Inside the Method to Elon Musk’s Madness – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Elon Musk
By Walter Isaacson
(Simon & Schuster, 688 pages, $35)

“To anyone I’ve ever offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

I thought of those words from Elon Musk when I saw him walk onto the stage at CPAC 2025. Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk leads with them, too. From the book, I never quite got the sense that I knew Musk. But, as I watched him take his seat to begin his conversation with Newsmax host Rob Schmitt, I did feel as though I had gained some sort of parasocial understanding of the man — that I understood more about his core programming than I had before. Perhaps with someone like him, that’s as much as can be expected.

After taking some time to pose with a chainsaw given to him by Argentinian President Javier Milei, Musk flatly declared, “I am become meme.” Musk’s organizational and technical skills are rightly revered — his social skills, however, are not. Both supporters and detractors of the richest man in the world — the owner of Tesla, SpaceX, and X, among other companies — would agree that he is certainly a character. But in taking on the role of semi-official third wheel in the Trump-Vance-Musk triumvirate, Elon Musk is making his biggest gamble yet.

Isaacson’s account covers Musk’s life up until April 2023. At the very end, Isaacson recounts advice given to Musk by Antonio Gracias, a close friend of many years: “During the launch week, [Gracias] and some other friends talked to Musk about the need to restrain his impetuous and destructive instincts. If he was going to lead a new era of space exploration, they said, he needed to be more elevated, to be above the fray politically.”

Well, so much for that. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, named for a cryptocurrency that was in turn named for the viral “doge” meme, has faced withering criticism from Democrats. Musk — once an Obama voter and electric car guru — is now a sworn enemy of the Left. After witnessing how Trump was pursued by the Left once he left power, Musk must know what awaits him if and when the Democrats reassert control over Washington. The first stage of Musk’s gamble paid off — Donald Trump won the election and, true to his word, has given Musk free hands to sort through the federal government. But now comes the hard part: Musk has to deliver the kind of results that will make it worth the cost of getting here.

In some ways, taking insane risks in uncharted territory is exactly what you would expect from Musk. Born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, the young Elon Musk was bullied at school and allegedly verbally abused by his father, Errol. Musk’s childhood set the stage for much of his later life: He never did reconcile with his father, but many who know Musk would say that the rages that he could throw later in life had a certain family resemblance. Musk would vacillate between emotional incontinence and what is frequently described as “demon mode” — almost inhuman bouts of drive, energy, and vision toward some supposedly impossible goal.

Musk has a method to his madness. He calls it “the algorithm.” Isaacson describes its elements as:

1. Question every requirement and put a name on every job.
2. Delete any part or process you can.
3. Simplify and optimize.
4. Accelerate process time.
5. Automate.

These steps often lead Musk to unconventional ideas that might otherwise go unconsidered. Why can’t we make rockets out of stainless steel instead of carbon fiber? Does this engine really require this expensive machined part, or can we use something else? From space travel to electric cars, Musk’s technical ambition paid off, allowing greater production numbers at cheaper costs than previously imagined. Be it electric cars or reusable rockets or brain implants, Musk’s companies have pushed the boundary of what was once deemed possible.

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What is Musk after? Money would seem the obvious answer, but, if that were the case, his foray into politics would make no sense. It would be better to remain uncontroversial and apolitical. Also, Musk is already the richest man in the world, and he can afford just about anything money can buy. According to Isaacson, Musk’s true desire is to push the technological envelope, making space colonization a reality and expanding humanity and human consciousness to the stars.

Somewhat more controversial are Musk’s relationships with real human beings, especially when the algorithm is applied to them. In one standout incident, Musk was visiting one of Tesla’s factories and noticed a mechanical arm was not functioning properly. Musk asked for the man who programmed the arm to be brought to him. The programmer, initially excited to meet Musk for the first time, was fired on the spot.

Deleting parts and processes often means laying people off, and that’s what Musk did to most of Twitter’s employees. And, defying critics who expected the rebranded X to falter, Musk’s skeleton crew kept the platform running and at the heart of the American cultural conversation. Accelerating process times often involves Musk setting a ludicrously ambitious deadline or goal for one of his projects. If the person assigned to the project objects or says it is impossible, Musk removes him or her and burns through as many people as it takes to find someone who will promise to make it happen.

Musk himself admits that his method can overshoot the target. If you don’t need to reverse 10 percent of the changes you make, he says, you aren’t being aggressive enough. Sometimes, his decisions result in failure and his ambitious deadlines go unmet. But surprisingly often, they don’t. When one looks at DOGE, it’s hard not to see the algorithm written all over it.

Musk thrives on stress and drama, and not just while at work. Detailing all of Musk’s relationships would be an article unto itself — Isaacson, thankfully, has a book. Suffice it to say that, in some respects, Musk makes Donald Trump look like a traditional family man. He has a dizzying array of ex-wives, lovers, women who have used him as a sperm donor, and children with such strange names as “X Æ A-Xii,” “Exa Dark Sideræl,” and “Tau Techno Mechanicus.” As of this writing, Musk has fourteen children who are publicly known, with four different mothers. The most recent case, though surprisingly not the most bizarre, is that of Ashley St. Clair, a 26-year-old conservative social media influencer. St. Clair recently posted on X that Musk is the father of her child. She is now suing him for full custody.

On Musk the political animal, Isaacson has less to say than one would hope. He gives the sense he is embarrassed by some of Musk’s opinions on the “woke mind virus,” even as he tries to treat them charitably. The lack of attention on Musk’s politics is partially due to the publication date, as, at the time of publication, Musk’s transformation in the minds of the Left into an evil right-wing oligarch was still in its infancy. An early backer of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign, Musk’s relationship with The Donald during his first term in office was cold, and it wouldn’t be until Trump’s near brush with death in Butler, Pennsylvania, that Musk would extend his support to the former, future, and current president.

While Elon Musk does not cover Musk’s ideological transformation in the same depth as his leadership of SpaceX and Tesla, there is still much that we can glean from Isaacson. One of the precursors to Musk’s political transformation was likely his disdain for regulations. Part of his algorithm is knowing which public official is responsible for each rule his companies are forced to follow so that the person can be persuaded to recant if the regulation is deemed overly burdensome. When California sought to shut down Tesla’s Fremont plant because of COVID in 2020, Musk defied the state. By all accounts, it was a formative experience and caused him to question many of the rules imposed by the government.

Musk’s wry sense of humor was another vector. Often edgy and sometimes juvenile, Isaacson observes that in the beginning stages of the development of SpaceX’s Starship rocket, the project was referred to as “BFR.” The “B” stood for “big,” the “R” for “rocket.” Perhaps that’s why, fatefully, Musk took such a liking to a small Christian satire website called the Babylon Bee. When the Bee was banned by Twitter for poking fun at gender ideology, Musk became increasingly worried about the state of freedom of speech.

But perhaps the most personal reason was Xavier Musk. Strong-willed and opinionated like his father, Xavier became increasingly interested in socialism and suspicious of wealth. As their relationship soured, Xavier began identifying as transgender and going by the name Vivian Jenna Wilson. (Isaacson pointedly refers to Wilson throughout the text using “she” and “her.”) “I hate you and everything you stand for,” Wilson purportedly told Musk. Rather understandably, he took the blow hard, stating in a 2024 interview with Jordan Peterson, “My son was killed by the woke mind virus…. I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that.” All of these factors put Musk on a path that, while not apparent in 2023, would inevitably lead him into the highest echelons of American political life.

There are several throughlines in Musk’s history that can be drawn from Isaacson’s book. The most obvious is that he does not play well when working for others. First exemplified by his exile from the board of PayPal, Musk would run every company he joined, culminating in his hostile takeover of Twitter, where he ousted the board moments after his acquisition became official. That history raises an obvious question from political observers: What does this presage about his relationship with Trump?

There are a few possibilities. The most intuitive one is that the partnership will fall apart over some dispute or other. MAGA firebrand Steve Bannon, for example, recently criticized Musk as “a parasitic illegal immigrant.” Many on the right look with distrust on the tech industry’s fondness for immigration in general, and the H1B visa program in particular. There are plenty of places for fissures to open, even without considering the prickly nature Trump and Musk alike can sometimes display.

But enough time has passed that we should consider the alternative: What if the pair has staying power? Thinly veiled media campaigns to drive a wedge between them have thus far ended in failure, and, by all accounts, Trump continues to hold Musk in high regard. Trump also owes Musk a debt of gratitude for putting so much on the line in an election that, had Trump lost, might have seen him spend the rest of his life in jail. And Trump, too, has plenty of bones to pick with the D.C. bureaucracy, and evidently is more than fine to allow Musk to take the credit (or the blame, if you prefer) for scorching it. And Musk, a lifetime seeker of challenge and struggle, seems thrilled to have been given his most difficult task yet.

At the risk of sliding into cliches, Musk is an enigma. He is the richest man in the world, yet he doesn’t seem to be in any of this for the money. His life’s mission is to extend humanity into the stars, yet his relationships with so many of the flesh-and-blood humans in his family remain troubled. He is one of the most important men of the American Right in a generation, yet many of his views and actions range from heterodox to flagrantly nonconservative. Perhaps the thesis of Elon Musk can be found on the inside cover, where Isaacson posits the question: “Are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?” As with most such musings, to ask is to answer.

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