Elon Musk’s Brain Isn’t Like Yours
The author of a book about serial innovators says Musk’s outrageous behavior is the flip side of his extreme creativity.
Like he cares what you think.
Photographer: Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images
Entrepreneur Elon Musk has been buffeted by a lot of self-created turbulence lately, what with his apparently unsupported assertion that he had a deal lined up to take electric-car maker Tesla Inc. private, his creepy ongoing Twitter battle over the cave rescue of a youth soccer team in Thailand, and his joint-smoking appearance on a comedian’s podcast last Thursday night, which was followed the next morning by the news that Tesla’s chief accounting officer and head of human resources were both quitting.
Melissa Schilling, a management professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has been watching Musk’s escapades with great interest. That’s partly because, well, they’re interesting, but also because she recently wrote a book called “Quirky: The Remarkable Story of the Traits, Foibles, and Genius of Breakthrough Innovators Who Changed the World,” and Musk is one of the eight innovators whose traits, foibles and genius she focused on. So is Nikola Tesla, who along with being the guy Musk named his car company after was the developer of, among other things, alternating electric current and wireless communication. The other six are Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs and Dean Kamen, and the book is more serious and revealing than its title (or that list of luminaries) may make it sound.1 So I asked Schilling on Friday to put Musk’s recent behavior in perspective; what follows is an edited transcript of our phone conversation.