For Elon Musk, chaos may be more than a management style: His ex-wife says it’s where he feels comfortable.
Justine Musk described the billionaire’s appetite for intensity in a teaser posted Tuesday for Kara Swisher’s interview with her and filmmaker Alex Gibney ahead of the release of Gibney’s documentary “MUSK.”
“I once described him as somebody who can, like, jump off the edge of a cliff and, you know, invent a parachute on the way down,” Justine Musk told Swisher about her ex-husband, “Like, I think he thrives on chaos.”
Justine Musk, an author and the mother of Vivian Jenna Wilson, said the Tesla CEO’s language often casts challenges as existential emergencies, with an element of performance.
“Everything is life and death,” she said. “And I think he really lives like that. He really lives with that pitch of intensity.”
That description echoes inside Elon Musk’s companies.
At xAI, current and former employees told Business Insider that Musk’s growing involvement led to abrupt shifts in priorities, intensive “war rooms,” and a group chat of more than 300 engineers. Researchers would interrupt ongoing work to address concerns he flagged.
“Because the company is so small, everything is a fire drill,” one former worker previously told Business Insider.
Musk’s willingness to make sweeping changes and quickly reverse some of them predates his AI startup. After slashing Twitter’s workforce following his 2022 takeover, he said that some cuts had gone too far.
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Justine Musk said her former husband’s intensity can draw others in before they recognize what’s happening.
“He brings it with him, and he has a way of sucking you into it, and at first it can look a lot like excitement,” Justine Musk said. “I always assume that there’s a method to his madness, you know, a lot of sleight of hand sometimes.”