Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs revolutionized multiple industries during his life, but Walter Isaacson, the biographer of both Jobs' and Elon Musk, thinks that the Tesla Inc. CEO is in a "league of his own."
What Happened: In a conversation with Lex Fridman, Isaacson dived into Musk's thought process and how he manages time between his personal life, and his professional life where he manages Tesla, SpaceX, and X, formerly Twitter, among others.
Isaacson, who has had a close peek into the lives of both the tech titans, thinks "Musk is in a league of his own in the way he does it" as far as time management is concerned.
"First of all, Steve Jobs had to run Pixar and Apple for a while, but Musk every couple of hours is switching his mindset from how to implant the Neuralink chip and what will the robot that implants it in the brain look like and how fast can we make it move?"
Isaacson recalled an incident where Musk went to the SpaceX Starbase in Boca Chica, Texas, to think about how to fix a valve in the Raptor engine with a methane leak issue.
"All the engineers in that room, I assume, or thinking about, 'This guy just bought Twitter, should we say something?'"
Isaacson says Musk then went to a roadside joint in Brownsville with his brother Kimbal Musk to do nothing but listen to the music.
Subscribe to the Benzinga Tech Trends newsletter to get all the latest tech developments delivered to your inbox.
Musk's Strength, As Well As Weakness, Is This
Isaacson marveled at Musk's ability to multitask, saying this is one of his strengths as well as weaknesses.
"One of his strengths and sort of weaknesses in a way is in a given day, he'll focus serially, sequentially, on many different things."
"He's a serial tasker, which means focuses intensely on a task for an hour," Isaacson added, and Musk now has a comeback – he says he switches context every five minutes now, and sometimes in just 30 seconds.
Actually, I'm switching context roughly every 5 mins on average and sometimes every 30 secs if going through texts/email.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 13, 2024
A full hour on a single subject would be a long time.
Check out more of Benzinga's Consumer Tech coverage by following this link.
Photos courtesy: Shutterstock and Wikimedia