Read the Lines when Musk Speaks…

… You Don’t Need to Read Between Them

August 13, 2025

By Charles Steel

“I am not really a businessman.” 2018

“My favorite philosopher is Douglas Adams.” 2019

“SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, and the Boring Company are philanthropy.” 2022

“My religion, for the lack of a better word, is one of curiosity.” 2025

These are all views expressed by Elon Musk and they are so unconventional that most people just don’t believe him when he says such things. They do not sound plausible, especially coming from the richest person in the world. He must be saying them for effect?

Musk also says things that are shocking because they breach what we consider to be the norms of civilized discourse. He makes ad hominem attacks, for example, against George Soros, whom he compared to the comic-book villain Magneto, and against the long-dead economist John Maynard Keynes whom he described as “a great evil.” He even went so far as to say publicly of his own child, “My son, Xavier is dead, killed by the woke mind virus.”

I am convinced, however, that Musk actually means most of what he says most of the time. As Musk himself insisted in a leaked all-hands meeting at Twitter, “I tend to be extremely literal in what I say. So aspirationally, one does not need to read between the lines; one can simply read the lines.”

He doesn’t say or do what we expect him to. He is just very, very different.

A Fresh Perspective on Musk

I set out, therefore, to write a book – The Curious Mind of Elon Musk – to examine Musk in his own terms, looking at his philosophy of life, his life’s work and his more recent ventures into politics. What emerges is a person who is even more different than he first appears.

When we read between the lines with someone like Musk, the mistake we often make is to project onto them our own way of thinking and thereby miss the essence of what they say. Musk, for example, says, “I’m not trying to be anyone’s savior. I am just trying to think about the future and not be sad.” Even so, his fans elevate him to a savior figure, and his critics insist he is delusional and has a savior complex.

My research set out with no agenda to push, merely to present Musk in his own words and let readers form their own conclusions. I was aided, however, by three personal insights.

First, if we want to truly understand someone, we must guard against the tendency to interpret them through our own frames of reference. This was drilled into me at university where I was initiated in the Cambridge School of history and in particular the work of Professor Quentin Skinner. The beliefs of moral and political philosophers of the past, I was told, must 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. It is the job of the historian to work out when to read the lines and when to read between them. This defined my method vis-à-vis Musk.

Second, I recognize how Musk combines the attributes of people from both the business and nonprofit worlds but belongs to neither. Through working as a private equity investor for twenty years, I have studied hundreds of companies and worked closely with more than a dozen CEOs, and I can confidently say that Musk is not a regular businessman. He likes to have his hands on the products, working with engineers, constantly pushing the limits. And his drive is unimaginable. I used to work 80-100-hour weeks as an M&A analyst at Goldman Sachs in my early twenties and I only lasted a few years. It’s inhuman. Yes, there are a lot of workaholics in business but no one buys Twitter or starts xAI in their fifties for money when they are already working around the clock.

Alongside business, I have also worked in the nonprofit world, both in the Middle East and at the helm of a fundraising entity in London. I have witnessed how people in the sector are passionate about helping others but it is also fair to say that more attention needs to be given to innovation and efficiency. I certainly don’t believe Musk when he said, “USAID is a ball of worms,” but I think he was sincere when he said that philanthropy is extremely hard if you care about “the reality of goodness instead of the perception of it,” and that “Starlink will do more to educate and lift people out of poverty than any NGO ever.”

Third, I have long had a mild anxiety that I should be doing more with my life. And when I became a father, I regretted that my late mother never got to meet my newborn son. By now, though, I have come to realize that I am a living bridge between the two. And so, when Musk says he had an existential crisis and was inspired by Douglas Adams, I am inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. I suspect he figured out, even as a teenager, that consciousness allows us to connect those who came before with those who will come after.

Fortunately, when it came to analyzing Musk, there were tens of thousands of posts on X, and scores of interviews for me to pore over. Now, having done so, I am more convinced than ever that Musk only makes sense when you consider him in his own terms.

Religious about Curiosity

What makes Musk so different is that he is a unique blend of existential angst and extreme rationality, two characteristics that don’t normally go together. In his case, they gave rise to his self-declared philosophy of curiosity: (i) the universe is the answer; (ii) we need to find the questions that will better make sense of it; and (iii) we must increase the scope and scale of human consciousness to do so. It may sound somewhat absurd but here one can read the lines more than you would think. It may not motivate you but it is the only way to explain how Musk has been so productive over three decades.

Musk has some similarities with DeepMind founder and Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis. In a recent podcast with Lex Fridman, Hassabis said that he has long been obsessed with the nature of reality. “I don’t really understand why the average person doesn’t worry about this stuff more,” he said. “I’ve always had this sort of screaming at me in my face and it’s getting louder.” Musk is the same, except that, while Hassabis is a courteous, English fellow, Musk has a much more willful personality. This could lead to self-destructiveness in a lot of cases, but Musk manages to use it as fuel and channel it into being supremely creative. The results include Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, OpenAI (the nonprofit version) and most recently xAI. These are mission-driven organizations. Musk’s fans might not pay so much attention to the angst but it is what makes him maniacal in his work.

For his numerous critics, Musk’s angst provides ammunition for the belief that he is a warped human being who routinely lies. He is certainly not an angel. He does, for example, over-promise on how soon he will deliver, whether that’s for Tesla’s full self-driving or manned missions to Mars. Here one does have to read between the lines a bit. Most executives will provide timelines with some cushion so they don’t look bad if they miss them. Musk is the opposite. He shares the very aggressive goals he sets for himself and his teams, knowing that the value of achieving the seemingly impossible will dwarf the cost of being late, and he has a track record to back this up.

Musk also says many reprehensible things online. Notoriously, for example, he responded to a spurious article about Nancy Pelosi’s husband, tweeting, “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” Here again, one should read between the lines. He was trying to create mischief for the Democrats but, even then, he was careful to be literal by prefacing the comment with “there is a tiny possibility.” Musk can be merciless and politics definitely does not bring out the best in him, but he might counter that most politicians deliberately mislead the public most of the time.

A Curious Case

Zooming out, Musk just doesn’t care that much about fitting in the way that most of us do. It is the same trait that helped him to become a brilliant engineer. More shocking to him is that his own views are considered heretical. And so he doesn’t hold back. In fact, he relishes the controversy. If he thinks that he is closer to the truth, he will not rephrase his words to make them more palatable to others.

Most people might hesitate to say that their son is dead when their daughter changed their gender identity. For Musk, however, “deadnaming” is the term for using someone’s pre-transition name and so he was being literal. Neither would most people in Musk’s position try to argue that Jewish philanthropists who support NGOs that encourage illegal immigration can inadvertently encourage the immigration of those who are anti-Western and antisemitic. Musk, however, did. He had already likened George Soros to the mutant enemy of the X-Men who happened to be a Holocaust survivor. “I’ll say what I want to say,” he insisted to David Faber, “and if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it.” It’s no wonder that he is such a polarizing figure.

By the same token, most people would not blow up a close relationship with the President of the United States over a budget bill. Musk described Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill as “a disgusting abomination,” and refused to back down. The talking heads tried to read between the lines and blame the fallout on a range of causes from EV credits to the warring of oversized egos. Surely no one would jeopardize their access to such power because they thought that endlessly increasing national debt was evil? But how many people would rebuke Keynes in a similar way? Not many. But Musk did. There is a chain of thought in his mind that connects debt, civilization, rockets, consciousness, truth and the meaning of life.

It is easy to love or hate Musk. Understanding him, though, is harder. The deeper you look, the curiouser and curiouser he becomes.

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This is the first in a series of blogs on How Elon Musk Thinks. If you are interested in receiving blog updates, please sign up.

The Curious Mind of Elon Musk: 9 Ways He Thinks Differently will be published in 2026 by Greenleaf Book Group.