Elon Musk is not the first star boss to come from the tech sector. But he is the first to communicate so often and directly on the Internet. Business announcements, acerbic comments, funny memes… He sends a number of tweets every day, from the most serious to the most prosaic, and makes so much noise that we ultimately know little about him. The book investigates Elon Musk by Emmanuel Botta and Béatrice Mathieu, senior reporter at L’Express, revealed in 2022 the projects and methods of the person concerned, his story and the people around him. This year it’s the biography Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson (Fayard editions) which immerses us in the Muskian galaxy after two years spent alongside the billionaire. Here are the five passages that we retained.
1. Elon and the human species
Icy management, killer sentences… Investigations into Musk often highlight this fault: the boss suffering from Asperger’s syndrome shows little empathy towards those around him. Walter Isaacson’s book nevertheless highlights the visceral fascination that Elon Musk feels for the capabilities of human beings. In his chapter devoted to the dark period that Tesla went through in 2018, the author shows how Elon Musk jubilantly orders his teams to identify and dismantle some of the industrial robots on the site, when he understands that some work slower than robots. humans. “Tesla’s excessive automation was a mistake […] We underestimate humans,” he declared publicly on this subject.
Musk’s fascination with humans often guides his technological choices. If over the last two years he has brought robotics back to the forefront with his Optimus project, he persists in wanting to create machines with humanoid shapes, even though this design is far from having proven its usefulness. value. We find the same stubbornness in the chapter devoted to the launch of Autopilot, when Walter Isaacson explains why the boss of Tesla is so reluctant to rely on lidar, a rotating laser sensor, to make his cars autonomous. “It is [pour lui] a matter of first principles: humans only drive using visual input, so machines should be able to.”
2. His fears about artificial intelligence
Musk’s fascination with human faculties is essential in his trajectory: it is this which shapes his vision of artificial intelligence (AI). The billionaire’s concern about AI sometimes borders on the irrational. The book shows, however, that she is not pretending and strongly motivated her participation in the OpenAI project in its early days. Isaacson thus describes the heated debates in 2013 between Musk and Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, whom he knows well.
“Musk argues that if we don’t protect ourselves, artificial intelligence systems risk replacing humans, reducing the human species to insignificance or even hastening its extinction. Page hits back. Why it matters “If, he asks, machines one day surpass humans in intelligence, and even in degree of consciousness? That would simply be the next stage of evolution. Human consciousness, Musk retorts, is a precious glimmer in the Universe, and we must not let it go out. Page considers these to be sentimental fantasies. If consciousness could be duplicated by a machine, in what way would it lose its value? We might even one day be able to upload our consciousness into a machine. He accuses Musk of “speciesism”, meaning being motivated by a bias in favor of one’s own species. “Well , yes, I am pro-human, he replies. Damn, what, I love humanity, man.”
3. His plan to save humanity
Elon Musk’s biography offers a detailed dive into his working methods and the way he organizes his messianic project to save humanity. “Going to Mars will be very expensive, so Musk has combined together, as he often does, an exciting mission project and a very concrete business project,” Isaacson writes. Space tourism and the launch of satellites for countries and companies must finance this much more ambitious goal of making humanity multi-planetary. In 2014, the author describes, Musk identified a new outlet. “The Internet brings in 1,000 billion dollars a year, […] If we manage to occupy 3% of the market, that’s 30 billion, which is more than NASA’s budget. This is what inspired Starlink to finance the journey to Mars. [Elon Musk] pauses, then emphasizes: The prospect of travel to Mars underpins every decision SpaceX makes.”
The book also details the five golden rules of the entrepreneur. First, “question all requirements,” then “eliminate all eliminable parts of the technical process.” “Simplify and optimize” those that remain then “shorten the cycles”. Last step: automation. All with tasty examples, like this day when Musk noticed that the standard settings of certain machines at the Tesla factory in Fremont (California) limit their speed and impose certain unnecessary maneuvers. “Factory settings are always stupid”, comments [Elon Musk]. He quickly rewrites the code to remove the double reverse rotation, then sets the speed to 100% of the machine’s capacity. The machine starts to damage the thread, so it slows it down to 70%. It then functions correctly, reducing by more than half the time needed to bolt the body onto the transfer carts.”
4. Musk, Twitter and China
Elon Musk has made it his hobby horse. The acquisition of Twitter would, according to him, be motivated by a fierce desire to provide a quality forum to the entire world. A place cleaned of false lying profiles, a “business of truth”. However, he finds himself in a more delicate position than the bosses of other major social networks. Tesla’s health depends closely on China: it produces half of its cars there and generates a large part of its turnover there. However, the country is regularly accused of orchestrating disinformation operations. How will Elon Musk handle this complex situation? In his book, Walter Isaacson, reveals that this sensitive subject was brought up by Bari Weiss, an independent journalist whom Elon Musk contacted at the end of 2022 so that she could investigate, with Matt Taibbi, the internal files of Twitter and the choices made by the previous management team.
“At one point, during the two-hour conversation, she asked him what influence Tesla’s business interests in China were likely to have on the way he ran Twitter,” reveals Walter Isaacson. Musk looked annoyed. The discussion n “is not supposed to be about that. Weiss holds his ground. Musk ends up responding that the social network must indeed be careful with the comments it makes about China, because Tesla’s business may be threatened. There is two ways of looking at, he specifies, the problem of Chinese repression of the Uyghurs. Weiss is troubled.”
5. Starlink in the geopolitical deep end
This is the most commented on passage in the book. In the chapter “Ukraine”, Walter Isaacson indicates that Elon Musk would have given “secret instructions to his engineers to cut the satellite coverage” of Starlink “within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast” in order to prevent Ukrainian underwater drones. to target the Russian fleet. “Authorize the use of Starlink in this attack,” concluded [Elon Musk]risks ending in disaster for the world […] I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been the equivalent of a mini-Pearl Harbor and would have led to a major escalation, explains [Musk]. We don’t want to be involved in this.” Information which triggered very strong reactions, and the immediate denial from the principal concerned. Walter Isaacson returned to his remarks on September 9.
“Following several conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought that the framework prohibiting Starlink from being used to carry out attacks in Crimea was decided on the night Ukraine attempted to carry out this surprise attack. [Elon Musk] now indicates that this policy was already in place but that the Ukrainians were not aware of it and that last night, he simply reaffirmed this policy already in place.” In other words, there would have been no action to prevent Ukraine from launching its attack, but a refusal to modify the existing framework to make it possible. “Had I accepted their request, SpaceX would have been clearly complicit in a major act of war and escalation of the conflict”, tweeted the entrepreneur on September 8.
What is certain is that the war in Ukraine has unvarnishedly shown the other face of these satellite constellations. Starlink “was designed for people to watch Netflix, relax, take online classes and engage in all kinds of positive and peaceful activities,” Musk said in a phone conversation with Walter Isaacson reported in the book. No doubt, but since then, this technology has shown the major role it will probably play in future conflicts.
Telecom networks are often the first infrastructures targeted in times of war. States capable of dispatching an emergency network at will to the area of their choice therefore have a major advantage. This safety net allows populations to remain informed, and even to pursue economic activities necessary for the purchase of military equipment. These minisatellites also have interesting characteristics for armies, because they are more complex to jam or cut. Thanks to their low orbit, they also allow the military to exchange information in greater numbers and more quickly. Following the war in Ukraine, the world discovered that Elon Musk held “an essential military asset with Starlink”, explained to L’Express last October Julien Nocetti, associate researcher at the French Institute of International Relations ( Ifri). American officials have also called for a re-study of the framework around Starlink, in order to ensure adequate control of United States foreign policy.