Quotulatiousness

September 14, 2023

Scott Alexander reviews the (old) Elon Musk biography

Filed under: Books, Business, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s okay, he makes it clear from the start that he’s talking about Ashlee Vance’s earlier work, not the one that just hit the shelves this year:

Elon Musk at the 2015 Tesla Motors annual meeting.
Photo by Steve Jurvetson via Wikimedia Commons.

This isn’t the new Musk biography everyone’s talking about. This is the 2015 Musk biography by Ashlee Vance. I started reading it in July, before I knew there was a new one. It’s fine: Musk never changes. He’s always been exactly the same person he is now.1

I read the book to try to figure out who that was. Musk is a paradox. He spearheaded the creation of the world’s most advanced rockets, which suggests that he is smart. He’s the richest man on Earth, which suggests that he makes good business decisions. But we constantly see this smart, good-business-decision-making person make seemingly stupid business decisions. He picks unnecessary fights with regulators. Files junk lawsuits he can’t possibly win. Abuses indispensable employees. Renames one of the most recognizable brands ever.

Musk creates cognitive dissonance: how can someone be so smart and so dumb at the same time? To reduce the dissonance, people have spawned a whole industry of Musk-bashing, trying to explain away each of his accomplishments: Peter Thiel gets all the credit for PayPal, Martin Eberhard gets all the credit for Tesla, NASA cash keeps SpaceX afloat, something something blood emeralds. Others try to come up with reasons he’s wholly smart – a 4D chessmaster whose apparent drunken stumbles lead inexorably to victory.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, And The Quest For A Fantastic Future delights in its refusal to resolve the dissonance. Musk has always been exactly the same person he is now, and exactly what he looks like. He is without deception, without subtlety, without unexpected depths.

The main answer to the paradox of “how does he succeed while making so many bad decisions?” is that he’s the most focused person in the world. When he decides to do something, he comes up with an absurdly optimistic timeline for how quickly it can happen if everything goes as well as the laws of physics allow. He – I think the book provides ample evidence for this – genuinely believes this timeline,2 or at least half-believingly wills for it to be true. Then, when things go less quickly than that, it’s like red-hot knives stabbing his brain. He gets obsessed, screams at everyone involved, puts in twenty hour days for months on end trying to try to get the project “back on track”. He comes up with absurd shortcuts nobody else would ever consider, trying to win back a few days or weeks. If a specific person stands in his way, he fires that person (if they are an employee), unleashes nonstop verbal abuse on them3 (if they will listen) or sues them (if they’re anyone else). The end result never quite reaches the original goal, but still happens faster than anyone except Elon thought possible. A Tesla employee described his style as demanding a car go from LA to NYC on a single charge, which is impossible, but he puts in such a strong effort that the car makes it to New Mexico.

This is the Musk Strategy For Business Success; the rest is just commentary.


    1. Vance starts with the story of the biography itself. When Musk learned he was being profiled, he called Vance, threatened that he could “make [his] life very difficult”, and demanded the right to include footnotes wherever he wanted telling his side of the story. When Vance said that wasn’t how things worked, Elon invited him to dinner to talk about it. Elon arrived late, and spent the first few courses talking about the risk of artificial superintelligence. When Vance tried to redirect the conversation to the biography, Elon abruptly agreed, gave him unprecedented access to everyone, and won him over so thoroughly that the book ends with a prediction that Musk will succeed at everything and become the richest man in the world (a bold claim back in 2015).

    I like this story but find myself dwelling on Musk’s request — why shouldn’t he be allowed to read his own biography before publication and include footnotes giving his side of the story where he disagrees? That sounds like it should be standard practice! If I ever write a post about any of you and you disagree with it, feel free to ask me to add a footnote giving your side of the story (or realistically I’ll put it in an Open Thread).

    2. The book gives several examples of times Musk almost went bankrupt by underestimating how long a project would take, then got saved by an amazing stroke of luck at the last second. When Vance asked him about his original plan to get the Falcon 1 done in a year, he said:

    “Reminded about the initial 2003 target date to fly the Falcon 1, Musk acted shocked. ‘Are you serious?’ he said. ‘We said that? Okay, that’s ridiculous. I think I just didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. The only thing I had prior experience in was software, and, yeah, you can write a bunch of software and launch a website in a year. No problem. This isn’t like software. It doesn’t work that way with rockets.”

    But also, the employees who Vance interviewed admit that whenever Musk asks how long something will take, they give him a super-optimistic timeline, because otherwise he will yell at them.

    3. I wondered whether Elon was self-aware. The answer seems to be yes. Here’s an email he wrote a friend:

    “I am by nature obsessive compulsive. In terms of being an asshole or screwing up, I’m personally as guilty of that as anyone, and am somewhat thick-skinned in this regard due to large amounts of scar tissue. What matters to me is winning, and not in a small way. God knows why … it’s probably [rooted] in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit.”

I Built a FOOT POWERED Lathe (Most requested video)

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 13 Sep 2023

How to make a hand tool spring pole lathe. Almost.
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Canadians’ opinions have flipped on the immigration issue this summer

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tristin Hopper covers the rapid change in public opinion from majority in favour of the Liberal government’s expanded immigration targets to majority opposed in recent polling:

A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing PPC leader Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message.
Photo from The Provincehttps://theprovince.com/opinion/columnists/gunter-berniers-legitimate-position-on-immigration-taken-down-by-spineless-billboard-company/wcm/ecab071c-b57d-4d93-b78c-274de524434c

A majority of Canadians now seem to think that immigration is too high, according to a recent Nanos poll. Of respondents, 53 per cent said that the government’s plan to accept 465,000 new permanent residents was too high. It’s a sharp turnaround from just a few months prior, when a similar Nanos poll in March found that only 34 per cent of Canadians thought immigration was too high.

Canada has long been one of the most pro-immigration countries on earth, and since at least the 1990s the mainstream Canadian position on immigration levels was that they were just fine. On the eve of Justin Trudeau’s election as prime minister in 2015, an Environics poll found that a decisive 57 per cent of Canadians disagreed with any notion that there is “too much immigration in Canada.”

But if this sentiment is changing, it might be because Ottawa has recently dialled up immigration to the highest levels ever seen in Canadian history. Below, a quick guide to just how many people are entering Canada these days.

Immigration is nearly double what it was at the beginning of the Trudeau government (and way more when you count “non-permanent” immigrants)

In 2014 — the last full year before the election of Justin Trudeau — Canada brought in 260,404 new permanent residents. This was actually rather high for the time, with Statistics Canada noting it was “one of the highest levels in more than 100 years”.

But last year, immigration hit 437,180, and that’s not even accounting for the massive spike in “non-permanent” immigration. When the estimated 607,782 people in that category are accounted for, the Canadian population surged by more than one million people in a single calendar year. Representing a 2.7 per cent annual rise in population, it was more than enough to cancel out any per-capita benefits from Canada’s GDP rise for that year.

It’s about on par with the United States (a country which is eight to 10 times larger)

Proportionally, Canada has long maintained higher immigration than the United States. But in recent months immigration has gotten so high that Canada is even starting to rival the Americans in terms of the raw number of newcomers.

Last year, while Canada marked one million newcomers, the U.S. announced that its net international migration was about the same. Given the size of the U.S. (331 million vs. 40 million in Canada), this means that Canada is absorbing migrants at a rate more than eight times that of the Americans.

When these trends first began showing themselves in early 2022, CIBC deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal credited it with driving down Canadian wage growth. “The last time I checked, the U.S. is 10 times larger than we are,” he said.

Chip Carving with a Gouge | Paul Sellers

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Paul Sellers
Published 5 May 2023

Starting carving usually begins with a simple project, and this flower will get you started. Once you have done this, you can create a wide range of other decorative carvings and add them to your woodworking projects, pieces like box lids and picture frames. Enjoy!
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QotD: Going to “the mall”

Filed under: Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“How was the mall?” Mom would ask when you got home.

“Eh, it was dead,” you might say.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

Neither was true. Every trip to the mall had a routine. You’d swing by the sausage and cheese store for samples. You’d go to the record store to leaf through the sheaves of albums, nodding at the rock gods’ pictures on the wall, content in the cocoon of your generation’s culture. Head over to Chess King to see if there was something stylish you could wear on a date, if you ever had one; saunter casually into Spencer Gifts to look at the posters in the back, snicker at the naughty gifts, marvel at some electronic thing that cast colored patterns on the wall. Then you’d find a place, maybe by the fountain in the center, and watch the world go past in that agreeably tranquilized state of mall shopping.

Dead? Hardly. Okay, maybe it was the afternoon, low traffic. No movie you really wanted to see, the same stuff in the stores you saw last week. Of course you’d go back tomorrow, because that’s what you did with your friends. You went to the mall.

A dead mall is something else today: a vast dark cavern strewn with trash, stripped of its glitter, its escalators frozen, waiting for the claws to take it apart. The internet abounds with photos taken by surreptitious spelunkers, documenting the last days of once-prosperous malls. We look at these pictures with fascination and sadness. No one said they’d last forever. But there wasn’t any reason to think they wouldn’t. Hanging out as teens, we never thought we’d outlive the mall.

James Lileks, “The Allure of Ruins”, Discourse, 2023-06-12.

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