One of Elon Musk’s favorite video games taught him the ‘life lesson’ that ’empathy is not an asset.’ It’s the opposite of what most CEOs preach

In recent years, Isaacson reveals, Musk has become particularly obsessed with the multiplayer strategy game Polytopia, which describes itself as a “strategy game about building a civilization and going into battle.”

In fact, it became such a staple of Musk’s life—he played it with his partners, coworkers, and brother—that he even made a list of the life lessons the game taught him, which he called Polytopia Life Lessons. The very first rule: “Empathy is not an asset.”

To hear those close to Musk tell it, the game’s importance to his leadership style is more than just inference. “He said it would teach me to be a CEO like he was,” Elon’s brother Kimbal Musk told Isaacson about its influence.

Musk’s indifference to the concept of empathy is far from a surprise for anyone who’s followed his career, but to see it codified in a series of lifestyle philosophies, coming from the author who wrote the definitive biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, is still notable. But as Isaacson also notes in the book, some of our greatest business leaders show the same bluntness. He relayed, for instance, that one of Musk’s favorite phrases was also a common refrain from Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates for underperformers: “That’s just the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” This also contrasts with the leadership fashions of the last decade, when empathy has taken center stage. 

Here’s a closer look at Musk’s Polytopia-based principles, and how the world’s richest man is swimming against the tide. 

“Empathy is not an asset”

Kimbal Musk told Isaacson that his brother regularly counsels him to avoid being overly empathetic in his work. “He knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business,” Kimbal Musk says. “Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?” 

The other life lessons that Musk gleaned from Polytopia reveal a gamer’s mindset in all things, as seen with rule No. 2: “Play life like a game.” He adds to the list: Do not fear losing, be proactive, optimize every turn, double down, and pick your battles. But still, in the final rule, he cautions himself to “unplug at times.” Musk’s love for Polytopia has been reported previously, from interviews with Grimes and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, but not Musk’s life lessons from it.

Kimbal has been making similar points about his brother for years, such as when Elon was named Time’s 2021 Person of the Year. “He is a savant when it comes to business, but his gift is not empathy with people,” Kimbal said at the time. 

Over the course of his career, Musk has been known for his angry outbursts. One time, he berated an employee who had (unbeknownst to Musk) recently lost their infant daughter for not knowing the specifics of a part needed to build one of SpaceX’s Raptor engines. Isaacson writes that Musk twice encouraged the employee to resign in the meeting and told him, “You have very badly failed.” 

Of the incident, Musk would later say, “I give people hard-core feedback, mostly accurate, and I try not to do it in a way that’s ad hominem. I try to criticize the action, not the person.” 

The next day, the engineer in question performed admirably in a meeting and became one of Musk’s go-to sources for questions about the costs of engine parts. That same employee said working for Musk is “one of the most exciting things you can do,” but they acknowledged it happened within a workplace culture that prioritized results and commitment to a lofty mission above all else. “You definitely realize that you’re a tool being used to achieve this larger objective, and that’s great,” the employee told Isaacson. “But sometimes tools get worn down and he feels he can just replace that tool.” 

Empathetic leadership has gone mainstream in corporate America

Empathy has been increasingly touted by management coaches since at least 2007, when Stanford Graduate School professor Robert Sutton published an article in the Harvard Business Review outlining his “no asshole rule.” But it really started to become a hot workplace topic around 2020, when the pandemic blurred the lines between people’s professional and personal lives in a radically new way. The murder of George Floyd thrust the struggles of Black employees to the fore the same year, making the need for empathy a requirement for every member of the C-suite. 

Leaders all over the business world adopted empathy as a key principle for running their organizations. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, for example, said the experience of having a son with cerebral palsy taught him about empathy in his home life, which he then brought with him to work. 

“Empathy makes you a better innovator,” he said. “If I look at the most successful products we [at Microsoft] have created, it comes with that ability to meet the unmet, unarticulated needs of customers.”

But empathy is also shown to yield genuine results. In an EY survey from 2021, 89% of employees said empathy leads to better leadership, and 88% said it could inspire positive change in the workplace. It’s also a valuable recruitment tool—or, for those who fail to implement it across their workplaces, a dangerous way to bleed talent. Just over half of respondents in the EY survey said they left their previous job because of a lack of empathy about their difficulties at work, while 49% said a former employer’s lack of empathy toward their personal lives had caused them to leave.  

For most workplaces, managing with empathy has gone from an exception or a welcome perk to a minimum requirement. It’s also become a standard for driving business results. 

“Organizations that invest time and resources into driving short-term, company-focused efficiency and effectiveness without empathy will fail to survive in this new, incredibly interconnected era,” wrote Arianna Huffington and Tony Bates, CEO of telecom company Genesys and author of the management book Empathy in Action, in a commentary for Fortune. 

As empathy has grown into a more common and widely desired leadership trait—alongside strategic thinking or financial acumen—experts have agreed that it can be learned. Empathy can “100% be changed and developed over time,” executive coach Peter Bregman told Fortune in November 2021. “I’ve done it, and I’ve seen it. In fact, once that skill is developed, it becomes hard not to empathize with people.” 

And yet Musk insists he’s acting with the greatest empathy—for the future of humanity itself.

Musk’s empathy for humanity

While Elon Musk is known not to prioritize empathy in personal relationships, he consistently exhibits a broader empathy toward what he perceives as a greater mass of humanity. One of his previous biographers, the journalist Ashlee Vance, said Musk had the “weirdest kind of empathy” of anyone she’d met, because he exhibits it for all of mankind. 

Isaacson came to the same conclusion: Musk is capable of thinking broadly about the needs of the human race, if not often individual humans who work for him. The SpaceX employee who he famously chewed out agreed, telling Isaacson, “Elon cares a lot about humanity, but humanity in more of a very macro sense.” 

For example, Musk has often talked about Tesla as more than a car company, as something that he considers critical to mitigating climate change. 

“Our role is as a guiding light, helping bring these cars to market five or ten years faster than they would have otherwise—which could make an important difference for saving the species,” Musk told the New Yorker in 2009, two years before Tesla released its Model S sedan. 

Tesla has since sold around 4.5 million electric cars, becoming one of the first companies to mainstream electric vehicles and present a viable future for an entirely emissions-less automotive industry. 

This comes in contrast to Tesla employees making a series of ongoing allegations about difficult working conditions. Tesla employees reportedly slept on the floor after 12-hour shifts, and in April the company was ordered to pay $3.2 million to settle a racial discrimination lawsuit against a Black employee. Musk’s disregard for individuals in the pursuit of serving humanity even affected the physical safety of Tesla’s factory employees, where, according to Isaacson, his efforts to speed up production have led to an injury rate that is 30% higher than the rest of the industry. 

At the moment, Musk’s particular approach has reaped financial rewards of historic proportions. As of last month, he currently owned about 411 million shares of Tesla, valued at about $90 billion, according to the Nasdaq. He’s also the largest shareholder of the privately owned SpaceX, which reportedly achieved a valuation of $150 billion in July. Still the world’s richest man, his net worth is estimated at $269 billion by Forbes. He has many assets, in other words, even if empathy isn’t one of them.