Elon Musk

 After finishing Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, I felt like I finally understood Musk more deeply—and a few things I’d long found puzzling about him started to make sense.

Elon Musk is an extreme rationalist. His mind doesn’t run the way most people’s do. He has a crisp vision of the future, and then he pursues it with a near-obsessive intensity.

Where does that kind of drive and sense of mission come from? I think it’s a mix of nature and nurture. On the nature side, Musk has described himself as having Asperger’s (AS), and friends have suggested he may have bipolar tendencies. On the nurture side, his childhood in South Africa matters a lot. It was a place marked by violence, bloodshed, and racial conflict, and those experiences seem to have planted a bone-deep sense of danger and insecurity in him.

The sharpest description of Musk, in my view, came from one of his former closest friends—Google co-founder Larry Page—who called him a “speciesist.” Put bluntly, Musk is a fervent human-species partisan.

In a strange way, we might even credit science fiction—especially big, cosmic-perspective series like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Asimov’s Foundation—for giving Musk a language that elevates some of his more extreme impulses into concern for humanity as a whole. In Avatar, you can almost watch the collision of the two worldviews that Page and Musk came to represent: one that’s more invested in intelligence itself, regardless of what body it lives in, and another that’s invested in the continuation of human beings as a particular species. That philosophical gap seems to have been big enough to break a friendship.

Once you see Musk through that lens, a lot of his behavior becomes easier to interpret. His intense anxiety about a population crisis, his fierce hostility toward DEI and “woke” politics—these can be read as downstream of a single underlying worry: the long-term survival of the human species.

For a long time, I was especially confused by his stance on nuclear fusion. By his own first-principles, engineer’s mindset, he shouldn’t be so dismissive of fusion research. And if you take Mars colonization and terraforming seriously, the energy requirements are so enormous that fusion seems like an obvious fit. But the speciesist framing makes his position more legible: if fusion ever became widespread, it could make doomsday-level power far easier for ordinary people to access. A world where everyone has a thousand square meters of solar panels is simply safer than a world where everyone has a fusion battery.

Another one of Musk’s interesting ideas is that we may be living inside a virtual-reality simulator. He’s referenced the Kardashev scale—ranking civilizations by the amount of energy they can harness. Even a Type I civilization, with planet-scale power, might struggle to avoid self-destruction. So how do you keep pushing civilization forward while also keeping it alive, preserving human diversity, and preventing AI from replacing us? Maybe one answer is to put people into separate but interconnected virtual worlds and let them play out their impulses there.

Musk’s enormous achievements may, in their own way, underline the value of human diversity. In a prosperous, stable America, the iconic top-tier figure looks like Steve Jobs—driven by aesthetics and creativity. But Musk, an immigrant shaped by a more violent and conflict-ridden environment, seems driven by something harsher: the survival crisis of the species. The difference in intensity is hard to miss. When survival itself feels like the problem, the kind of energy people can summon goes far beyond the pursuit of a better life.