushing for Twitter he was simultaneously talking about starting up his own social media company.
When he finally decided to go ahead and take Twitter into private ownership, his on-off partner, the musician Grimes, recalled returning to their hotel where he immersed himself in Elden Ring, a video game which requires intense focus, especially when attacking. “Instead of sleeping,” Grimes told Isaacson, “he played until 5.30 in the morning.”
Elsewhere, he told Isaacson of problems sleeping at times and the author writes of one interview punctuated by manic laughter.
wWhen he got the financing for the Twitter deal he skipped celebrations to fly to his rocket launch site in Texas for a meeting about unexplained methane leaks. He also confessed to self-doubt. “I’ve got a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew,” he said during the Twitter purchase.
Unlike the man he was conversing with on Monday, Musk, whatever you think of him, is fascinated by big ideas. He told Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind, the AI company, that he was building rockets that could go to Mars as a way to preserve human consciousness in the event of a world war, asteroid strike, or civilisation collapse. Hassabis told him to add artificial intelligence to his threat list.
Musk also told Google’s Larry
Page in an AI discussion that human consciousness “was a precious flicker of light in the universe, and we should not let it be extinguished”.
Page apparently considered that sentimental nonsense. If consciousness could be replicated in a machine, why would that not be just as valuable? He accused Musk of being a “specist”, biased in favour of their own species. “Well, yes, I am pro-human,” Musk responded. “I f...ing like humanity, dude.”
As a teenager growing up in South Africa, Musk had what he described as an “adolescent existential crisis”. He looked for answers in books, and became hooked on science fiction. His favourite was Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
When Isaacson heard about his ambition to build “a maximum truthseeking AI” that would be able to take on existential questions, he thought it all sounded familiar.
“He was embarking on a mission similar to the one chronicled in the bible of his childhood years, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which featured a super-computer designed to figure out ‘the Answer to The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything’.”
Sadly, Musk didn’t ask Trump about his favourite sci-fi literature.