Elon Musk’s Biographer Says the Billionaire Is Sometimes ‘Brutal,’ Enters ‘Demon Mode’

Elon Musk’s biographer said the entrepreneur sometimes goes into “demon mode — a state that makes him display a “real lack of empathy” in order to be highly productive.

Walter Isaacson said during a Twitter Spaces interview that the term for Musk’s “dark” side was coined by his former girlfriend singer Grimes, according to Insider (she didn’t respond to an inquiry from the publication). Musk can be “unpleasant” when he’s in such a headspace, but he also “gets sh** done,” the writer said she told him.

The biographer said Musk has a “maniacal sense of urgency” that has the ability to scare some of his employees, especially when they don’t match his energy, according to Insider. “He’d go dark and I’d know that he was just going to rip that person apart,” Isaacson said. He added that this happened often when Musk first took over at Twitter and implemented mass layoffs. His outbursts were at times “uncomfortable” to observe.

“He is just brutal,” Isaacson reportedly said. “The thing that I noticed is that once he finishes doing it—and it was never physical and it was almost done in a flat monotone—but he would just really attack people and then a few days later, if they absorbed the lesson, he’d forget about it. It would be as if he went from becoming Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde and then didn’t even think that much or remember that much of how tough he had been on people.”

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Musk explained to the writer that it’s a form of “egotism” to desire to be empathetic to one person and jeopardize the larger mission. The biographer says his book will explain the complexity of Musk and how the personality of the world’s richest person fits in with his work at Tesla and SpaceX.

Isaacson watched Musk’s daily life for two years for his forthcoming book, according to Insider. The journalist, who plans to release his work on Musk in September, has written biographies on Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci. He said in the Twitter Spaces interview that many successful people have a “dark streak,” Insider reported. Because they aren’t preoccupied with empathy, they are able to pay attention to a larger mission.