I’ve always thought of him as the biggest gambler, the highest risk-taker you can find.
And that’s kind of like where he seems to exist.Įvery time those companies got to a stable point, he would just immediately go all-in and risk the entire company on the next new venture. Tesla and SpaceX have been on the verge of bankruptcy, they’ve been in sort of life-and-death struggles most of their existence. I think the chaos that we see unfolding at Twitter, I don’t think that really frightens Elon. Peter Kafkaīut beyond the fact that he’s tweeting a lot, is there something different about the Twitter situation than those he’s faced in the past? Ashlee Vance But he’s a bit more extreme than the guy I was covering. The version of Elon who exists today - I do think some of these elements were always there. But somewhere around three years ago, I think we got the Full Elon, both good and bad, out on Twitter, in full display. He wasn’t quite as active on Twitter for a long time - he didn’t really let what I call Bad Elon out. But this sort of darker, other side of Elon was contained to those spheres. You would hear all these stories about some of the more extreme bits of his behavior at Tesla or SpaceX, or with his circle of friends. Elon went through an interesting change when I was doing the reporting for my book. Is the version of Musk we’re seeing now - the one struggling with this Twitter acquisition - the one you wrote about seven years ago? Ashlee Vance You can listen to our entire conversation in a special edition of my Recode Media podcast the following interview has been excerpted from that conversation: Peter Kafka But Vance, whose portrait of Musk was a generally admiring one, says he thinks Musk has changed in recent years, and not necessarily for the better. In Vance’s telling, you can see a lot of the elements of the Musk on display today: ambitious, stubborn, and willing to make bets that seem like terrible ideas to any normal human.
To find out, I asked a man who’s spent years paying close attention to Musk: Ashlee Vance, the veteran Bloomberg reporter who talked to Musk and hundreds of people in his orbit for his 2015 book Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future. So what’s different about Twitter than the rest of Musk’s history as a businessman - or is there any difference at all?
But here it seems like he has no idea what he was doing, starting with his on-off-on approach to buying the thing for $44 billion in the first place. The chaos is also, quite frankly, confusing: No matter what you want to say about Musk, he’s been successful multiple times in his career. But even if you thought the world’s richest man and Twitter’s most high-profile user would stumble once he owned his favorite messaging service, the scale of the chaos seems staggering. It was easy to predict that Elon Musk’s first few weeks as Twitter’s owner would be a mess.
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