- [Elon Musk] These questions
are so dry they're killing me.
- He's gotten himself into
all kinds of spats on Twitter.
He threw a hissy fit on an earnings call.
Elon, you know, got mad at some analysts
who were asking questions,
called them boring, bone-headed.
He had the mini-sub where he accused
one of the divers, I gather,
of being a pedophile.
He recanted that later
and apologized on Twitter.
People started asking serious questions
about, you know, does Elon Musk
actually know what he's doing?
Is he under a lot of pressure?
If you look around the landscape of CEOs,
it's actually hard to find somebody
who's this unpredictable, this volatile.
He's definitely feeling a lot of pressure.
He started sleeping in the factory
again, which he'd done before.
He had slept in the actual factory before,
but he started sleeping
in the factory again.
And so, you're looking at this as, well,
the guy's probably not sleeping very much.
He's probably not eating very much.
He seems to be, you know,
addicted to Twitter.
The pressure cooker was just
getting amazingly intense there.
What this has actually
done on the investment side
and as far as the people who are looking
at Tesla as a business is concerned,
is they're saying "Why is
he wasting all of his time
on these fights, these side projects?"
I think some people are
perhaps being exposed
to Elon's unusual personality
for the first time.
I've watched the Elon Musk show for years,
and so when he starts doing these
crazy things, I'm not necessarily
as knocked back by it as some people are.
But, having said that, there
is a pileup of oddness.
As far as his behavior now
versus his behavior in the past,
I actually think, when I first met him,
he was a much geekier
and much stranger person.
I think, by his own accounts, not really
that good at interacting with the media
or interacting with the
investment community
or anything like that, and
he's gotten better at it.
But he obviously sees Twitter as a way
for him to communicate with his peeps
and to be able to get his message across.
What we should credit him with,
it's not like Twitter is a
universal problem for him.
He often gets on Twitter and he'll engage
with people in meaningful ways.
One of his drawbacks, I think, is that
he really does like to have the sense
that he's, this is his vision.
His vision is being executed
the way he envisions his vision.
So what Elon is really all about
is finding solutions, you know.
That's why he wanted to get on
the cave crisis with the mini-sub,
because he thought "Oh,
problem, solution."
Traffic in L.A., dig tunnels under L.A.,
Boring Company, solution to the problem.
You know, he thinks of himself as an,
not as a businessman, but as an engineer
and a designer who's out there
looking for problems
that he's going to solve.
You kind of have to accept with Elon
that all the stuff he says about wanting
to save the planet is for real.
If you don't accept that basic premise,
that what he wants to
do with these companies
is accelerate humanity's exit
from the fossil fuel era,
then it's going to be hard for you
to understand some of
the stuff that he does.
He's in it for Elon, but he's
also in it for the species,
and maybe he's way more
in it for the species.
And he's a bigger celebrity now
than he ever was in the past though
so there's a great deal more focus
on how the company is being operated.
I don't think Elon's strange behavior
is going to wreck the company.
If it were just really
Enron-ing, you know,
and like going, well, off a cliff,
then we could look at this and go
well, you know this is
serious stuff and blame Elon.
But their stock hasn't gone off a cliff,
and so far they're doing just fine.
He spends some bread on his threads
to be sure, right, you know?
It's like Elon Musk jacket watch
every time there's a product launch.
