On a visit to Tesla’s Berlin factory, he got so wrapped up in Polytopia that he delayed meetings with the local
managers. His mother, who was on the trip, scolded him. “Yeah, I was wrong,” he conceded. “But it’s the best game ever.” During the ride home on his plane, he played it all night.
A couple of months later, in Cabo for Christiana San Lucas for Musk’s birthday party, he spent hours by himself in his room or in the corner playing the game. “Come on, you got to come hang one she pleaded, but he refused. Kimbal had learned the game in order to bond closer with his brother. “He said it would teach me how to be a CEO like he was,” Kimbal says. “We called them Polytopia Life Lessons.” Among them:
Empathy is not an asset. “He knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business,” Kimbal says. “Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?”
Play life like a game. “I have this feeling,” Zilis once told Musk, “that as a kid you were playing one of these strategy games and your mom unplugged it, and you just didn’t notice, and you kept playing life as if it were that game.”
Do not fear losing. “You will lose,” Musk says. “It will hurt the first fifty times. When you get used to losing, you will play each game with less emotion.” You will be more fearless, take more risks.
Be proactive. “I’m a litle bit Canadian pacifist and reactive,” Zillis says. My gameplay was a hundred percent reactive to what everyone else was doing, as opposed to thinking through my best strategy.” She realized that, like many women, this mirrored the way she behaved at work. Both Musk and Mark Juncosa told her that she could never win unless she took charge of setting the strategy.
Otimize every turn. In Polytopia, you get only thirty turns, so you need to optimize each one. “Like in Polytopia, you only get a set number of turns in life,” Musk says. “If we let a few of them slide, we will never get to Mars.”
Double down. “Elon plays the game by always pushing the edge of what’s possible,” Zilis says. And he’s always doubling down and putting everything back in the game to grow and grow. And it’s just like he’s just done his whole life.”
Pick your battles. In Polytopia, you might find yourself surrounded by six or more tribes, all taking swipes at you. If you swipe back at all of them, you’re going to lose. Musk never fully mastered that lesson, and Zilis found herself coaching him on it. “Dude, like, everyone’s swiping at you right now, but if you swipe back at too many, you’ll run out of resources,” she told him. She called that approach “front minimization. “It was a lesson she also tried and failed to teach him about his behavior on Twitter.
Unplug at times. “I had to stop playing because it was destroying my marriage,” Kimbal says. Shivon Zilis also deleted Polytopia from her phone. So did Grimes. And, for a while, Musk did so as well. “I had to take Polytopia off my phone because it was taking up too many brain cycles,” he says. “I started dreaming about Polytopia.” But the lesson about unplugging was another one that Musk never mastered. After a few months, he put the
game back onto his phone and was playing again.