That didn’t work well on Levchin, who was shielded from irony flamethrowers by his earnestness. He had a good radar for detecting Musk’s exaggerations. During the merger, Musk kept insisting that X.com had close to twice as many users, and Levchin would check with its engineers and get the real number. “Elon didn’t just exaggerate, he made it up,” Levchin says. It was what his father would have done.
And yet, Levchin began to marvel at the counterexamples, such as when Musk astounded him by knowing things. At one point Levchin and his engineers were wrestling with a difficult problem involving the Oracle database they were using. Musk poked his head in the room and, even though his expertise was with Windows and not Oracle, immediately figured out the context of the conversation, gave a precise and technical answer, and walked out without waiting for confirmation. Levchin and his team went back to their Oracle manuals and looked up what Musk had described. “One by one, we all said, Shit, he’s right,'” Levchin recalls. “Elon will say crazy stuff, but every once in a while, he’ll surprise you by knowing way more than you do about your own specialty. I think a huge part of the way he motivates people are these displays of sharpness, which people just don’t expect from him, because they mistake him for a bullshitter or goofball.