The Man with the Best X in the World - Part 1

 The Man with the Best Ex in the World

Hello, dear readers. Today's post is about the man who has the best ex in the world. Imagine an ex that gives you money every day... Yes, today's topic is Elon Musk.

You might be thinking, "Are you trying to find easy content, Zelial? Do you need money so badly that you're chosing content that has been talked about by everyone for years now?" But no, this is a new take on Elon Musk, inspired by Walter Isaacson's recently released book.

In July 2018, Elon Musk's empire was at its golden age. The production rate of Tesla Model 3 reached 3,000 units weekly, while SpaceX's rockets completed 56 successful space trips. The rate of payloads the company was sending to space was more than that of the USA and China. Everything was going great until suddenly Elon's empire was threatened. It wasn't threatened by a recession, a normal crisis, or even a younger competitor who was going to steal the market from Elon—it was threatened by a tweet.

While Musk was scrolling through Twitter, just like you and I do, he found a tweet from someone asking him to save some teenage boys who were trapped inside a cave by a flood in Thailand. Musk ordered the engineers of SpaceX to build a capsule-shaped submarine that could reach the cave and save those boys. On July 8, he went to Thailand, and the Prime Minister welcomed him wearing a SpaceX hat, as if Musk was a superhero. However, the divers managed to save the teenagers before Musk even used his capsule.

Up to this point, it was a normal story of good people competing over good deeds. The surprise came when Vernon Unsworth, a British caver who participated in the rescue, told CNN that Elon Musk was just seeking attention, and his capsule couldn't have entered the cave. He even suggested that Musk could "stick his submarine where it hurts." Musk got involved in a heated exchange on Twitter, accusing Vernon of shameful things—the least of which was calling him a pedophile. Elon didn't stop there; he kept provoking Vernon, as if daring him to sue for defamation.

This childish battle drove Tesla's biggest investors crazy. Musk's tweets caused Tesla's stock to drop by 3.5%, along with damaging his brand more than any competitor could. What genius inventor goes on Twitter and starts calling people names and making accusations? Come on, man, you're a CEO!

Less than a month later, while things were calming down, Musk made another catastrophe. He tweeted that he was considering taking Tesla private, meaning it would no longer be listed on the stock market, so that the investors who were mad at his tweets wouldn't have any share in the company. Not only that, he also mentioned a stock price of $420—a number that's a symbol for smoking certain substances at specific times, basically a joke.

Of course, the SEC, the agency responsible for the U.S. stock market, halted stock trading temporarily to deal with the chaos he created and started investigating him. How could someone as big as Elon Musk announce such a crucial decision on Twitter before even informing the stock market, as he is legally obliged to do? The agency filed a claim to prevent him forever from managing Tesla or any public company, and if he didn't agree to this, he had to pay a settlement of $40 million and vow not to tweet about anything related to his companies without approval. It's like having someone watch over a child to see what he does on Twitter.

Musk refused all offers; however, as time went on and Tesla's stocks dropped by 17%, he eventually had to agree. Newspapers as big as The New York Times started to question Musk's mental state, wondering how his tweets could endanger companies worth billions and affect thousands of investors. Jim Cramer, a host on CNBC, publicly described Musk as extremely bipolar, with a new mood every hour. Everyone started to wonder how one of the world's richest men and geniuses could be that reckless and impulsive.

According to Antonio Gracias, a billionaire and Musk's friend, we all know that Musk is intelligent, but many of his responses and ways of dealing with situations don't come from the intelligent part of his brain but from a more primitive part. We witness an emotional person acting, not an intelligent one. We always feel like he's under the fight-or-flight response; he acts upon instincts in situations where he doesn't have to. Anytime he's provoked, this response turns him into a victim that doesn't act calmly; he has two options: either escape or enter a battle head-first. Either way, he feels trapped.

According to Antonio, what has driven his friend Musk throughout his entire life, along with his intelligence, is PTSD. He always feels trapped, which comes from his childhood. You'd find that someone like Musk can invent a rocket, but at the same time he uses extremely dumb replies on Twitter. That's why Talulah Riley, his ex-wife, said that she always protected him from becoming a "mad king" because of his past, or as she expressed it, from feeling like a king and developing megalomania, where he would start to think that he's better than everyone.

Those who were close to Musk always treated him as a traumatized child, who was one situation away from going crazy.

- "But Zelial, how can this intelligent man have such a chaotic inner child?"

- "Good question my friend, you have the potential to be smarter than Elon Musk."

The chaotic inner child

Elon Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. Since he was three years old, he showed endless curiosity towards the world, and he had questions that his mother couldn't answer. She decided to send him to nursery school, but the owner told her to wait for one more year—not only because Musk was still young, but also because he was different. He was always absent-minded and didn't respond normally like other children, and he sometimes understood things literally. If you joked that you'd "eat him up," he'd be scared that you'd actually eat him.

Musk's uniqueness didn't extend beyond his house; Twitter wasn't around then. However, when he joined school at a young age, his classmates said that he was mentally disabled because he didn't answer any questions and was absent-minded. He wasn't able to make friends to break his isolation because he had a huge problem understanding social cues. If someone said "on a cold day in July," he would ask "which one?" His younger siblings Kimbal and Tosca made friends normally on the first day of school.

Elon used his isolation in the best way possible. At first, he read all the encyclopedias he found in his father's bookshelf. He was hungry for knowledge, and this hunger stemmed from his desire to understand people because he couldn't grasp their indirect words. As time went on, and with more reading and knowledge, he became really interested in rockets. Elon read a book about future inventions; one of these inventions was a rocket that flew with an ion engine, not a gas one.

Musk didn't read scientific books only; he loved reading comics of superheroes, and he felt similar to them as they were different from other people. They lived in isolation like him, but their difference was their strength because they were smarter and stronger than others. Musk learned from superheroes to use his uniqueness for his personal benefit.

He also excelled in computer programming, probably because its language is direct with no hidden meanings. To him, it was much easier than human language—only if-then-end. At 13 years old, Elon managed to design a video game using 123 lines of the BASIC language, which he learned in three days. He created the "Blastar" game. In his book Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson said that a teenager who loved science, superheroes, programming, and rockets saw his dreams come true in a single novel that mixed all of this: Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which mentions 42 as the secret of the universe. The novel talks about Arthur Dent, the last human to escape Earth, which was destroyed by a higher civilization. According to Isaacson, Musk saw himself similar to the novel's hero: a person whose problem is that he's on the wrong planet and needs to go to a far planet where everything is logical—a true home.

Elon thought that his uniqueness was due to his Asperger's syndrome, which he believed would never let him be a normal person. His intelligence didn't only make him think of escaping but also acting like the superheroes he loved. Musk decided to save humanity.

How could he do this? By building a bunch of rockets with the aim of delivering humans to Mars, to settle there and plant potatoes just like Matt Damon did in The Martian. Elon discovered that going to Mars was the way he could turn his intelligence into a method to escape to a better world and save humanity, as humanity will surely need a new planet in the future. That way, people would recognize him. His uniqueness wasn't a disability stopping him from understanding the world; he could help us because he's different.

This is a goal that became a compass guiding him throughout his life. If we use the language of the superheroes that Musk loves, we'll find that he's similar to Batman—the person who decided to save the world because he couldn't save himself. We all know where Batman's power lies.

"Where?"

In his money. He can't fly, become invisible, or even control insects; he's normal just like us. He has his own villa, car, and loyal companions working for him, and that's his superpower.

Musk realized that for him to have a superpower that could change the world, he needed money. That's the first step Musk took to save the world: he became a millionaire.

In the early '90s, the 20-year-old Elon who joined the University of Pennsylvania was a totally different version of kid Elon. He was confident in his goal and had a plan. According to Robin Ren, his college friend, if you met the '90s Elon, you'd find that he's not really different from the current Elon. He mostly talked about physics and building rockets to go to Mars.

When he learned that a law in California required 10% of car production to be electric cars by 2003, he said confidently that he wanted to do that because electrical and solar energy are our only hope, so that we don't have to leave this planet on a rocket. "I'll be the one to invent electric cars, so global warming doesn’t destroy the planet, so that I won't have to fly people in rockets because I don't have enough money for rockets."

Musk knew very well that if he told anyone about his dreams, they'd call him crazy. He decided that big dreams aren't the first step to becoming wealthy to achieve his dreams; instead, he started with simple, manageable goals. We're talking about the '90s—the revolution of the internet; it was a virtual, open world with amazing capabilities and fewer complexities than the physical world. It's a place where the fittest don't rule; the masters of this place are nerds, programmers, and those who think differently. Its heroes are people like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates—individuals who might not win a physical fight but can change the world with their ideas.

Elon Musk found himself in this world. He created something called "Zip2," which was a guide for businesses where you'd go on the internet, type the business name, and get its information and directions to reach it—basically Google Maps before Google Maps. Keep in mind that 30 years ago, this was a breakthrough; that's why he found a company that invested $3 million in it. The company succeeded in selling the guide to more than 140 newspapers, including The New York Times.

However, something important happened. Even though everything was going great, Elon Musk was a nightmare to his engineers. The employees, and even himself, were surprised to see a new side of Musk. When he stepped away from his computer and interacted with them, they saw a different person. Perhaps he realized that he didn't want to save humanity anymore. "These are the people I want to save? They're impossible!"

If we try to find a suitable analogy from the world of superheroes, we'll find that Musk's relationship with his partners and engineers was similar to the "X-Men." He loved "X-Men" to the point that he named his son Xavier after Professor X. The thing is, the X-Men can't be weak. Musk saw himself as Professor X; therefore, his team had to be superheroes so that together they were the X-Men. They were hardly "men" to even be "X-Men"; they just carried around chairs to sit.

While working on Zip2, the engineers were surprised that Elon corrected the mistakes they made in programming and code in a humiliating way, and he scolded them in front of each other. Even when he argued with his brother Kimbal, who was his best friend at some point, they would fight—not just verbally but physically. It wasn't just a heated exchange; first aid was needed. At one point, in order to save himself from Elon's aggression, Kimbal bit Elon's hand and wouldn't let go. Elon had to get a tetanus shot afterward, as if he was bitten by a dog.

All employees said that they experienced a chaotic atmosphere, and Musk was the reason behind it. No one took any days off because Musk wouldn't take any days off. We'll see this pattern occur in all companies managed by Elon Musk. Can you imagine that he owns the world's largest car company, possibly the world's largest rocket launching company, and one of the world's largest social media platforms, aside from the numerous projects he invests in like Neuralink? Of course, he doesn’t take days off. After all of this, if an employee tells him, "I want some days off to go on a summer vacation," he'll say: "What summer vacation!"

This is probably one of the reasons why Musk doesn't have many partners or friends; no one can tolerate him. The only exception was Gwynne Shotwell, the chief of SpaceX, who worked with him for over 20 years. He has huge fights with his brother. According to her, she can tolerate Musk because her husband has the same condition—Asperger's syndrome.

"Hold on a second, Zelial. My teacher told me the difference between a leader and a manager. This guy is a manager, and he'll never succeed because he micromanages."

I want to tell you that he's the richest man in the world right now, my friend, and he wasn't the usual leader we know, but he succeeded. Musk's harshness and pressure on the employees wasn't solely due to Asperger's syndrome, as more than 37 million people suffer from it. Maybe they differ from each other, but they don't resort to violence. Not all of them are toxic managers who intentionally ruin the mentality of those around them.

When you read Walter Isaacson's book, you'll find that Musk's childhood is one of the most important reasons behind his harshness. In any biography, if you want to understand everything, read about the childhood, and you'll understand why he's like this. Parents can sometimes be the best thing a person can have and the worst. If I sum up Musk's childhood in a word, it wouldn't be Asperger's; it would be violence.

"What?"

Violence.

Elon Musk knew violence ever since he was five years old when he tried to protect his mother from his father, who tried to hit her. At six years old, he was fiercely attacked by his own dog. Can you imagine that? It was his only friend, and his dog—the ones who are called loyal on every social media platform—attacked him. Such a shock! While he was in the hospital, he insisted that no one hurt the dog; however, when he left the hospital, he learned that the dog was killed. This made him feel that maybe humans are more violent than dogs.

Elon's father didn't enroll him in a normal school; he sent him to a field school composed of survival camps in the forest that teach children toughness. Bullying was a virtue there because the strong took the food of the weak—the normal survival rule in the forest. Musk was beaten up and lost his money. If he complained to the supervisor, the supervisor would scare him with stories of children who died in the camp because they were weak.

Elon spent his childhood in a blockade without an exit. It got to the point that one time he was beaten up by bullies, and according to him, they turned his face into a meatball or a burger. He was severely beaten to the point that his nose needed multiple surgeries to fix its position. When he complained to his father, his father scolded him, saying: "Man up! Don't be such a wuss!" According to his brother Kimbal, this was the worst memory in Elon's life, and it could be what shaped him for the rest of his life.

This explains why he's angry, violent, and acts tough on Twitter, but when Mark Zuckerberg challenged him to a boxing match, he kept saying "Come on! Let's go!" and nothing happened. Behind this is a scared child—a vulnerable person.

Even though Elon's childhood was rough, it was a small frame in a bigger, more violent picture, which is South Africa in the '80s. It was a country about to explode because of apartheid. Musk talked about a situation where he went to a musical concert against apartheid, and on the way, he saw bodies with knives protruding from them, and he had to step over blood. Fights involving knives and automatic weapons were routine there.

- "Everything you said creates a victim, not a toxic person."

- My friend, toxic people are often previous victims.

- "You said that mentally ill toxic people should seek help, and ill-mannered toxic people should be treated the same way?"

Honestly, I didn't, but the world can tolerate both people. Musk was indeed a victim, but when he reached 16 years old, he started learning how to fight, and he responded violently to any bullying or blockade. He kept using this response method until the tweets that we talked about. He doesn't believe in "an eye for an eye"; he attacks whoever even insults him. Like how he said: "If you've never been punched in the nose, you'll never know how it affects you for the rest of your life." If you don't get punched in the face, you'll never know how it feels.

Elon didn't leave this phase for the rest of his life; he always feels like he's in a fight and trapped, and he must attack with intensity to win before he becomes a victim, even if this winning was just an achievement in a company. As you know, no matter how strong you are, you have to get hit in any fight; even if you win, you'll still get punched.

In the Zip2 fight, Elon found himself cornered. It's true that his intelligence made the project succeed, but there was a consensus to oust him from his position due to his harsh management. "You're a genius and thank you so much for your idea and great efforts, but no one can work this way; no one at the meeting table likes you!" The situation remained the same until 1999, when Zip2, the company created by Elon Musk, was sold for $300 million. Elon's share was $22 million.

Keep in mind that 10 years prior to this, Elon was a poor teenager who had just arrived in Toronto. Then, he became a multimillionaire. Everything suddenly changed in his life: his bank account, his look, and his family—everything changed.

It was clear that Musk was wealthy; he ordered gourmet food every day. He bought a McLaren car for a million dollars to suit his new position.

- "That's great; he'll buy a villa in Florida, with a roof, a garden, and a view that doesn't overlook anyone, and put the money in certificates of deposit and live off the monthly interest."

- My friend, money doesn't buy everything, I mean what he had wasn't enough at the time. We all know money buy everything. 

The Rich Elon Musk

There were two things that didn't change in Elon: 

1. He still wanted to build rockets and go to Mars, but his money wasn't enough for this, even though it's a lot to us
2. He couldn't change his harsh personality, which ruined any attempt at communicating with people.

In one year, Musk did everything again; he repeated the same cycle of intelligence, harshness, and money in a project we know today as PayPal.

In 1999, Musk invested most of the money he took from Zip2 in an electronic bank called X.com.

You understand? If you're an investor, and someone suggested an idea with such a name in the '90s, and even today, you'd say: "Don't you think that X.com has a questionable connotation?" It's a weird name just like the first company. The symbol X remained with Musk for the rest of his life; he named his space company SpaceX, changed the name of Twitter to "X," and he even named his son with an X. Musk loves the symbol X because it stands for the unknown variable; it's a logo that gives you infinite possibilities wherever you use it.

The X.com bank was a genius idea. At the age of 28, Elon Musk was regarded as the leader of one of the most famous startups in all of Silicon Valley. As usual, Musk's management pattern was abusive, and in the board meeting, everyone voted unanimously to oust Elon Musk from the CEO position in X.com. The same thing happened again, without losing or gaining one more member of the board of directors.

- "Who wants him to leave?"

- "I do!"

- "Please, leave!"

Not only did Musk pressure the employees, but he also set impossible deadlines for them, like announcing that the site would launch all of its services in autumn 1999. What's strange is that this worked. He set unimaginable deadlines and asked people to accomplish impossible tasks in unrealistic timeframes. In fact, many times throughout his career, he delivered before the deadline. I said many times—we still haven't seen the robotaxis he's been talking about since 2018.

In the case of X.com, in autumn 1999, he used his X Visa card and withdrew money. Can you imagine that he sold Zip2, used the money to make X.com, and succeeded in operating it with the specs he wanted in 1999? Leave something for next year! Elon's team couldn't believe how this determined individual made them work at such a rate in such a short time and succeed.

When PayPal emerged as a rival company to X.com by the year 2000, the rivalry between the companies was intense; one company had to outdo the other. The solution was a merger, where Elon Musk had to give up the name X.com because PayPal was more commercially recognized. Keep in mind that Elon attacks aggressively when he's cornered or threatened. In one of the merging meetings with Peter Thiel, his rival and owner of PayPal, Musk took Thiel in his McLaren car, and to impose his authority, Musk drove at extreme speed. Why? To intimidate Thiel and let him know that he's a person who's not scared of anything.

Suddenly the car crashed, and Thiel barely survived. Musk said that he was happy this accident happened because he assured Thiel that he's not afraid of taking risks.

- "Nice ride, man. You could've just said so."

According to an investor in PayPal, this accident is a perfect analogy for the period of Elon Musk ruling over PayPal. While the company was doing great as a financial service that you could use on eBay, Musk wanted to change the entire banking sector and turn it into a full-fledged bank that has a social network. While the company was using Unix operating system, Elon insisted on using Microsoft. To settle this, Elon had an argument with the engineer at PayPal, and to settle this argument, Elon told the engineer to arm wrestle him.

- "I agree with him, Zelial. During arguments, people need to relax and play some games to think straight."

- "No, my friend, they actually had an arm wrestling match to see who would decide what to do, and Elon won the match. He literally ruled with an iron fist."

Let me tell you that an entire year was wasted in the company changing the codes to get it to run on Microsoft. They focused on this instead of the scams that were happening on this electronic bank, which were pulling the company down.

In 2000, something strange happened that rarely happened in Elon's life: the founders of PayPal led what's called the PayPal Mafia Uprising with the clear aim of ousting Elon from the CEO position because they thought he was reckless. They believed that he was a person flooring the pedal to prove his authority and that he would crash the company just like he crashed the car. Musk was kicked out of PayPal two times in the span of three years, and PayPal had the same fate as Zip2. In 2002, the company was publicly offered for sale, and eBay bought it for $1.5 billion. How much do you think was Elon's share of it? It was $250 million—a quarter of a billion.

Elon Musk checked his bank balance, entered the six-digit passcode, clicked on check balance, and realized that this amount was fit for Bruce Wayne. Then, Elon Musk was able to become Batman.

Musk started a new phase of his life during which he built the inventions that achieved his dream. New aspects of his personality started to appear. Maybe Batman wasn't the suitable superhero for Musk, but Iron Man. He's a millionaire who doesn't have superpowers, but he's very intelligent and can invent machines that can save humanity; he dedicates his fortune to building machines. Elon loved Iron Man so much that he appeared in Iron Man 2 as a real-life equivalent to the character Tony Stark.

Tony inherited his arms-dealing empire from his father, but Musk built his empire himself and inherited from his father something much worse than arms dealing: he inherited the worst possible way of dealing with failure. Failure was waiting like a monster for Elon in his next phase.

[To be continued in the next post...]

Last but not least, stay tuned for the new posts in this series. Share the post with your friends and leave your comment on the post (positive or negative) 

Do you know what's common between Elon Musk and Thomas Edison?

Both of them made money off of a Tesla.