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Tech

The Odd Empathy of Elon Musk

An enthralling new biography gives us a peek into the psyche of the SpaceX and Tesla CEO.

At the moment, Elon Musk and Ashlee Vance aren't speaking. Having one of the more powerful men in the world pissed at you probably isn't a great feeling, but, considering that Vance just spent three years probing every corner of Musk's life, he probably got off a bit easy.

Vance's biography, called Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future, is an enthralling look behind the curtains at some of the world's most interesting companies and the most clear picture of the man behind it all.

Musk hasn't exactly shied away from the limelight—as a brash young entrepreneur, he had journalists watch him buy a $1 million McLaren super car—but he's generally preferred to muse about the future of humanity and ruminate about the possibility of super intelligent artificial intelligence destroying mankind as we know it, not look inwardly at himself.

And so, we know tons about what Musk, he who wants to live and perhaps die on Mars and revolutionize transportation, wants to do, but we know little about who he is.

Vance is a veteran of Bloomberg Businessweek and, after writing a cover story about SpaceX in 2012, decided to start writing a book about Musk. Musk didn't want to participate.

"He said 'That's very nice, I don't think I'll help you,'" Vance told me. "Some other people had asked him, he told them no, he felt bad doing something with someone else, he said he wanted to write his own book and I think he didn't want to be seen as wanting a book."

"To be fair, Elon doesn't run around today saying you should miss the birth of your children"

But, with or without Musk, there was going to be a book. Vance spoke to hundreds of Musk's childhood friends, classmates, friends, and employees, all the while trying to get Musk to agree to participate. And finally, after 18 months of hounding, Musk agreed to meet him for dinner, and agreed to help him finish the book. Vance and Musk met for dinner once a month, speaking for roughly 40 hours in total. Vance calls this "after Elon."

"It was just better, you learn way more about him. He's a good interview, he'll tell you answers to things. He was blocking access to veterans at Tesla and SpaceX who really knew all the good stories and had deep knowledge of the technology. They were people I wanted to give ink to because they're ignored," Vance said.

Musk, as we learn in Vance's book, is a guy who rents out castles for his birthday and lets knife throwers bust balloons that he holds between his legs. He's a guy who, as a child, was sold out by his friend, kicked down stairs by some bullies, and jumped.

He's a guy who thinks that keeping a woman with him requires "maybe 10 hours" of time a week. He's a guy who, at his first startup, asked his employees work 20 hours a day, and worked 23 hours himself, according to Vance. He's a guy who will not fail, one who can talk about colonizing Mars and somehow make it sound not only not impossible, but inevitable.

"When he saw it, he freaked out for a couple days"

And he's a guy who, according to Vance, once chastised a Tesla employee for missing a work event to attend the birth of his child.

"One employee missed an event to witness the birth of his child. Musk fired off an email saying, 'That is no excuse. I am extremely disappointed. You need to figure out where your priorities are. We're changing the world and changing history, and you either commit or you don't,'" Vance wrote.

The inclusion of that quote is why Vance and Musk currently aren't speaking. The story was jumped on by The Washington Post and several other news outlets, and Musk quickly took issue with it on Twitter:

"It is total BS and hurtful to claim that I told a guy to miss his child's birth just to attend a company meeting," Musk tweeted. "I would never do that." Musk added that "Ashlee's book was not independently fact-checked. Should be taken w a grain of salt."

"The thought of the human species being wiped out, it's all consuming"

Vance anonymously quoted this employee, who was recounting an email (Vance did not see the email). It is one of very few anonymous quotes in the book. I met with Vance last week and asked him why he used the quote—there are many, many instances of Musk's friends, family, and employees saying that he is singularly focused on his vision, often at the expense of others' feelings. Why go out on a limb here?

"On that particular one, I thought it got to the core of how desperate the situation was, and how much he asks of people. It was 100 percent true and it was what it was," Vance told me. "The tricky thing about that quote is it was put on a list of quotes, so it's pulled out of where it is in the book. That happens to come from this period in 2008 when Tesla could disappear and go bankrupt at any moment and everything was going wrong."

"To be fair, Elon doesn't run around today saying you should miss the birth of your children," he added. "But in this period of 2008, every employee was asked to be at the company all the time. I completely stand by the quote, but when you see it starkly in this list, it comes off pretty bad."

Though the quote has been picked up by the press and has now been disavowed by Musk, Vance says that Musk didn't immediately flag it. Musk wasn't allowed to read a copy of the book "until the presses started," but he did see a copy of it before the press got ahold of it.

"When he saw it, he freaked out for a couple days," Vance said. "But then a few days went by and he came back and said it's well done and accurate. We were still talking after that."

Musk's participation was integral to the book, and it's the reason why it serves as a definitive history of Tesla and SpaceX, which are two companies that are very much still in flux and have their greatest tests still in front of them. Because of Musk's participation, Vance was able to speak to some higher-level folks at both companies, who could talk about the time Musk nearly sold Tesla to Google or the months spent attempting to assemble and launch a rocket from the Kwajalein Atoll, some 2,100 miles southwest of Hawaii.

"My thought was he'd do one interview and then end it, and then he did a second one, and I thought he'd end it, and to his credit he never did," he added. "Once he committed to do it, he was a good sport about it. He would answer any question I asked. As time went on, the interviews got way better. By the third or fourth interview I remember going home and thinking, 'Oh my God, now we've finally gotten somewhere.'"

Vance's book is a masterful piece of reporting. Over the last few years, we've gotten glimpses at what went on at PayPal and what happens at Musk's current companies.

This book, however, is like shining a giant spotlight on all of it, putting everything in plain sight. We always knew Musk had a plan, now we know how he hopes to go about achieving it. Along the way, he's hurt people's feelings. He'll surely hurt more. It's not because he doesn't care. It's because he cares a lot.

"Elon has the weirdest kind of empathy of anyone I've ever come across. He doesn't have a lot of interpersonal empathy, but he has a lot of empathy for mankind," Vance said. "I think he has a completely different set of emotions than the average person does. The thought of the human species being wiped out, it's all consuming."