“We had worked on many possible new features for years, but no one ever made decisions about them,” he said later. “Suddenly, we had this guy making rapid decisions.”

When I asked Gates why he had shorted Tesla, he explained that he had calculated that the supply of electric cars would get ahead of demand, causing prices to fall. I nodded but still had the same question: Why had he shorted the stock? Gates looked at me as if I had not understood what he just explained and then replied as if the answer was obviou

Gates, who has a team of schedulers and assistants, said he would have his office call Musk’s scheduler. “I don’t have a scheduler,” Musk replied. He had decided to get rid of his personal assistant and scheduler because he wanted complete control of his calendar. “Just have your secretary call me directly.”

Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.

“To be clear, I support the left half of the Republican Party and the right half of the Democratic Party!”

“Wokeness wants to make comedy illegal, which is not cool,” he contended. “Trying to shut down David Chappelle, come on, man, that’s crazy. Do we want a humorless society that is simply rife with condemnation and hate and no forgiveness? At its heart wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful. It gives mean people a shield to be mean and cruel

His humor has many levels. The lowest is his puerile affection for poop emojis, fart sounds programmed into the Tesla, and other discharges of bathroom humor. Say the voice command “Open Butthole” to the console in a Tesla, and it opens the electric charging port at the rear of the vehicle.

The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.

The algorithm At any given production meeting, whether at Tesla or SpaceX, there is a nontrivial chance that Musk will intone, like a mantra, what he calls “the algorithm.” It was shaped by the lessons he learned during the production hell surges at the Nevada and Fremont factories. His executives sometimes move their lips and mouth the words, like