Introduction to The Curious Mind of Elon Musk

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“My religion, for the lack of a better word, is one of curiosity.”

— Elon Musk

Curious (adjective)

1. Inquisitive; beyond comprehension as out of the ordinary.

Drawn to the unknown and the unusual in order to learn.

2. Strange; beyond comprehension as out of the ordinary.

Demanding attention as difficult to define and categorize.

3. Archaic.

Careful; diligent in making something with attention to detail.

Made with unusual care and intricacy.

Contents

Introduction

In July 2023, Elon Musk hosted a live broadcast with eleven young recruits to announce his ninth and newest company, xAI. Musk’s men wanted to build artificial intelligence (AI) that could reason and make discoveries that might help us understand the universe.

Led by Igor Babuschkin, they spoke of their passion for math, physics, and logic and their mission to create a general-purpose problem-solving machine. Greg Yang spoke of his fascination with free will, Gödel, and quantum mechanics. Kyle Kosic mentioned the need to give other companies some competition and not to be distracted by the political and social issues of the day. Ross Nordeen was the last to speak and highlighted the importance of creating tools to ask the right questions.

A slick, corporate presentation this was not. These engineers were clones of Musk—quirky, intense, and formidably bright—although he noted they were “reluctant to be self-promotional” and so encouraged them to “brag a little.”1 What Musk was saying to the audience listening in was that if you think like him or the other speakers and want to be part of such an elite team, come and work at xAI.

This launch also provided a window onto Musk’s own deeply entrenched obsession with the meaning of life. Musk told listeners that his two best subjects when young were computer science and physics. He nearly pursued a career in physics, which he loves as a way to understand the nature of reality, but he opted instead for engineering. Initially, he leaned toward computers as a way to make an impact, but then he shifted his focus to physical objects with SpaceX and Tesla, and later from atoms back to bits. Musk proceeded to riff on the fragility of civilization, consciousness, and how AI might one day shed light on mysteries like the existence of aliens and dark matter.

Musk also spoke of his hero and favorite philosopher, Douglas Adams, famous for the absurd joke that 42 is the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Musk explained how Adams had taught him that the hardest part of understanding the universe is formulating the right questions. The tweet to announce the broadcast had even made a joke out of its date, noting that July 12, 2023, equated to “7 + 12 + 23 = 42.”2

How would Musk’s company differ from the other AI companies? He wanted it to be more like him. He aspired for his own biological “neural nets” to be maximally truth-seeking, and he felt that artificial “neural nets” should be developed in the same way. Why? “If the goal of AI is curiosity, aka understanding the universe,” he posted on X, “then it will aide humanity, because we are more interesting than not-humanity.”3 Truth-seeking AI, he was convinced, would be the safest form of AI.

. . .

Musk is curious in every sense of the word. First of all, he is curious in the strange sense of the word. He named three of his children X Æ A-XII, Exa Dark Sideræl, and Techno Mechanicus, together with their mother, Claire Boucher. He sends thousands of tweets that enrapture his fans and appall his critics. He can be goofy, posting memes, and yet quick-tempered and callous. And he breaks all business conventions by running very flat corporate structures, which he replicates across multiple organizations, while sending up traditional executive titles by calling himself “Technoking,” “Chief Twit,” or “White House Tech Support.”

But Musk is even stranger than we realize, because he is curious in the inquisitive sense of the word to such a degree that he calls it a religion. His curiosity about the universe directly motivates him to embark on grand missions to solve fundamental problems across communications, energy, transportation, and computation, and even to get involved in politics to take on beliefs that he thinks threaten his missions.

The way he accomplishes this is by immersing himself in the design and engineering of his products. He is curious in the old-fashioned careful sense of the word. He engages in the minutest details of the design and engineering of his products, both software and hardware. When describing the production of the Cybertruck, for example, he drew an analogy with LEGO, noting that it was his “favorite example of how extreme precision does not need to be expensive, it is mostly about caring”4 [my italics].

The end products are often futuristic and strange, although, whereas curious once emphasized complexity and intricacy, his products are stranger in their simplicity, like his steel, straight-edged Cybertruck or, even more so, his Cybercab, which has no pedals or steering wheel.

Like many strange people, Musk is called names like monstrous, grotesque, and freakish, which highlight his differentness. His critics variously say that he is a huckster, a man-child, a sociopath, a megalo-maniac, and a fascist. For all the weird things he does, though, it is his obsessive drive and creativity that truly make him a curiosity.

As physicist and entrepreneur Casey Handmer wrote, Musk is enigmatic because it is hard to relate to someone who “thinks in physics and math” and is preoccupied with problems that, in most cases, he is the “first person in history to ever encounter.”5 Accordingly, Bill Gates, for example, acknowledged that, “You can feel whatever you want about Elon’s behavior, but there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science and innovation.”6 Jensen Huang, CEO and founder of Nvidia, also described Musk as being “singular in this understanding of engineering and construction and large systems and marshaling resources.”7 This is no ordinary person.

Musk’s biographer Walter Isaacson summed it up when he wrote that Musk is “driven by mission more than any person I’ve ever seen, and it’s not only mission, it’s cosmic missions,” and this comes from someone who has studied a wide range of people, including Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Jennifer Doudna. He says Musk’s mission is “the most deeply ingrained thing in him,” even though he knows that might sound naive.8

Journalist and Musk expert Tim Higgins identified this too. He wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2024 that, to many young men, Musk is a hero because he represents something more precious than wealth: purpose.9 In fact, Musk saw the article on X and replied, “What is life without purpose? But there is a purpose! It is to expand to the stars and thereby understand the Universe.”10 Agree with him or not, this is not how a regular businessperson speaks. It is key, however, to understanding what makes him tick.

. . .

Musk is so different from most other people that the only way to make sense of him is to consider him in his own terms. That is my goal with this book: to lay out the unique sequence of beliefs that make Musk such a curious person. There are nine beliefs, organized loosely around his philosophy of life, his companies, and his politics. A common theme among all nine is that Musk goes against the grain and never relents.

The list is subjective, but it draws on Musk’s own words, across tens of thousands of tweets and scores of public interviews that he has given. This is not a straightforward task, as Musk’s use of words can be very confusing. Most of the time he is surprisingly literal, and when he switches, say, from being serious to silly or from technical details to hyperbole, that is easy enough to follow. But sometimes it is not always so obvious whether he is being literal or ironic or rhetorical. His intent can be readily misconstrued and so one of the objectives of this book is to show on such occasions what he is “doing” when he is “saying” something.11

Each chapter looks at the context of his thinking, considering the influence of novelists, philosophers, politicians, fellow technologists, and public opinion on the X platform. This reveals that Musk can only be understood by looking at how his beliefs developed and how they build on one another. The order of the beliefs matters. Though each idea is key, how they are linked is more important.

The first third of the book—“The Convert”—focuses on three beliefs that shaped Musk’s philosophy of life and how they mark him out as different to most people: seek meaning through better questions; assume you are wrong and try to be less wrong; and challenge yourself by loving humanity.

Musk firmly believes that “in order to be highly motivated, you have to have some philosophical foundation.”12 And he often describes Douglas Adams, Isaac Asimov, and the importance of physics as being foundational to his thinking.13 He explains his three-point religion: the universe is the answer; we need to find the questions that will better make sense of it; and we must increase the scope and scale of human consciousness to do so. Yet few people really believe this because it sounds so bizarre. Musk himself describes his own thinking as niche and esoteric.

Sometimes Musk’s philosophizing can sound like sci-fi storytelling, but I argue that he is for the most part sincere. We see how a combination of being on the spectrum and severe childhood trauma contributed to Musk’s mixture of existential angst and hyperrational thinking. And we understand how they were reconciled by Douglas Adams’s positive reframing of the question of life’s meaning in a way that would lead to his lifelong obsession with human consciousness.

Part II of the book—“The Missionary”—focuses on how he gave creative expression to his angst and his rationality by applying three powerful, related beliefs: find purpose in creating; missions need corporations; and leaving Earth makes the universe more human. If Part I is about the making of his new religion, Part II is about how he puts it into practice. Musk may feel a lack of purpose from the belief that we humans are not created with any design, but he can find some meaning by designing and making things for others that have a life of their own.

Musk once denied he was really a businessman, claiming, “I’m sure probably lots of analysts on Wall Street would agree with that.”14 While he is not immune to the appeal of wealth and power, and has a monumental ego, he is first and foremost an engineer. It is his intensity and courage to defy received wisdom that combine with natural intellectual gifts to make him exceptional at building technology. Unlike most businesspeople, his companies are not simply a means to sell stuff and make money. Unlike most people who think of themselves as acting for humanity, he uses technology and markets. And unlike nearly everyone, he thinks of consciousness in a cosmic context and over the very long term, as symbolized by a city on Mars.

Part III of the book—“The Crusader”—focuses on how Musk went on offense to defend his core religious beliefs in society at large: put truth-seeking before tribe; protect the right to offend; and AI is inhuman—make it curious. Having practiced his religion in the real world of physics and markets, he takes affront at what he sees as untested secular religions that oppose his. In particular, he sees political correctness, compromise on free speech, and complacency about the risks of AI as failures of critical thinking, which undermine curiosity and creativity and are now being programmed into our technology platforms. Here Musk’s existential anxiety kicks in, and he anoints himself the standard bearer for rationality in American culture.

Musk’s views, in turn, pushed him into politics, but he is not one of those businessmen like Michael Bloomberg or Mitt Romney who ran for office because they thought they would be great at governing. In that sense, he is more like Ross Perot. He feels the need to speak up when he perceives that everyone else has succumbed to what he considers to be groupthink: societies must maintain a field of play in which people like him—people who are different—are free to operate. As the launch of xAI shows, through it all, his mind is never far from the question of life’s meaning, Douglas Adams, and the rational pursuit of truth, which may come as a disappointment to some on the right who are drawn to him in the mistaken belief that he thinks the way they do.

. . .

Taking all nine beliefs together, I contend that there is an internal consistency to Musk, from founding SpaceX and Tesla to becoming political, buying Twitter, building AGI, and even having fourteen children (and counting). Each of the nine beliefs is not unique to Musk, but the fervor with which he applies himself to each and every one of them is. Curiosity is the key to understanding him. It makes him hard to categorize, and harder still to emulate, but it is the only way to explain his extraordinary drive, self-belief, and inventiveness.

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Notes

1. Elon Musk, discussion about xAI hosted by Elon Musk, X Spaces, July 14, 2023, https://x.com/xai/status/1679945247340793856.

2. Elon Musk, “7 + 12 + 23 = 42,” X/Twitter, July 12, 2023, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1679182035645235200.

3. Elon Musk, “If the goal of AI is curiosity, aka understanding the universe, then it will aide humanity, because we are more interesting than not-humanity,” X/Twitter, August 7, 2023, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1688482706454163456.

4. Elon Musk, “LEGO is my favorite example of how extreme precision does not need to be expensive, it is mostly about caring,” X/Twitter, February 16, 2023, https://x. com/elonmusk/status/1626078874441510915.

5. Casey Handmer, “Elon Musk Is Not Understood,” Casey Handmer’s Blog, January 2, 2024, https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/01/02/elon-musk-is-not-understood/.

6. Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023), 439.

7. Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner, “Welcome Jensen Huang,” October 13, 2024, in BG2 Pod, podcast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUrCR4jQQg8.

8. Lex Fridman, “Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin,” September 10, 2023, in Lex Fridman Podcast, podcast, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=aGOV5R7M1Js.

9. Tim Higgins, “On the Campaign Trail with Elon Musk: Offering Young Men an American Dream,” The Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2024, https://www. wsj.com/tech/on-the-campaign-trail-with-elon-musk-offering-young-men-an-american-dream-05bd0349?.

10. Elon Musk, “What is life without purpose? But there is a purpose! It is to expand to the stars and thereby understand the Universe,” X/Twitter, October 21, 2024, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1848239368353231005.

11. This is the approach of the Cambridge School of history and in particular Professor Quentin Skinner, who argues that moral and political philosophers of the past can only be understood in their own terms. Their beliefs should not be taken out of context. Rather, you have to try to put yourself in their shoes and see the world as if you were a contemporary in order to understand them; how, for example, they may have written to agree or disagree with those who came before them or to debate with their peers. This naturally raises the question of whether an author’s words should be taken literally or whether their writing might have been, for example, rhetorical, provocative, or impulsive. It is the job of historians, therefore, not to impose their own terms but to inquire what their subjects were “doing” when they were “saying” something.

12. Ted Cruz, “Elon Musk Joins Verdict—Part 2,” March 19, 2025, in Verdict with Ted Cruz, podcast, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKxgaxAVDfM.

13. For example, Musk wrote, “Should prob articulate philosophy underlying my actions. It’s pretty simple & mostly influenced by Douglas Adams & Isaac Asimov,” X/Twitter, June 15, 2018, https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1007665949044928517.

14. Elon Musk, interview by Gayle King, CBS Mornings, CBS, April 13, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-tesla-model-3-problems-interview-today-2018-04-13/.