walter isaacson elon musk biography release date

Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography will hit the streets in September

Walter Isaacson, who has written critically acclaimed biographies of Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin and more, will release his next tome, focused on Elon Musk on September 12.

Simon & Schuster has started taking preorders for the 688-page book that, based on the preview the publisher offered, seems to offer a sympathetic look at the controversial owner of Twitter , Tesla and SpaceX .

“When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies,” the book’s Website reads. “One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.”

That childhood, the publisher says, left a lasting impact on Musk’s psyche, turning him into “a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.”

Musk and Isaacson agreed to work together on the bio in 2021—and Musk Tweeted news of the book roughly 20 minutes after they had spoken, before Isaacson’s agent was even aware . (In that same thread, Musk did not rule out writing his own autobiography one day.)

Isaacson spent the next two years attending meetings with Musk, speaking with his friends, family and rivals, and shadowing him as he went about his day.

At the beginning of last year, Simon & Schuster says, as he was secretly buying shares of Twitter, Musk told Isaacson: “I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life.”

Isaacson previously previewed the book in an interview with Kara Swisher and indicated Musk’s childhood would be an overriding them in his exploration of the entrepreneur.

“We start the book with this astonishingly difficult childhood in South Africa with a father who is Darth Vader and who still is still alive, but haunts Elon every day,” he said .

He also indicated he was braced for criticism about how Musk is portrayed.

“[He’s] the most interesting person on the planet right now doing the most interesting things and driving people crazy in the process,” said Isaacson. “And I’m just there to tell a narrative story that helps you understand it. It explains why things happened. And there’ll be people who say, ‘Oh, you explained it, so you are justifying this or that or the other.’ … I’m gonna get a lot of that.”

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of  Time . He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
• Length: 688 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982181284

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Raves and Reviews

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year "Whatever you think of Mr. Musk, he is a man worth understanding— which makes this a book worth reading." — The Economist "With Elon Musk , Walter Isaacson offers both an engaging chronicle of his subject’s busy life so far and some compelling answers..." — Wall Street Journal "Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk , published Monday, delivers as promised — a comprehensive, deeply reported chronicle of the world-shaping tech mogul’s life, a twin to the author’s similarly thick 2011 biography of Steve Jobs . Details ranging from the personally salacious to the geopolitically volatile have already made the rounds — the rare example of a major book publication causing a news cycle in its own right...What Isaacson’s biography reveals through its personalized lens on Musk’s work with Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, and more is not only what Musk wants, but how and why he plans to do it. The portrait that emerges is one that resembles a hard-charging, frequently alienating Gilded Age-style captain of industry, with a particular fixation on AI that ties everything together....Isaacson’s book is like a decoder ring, tying the mercurial Musk’s various obsessions into a coherent worldview with a startlingly concrete goal at its center." — Politico "[The book] has everything you'd expect from a book on Musk—stories of tragedy, triumph, and turmoil.... While the stories are fascinating and guaranteed to spark a mountain of coverage, founders and entrepreneurs will also unearth valuable lessons." — Inc. "Isaacson has gathered information from the man’s admirers and critics. He lays all of it out.... The book is bursting with stories....A deeply engrossing tale of a spectacular American innovator. " — New York Journal of Books "One of the greatest biographers in America has written a massive book about the richest man in the world. This fast-paced biography, based on more than a hundred interviews...[is] a head-spinning tale about a vain, brilliant, sometimes cruel figure whose ambitions are actively shaping the future of human life." —Ron Charles on CBS Sunday Morning "A painstakingly excavation of the tortured unquiet mind of the world’s richest man… Isaacson’s book is not a soaring portrait of a captain of industry, but rather an exhausting ride through the life of a man who seems incapable of happiness." — The Sunday Times "An experienced biographer’s comprehensive study." —The Observer "Walter Isaacson’s all-access biography… Its portrait of the tech maverick is fascinating." —The Telegraph "Isaacson boils Musk down to two men… the result is a beat-by-beat book that follows him insider important rooms and explores obscure regions of his mind." —The Times

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‘I’m Not Trump’s Fan’ and Other Takeaways From a New Book on Elon Musk

The biography, by Walter Isaacson, portrays Mr. Musk as a complex, tortured figure.

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By Jeremy W. Peters ,  Niraj Chokshi and Benjamin Mullin

A new biography of Elon Musk portrays the billionaire entrepreneur as a complex, tortured figure whose brilliance is often overshadowed by his inability to relate on a human level to the people around him — his wives, his children and those on whom he relied to help develop the space exploration and electric car businesses that made him the wealthiest man on Earth.

Mr. Musk’s life so far — his difficult childhood in South Africa, his stormy romantic relationships, his success as a visionary who built SpaceX and Tesla, and his impetuous decision to buy Twitter — is detailed through scores of interviews with his family, friends, business associates and Mr. Musk himself.

The book, which will be released on Tuesday, is by Walter Isaacson, the journalist whose previous works have chronicled the lives of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin.

It opens with a quote from Mr. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, who once said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

The New York Times bought copies of the book at a retail store that was selling it in advance of its authorized release.

Twitter, Now Known as X

Mr. Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, after a surprise bid for the company and then a seeming reluctance to follow through with the deal.

Days after Twitter’s board approved the deal, Mr. Musk told his four teenage sons that he had purchased the social network to sway the next U.S. presidential election. “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?” he said. (It was a joke, Mr. Isaacson writes, but Mr. Musk’s sons still didn’t understand his rationale for buying Twitter, an app they rarely used.)

After acquiring Twitter, Mr. Musk and his lieutenants combed through its employees’ internal communications and social media posts, looking for signs of disloyalty, Mr. Isaacson writes. The “musketeers,” as Musk loyalists were known inside Twitter, searched Twitter’s Slack archives for keywords including “Elon,” and fired dozens of employees who had made snarky comments about Mr. Musk.

Mr. Musk staged a surprise raid on a Twitter data facility in Sacramento, Calif., last winter, shortly after acquiring the company. Mr. Musk had decided to move servers housed in the facility to another Twitter data center to cut costs, but Twitter’s infrastructure leaders warned him that moving the expensive equipment safely could take months. In a fit of anger, Mr. Musk decided to move the servers himself, enlisting a small team and a flock of moving vans to haul them away on Christmas Eve. (He later said he regretted the decision, which led to service outages.)

Personal Life

Mr. Musk’s sprawling family has been a source of comfort amid the frequent turmoil of his industry-spanning business interests, Mr. Isaacson writes. But his relationship with his father, Errol, is a source of trauma that remains with him.

Mr. Musk’s father is described as emotionally and physically abusive and is quoted speaking disparagingly of Black people. When Mr. Musk agreed in 2016 to meet his father, from whom he has been largely estranged, a friend recalls to Mr. Isaacson, “It was the only time I had ever seen Elon’s hands shaking.” Mr. Isaacson writes, “There are certain people who occupy a demon’s corner of Musk’s head space. They trigger him, turn him dark, and rouse a cold anger. His father is number one.”

While the musician Grimes, also known as Claire Boucher, was giving birth to his son X in May 2020, Mr. Musk took a picture of the delivery and shared it with his friends and family, including her father and brothers. Grimes was understandably horrified and scrambled to get it deleted. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset,” she told Mr. Isaacson.

Politics and Trump

Mr. Musk’s politics defy simple categorization. Despite his attacks on liberal critics, his rants against “woke” Democrats and his occasional promotion of far-right conspiracy theories, he is portrayed as more disillusioned with the leftward drift of the Democratic Party than he is a fan of Republicans.

Mr. Musk repeatedly professes not to be an admirer of former President Donald J. Trump, telling his biographer, “I’m not Trump’s fan. He’s disruptive.” Mr. Isaacson writes that Mr. Musk harbors a “deep disdain” for the former president “whom he considered a con man” and seemed, Mr. Musk says, “kind of nuts.”

But neither is he a Biden supporter, though he tells Mr. Isaacson that he would have voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 had he cast a ballot. (He decided not to vote because he was registered in California and considered it a waste because the state was not competitive in the presidential election.) Mr. Musk describes an encounter with Mr. Biden several years ago in which he came away unimpressed. “When he was vice president, I went to a lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over.”

Artificial Intelligence

Mr. Musk has long been worried about artificial intelligence, which he considers a potential existential threat. He was a co-founder of OpenAI before breaking ties with the organization in 2018, and recently announced he was forming a rival A.I. company, X.AI .

Mr. Musk “summoned” Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, to a meeting at Twitter’s headquarters in February 2023, shortly after the release of ChatGPT. Mr. Musk angrily asked Mr. Altman to “justify how he could legally transform a nonprofit funded by donations into a for-profit that could make millions.” The encounter, Mr. Isaacson writes, left Mr. Altman “pained.”

Mr. Musk’s decision to start X.AI came partly out of concerns about underpopulation. (He is the father of 10 children.) “The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was leveling off because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially,” Mr. Isaacson writes. Mr. Musk believed that “at some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.”

Mr. Musk’s gave X.AI’s early employees three goals: Create an A.I. chatbot capable of writing code, an A.I. chatbot trained to be politically neutral and an artificial intelligence that could reason and pursue truth. “You should be able to give it big tasks, such as ‘Build a better rocket engine,’” Mr. Musk told Mr. Isaacson.

Elon and the Media

Mr. Musk’s relationship with the media, which was already strained before he bought Twitter, reached new levels of tension after the deal was announced.

The “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David confronted Elon Musk at the wedding in 2022 of Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of the media conglomerate Endeavor, who had seated them at the same table. “Do you just want to murder kids in schools?” Mr. David asked Mr. Musk, grilling him on his support of Republican candidates in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 students dead. “No, no,” Mr. Musk replied, according to Mr. Isaacson. “I’m anti-kid murder.” Mr. Emanuel also seated the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, another Musk critic, at the same table. “It ended up being a microcosm of Twitter,” Mr. Isaacson wrote.

As Mr. Musk’s erratic tweets damaged Twitter’s relationship with advertisers, he sought counsel from boldfaced names in the media industry on how to repair the rift. One was David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, the Warner Bros. movie studio and CNN. They spoke for more than an hour. “Zaslav told him that he was doing self-destructive things that made it harder to attract brands that were aspirational. He should focus on improving the product by adding longer video offerings and making ads more effective.”

For years, Tesla has been the highest-profile business in Mr. Musk’s portfolio of companies, serving as a constant source of pride and stress.

The company’s early struggles contributed to a long, difficult period for Mr. Musk, one that took a physical and mental toll, he told Mr. Isaacson in a 2021 interview. “You can’t be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you,” Mr. Musk said. But he also acknowledged that he had found purpose under pressure: “When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated every day.”

Even as the company found success, it attracted critics in the form of short-sellers who bet against Tesla’s stock. That practice reached a fever pitch in 2018 as Tesla struggled to meet production goals, infuriating Mr. Musk, who called short-sellers “leeches on the neck of business.” But he acknowledged that some of those traders had also collected an impressively accurate picture of the company from insiders and even drones flying over Tesla’s factory. “The degree of inside information they had was insane,” he said.

Production sprints and struggles at Tesla and the space exploration company SpaceX also sharpened Mr. Musk’s philosophy, which he distilled into a five-step approach that he called “the algorithm” and which he repeatedly invoked to employees. It involved, in order: questioning requirements, deleting parts or processes, simplifying and optimizing, accelerating processes, and, finally, automating. “I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Isaacson.

Mr. Musk created SpaceX to help humanity become a multi-planetary species. The company’s success so far is a credit to his willingness to accept risks, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

During the countdown to a pivotal launch in 2015, an unidentified liquid began dripping from a Falcon 9 rocket, frightening Mark Juncosa, a top SpaceX official. Mr. Musk deliberated briefly before deciding to proceed, resulting in a successful launch. At the time, Mr. Juncosa assumed that Mr. Musk had based that decision on a complicated risk assessment, but realized he was wrong after reviewing footage years later. “I thought he had done some complex quick calculations to decide what to do, but in fact he just shrugged his shoulders and gave the order,” Mr. Juncosa said of Mr. Musk. “He had an intuition of what the physics were.”

To achieve interplanetary flight in the future, SpaceX needed to find a way to make money in the present. So in 2015, Mr. Musk announced Starlink, seeking to tap into the lucrative market of providing internet service, in this case through a constellation of low-orbit satellites. The service has become a vital lifeline to people in war zones and helped the Ukrainian military defend against Russian invasion. But Mr. Musk has also been criticized for not allowing Ukraine to use the service to launch a drone attack on a Russian naval base last year, fearing that it would have provoked a major escalation in the war. “We did not want to be a part of that,” Mr. Musk said.

In 2021, SpaceX for the first time successfully sent a crew into orbit without a professional astronaut aboard . Afterward, Mr. Musk reflected on the role that he and his company had played in advancing space exploration. “Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable,” he said. “It would have happened without me. But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.” He added, “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”

Sarah Nir contributed reporting.

Jeremy W. Peters covers media and its intersection with politics, law and culture. He is the author of “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.” He is a contributor to MSNBC. More about Jeremy W. Peters

Niraj Chokshi covers the business of transportation, with a focus on airlines. More about Niraj Chokshi

Benjamin Mullin is a media reporter for The Times, covering the major companies behind news and entertainment. More about Benjamin Mullin

Elon Musk Biography Shoots to Top of Bestseller List Ahead of Release

Walter Isaacson's latest tome will release on Sept. 12.

By Anna Tingley

Anna Tingley

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If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission.

Best-selling author and historian Walter Isaacson has penned the definitive biographies of some of the most powerful figures in history, from Steve Jobs to Albert Einstein, and this month he’ll finally be releasing his highly anticipated tome about Elon Musk . The biography, simply tiled “Elon Musk, ” officially releases on Sept. 12 and is currently available to pre-order on Amazon , where it’s already a No. 1 bestseller.

For two years, Isaacson followed the billionaire entrepreneur through his SpaceX and Tesla factories and board meetings, while spending hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers and adversaries. In addition to leading the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence, Musk also made the controversial choice to take over Twitter (now X) during the book’s writing.

Musk’s childhood weaves its way through much of the book, as Isaacson has hinted in numerous interviews leading up to its release. Growing up in South Africa, Musk was regularly beaten by bullies and would come home to an emotionally abusive father. As he grew older, the wounds from his tumultuous upbringing lingered, likely explaining his infamous attraction to risk, maniacal intensity and epic sense of mission.

“We start the book with this astonishingly difficult childhood in South Africa with a father who is Darth Vader and who is still alive, but haunts Elon every day,” Isaacson told tech reporter Kara Swisher earlier this month. “He’s the most interesting person on the planet right now doing the most interesting things and driving people crazy in the process.”

One of the biggest bombshells in the book is the revelation that Musk allegedly thwarted a Ukranian drone attack on Russian ships. According to the book, the SpaceX CEO turned off Starlink near Crimea to disrupt Ukraine’s strike against a Russian fleet. As the drones loaded with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.

“Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson is now available to pre-order on Amazon, and is also available on Kindle for $16.99 and Audible for free with this 30-day trial.

Elon Musk $33.07   $28.94 Buy Now On Amazon

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2023

New York Times Bestseller

by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781982181284

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | BUSINESS | POLITICS | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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BOOK REVIEW

by Walter Isaacson with adapted by Sarah Durand

by Walter Isaacson

More About This Book

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

More by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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Let’s put a stake in the ‘great man’ biography — starting with Isaacson’s ‘Elon Musk’

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By Walter Isaacon Simon & Schuster: 688 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

The opening pages of “Elon Musk,” the new doorstop biography from Walter Isaacson , the bestselling chronicler of the great innovative men of modern history, are jarring, especially to anyone expecting to be greeted with plucky tales of unlikely genius.

On the first page, we’re told that Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, owner of X (formerly Twitter), and currently the world’s richest man, was born into a land of incredible violence in South Africa , “with machine gun attacks and knife killings common,” where boys have to “wade through pools of blood” on the way to concerts and are sent to wilderness camps that resemble “a paramilitary Lord of the Flies,” per Musk. Young Elon is bullied relentlessly — by his classmates but also by his abusive father — until he grows big enough to fight back.

Introducing the 688-page biography this way seems designed to address Musk’s recent turn toward combativeness and cruelty — if not justifying it, then offering a skeleton key to understanding where it’s rooted. But as we learn throughout the book, the Musks are persistent fabulists, prone to embellishment and fabrication, and this becomes the first of many narrative sequences that the reader must consider with an eye to truth versus narrative convenience.

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And Isaacson’s truth is, above all, selective. Given Musk’s recent coziness with white nationalists and peddlers of junk race science and his ongoing tirade against the Anti-Defamation League , whom he blames (rather than himself) for chasing advertisers from Twitter, it seems startling that nothing in those opening pages touches on his experiences with apartheid . Much of that horrendous violence unfolding in 1980s South Africa was precipitated by a brutally racist government; we discover only that it taught Musk to survive adversity. “My pain threshold is very high,” he tells Isaacson.

We do learn that Musk’s Canadian grandfather was involved in a fringe political party with antisemitic views and relocated his family to South Africa because he liked the government better — he is described as harboring “quirky conservative views” — and that Musk’s father is now outspokenly racist. But in a book that goes to great lengths to dissect the transmission of habits and ideas from father and son, Elon is allowed to stay mum.

Silences like that come to haunt the capacious hull of “Elon Musk” — to the point that they risk drowning out the project altogether.

After the burst of violence in the introduction, we move into more familiar territory, led on by Isaacson’s brisk, propulsive prose: Musk is a spacy, lonely outsider who is bright but has trouble making friends. He disappears into video games and science fiction and soon dreams of horizons far beyond his hometown, and sets out to North America with an entrepreneurial spirit in tow. He graduates with a dual degree in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, gets accepted into a PhD program at Stanford, but decides instead to set out into the buzzing startup scene of Silicon Valley.

He founds Zip2 with his brother Kimbal , sells it , and makes a lot of money. He founds the first iteration of X.com, merges with PayPal, and makes even more. Initially the CEO of both companies, he’s pushed out of each — in a bit of foreshadowing, Musk is booted from PayPal because of his monomaniacal dedication to the porn-adjacent letter X, as well as the idea that PayPal should try to “take over the world’s financial system.” His dismissal, brought about in a coup led by Peter Thiel and other members of the so-called PayPal mafia, leaves him with a large pool of cash, an ax or two to grind and an aspiration to take on loftier goals.

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Here the limitations of Isaacson’s project are revealed: Musk had pushed some of the worst ideas of his young career. From a business perspective, it seemed his colleagues were correct to oust him, preserve their product and make them all fabulously wealthy in an IPO and later sale to EBay . But here’s Isaacson’s diagnosis: “He was a visionary who didn’t play well with others.” The word “visionary,” in this application, is doing a lot of work.

The narrative is filled with moments of similar dissonance, with Isaacson quick to praise Musk’s incessant risk-taking after a disaster, or to excuse his rude behavior to underlings as necessary to get things done, or to nod along in prose while Musk announces his latest idea that will transform the world. He does occasionally push back, as when Musk claims the Hyperloop will change everything (“It did not change everything”), but Isaacson mostly accepts Musk’s confident prognostications as gospel.

Isaacson — biographer of Steve Jobs , Albert Einstein , Henry Kissinger , Benjamin Franklin — is concerned with the study of world-moving men (and occasionally a woman ). What makes innovators tick? What makes them so successful? (In the case of Musk, the prognosis can be summarized as: a large appetite for risk, a willingness to alienate colleagues, a detailed knowledge of industry and science, an ability to process work tasks like an algorithm and a predilection for drawing lessons from video games and “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . ”)

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This sort of framing may have made sense in the early aughts, when so many were dizzy with optimism that Amazon’s everything store and the iPhone would transform the world for the better. It makes less sense 12 years after “ Steve Jobs ” — now that we’ve seen the toll the tech giants have levied on society: labor exploitation at Amazon, Uber and, yes, Tesla; misinformation and harassment on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and, yes, Twitter. These costs are almost entirely omitted from the equation of “Elon Musk.”

That may be because there is a tacit pact between author and subject in the Isaacson “great man” biography: The author will unearth unflattering personal anecdotes and share stories about the subject’s capacity to be cruel. In exchange, the subject’s greatness will be treated as an assumption, the raison d’etre for the book itself. In honor of Isaacson’s habit of using pithy, memorable phrases to describe a phenomenon, we might call it “the Isaacson Accord.”

And so it is in “Elon Musk,” whose subject is described as “a visionary” and a “risk-taking innovator” and, most pointedly, “the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future.” Musk’s many fans will surely take those descriptors as a given. But that seems all the more reason to challenge the assumptions. Because the Isaacson Accord turns out to be a devil’s bargain. We get a lot of palace intrigue, well-told anecdotes and some genuine insight into Musk’s familial psychology; but the good stuff almost comes in spite of Isaacson’s constant framing of Musk as a moody but brilliant world-mover.

Worse, in exchange for unprecedented access, the Isaacson Accord demands that a lot of the most difficult and pressing questions go unasked and, therefore, unanswered.

Isaacson repeatedly says one of Musk’s unparalleled strengths as a manager is his intimate knowledge of the factory floors where his products are made. Yet there is not a single mention of the sweeping allegations of racial discrimination at Tesla’s flagship Fremont factory that resulted in juries finding Tesla liable for millions in damages. Workers of color say they were called the N-word and saw swastikas painted on the bathroom. In 2021, Tesla was ordered to pay $137 million to one employee who suffered racist abuse, though that amount was later reduced.

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Likewise, there is no examination of the union drives at Tesla plants, or the wrongful termination case Tesla lost after firing a worker involved in organizing. In all the discussion of Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot program, there is no mention of the blockbuster revelation from a former engineer that one of the first key promotions of Autopilot was staged , contributing to the false sense of security buyers had in the program.

And while a major focus of the book is the impact of Musk’s abusive father and the traits that might have been passed down, Isaacson speeds past any explanation of the falling out with Musk’s trans daughter, Jenna , allowing Musk to file it away as her political views simply having grown too radical. Isaacson does not list her as a source in the book, as her twin brother, and does not say whether he tried to reach out. Musk’s story, about Jenna having succumbed to the “woke mind virus,” stands.

No biography can or should be totally comprehensive, but it’s pretty easy to conclude which sorts of topics and conversations Isaacson decided it would be best to avoid altogether. I started “Elon Musk” wondering if the world needed another book positioning Musk as a great man — Ashlee Vance’s book of the same title ably covered many of the same bases — and finished thinking it’s time to retire the entire genre of “great innovator” biographies, period.

The idea that the future is created by flawed geniuses who happen to accumulate great wealth is outmoded and simplistic, and it encourages a flattened view of how technology is developed and whom it impacts. Just scan the list of sources Isaacson includes in the book: executives, venture capitalists, founders and high-ranking engineers. Yes, Isaacson spoke to “adversaries” like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, but not (at least per the list) to line workers, not to Jenna, not to anyone whose family member died in an Autopilot crash, nor anyone who tried to organize a Tesla plant.

The bottom line: This is the story Musk himself wants told. Sure, he might have excluded a handful of the details that proved personally embarrassing, but nothing here challenges the idea that Elon Musk is an all-too-human hero valiantly trying to save humanity from the threats he sees cascading down upon us. It’s the book Musk would have written himself.

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Brian Merchant is the Los Angeles Times’ technology columnist. He’s the author of “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone” and the forthcoming “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.” Merchant is the co-founder of Terraform, Vice Media’s speculative fiction website, and the co-editor of the anthology “Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn.” Previously, he was a senior editor at Motherboard, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, the Atlantic, Fast Company, and Slate, among others.

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When Will Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk Biography Be Released?

Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography has a “pending” release date. Isaacson is still in the process of interviewing people close to Musk and showing the billionaire.

Aug. 18 2022, Published 2:57 p.m. ET

Billionaire business magnate Elon Musk didn’t acquire the title of being the wealthiest person on the globe overnight. Through trial and error, and serious commitment, Musk has managed to build massive companies that create astonishing products. For this reason (and plenty of others), Isaacson has decided to write a biography about the Tesla founder .

Isaacson has written biographies covering the lives of the late Steve Jobs , Leonardo da Vinci, and Albert Einstein. Now, he’s focused on the man who has developed a brain chip that can connect humans with computers telepathically. Eager to read it? Here’s what we know about Isaacson’s Musk biography release date.

Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography still has a “pending” release date.

As active as Musk is on Twitter these days, he hasn’t dropped any hints on when his latest biography being written by Isaacson will be released (sigh). The last time the SpaceX founder mentioned anything about the biography was on August 4, 2021, when he tweeted “If you’re curious about Tesla, SpaceX & my general goings on, @WalterIsaacson is writing a biography.”

The tweet garnered over 140,000 likes and nearly 8,000 retweets. It was also met with much excitement from plenty, including Jimmy Donaldson (aka MrBeast) who praised Isaacson for the previous biographies he has authored.

YES! His Steve Jobs biography was fantastic :) Any idea when yours will be coming out? I’ve listened to Ashlee Vance’s book so many times and I could use something new haha — MrBeast (@MrBeast) August 5, 2021

Isaacson has been shadowing Musk to gather more information for his biography.

The reason Isaacson hasn’t set a release date for Musk’s biography is that it’s still being written. In April 2022, around the same time Twitter accepted Musk’s bid to buy the company (he has since attempted to terminate the deal ), Isaacson was preparing to “travel with Musk and visit people from his past,” The New York Times reported.

In an interview with The Times , Isaacson expressed how challenging it was to “write a biography about a figure who is constantly evolving and expanding his empire.” He said that the process is like “trying to take notes while drinking from a fire hose.”

Musk and Isaacson didn't set any terms or sign a contract.

During his interview with The Times , Isaacson admitted that he and Musk began discussing the idea of a biography to “see if it would make sense.” The biographer said, “I have no deal with him, there’s no contract.” Ever since the two unofficially agreed to partake in the process, Isaacson has interviewed “about 200 people” close to Musk and continues to travel to the same places he goes, reports The Times .

Here’s what you can expect to find in Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk.

Most biographies contain information about a person’s life, including their upbringing, interests, and their downfalls and/or accomplishments. Isaacson’s Musk biography might delve deep into this, but it will likely uncover intricate details about his businesses and what makes him such a unique innovator .

Isaacson shared in his interview that he’s letting Musk’s life “events drive the books,” which is why he isn’t “forcing an artificial deadline.” Despite the fact that we don’t have a release date for Musk’s biography, we do know it will likely be published under Simon & Schuster.

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Elon Musk confirms Walter Isaacson is writing his biography

The author wrote the famous steve jobs' biography published in 2011..

Walter Isaacson, the author behind the 2011 Steve Jobs biography published shortly after his death, is currently writing Elon Musk's life story. Fox Business reported back in June that the famous writer was in talks with Musk about the possibility of writing a book on him. The author was reportedly yet to make a decision back then, but now Musk has confirmed on Twitter than Isaacson is writing his biography covering his work on Tesla, SpaceX and his "general goings on."

If you’re curious about Tesla, SpaceX & my general goings on, @WalterIsaacson is writing a biography — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 5, 2021

As CNET notes, there's already an official published biography on the entrepreneur entitled Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future . It was written by Ashlee Vance and was published in 2015. Since then, though, Tesla has launched the Model 3, which became the world's best-selling electric car. It was also only later in 2015 that SpaceX first achieved the successful landing and recovery of a rocket's first stage. In 2017, the private space company made history when it successfully relaunched its reusable Falcon 9 rocket for the first time. Four years later, SpaceX launched four astronauts to the ISS on a Dragon capsule used in a previous mission on top of a reused Falcon 9 booster.

Isaacson's Jobs biography was adapted by Aaron Sorkin into a film starring Michael Fassbender and directed by Danny Boyle. He also wrote biographies on Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who's known for her work in CRISPR gene editing. While he didn't respond to Musk's announcement, he has been retweeting SpaceX-related content since June.

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How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson

One way to keep musk’s myth intact is simply not to check things out..

By Elizabeth Lopatto , a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg.

Share this story

The trouble began days before the biography was even published.

CNN had a story summarizing an excerpt of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk that claimed Musk had shut down SpaceX’s satellite network, Starlink, to prevent a “Ukrainian sneak attack” on the Russian navy. The Washington Post followed it up, publishing the excerpt where Isaacson claimed Musk had essentially shut down a military offensive on a personal whim.

This reporting did not pass the smell test to me, and I said so at the time ; I wondered about the sourcing. One of the things that anyone covering Elon Musk for long enough has to reckon with is that he loves to tell hilarious lies. For instance:

• “Funding secured.” Remember when Elon Musk pretended he was going to take Tesla private and had everything in order, and then whoopsie, that was not at all true ?
• Tesla share sales. Of course, there’s the time in April 2022 when he sold Tesla shares and said he had no further sales planned , followed by him selling more Tesla shares in August 2022, when he said he was done selling Tesla shares . He sold more shares in November 2022 .
• Tesla and Bitcoin. Remember when Musk said, “ I might pump but I don’t dump ,” and then Tesla sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin ?
• The staged 2016 Autopilot demo video. In the demo video, which features the title card “The car is driving by itself,” the car was not driving by itself , Tesla’s director of Autopilot software said in a deposition. Musk himself asked for that copy.
• The batteries in Teslas will be exchangeable. Refueling your EV will just be a battery swap that will happen faster than pumping gas.
• The time he said Teslas might fly. I am not making this up . He really said he’d replace the rear seats with thrusters, and journalists spent time trying to figure out what the fuck that meant .

The thing you learn after a while on the Musk beat is that his most self-aggrandizing statements usually bear the least resemblance to reality. Musk says a lot of stuff! Some of it is exaggeration, and some isn’t true at all.

Isaacson’s sweeping 670-page biography has an intense amount of access to the man at its center. The problem is the man is Elon Musk, a guy who in 2011 promised to get us to space in just three years . In reality, the first SpaceX crew launched into orbit almost a decade later. Sure, access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk lots of chances to sell his own mythology.

I wanted to know if Isaacson had done his homework

So when I opened the Musk biography, I wanted to know if Isaacson had done his homework. The first thing I did was flip to the back, where the author lists his sources for the Ukraine thing. They are: interviews with Musk, Gwynne Shotwell, and Jared Birchall (Musk’s body man); emails from Lauren Dreyer; and text messages from Mykhailo Fedorov, “provided by Elon Musk.” Other sources are news articles, one of which was about SpaceX curbing Ukraine’s use of drones . Crucially, though, this article says nothing about Ukrainian submarines — instead, it’s primarily about aerial vehicles.

 In his book, Isaacson writes:

Throughout the evening and into the night, he [Musk] personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.

That final sentence is arresting, isn’t it? I could find no support for it in any of the news articles that Isaacson listed as sources for this chapter. There is a Financial Times story that confirms some Starlink outages during a Ukrainian push against the Russians, but it says nothing about drone subs or washing ashore harmlessly. A New York Times article confirms Musk doesn’t want Starlink running drones but says nothing about drone subs.

What could the possible source for this sentence be? In the following paragraph, Isaacson quotes text messages from Fedorov, who had “secretly shared with him [Musk] the details of how the drone subs were crucial” to the Ukrainians. Not very secret now, I suppose.

Musk disputed Isaacson’s account on Twitter: “SpaceX did not deactivate anything,” he said. “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” he went on, though he did not specify which government’s authorities . “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

Isaacson caved immediately :

To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.

Tremendous statement. “To clarify” obfuscates what’s going on: is Isaacson saying his book is wrong? Surely that is what this means since “future editions will be updated” to correct it . The Post corrected its excerpt , anyway. “The Ukrainians thought” — which Ukrainians, and how did Isaacson know their thinking? In his listed sources, we have only the text messages of one Ukrainian, who, for diplomatic purposes, may be obscuring what he knows. “They asked Musk to enable it for their drone attack” is an entirely different account than the one given in the book, which says Musk shut off existing coverage rather than approving extended coverage; what could possibly be the source here? And of course, the last sentence — “Musk did not enable it because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war” — is simple boot-licking.

We are dealing with not one but two unreliable narrators: Musk and Isaacson himself

Isaacson “clarified” further in another tweet. ”Based on my conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack that night,” he wrote on Twitter . “He now says that the policy had been implemented earlier, but the Ukrainians did not know it, and that night he simply reaffirmed the policy.”

There was a way to find out what’s true here, and it would have been to interview more sources, both Ukrainian and US military ones. Isaacson chose not to. Musk’s word was good enough for him — and so, when Musk contested the characterization, Isaacson rolled over.

I am lingering here because it highlights a major problem with Isaacson’s biography. We are dealing with not one but two unreliable narrators: Musk and Isaacson himself. After all, just before issuing his clarification, Isaacson had been touting a walk through the SpaceX factory with CBS’s David Pogue to promote his book. 

Isaacson writes a specific kind of biography. There is even a “genius” boxed set of his biographies that includes Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and — somewhat incongruously — Steve Jobs. 

One way to keep Musk’s myth intact is simply not to check things out

Having made a pattern of writing biographies of important men — and one important woman, Jennifer Doudna of CRISPR fame — Isaacson is now in the position of a kind of kingmaker. To keep up his pattern, everyone he writes about implicitly is branded a genius. 

One way to keep Musk’s myth intact is simply not to check things out. Within the first three paragraphs of the book, Isaacson describes a wilderness survival camp Musk attended, where “every few years, one of the kids would die.” This is a striking claim! I flipped to the “notes” section to see if Isaacson had interviewed any of Musk’s schoolmates. He hadn’t. There are no news articles backing it up, either. So what is the source? Presumably one or more of the Musks — Elon is quoted directly as saying the counselors told him not to die like another kid in a previous year. 

Arguably the entire Musk family has an interest in presenting Elon Musk as preternaturally tough and also as using his tough childhood as an excuse for his continuing bad behavior. There are some weird choices as a result.

Isaacson writes that Musk’s “blood boiled if anyone falsely implied he had succeeded because of inherited wealth or claimed he didn’t deserve to be called a founder of one of the companies he helped start.” The bolding on “falsely” is mine because Isaacson had earlier detailed Errol Musk, Elon’s father, giving Elon and Kimbal Musk “$28,000 plus a beat-up car he bought for $500” to help them start Zip2. Maye, Elon’s mother, contributed another $10,000 and “let them use her credit card because they had not been approved for one.” Certainly Musk got started with family money. Is the problem about the meaning of “inherited wealth”?

Skipping how dependent Musk is on Texas is a howler

Here’s another strange choice. “Over the years, one criticism of Tesla has been that the company was ‘bailed out’ or ‘subsidized’ by the government in 2009.” This is not quite right. Over the years, the criticism has been that Tesla has gotten a great deal of assistance from state, federal, and local governments , sometimes screwing them in the process, as demonstrated by the Buffalo Gigafactory. By one estimate, Tesla alone has gotten more than $3 billion in loans and subsidies from state and local governments . While Isaacson gives a detailed accounting of Tesla’s $465 million in loans from a DOE program, he skips all the rest of the assists Musk has gotten over the years — goodies that have inspired jealousy from the likes of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos .

Then there’s this description of Neuralink, Musk’s brain implant company: “The idea for Neuralink was inspired by science fiction, most notably the Culture space-travel novels by Iain Banks.” Maybe so, but there’s actual science fact : brain-machine interfaces had been implanted in humans as early as 2006 , something Isaacson doesn’t mention. Musk certainly didn’t come up with the idea; brain-machine interfaces already existed. Nor does Isaacson mention the gruesome allegations about Neuralink’s test subjects .

But I want to get to the real big one: Musk’s politics. This is a recurring theme for Isaacson, and his perspective is bewildering.

Musk’s dependence on taxpayer largess plays a role here; skipping how dependent Musk is on Texas is a howler. Musk has often donated in ways that will benefit him in Texas , where he has a substantial operation. So writing a sentence like “Musk has never been very political” when Musk has donated more than $1 million to politicians in the last 20 years is odd.

Now, I personally view Musk as a political nihilist, willing to say whatever he needs to say to get taxpayer money. But it’s undeniable that he’s spent decades palling around with libertarian-to-far-right types (most famously Peter Thiel and David Sacks, who is inexplicably described as “not rigidly partisan” despite coauthoring a noxious book with Thiel that, among other things, suggested date rape wasn’t real ). 

If you know these details, Musk looks like a dolt

These long-standing right-wing ties belie the notion advanced by Isaacson that the real cause of Musk’s right-wing pivot is his daughter, Jenna; I found these sections of the book difficult to read, as they essentially amount to victim blaming. In Isaacson’s telling, “Jenna’s anger made Musk sensitive to the backlash against billionaires.” She stopped speaking to her father in 2020 and transitioned without telling him. 

I wonder, though Isaacson doesn’t, if she didn’t tell him because she was afraid to. Musk found out from a member of his security detail — and it’s revealing to me that none of the people around Musk who knew, including Grimes, wanted to break the news. It’s not unusual for queer people to hide from parents they suspect will reject them; there is a reason many gay and trans people have “ found families .” 

When Musk tweets, “Take the red pill,” in 2020, Isaacson notes that it’s a reference to The Matrix but does not add that The Matrix is a movie made by two people who later came out as trans. In fact, The Matrix itself is a trans story — in the ’90s, prescription estrogen was literally a red pill . Isaacson includes Ivanka Trump’s reply (“Taken!”) but not that of Matrix creator Lilly Wachowski: “ Fuck both of you .” If you know these details, Musk looks like a dolt — sort of a problem for a biographer trying to write a Great Man book.

Similarly, Isaacson falls flat on racial issues — the existence of apartheid in Musk’s youth is barely mentioned. It’s a strange omission; Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman . was the chair of the national council of the Social Credit Party, which was openly antisemitic. Haldeman’s beliefs are characterized by Isaacson as “quirky conservative populist views,” which… led him to immigrate to Pretoria, South Africa, which was ruled by the racist apartheid regime. 

Justine Musk and Amber Heard are both disparaged

One of the other things Isaacson doesn’t mention is the alleged racist working conditions at Tesla’s Fremont factory . Recently, a former Tesla worker was awarded millions for racist abuse at work . This does seem relevant to Musk’s politics.

Also relevant: how Isaacson treats Musk’s exes. Justine Musk and Amber Heard are both disparaged. Of Justine Musk, Elon’s mother said, “She has no redeeming feature.” Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother and sometimes business partner, is quoted as saying, “This is the wrong person for you.” We don’t hear Justine’s side of the story, except via a magazine article she published during her divorce, “ I Was a Starter Wife .” It makes me wonder: is Justine under a non-disclosure agreement? Did she sign something with a non-disparagement clause, like Tesla founder Martin Eberhard ? Isaacson spoke to her — so why did she have nothing to say?

Similarly, Amber Heard is described by Kimbal as “so toxic,” by Grimes as “chaotic evil,” and by Musk’s chief of staff as “the Joker in Batman… She thrives on destabilizing everything.” Heard is even blamed for Musk’s misbehavior — including “funding secured” in 2018. Even so, Heard’s response is muted enough (“I love him very much,” she says. “Elon loves fire and sometimes it burns him.”) that I wonder if she, too, is NDA’d. By not even bringing up this possibility, Isaacson’s story is inherently skewed.

There is one person we do know is under an NDA: a flight attendant who says Musk propositioned her in 2016 . We also know that five women at SpaceX have said that harassment was regular at the company and that women workers at Tesla say they have been subjected to “nightmarish” sexual harassment . This does not especially interest Isaacson.

Isaacson does have time for a lot of Steve Jobs comparisons, which, after a while, begin to feel like product placement

The workers at Musk’s companies, generally, don’t interest his biographer much. Isaacson begins describing the 2018 Fremont production push from Musk’s perspective: “Musk had come to realize that designing a good factory was like designing a good microchip.” During the production surge, Musk began walking the floor, barking questions at workers, and “making decisions on the fly.” He decided that safety sensors were “too sensitive, tripping when there was no real problem.” 

In this chapter, Isaacson cites stories where rank-and-file workers complained about being pressured to take shortcuts and work 10-hour days. “There was some truth to the complaints,” Isaacson writes. “Tesla’s injury rate was 30 percent higher than the rest of the industry.” Leave aside the risible “some truth.” There is a very obvious question that Isaacson had the access to explore: how did Musk’s meddling with the safety sensors, the seat-of-the-pants fixes changes to the manufacturing process, and general “production hell” affect that injury rate? He chose not to. The injuries among Tesla’s workers aren’t mentioned further.

Isaacson does have time for a lot of Steve Jobs comparisons, which, after a while, begin to feel like product placement for his other book. In the index, Jobs is listed as showing up on 20 pages. You’d be forgiven for thinking Jobs was an important part of Musk’s rise, based on the index alone.

It’s impossible to escape the conclusion that Musk views everyone around him as disposable. The biography teems with mentions of Musk firing people on the spot, demanding to have things his own way even when it is stupid and expensive, and being unable to tolerate even the slightest dissent. “When Elon gets upset, he lashes out, often at junior people,” Jon McNeill, the former president of Tesla, says. 

The later chapters aren’t very revealing

“You definitely realize you’re a tool being used to achieve this larger objective and that’s great,” says Lucas Hughes, who worked as a financial analyst at SpaceX and was one of the junior people Musk lashed out at. “But sometimes tools get worn down and he feels he can just replace that tool.” Musk believes that “when people want to prioritize their comfort and leisure they should leave,” Isaacson writes.

The later chapters aren’t very revealing. Isaacson is bought in on Musk’s vision of AI and his hinky Tesla Bot . The biographer has swallowed Musk’s hype here wholesale. But I remember the days of the “ alien dreadnought, ” the promises for swappable batteries that never materialized, and the countless other things Musk said that turned out to be, at best, exaggeration. In 10 years, the big revelation that Musk switched off the Ukrainian internet access during a battle may not be the most embarrassing thing Isaacson has committed to the page.

Isaacson wraps up the book by ponderously wondering if Musk’s achievements are possible without his bad behavior: 

Would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training.

This seems to me to be the wrong set of questions. Here are some other ones: If Musk were more receptive to criticism, would his companies be in better shape? If Musk cared more about the team around him, what else could he have accomplished by now? Is achieving the specific vision Musk has for the world worth the injuries he’s inflicted on his workforce? Do we — the readers of Isaacson’s book — want this particular man’s vision of the future at all?

While Isaacson manages to detail what makes Musk awful, he seems unaware of what made Musk an inspiring figure for so long. Musk is a fantasist, the kind of person who conceives of civilizations on Mars. That’s what people liked all this time : dreaming big, thinking about new possible worlds. It’s also why Musk’s shifting political stance undercuts him. The fantasy of the conservative movement is small and sad, a limited world with nothing new to explore. Musk has gone from dreaming very, very big to seeming very, very small . In the hands of a talented biographer, this kind of tragic story would provide rich material.

Correction 11:00AM ET: The original version of this mischaracterized Musk’s donations — he has donated more than $1 million, not more than $1 billion. We regret the error.

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The Journalist and the Billionaire

What did an old establishment guy like walter isaacson learn writing elon musk’s biography.

It’s a Saturday night in August, and Walter Isaacson is sitting in the back of Lilette, a restaurant on Magazine Street in his hometown of New Orleans, swizzling a Sazerac. “The question for a biographer,” he tells me, holding forth a little, “is to show how the demons of a person are totally connected to the drive that gets their rockets to orbit. People who are driven by demons get shit done.”

Isaacson was the editor of Time magazine in the 1990s, a decade or so before the internet wrecked the print party. He was running CNN when 9/11 happened and then landed in 2003 at the Aspen Institute, where, for 14 years, he was the impresario of its thought-leader confabs. But he’s long had a side hustle writing biographies of Great Men: Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs — as well as one Great Woman, biochemist Jennifer Doudna.

On September 12, Isaacson’s latest will be published, about Elon Musk , a man many take to be something of a demon himself — erratic, vindictive, and exhibiting little impulse control. His moods can have far-reaching implications for, say, the Ukrainian army, which depends on his Starlink satellites to fight Russia. Many others hail him as a hero trying to get humanity to Mars while battling evil AI and dating many hot babes in the process. But if you’re somewhere in between, trying to figure out if he is becoming a Bond villain or still that Tony Stark–like figure many people assume him to be, Isaacson’s book is not designed to help you sort it out.

It is written in Time -magazine style — restrained, middlebrow, and without an obvious agenda. Its author is just there to give you, the reader, the facts of Musk’s life as he was able to observe and report them. Isaacson spent more than two years hanging around with the guy in his factories and at his rocket-launch sites, interviewing 128 people in his orbit and fielding many surreal late-night phone calls and text messages. But unlike his previous subjects, Musk was tweeting the entire time Isaacson was reporting, making news constantly with his megalomaniacal maneuvering. Sometimes this was alarming, as when the richest man in the world tweeted, as he did in April, “Between Tesla , Starlink & Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in one head than anyone ever.”

Isaacson, who at 71 still retains a touch of his genteel Louisiana drawl, is the ultimate Old Establishment man — Harvard, Rhodes scholar, approached to join the CIA (but declined) — so much so that his first book, The Wise Men , co-written with Evan Thomas in 1986, was literally about the old Establishment Isaacson had been groomed to join. He has a golden Rolodex and is utterly at ease at a cocktail party. Richard Stengel, who is Isaacson’s friend and was one of his successors running Time, says that when Isaacson was at Aspen, he was “the most intellectual maître d’ in the history of the world.”

And Musk? He has total contempt for the stodgy elites and their status anxiety — he wouldn’t even let the media keep their little blue check marks after he took over Twitter . And while he loves a party and hanging out with celebrities and his fellow billionaires, he can be a goofy social presence, like a too-smart kid not quite grown up. As Isaacson writes in the book, sounding a little stodgy himself, Musk’s humor tends “to be filled with smirking references to 69, other sex acts, body fluids, pooping, farts, dope smoking, and topics that would crack up a dorm room of stoned freshmen.”

They may be the unlikeliest writer-subject pairing since Bob Woodward and John Belushi. Except that for Isaacson, Musk is irresistible. Both as a journalist and “intellectual maître d’,” Isaacson has always made it his business to get to know, and win over, everyone worth knowing. If that compulsion counts as a demon driving him , well, perhaps that is how he has gotten so much shit done.

His courtship of Musk began in August 2021. Isaacson was in Sag Harbor, staying at the home of his high-powered lawyer friends Joel Klein and Nicole Seligman , when Musk called. Antonio Gracias , who sat on the boards of both Aspen and Tesla, had set it up.

At the time, Musk was more an engineer with a halo than the controversialist he has since become. Thanks to the success of Tesla and SpaceX, he was the richest person in the world, and Time magazine — now something of a hobby project owned by a software billionaire — picked him as its 2021 Person of the Year . (“This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit.”)

Musk thought it might be a good moment to do a book and wondered if Isaacson would want to write it. Notably, on Amazon, four of Isaacson’s works — Franklin, Einstein, Jobs and da Vinci — are packaged and sold as a set: “ The Genius Biographies .” Why wouldn’t Musk want to join the others on that shelf?

Isaacson and Musk discussed the possibility for over an hour. The journalist laid out his ground rules: He’d want to shadow Musk in meetings and on assembly lines and interview ex-wives, lovers, children, enemies, and employees. No topic could be off limits. Musk said he was game, and they hung up. Twenty minutes later, Isaacson’s phone started blowing up. He picked it up to discover that Musk had tweeted , “If you’re curious about Tesla, SpaceX & my general goings on, @WalterIsaacson is writing a biography.”

Look,” Isaacson tells me in New Orleans. “He and I are very different. I came from a charmed childhood and became very much a part of the media Establishment. He came from a brutal childhood and resents the established elites. It means I have to work to understand his mindset. And he has to get his head around that somebody like me is writing the book.”

At the restaurant, he drops a couple of ice cubes into his drink and says, “I put ice in it ’cause I’ve been across the lake and it’s 99 degrees.” People keep coming up to the table to shake his hand. First, a boisterous bald man whom Isaacson introduces as his haberdasher, “the other David Rubenstein” (not to be confused with the billionaire David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group, who will be giving Isaacson’s book party in Washington, D.C., on September 17; the New York book party is being thrown by Michael Bloomberg at his place on East 78th Street). The chef comes out of the kitchen to say “hello,” followed by a local politician named Helena Moreno, who could very well be the city’s next mayor, Isaacson assures me.

Also at our table is a prim, polite, and politically connected uptown New Orleans woman in a floral dress whose name is Anne Milling. “A real steel magnolia,” Isaacson calls her. She tells him she’s not so sure about his latest subject. “I just don’t like his values,” she says with exquisite disdain.

“You may not like certain aspects of what he tweets,” Isaacson tells her, “but he has sent up this year so far more mass to orbit than all countries and all companies combined. He has created a car company that’s worth as much as all nine other car companies combined.”

“That’s great,” she shoots back. “I admire that, Walter, but now I’ll teyyeh what! His values are not my values, so theyyeh go!”

“But have you gotten a rocket to Mars?” he asks.

“I don’t give a hoot about a rocket tah’ Mahhs!”

Isaacson smiles and sips his rye. Ever since he started this book, he has heard the same sorts of complaints from many in his circle: that Musk’s jokes and conspiracy mongering are in fact malignant. That he might actually be a homophobe or an antisemite . But Isaacson is guessing there are more people who haven’t made up their minds about Musk, and are simply fascinated by him and want to understand more. There is, of course, also a built-in fanboy audience for the book, assuming Musk himself doesn’t disavow it.

The next morning, Isaacson scoops me up in his gray Volvo — he keeps his Tesla in New York, where he still has a place on Central Park West — to show me his New Orleans. He grew up “well enough off,” the son of an electrical engineer and a real-estate agent. We stop by his childhood home, a rambling white pile encircled by lush palms on a corner of Napoleon Avenue in Broadmoor. His only sibling, a brother named Lee who owns an IT business, lives here now.

It was clear from the beginning that Walter was a little different. “He just sort of came out as Walter,” says The New Yorker ’s Nicholas Lemann , who grew up in New Orleans and has known Isaacson since they were children. “His parents were a little mystified by the whole thing, but he just always was recognizably the person he is now.” Isaacson attended the elite Isidore Newman School, where his classmates voted him Most Likely to Succeed.

The writer Michael Lewis was a few grades behind him. “This is my first impression of Walter Isaacson,” he says. “I was in like fifth or sixth grade. They hauled us into the auditorium, where we were supposed to just watch Walter onstage so we would be like him one day. It was like the headmaster thought Walter was the example of what a Newman student should be. He was like a senior, maybe. We all found it rather nauseating.” A few years after that, Lewis says, “we’re all ushered back into the auditorium, where Walter is once again onstage. At this point, I think, he had just gotten the Rhodes scholarship.” Incredibly, Lewis says, it then happened again. “This time, he is, like, the youngest person ever to whatever at Time magazine or something. By now, there’s, like, vomit running down the aisles.”

I recount this to Isaacson as we pass the school. “I love Michael,” he says carefully, “but I think that he makes all narratives more beautiful. I’ve heard his story about them parading me out at some assembly.” (This conversation is occurring the same weekend Lewis is embroiled in a controversy over whether he made some aspects of the narrative of his best-selling book The Blind Side a little too … beautiful.)

There is a story that Isaacson likes to tell about how he became the kind of journalist — and ultimately, biographer — that he has become. His childhood friend was the nephew of the novelist Walker Percy, who told Isaacson that there are “two types of people who come out of Louisiana: preachers and storytellers. It was better to be a storyteller.”

Isaacson’s parents subscribed to Time and Saturday Review and were members of the Book of the Month Club. In high school, he got a summer job at the States-Item, where, as he wrote in the introduction to his 2009 book of short profiles, American Sketches, he realized that “the key to journalism is that people like to talk.”

“In the world we grew up in, to leave New Orleans was considered a sort of mystery and tragedy,” explains Lemann. “So the idea that Walter would go off and become a super-achiever on a global scale, that was just not something that people thought about as a possibility.” He adds, “I’ve never completely gotten over my inner Quentin Compson,” referring to the William Faulkner character who leaves Mississippi for Harvard but can never let go of the South and kills himself by jumping off a bridge into the Charles River. “But I think Walter has completely triumphed over his.”

Isaacson practically gags at this. “What the fuck,” he says. “Nick ran the Columbia School of Journalism in New York City! Give me a break. He’s not only a success but a Yankee. At least I’ve moved back home. He hasn’t yet!”

He does cop to having had a bit of a Compson phase when he first arrived at Harvard in 1970, though. There’s a memorial plaque on a bridge there dedicated to the character, and Isaacson would visit it with a fellow Southerner classmate . There, they would recite passages from Faulkner novels. “I think I snapped out of that by sophomore or junior year,” he says, “but freshman year, when you’re trying to figure out your identity at college …” And yet he still can and does recite his favorite Faulkner passage from memory when I ask about it. (It’s an exchange from Absalom, Absalom! between Compson and his roommate about the fall of the South.)

He once wrote a review of a Faulkner biography in what he thought was the style of Faulkner for the Harvard Crimson, which never invited him to be on its staff. Instead, Isaacson joined the Lampoon, despite the fact that he doesn’t seem like a born satirist, really. He’s funnier in person than on the page.

One year, Sunday Times of London editor Harold Evans came to speak. Afterward, Isaacson mailed his States-Item clips to Evans, who was impressed. It was the summer of 1973, the era of Watergate, and Isaacson thinks perhaps Evans figured he might be the next Woodward or Bernstein, so he put him on the investigative team. But Isaacson soon realized that wasn’t for him. “I tended to like people too much to relish investigating them,” he wrote in American Sketches. He did learn something else from watching Evans work, which came in handy later at Time and in writing his biographies: “It was possible to be crusading and investigative while also retaining access to the people you cover.”

After his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, he returned, at 24, to New Orleans and the States-Item (which later merged with the Times-Picayune ). There, he befriended a 19-year-old reporter named Dean Baquet. “Walter stood out,” remembers Baquet. “He was so clearly an ambitious guy in a city that, frankly, sees really ambitious people as a little bit awkward.” (Baquet could probably relate, as he did become the executive editor of the New York Times. ) The two cub reporters teamed up for a story about a corrupt businessman who then threatened to sue them. Isaacson panicked, but, he recalls, “Dean said, ‘Don’t worry, we got it nailed.’ His source was the U.S. Attorney, who was leaking to him. He said, ‘He’s going to be indicted for this in a few weeks.’ Indeed, he was.”

Isaacson began getting noticed as a reporter and one week received two fateful phone calls. “Somebody calls and says, ‘I’m a friend of Cord Meyer. Can we meet you?’” Back at Oxford, Isaacson had encountered the tony and mysterious Meyer, who would visit campus to speak to promising students, claiming to be the cultural attaché to the U.S. Embassy. It turned out he was CIA. “They asked, ‘Would you ever think of joining the CIA?’” says Isaacson. “I said, ‘Yes, I guess so.’ Then they said something that totally screwed it up. They said, ‘But we never want you to be undercover or a secret agent. We want you to be an analyst because you’ve studied economics. Come be an analyst at Langley.’ I did want to say, ‘Hey, how come I can’t be cloak and dagger?’ But that was the offer they gave me. That very same week, an editor at Time called.” And so he picked New York over Langley. (But would he have made a good spy? “No,” he says. “I would’ve fucked it up totally.”)

The Time magazine to which Isaacson arrived in 1978 was an organ of the Wasp Establishment, peddling a sensible and optimistic Middle American worldview. It was the flagship title of a fleet of other money-printing magazines — People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune — which gave Time Inc. a glossy sheen of prosperity and power. This was another era entirely, when a magazine that came out on Monday (there were editions in other parts of the world, too) could set the agenda for the week. The office culture at Time was also, among other things, more than a bit sexist. The writers and editors were still mostly white Ivy League boys in crisp white shirts.

Isaacson was a confident, clever Ivy League boy, and he did well there. “He was a fine writer and editor,” remembers one of his former bosses, Stephen G. Smith. “But what struck me about him was that he was a prototype of a Rhodes scholar. Big brain. Great emotional intelligence, even in his 20s. He just had that gift of appreciating — it sounds like ‘sucking up’ — but it was a gift of connecting with people.”

“He had no problem finding mentors,” remembers one old work friend from back then. There were lots of determined young journalists at Time then. Isaacson worked there with Graydon Carter (who co-founded Spy, then ran Vanity Fair ), Kurt Andersen (another Spy co-founder; he later ran this magazine), and Jim Kelly (managing editor of Time after Isaacson). There was also Maureen Dowd, Alessandra Stanley, Michiko Kakutani, and Frank Rich, all of whom would become columnists or critics at the Times. (Rich now writes for New York . ) “Even among that group, you sort of knew that Walter and Frank were in a slightly different category,” recalls Carter. “They got along better with older people, knew more what they were doing and were going to do.”

“Walter was uncommonly ambitious in a place that was relatively kind of relaxed and not cutthroat,” remembers Kelly. “Not that he made it cutthroat.” Isaacson covered Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and chronicled the fall of Communism as a foreign correspondent and then worked his way up, eventually becoming managing editor of the magazine.

“You had to kind of respect his absolute grit,” says Stanley. “And I would say, of all of us, I would vote him most improved, not only because he’s gotten smarter, but he’s a much nicer person now than he was then. Success doesn’t always do that.”

Isaacson’s Well-Connected Life

He’s known everyone.

Reporting for the Times-Picayune in 1972.

With Time editor Henry Grunwald at the 1980 Democratic Convention.

With Kurt Andersen, Jim Kelly, and Richard Stengel at Time.

With The Wise Men co-author Evan Thomas in 1982.

With Walker Percy in 1984.

With Václav Havel during the Prague Spring.

In Moscow for Time in 1991.

 Interviewing Mikhail Gorbachev in 1997.

With George W. Bush in 2005.

With then-Senator Barack Obama in 2005.

With Musk in 2023.

Isaacson takes me back to his condo, where he lives with his wife, Cathy, a lawyer from Washington whom he met in his early 20s. It’s airy and spacious, in a newish building that was designed to fit in with the look of the Garden District with its columns and porches. A balcony overlooks St. Charles Avenue, lined with big Southern Gothic oaks, emerald Mardi Gras beads still festooning their branches. Isaacson acts a bit sheepish about all that talk of youthful ambition. “There was always part of me like, Okay, what am I really doing? When am I going to go back home to New Orleans? I do not remember a burning desire to run Time ,” he says while standing by his stove cooking red beans and rice. I almost believe him. He holds up a knife and asks, “Do you like garlic, by the way?”

When he was appointed editor of Time in 1996, the internet was not yet a threat. He knew something of what was coming, though: He had spearheaded Time Inc.’s boondoggle of an early web portal called Pathfinder (which he tells me was a childhood nickname) before pivoting back to the weekly. He created a new section in the mag covering technology and science and made early relationships in Silicon Valley.

At the end of the decade, Time Warner merged with America Online, and corporate synergy was the name of the game. Isaacson was tapped to run CNN. He had never worked in TV and hardly even watched it. But it was a promotion, the next stage of his media career. “I get to CNN,” he says, “it’s like, ‘We need a donut with an uplink and a wraparound.’ I’m like, What the fuck are you talking about? ” It was a culture clash in other ways, too. “All they care about is having their mug on TV,” says Isaacson. Suddenly, he was spending inordinate amounts of time dealing with people like Lou Dobbs and Greta Van Susteren. “I’m thinking, How do I get out of this movie? ” he says. “I visit Ken Auletta. I remember being in the guest room in a fetal position. I hate this job, I hate this job, I hate this job. Then 9/11 happens. Then for a year or so, at least I knew what we were doing.”

He lasted until 2003, when he left to be CEO of the Aspen Institute. There was, at the time, a little bit of Schadenfreude: Michael Wolff wrote a column for this magazine expressing shock that one of the “greatest careerists of our time” could have had what seemed like this comeuppance.

Isaacson, Cathy, and their daughter, Betsy (then a teenager), moved to Georgetown, where they lived down the street from Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee and next door to George Stephanopoulos. He set about transforming the sleepy think tank, starting the Ideas Festival and using his contacts to make it something like Davos in the Rockies mixed with TED Talks. “His capacity for that was beyond belief,” remembers the historian and journalist Evan Thomas, who has known Isaacson since they worked together at Time. “Walter started at breakfast and would still be going at 11 p.m., just as happy as a clam. He’s chatting up the Dalai Lama, Larry Summers, Gloria Steinem, whoever happened to be famous and hot, from any walk of life — they were either at Walter’s house, on Walter’s stage, in Walter’s tent.”

Isaacson says he loved Aspen, but his pals tell me they had a suspicion their friend wasn’t feeling totally fulfilled by it. “I think the job that he’s had that he loves the most is being editor of Time, ” says Stengel. “I think he feels the most nostalgia about that. I think if he could, in a fantasy way, go back and do anything, that’s what he would do.”

But that world — the world that Isaacson was formed by and helped form — was fast collapsing. “Thirty years ago,” says Kelly, “there was a powerful room of magazine editors and network anchors, and that’s Walter. He is one of the emperors in that room. That room is destroyed. A new room was built, and it has the Steve Jobses and Elon Musks of the world. Walter knows he is not one of them, but he wants to be in the room. So now he’s the scribe to the new emperors, and that makes him very happy.”

One Friday night last September, Isaacson was back at his high school in New Orleans, watching a football game when he received a text from Musk: “This could be a giant disaster.”

Months earlier, the Ukraine War had broken out; the Russians’ opening salvo had been a malware attack that cut off the Ukrainians’ communications and internet access. Musk jumped to help them get back online, sending 500 Starlink terminals to Ukraine just two days later and thousands more after that. Suddenly, the war effort was heavily dependent on Musk, who was giving away his technology largely for free. That September, the Ukrainians planned a sneak attack on the Russian fleet at Sevastopol in Crimea using explosive-packed drones that relied on Starlink to guide them. But it wasn’t until their drone subs lost connectivity that they learned that Musk had disabled coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast, fearing such an attack could lead to World War III. As this was unfolding, Musk called Isaacson.

“I finally went under the bleachers, and he told me about stopping Starlink service in Crimea because they were doing the sneak attack,” says Isaacson. What, in such a scenario, is the responsibility of the biographer? “I didn’t tell him what to do,” he says. “I said, ‘What’s happening?’ He didn’t ask advice, and so my questions were simply things like, ‘Have you talked to Jake Sullivan or General Milley?’ He said ‘yes,’ and I said, ‘Oh, okay. What did they say?’ He told me.” It seems as though Isaacson came to be a kind of Dr. Melfi to Musk’s Tony Soprano at a time when Musk was exercising a terrifying amount of power. “At one point,” says Isaacson, “I almost said to him, ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ But I didn’t. He was talking and telling me. I don’t think it was like a therapist. I think he wanted it to be in the book.” (Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

On Sept. 7, the Washington Post published an excerpt from the book about Starlink. It read like Musk had switched off the coverage as the attack was underway — the suddenly unguided drones washing dramatically up on the shore — which apparently was not the case, exactly. An uproar ensued and Musk posted to X : “The Starlink regions in question were not activated. SpaceX did not deactivate anything.” He also texted Isaacson about the excerpt. Isaacson then posted to X that he wished to “clarify” that “the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.” When I followed up on this, Isaacson texted me, “I realized that I misinterpreted him that night when he told me he was not allowing Starlink to be used during the attack. I thought he had just made that decision. In fact, he was simply adhering to a policy he had previously implemented. So I posted a correction.” (Musk reposted it and wrote, “Much appreciated, Walter.”)

As all of this came out, a Ukrainian official posted to X Sept. 7 that Musk’s decision meant that the unsunk Russian ships continued to “fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. As a result, civilians, and children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego.”

The book recounts Musk calling Isaacson late at night on another occasion, racked with anxiety, asking, “How am I in this war? Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.” It includes eye-popping text-message exchanges between Musk and Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s then-vice-prime minister, who begs Musk to turn Starlink on in the country’s eastern territories. (Musk: “Russia will stop at nothing, nothing, to hold Crimea. This poses catastrophic risk to the world … seek peace while you have the upper hand.”)

“He has an epic superhero-savior complex,” says Isaacson. “He told me that he loved reading comics as a kid. He said, ‘Heroes were weird because they were trying to save the world while wearing their underpants on the outside, but at least they were trying to save the world.’”

There are moments in the book when Musk is caught with his pants down, mostly around his various baby mamas. He donated his sperm to Shivon Zilis, an executive at one of his other companies, Neuralink (which is developing implantable “brain-computer interfaces”), so that she could have two of his children without telling Grimes, with whom he had also had children. Isaacson reports that while Zilis was in an Austin hospital with pregnancy complications, so too, in a nearby room, was a woman who happened to be a surrogate mother carrying another of Musk’s babies with Grimes. Despite the fact that Zilis and Grimes were acquainted, Grimes had no clue that Zilis was carrying Musk’s kid or that she was down the hall. Isaacson writes that Grimes was furious when she found out later and wasn’t at all sure whether she would ever allow her Musk babies (a boy named X and a girl named Y and a new baby boy named Techno Mechanicus) to hang out with Zilis’s Musk babies (a boy named Strider Sekhar Sirius and a girl named Azure Astra Alice).

Isaacson also wades into Musk’s fiery relationship with Amber Heard. “She was just so toxic,” Musk’s brother, Kimbal, tells Isaacson, “a nightmare.” In the book, Musk’s chief of staff, Sam Teller, compares her to the Joker and says “she didn’t have a goal or aim other than chaos. She thrives on destabilizing everything.” Grimes says, “My Dungeon and Dragons alignment would be chaotic good, whereas Amber’s is probably chaotic evil.” As for Heard herself? She tells Isaacson that “Elon loves fire and sometimes it burns him.”

Musk is a volatile, moving target. Isaacson would spend a week or so at a time with him each month, traveling to L.A. to meet him at the SpaceX factory, then up to Fremont to the Tesla factory, then to Boca Chica, Texas, for the Starship launch. “The way I did it was to avoid trying to pepper him with questions and just observe,” says Isaacson. “Secondly, don’t fill the silences. There’d be times when it would just be him and me sitting in a conference room between meetings, sometimes 45 minutes. Occasionally, he’d start talking and reminisce. Then he’d go quiet or he’d read his mail or just stare into space. My way of operating was, Don’t fill the silences. If I’m quiet, they’ll eventually start talking again.”

Isaacson tells me he didn’t party with the playboy mogul. “I saw people cross the line sometimes,” he says, “people who worked for him or with him or who suddenly thought that they were party friends.” So he never saw him doing ketamine in a hot tub or anything? “I have never had him and a hot tub in the same field of vision,” he says. After having spent so much time with the man, I wondered, quite simply and perhaps naïvely — did Isaacson end up liking Musk, like, as a person? “Well, first of all, there’s seven or eight Elons,” says Isaacson. “There’s Elon firing off memes, there’s Elon being an asshole, there’s Elon in engineering mode. I was totally fascinated by him. Really repelled at times, when he was being brutal to people around him, but also astonished when he would change a design of a valve on the fly and they would test it and it worked. It’s not like there was one simple emotion. This is a guy who has multiple personalities and, as Grimes said, ‘It’s really great and fun to be around Elon when you’ve got the right Elon.’” Isaacson says Musk’s neurodivergence plays “a very large part” in his makeup and concedes that “I think his lack of empathy is a deeply unattractive trait. I also think that he would not be who he was in terms of the enterprises if he hadn’t had the deficit of the empathy gene.”

Isaacson is a particular type of biographer. His book is driven by listen-to-everyone-he-can access. It is not the Robert Caro approach with granular, yearslong reportage on the nature and implications of Musk’s power. Washington Post’ s Will Oremus wrote in his September 10 review that “the larger concern is whether Isaacson’s heavy reliance on Musk as a primary source throughout his reporting kept him too close to his subject. Swaths of the book are told largely through Musk’s eyes and those of his confidants.” The book is scrupulously unsnarky — don’t expect the tone of the book Joe Hagan wrote on Jann Wenner. “It is pure narrative storytelling; there’s not preaching in there,” says Isaacson. “People will come away from this book, if they admire Musk, with more evidence that they would like. If they hate Musk, they’ll come away with more evidence to reinforce their dislike of him. Hopefully, there will be a large group of readers who’ll say, ‘Wow, I get it, it’s more complex, and there’s not simply one way to look at it.’”

What is the inherent value of reporting the words that come out of Musk’s mouth for two years straight when he just tweets with abandon anyhow, often contradicting himself? Musk is a contemporary celebrity, which means he keeps the stunts coming so that his audience doesn’t look away. He’s performing. At some point, you just want to look away to preserve room in your consciousness for less crazy-making things.

When The Wall Street Journal excerpted the part of Isaacson’s book about the purchase of Twitter, the reaction, at least among those who followed the Musk-Twitter saga very closely, was some measure of Elon fatigue . Is that all he got? But the Musk fanboys ate it up. When the second excerpt came out, in Time, Musk himself tweeted: “Not quite how I would tell the story, but very accurate for an observer who only saw part of the puzzle.”

But can the puzzle pieces of Musk ever really be fit together by a biographer?

When Isaacson wrote about Steve Jobs, he was a largely beloved figure at the end of his life. He wasn’t influencing wars and foreign policy, pimping for Tucker Carlson, fulminating against something called the “woke mind virus,” or beefing with the Anti-Defamation League. He was making really cool consumer technology. There is risk for Isaacson in applying his Time Man of the Year approach to Musk, to cover him as he did Jobs — He can be a real prick, but check out all these neat toys he’s made! — since Musk is probably going to be around for decades more. Who knows what his ultimate legacy will be?

On St. Charles Avenue, just outside Isaacson’s apartment, is what’s said to be the oldest continually operating streetcar in the world. He rides it for just 40 cents (senior-citizen discount) to and from Tulane University, where he is a professor and something of a celebrity on campus. (His classes are very difficult to get into.)

The boy who used to recite Faulkner on a bridge at Harvard was happy to return to his hometown. “When you’ve been at Time magazine,” he says, “half the publicists who act like they’re your friends are just doing it because you’re at Time or CNN, whereas when I came back home, everybody had known me when I had really big ears in kindergarten.”

His office is stuffed with bric-a-brac from his big life among the muckety-mucks; a photograph of him sitting with George W. Bush during the time Isaacson was vice-chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority after Hurricane Katrina; a picture of Isaacson flying on Air Force One with President Obama; a few of Isaacson’s favorite Time covers. There is also a 1984 Apple Macintosh.

Jobs approached Isaacson in 2009 after realizing he might not have much time left. The book was a balanced and unvarnished look at Jobs’s legacy and the darker sides of his personality; reviewing it for the Times, Janet Maslin observed that the book “greatly admires its subject.” Still, Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, and some members of Jobs’s inner circle, such as Apple’s chief designer, Jony Ive, loathed the book and, by extension, its author. Ever the deadline reporter, Isaacson rushed out the book the month of Jobs’s death, which upset them. But mostly they felt the book painted Jobs as too much of an asshole and deadbeat dad.

It’s hardly unusual for the family of a subject to hate a biography. What is more unusual is the line Isaacson included in his acknowledgments in later versions of the book: “I am grateful to those who have been forgiving of my lapses and misperceptions and who have helped me make corrections or clear a few things up.”

Certain things in the original version of the book were excised. Andy Hertzfeld, an original Apple employee, had speculated that Powell Jobs had been “scheming” to meet Jobs. Gone is this quote from Hertzfeld: “Laurene is nice, but she can be calculating and I think she targeted him from the beginning … Her college roommate told me that Laurene had magazine covers of Steve and vowed she was going to meet him. If it’s true that Steve was manipulated, there is a fair amount of irony there.” (Isaacson included her denial in all versions of the book.) Elsewhere, a nine-sentence paragraph about Jobs being a neglectful father to some of his children simply disappeared.

It goes to an interesting tension between biographer and subject. Jobs wasn’t alive to react negatively to Isaacson’s book, assuming he would have. Musk, who can be wrathful, childishly mocking, and unrelenting, will be. “I’m brutally honest about everything about Musk,” says Isaacson. “It’s just that sometimes people who are — especially children who didn’t ask to be part of the story — you have to balance how hurtful it will be to a person who’s not central to the story and is young versus how necessary it is for the reader. Maybe that was the case back with the parts I revised out of Jobs. ”

As for Musk, Isaacson says it was necessary to include his falling out with his oldest child. “Some of the politics are driven by his own personal things in his own life,” says Isaacson. “Like Xavier, the eldest, named after his favorite X-Man person, becoming Jenna, transitioning, and becoming a Marxist and rejecting him. It helps inflame his fears that wokeness has infected everything from Los Angeles high schools to Twitter. He’s become in the past four years obsessed by the need to fight what he has decided is the ‘woke mind virus.’”

To many observers, it seems as though Musk is falling down a rabbit hole, growing more conspiratorial and mean-spirited — an alarming trend line when crossed with his growing power. But Isaacson doesn’t think so. “He hasn’t changed,” he says, “because in 2017, 2018, he was doing dark human shit as much as he is doing now. Pedophile tweets and things like that. He’s not that different. One difference, especially among the formerly blue-checked elite, is that his politics has shifted to the populist anti-woke side.” But that is definitely a difference now that he actually owns Twitter and has renamed it X.

The book begins with Musk’s hard-core childhood in South Africa, where he was beaten up at school, attended a “paramilitary Lord of the Flies ” summer camp, and was terrorized and belittled by his father. Bringing it back to X, Isaacson says, “He got brutalized on the playground. Now he gets to be king of the playground.”

I ask what Musk will hate most about the book, and Isaacson pauses for a moment. “I think some of the complexities of his father and childhood influence on him,” he says.

On Saturday, Sept. 9, after the excerpts had been published, Musk posted about the book: “I have a copy, but Walter recommended that I not read it,” adding a laughter emoji. So far, the billionaire seems pleased with the journalist. The two men had dinner in Austin, Texas, last week — the moment was, as with everything with Musk, publicized on X — and Musk promoted an interview Isaacson did with podcaster Lex Fridman, writing that “Any conversation with Walter & Lex will be great.”

And what if Musk changes his mind and goes on the offensive, starts tweeting that Isaacson is a “pedo guy” or sics his rabid fanboys on him? “I will depend on you and many others to say, ‘We’ve never noticed him to practice pedophilia,’” says Isaacson with a laugh. “While I’m here in New Orleans, I’m not too worried what people say about me.”

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8 major takeaways from the explosive new book about Elon Musk that lifts the lid on the world's richest person

• Walter Isaacson's biography on Elon Musk hit shelves last Tuesday.
• The author trailed the Musk for about three years and provides a peek into the billionaire's mind.
• The book details everything from Musk's relationship with his father to his "hardcore" work ethic and "demon mode."

Elon Musk has dominated headlines for years, but a new book proves there is still plenty to learn about the world's richest man.

After shadowing Musk for three years, Walter Isaacson provided a peek behind the curtain into the life of one of the most powerful men in the world in his biography on the Tesla CEO.

The book hit shelves on September 12 and it had some eye-popping details about the billionaire — from big reveals on his relationship with Ukraine and the birth of his eleventh child to details on Musk's hardcore work ethic and emotional swings.

Here are eight things we learned from the biography.

Musk's moods vary a lot, and those close to him fear his 'demon mode.'

The book explains how Musk's moods can swing wildly .

"He has numerous minds and many fairly distinct personalities," Grimes told Isaacson. "He moves between them at a very rapid pace. You just feel the air in the room change, and suddenly the whole situation is just transferred over to his other state."

Isaacson said that throughout his time with Musk, he'd also witnessed the billionaire's emotional volatility, saying he'd switch between "light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional."

"When we hang out, I make sure I'm with the right Elon," Grimes said. "There are guys in that head who don't like me, and I don't like them." These vary from the version of him "who's down for Burning Man and will sleep on a couch, eat canned soup, and be chill" and his so-called "demon mode" — "when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain."

During these periods, Musk is likely to unleash his rage on employees or order up a work surge, according to Isaacson. Grimes said despite the darkness associated with "demon mode," it's also the mode where he "gets shit done."

Elon Musk's relationship with his father massively affected his personality and outlook on the world.

One character who appears frequently throughout the book is Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk.

The biography is peppered with descriptions of incidents where Elon Musk claims his father bullied and demeaned him ( something Errol Musk has denied ), as well as comments from Elon Musk's former girlfriends and wives about how Errol Musk ultimately influenced his son's personality and outlook on the world.

After his parents divorced, Elon Musk originally lived with his mother before spending about seven years living with his father in Pretoria from the age of 10.

"It turned out to be a really bad idea," Elon Musk told Isaacson. "I didn't yet how how horrible he was."

His younger brother Kimbal Musk told Isaacson that their father had "zero compassion" and often "went ballistic."

"It was mental torture," Elon Musk told Isaacson. "He sure knew how to make anything terrible."

Elon Musk's mother, Maye Musk , said there was a fear her son "might become his father."

Both Elon and Kimbal Musk no longer speak to their father, Isaacson wrote.

But the years that he spent with his father have somewhat shaped Elon Musk's personality, according to the book. 

"I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain," Grimes, Elon Musk's former girlfriend, told Isaacson. She also noted that because of how his father brought him up, Musk sometimes lets himself be treated badly and "associates love with being mean or abusive."  

Justine Musk , Elon Musk's first wife, told Isaacson said that during their arguments, Elon would belittle and insult her, calling her a "moron," an "idiot," or "stupid and crazy."

"When I spent some time with Errol, I realized that's where he'd gotten the vocabulary," Justine Musk told Isaacson. 

Ex-wife Talulah Riley also told Isaacson that Errol Musk's treatment of his son "had a profound effect on how he operates."

"Inside the man, he's still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad ," she said.

Musk's 'hardcore' work ethic has always been a part of him.

Musk is well known for his "hardcore" work mindset , which in some cases involved sleeping and eating in the office. His late-night habits seem to stem from his childhood, when he would stay up until 6 a.m. reading, Isaacson wrote.

While he worked at Zip2, his first business, Musk and his brother slept in the office, showered at the YMCA, and mainly ate at Jack in the Box, the book said. One early Zip2 employee told Isaacson that he even had to tell Musk to go home and shower before customer meetings.

"At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations, and he expected others to do the same," Isaacson wrote. "His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges."

Musk has applied the same intensity to other aspects of his life, too, including learning to fly planes. "I tend to do things very intensely," he told Isaacson.

Musk expects his employees to display the same workaholic nature. At banking company X.com, which later became PayPal following a merger, he told staff that the site would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend and "prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in a nervous and nervous-making frenzy and slept under his desk most nights," Isaacson wrote.

After buying Twitter more than two decades later, he told its staff to commit to an "extremely hardcore" work schedule with "long hours at a high intensity" if they wanted to keep their jobs.

He's been difficult to work with from the start.

Horror stories about working with Elon Musk are hardly a new phenomenon — from quickly laying off over half of Twitter's workforce to forcing some Tesla workers to work through Thanksgiving — working at one of his companies has become the stuff of urban legends. And it turns out tensions were often near a boiling point, even at Musk's first startup.

Musk's brother once "tore off a hunk of flesh" from Musk's hand while the brothers wrestled on the floor in Zip2 's office back in the 90s, according to Isaacson. The biographer said the two men would wrestle during periods of "intense stress."

Similarly, Musk's college dorm-mate quit working at Zip2 just six weeks after starting at the company because he couldn't handle working with Musk, according to the book.

"I knew I could either be working with him or be his friend, but not both," Musk's longtime friend and former dorm-mate, Navaid Farooq, told Isaacson.

Musk later explained the reasoning behind his intensity after he chewed out a SpaceX worker who had lost his child the week prior.

"I give people hardcore feedback, mostly accurate, and I try not to to do it in a way that's ad hominem," Musk told Isaacson. "I try to criticize the action, not the person. We all make mistakes. What matters is whether a person has a good feedback loop, can seek criticism from others, and can improve. Physics does not care about feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right."

Musk reacts physically to stress but it also motivates him. He can't handle peace.

During stressful periods at work and in his personal life, Musk would stay awake at night and vomit, Isaacson wrote.

The biographer said that at one point Musk's stomach pain had a doctor checking for appendicitis. 

In 2008 when Tesla was facing the potential of bankruptcy, Musk's wife at the time, Talulah Riley, told Isaacson she worried the stress would cause Musk to have a heart attack.

"He was having night terrors and just screaming in his sleep and clawing at me," she said. "It would go to his gut, and he would be screaming and retching. I would stand by the toilet and hold his head."

Musk's ex-girlfriend Grimes says she recalls similarly sleepless nights during her relationship with the billionaire.

Musk appears to seek out these periods of high stress, according to some. 

"You don't have to be in a state of war at all times," Shivon Zilis, the mother of two of Musk's children and a director at Neuralink, told Musk when he was gearing up to buy Twitter. "Or is it that you find greater comfort when you're in periods of war?" 

Musk told Zilis it's one of his "default settings."

"I guess I've always wanted to push my chips back on the table or play the next level of the game."

Though, Musk has admitted to Isaacson his intensity has taken a toll on him physically.

"From 2007 onwards, until maybe last year, it's been nonstop pain. There's a gun to your head, make Tesla work, pull a rabbit out of your hat, then pull another rabbit out of the hat," Musk told Isaacson in 2021.

"You can't be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you. But there's something else I've found this year. It's that fighting to survive keeps you going for quite a while. When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it's not that easy to get motivated every day," he added.

Musk can be a difficult person to date.

Isaacson interviewed many of the women Musk used to date or be married to. It becomes clear that Musk can be a difficult person to date because of a range of factors, including his laser focus on his businesses and his lack of empathy and social awareness.

"Elon and I were used to having big arguments in public," Justine Musk told Isaacson. "I don't think you can be in a relationship with Elon and not argue."

Musk postponed his honeymoon with Justine by months so that he could sort out X.com's merger with PayPal , and they had to cut it short amid turmoil at the company.

Justine told Isaacson that Elon Musk told her to dye her hair blonder and that she felt like she was being turned into a "trophy wife."

"I met him when he didn't have much at all," she told Isaacson. "The accumulation of wealth and fame changed the dynamic."

"The strong will and emotional distance that makes him difficult as a husband may be reasons for his success in running a business," she added.

Meanwhile, his emotional volatility and inability to understand other people's emotions at times can be hard to deal with, Grimes told Isaacson.

Isaacson wrote that Musk sent a picture of his then-girlfriend Grimes having a C-section when she had X to their friends and family, including her father and brothers. Grimes said he was "clueless" about why she'd be upset about it.

But he has a tender side too.

Though the book describes Musk's volatile relationships with many people, including relatives, friends, partners, and business associates, it also details how he can be tender at times. In particular, Isaacson paints a picture of Musk as a doting father to X AE A-XII, also known as "baby X," his first child with Grimes .

Isaacson wrote that X "had an otherworldly sweetness that calmed and beguiled Musk, who craved his presence. He took X everywhere."

Musk also moved in with his father aged 10 because he didn't want him to be lonely, Isaacson wrote. Musk's cousin Peter Rive told Isaacson that playing "Dungeons and Dragons" together as a child brought out the "incredibly patient" and "beautiful" parts of Musk's personality.

When a close friend of Musk's ex-wife Talulah Riley died in 2021, he flew over to England to be with her, "and he just made me laugh instead of cry," she told Isaacson.

Musk's politics are beginning to echo his father's.

While Musk has cut off communication with his father, Errol Musk, Isaacson said the billionaire's political stance is beginning to mimic his father's.

Isaacson said Errol's sons were sometimes off-put by their father's political rants. For example in 2022, Errol sent Musk an email in which he called the COVID-19 pandemic "a lie" and dubbed President Joe Biden a '"freak, criminal, pedophile president' who was out to destroy everything that the US stood for, 'including you,'" Isaacson wrote.

The biographer said Musk had begun to show a similar propensity which was in part triggered by his daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson 's decision to cut ties with him. Isaacson said that Musk blamed the disconnect on the "woke mind virus."

Over the past few years Musk has gone from from supporting the Democratic party to publicly dissing President Joe Biden, reposting anti-transgender content on X, and promoting conspiracy theories.

"Musk's tweet showed his growing tendency (like his father) to read wacky fake-news sites purveying conspiracy theories, a problem that Twitter had writ at large," Isaacson wrote of Musk's decision to post about a conspiracy theory related to the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband.

And, like his father, Musk's politics have been met with distaste from much of his family.

"It's not okay," Kimbal Musk told his brother after he tweeted "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci." "It's not funny. You can't do that shit."

The biography is in stores now.

• Main content

7 Takeaways From Walter Isaacson’s New Biography of Elon Musk

The book peers into the tycoon’s private life and his leadership style at Tesla, SpaceX and X, formerly known as Twitter

Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk went on sale Tuesday, offering a behind-the-curtain look into the businesses and lifestyle of the world’s richest man. Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years.

Ariel Zambelich/The Wall Street Journal

Running more than 600 pages, “Elon Musk” is the latest in a series of biographies by Isaacson, a Tulane University history professor and former editor of Time magazine. Here are seven takeaways.

Private Life

The book explores Musk’s difficult childhood and dives into his troubled relationship with his father. It describes how the billionaire and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Grimes secretly had a third child—bringing the total number of his known, living children to 10.

Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Huffington Post

Leadership Style

The book describes examples of Musk’s “hardcore” management style. At SpaceX, for example: “Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process and every specification needs to have a name attached. He can be quick to personalize blame when something goes wrong.”

SpaceX’s Starship launch in April ended with an explosion a few minutes into the flight. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty

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Isaacson puts forth the idea of “demon mode” to explain the temperamental impulses behind some of Musk’s successes—and setbacks. Grimes coined the term in an interview with Isaacson. “Demon mode is when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain,” Boucher said in the book. “Demon mode,” she added, “causes a lot of chaos but it also gets s— done.”

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Isaacson said that Musk’s demons stem from his childhood and a psychologically abusive father. Musk’s father, Errol Musk, pictured, disputed the suggestion that he exposed his son to psychological abuse and took issue with the “demon mode” characterization of his son’s behavior.

Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty

“The Algorithm”

Musk has five commandments for how he wants problems solved by his workers, a framework he calls “the algorithm.” In short, Musk urges his employees to: question every requirement; delete any part or process you can; simplify and optimize; accelerate cycle time; and automate.

Michael Reynolds/EPA/Shutterstock

In the book, Musk acknowledges he talks about the approach often. “I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Musk is quoted as saying. “But I think it’s helpful to say it to an annoying degree.”

Taking Over Twitter

Musk told his team to root out employees of Twitter who were untrustworthy. Musk’s lieutenants scoured Slack messages and social-media posts looking for disgruntled employees, searching for keywords including “Elon.” Dozens were fired.

Workers in July install a sign atop the San Francisco headquarters of X. Photo: Noah Berger/AP

Musk’s behavior after taking over Twitter was damaging enough to Tesla’s brand that board members intervened. “The giant elephant in the room was that he was acting like a f—ing idiot,” said his brother, Kimbal Musk, according to Isaacson.

Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg News

Driving Tesla

The book goes deep on a handful of initiatives, including new products. Isaacson writes that Tesla plans to make a robotaxi with a “Cybertruck futuristic feel.” Musk has been all-in on the idea, and adamant that the vehicle not have mirrors, pedals or a steering wheel.

Musk with a Cybertruck. Photo: Angela Piazza/Caller-Times/USA Today Network/Reuters

Guiding SpaceX

The book shows an intense cost focus embedded in SpaceX from its earliest days. It also spotlights moments where Musk pushes out employees or icily demands information and is furious when they don’t deliver. And it reinforces Musk’s dedication to launching a mission to Mars, a flight that he plans to attempt using SpaceX’s Starship rocket.

Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty

Artificial Intelligence

Musk has given three major objectives to his newest company, the artificial-intelligence venture called xAI: Make an AI bot that can code; produce a chatbot to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT; and, in a grander goal, develop a form of AI that would want to preserve humanity and “care about understanding the universe.”

Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty

Cover photo: Julia Nikhinson/Reuters Produced by Brian Patrick Byrne

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‘elon musk,’ biography by walter isaacson, may have been published too soon.

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SAN FRANCISCO, CA - OCTOBER 08: Aspen Institute President and CEO Walter Isaacson and Tesla Motors ... [+] CEO and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk speak onstage during "The State of Innovation" at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 8, 2014 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Vanity Fair)

Elon Musk’s SpaceX And Other Companies

Elon Musk asked rocket builder Tom Mueller in 2002 to build a rocket as big as TRW’s TR-106 engine - one of the most powerful rocket engines ever developed. (TRW was responsible for producing the lunar descent engine that brought Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong to the moon.)

At the time, Musk, had just become an internet millionaire and decided to get into the business of space exploration, a far jump from sitting at a computer typing code. This was the start of SpaceX. Mueller accepted the job but insisted his salary be put in escrow in case the new company tanked. Musk agreed, but he refused to let Mueller be considered a founder of SpaceX.

“There’s got to be some combination of inspiration, perspiration, and risk to be a cofounder” Musk, currently the second richest man in the world according to Forbes , told Isaacson. Throughout Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk , the 600-page biography published by Simon & Schuster, anecdotes like this one emerge as examples of how Musk would manage companies.

Isaacson’s new book chronicles Musk’s rise, from his thorny childhood to his advantageous risks in the 1990s that led to PayPal PYPL and his multi-industrial career at SpaceX, Tesla TSLA , and of course, X (née Twitter). After Musk is fired from PayPal in 2000, Isaacson writes that Musk was, “a visionary who didn’t play well with others” which could easily act as a summary for the entire book.

By that measure, Isaacson’s new work nearly mirrors his earlier biography of another visionary founder with poor people skills: Steve Jobs.

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Best 5% interest savings accounts of september 2023, parallels to steve jobs’ biography.

Musk and Jobs are comparable in innumerable ways aside from having the same biographer: They both benefit from celebrity that comes from tech media, both are socially awkward, they both have dealt with unresolved daddy issues, and according to Isaacson, both treat their employees poorly to “motivate them.” There’s no denying that Jobs and Musk have upended our living world and changed how we interact with our technology, but these men also differ in important ways.

Steve Jobs , written in 2011, was Isaacson’s first biography of a tech founder, immersing himself in the strange world of Silicon Valley and its power to shape our computerized immersive experiences.

Isaacson was clearly influenced by Jobs after spending years with him and interviewing more than 100 people close enough to the Apple founder to tell his story. It’s one thing to type on a MacBook and another to understand the philosophy behind its three-decade evolution from the Homebrew Computer Club to a trillion-dollar company.

How could one man have this much power to shape the world? Isaacson’s biography of Jobs feels like an investigation, trying to pin down what made him tick through the voices of the people around him. But Isaacson explains that everyone who knew Jobs felt they understood the openly emotional man, even though they sometimes didn’t appreciate his demands.

Musk on the other hand is a man of several big companies and even bigger ideas. Had PayPal not fired Musk, it would have been a trillion-dollar company, Musk tells Isaacson. In this case, his posturing is valid because in 2021 Tesla did become a trillion-dollar company . (It has since retreated to around 845 billion .)

But unlike how he chronicled Jobs, who died weeks before the biography was published, Isaacson is covering the story of Musk mid-journey. Musk’s tale continues to unfold in front of our collective eyes and out of the control of the biographer’s keyboard.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk introduces SpaceX's Dragon V2 spacecraft, the company's next generation version ... [+] of the Dragon ship designed to carry astronauts into space, at a press conference in Hawthorne, California on May 29, 2014. The private spaceflight company's unmanned Dragon spacecraft has been delivering cargo to the International Space Station three times since 2012. The new Dragon V2 will ferry NASA astronauts to and from the space station. AFP PHOTO / Robyn Beck (Photo by Robyn BECK / AFP) (Photo by ROBYN BECK/AFP via Getty Images)

Side by side, you can feel the methods of these men come through the pages: Jobs liked to walk and talk, taking time to explain himself and his thoughts, sometimes through tear-filled eyes. Musk’s method is to get things done quickly. As a result, while similar in size, Elon Musk feels rapid paced like a job to get finished quickly and into the public’s hands.

These men also represent their era. Where Jobs created computers with closed architecture, Musk inhabits the resulting environment and instead works on software and rocket engines. Jobs’ biography was a difficult task because it’s difficult to pry open the hardware, but Musk is the opposite, oversharing while short on couth.

Walter Isaacson’s ‘Elon Musk’ Biography

The biggest takeaway from Isaacson’s biography is that Musk’s most important product is Elon Musk himself and his fascination with fame and public relations shape his visionary stance. Jobs appreciated the fame as well, but not in the way Musk imagines it through his boyhood love of comic books, superheroes, and celebrities. Isaacson seems to take the bait and walk behind Musk, trying to keep up the story while simultaneously enamored by the rockets that may someday visit other worlds.

Later in the book, when we reach the near present when Musk smokes marijuana on Joe Rogan’s podcast and complains about @elonjet tracking his private plane , Isaacson avoids a harsh truth by using neutral adjectives and plain reporting: Many of Musk’s traits more resemble a reactionary who wants to control the narrative than a visionary who is building the future. While Musk’s cumbersome takeover of Twitter/X makes much more sense through Isaacson’s tale, the book finishes before the end of the story.

When we hold an iPhone in our hands, we see Jobs’ vision was remaking the world of tech by reinventing our relationship to computers and converting them to a lifestyle. Apple AAPL is a hardware company that occupies consumer reality. Musk occupies our minds because he makes the tech we interact with and fantasize about, from communication, to travel, to space exploration.

If Isaacson’s biography of Jobs is an examination of hardware, Elon Musk is exploration not that of software, but rather wetware: Elon Musk is about a man living to be the main character and trying to build the future — for better or for worse.

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Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk Biography Paints Him As Bullied Kid Who Grew Up To Be A Billionaire: How To Get Your Copy

Zinger key points.

• Famed biographer Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk will drop in on Sept. 12.
• Publishers promote the book as the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of the current era.

The much-awaited biography of Elon Musk by famed tech journalist and biographer Walter Isaacson will hit the shelves on Sept. 12. Publisher Simon & Schuster has begun taking preorders for the 688-page book.

What Happened: The book titled "Elon Musk" — in a similar style to Isaacson’s previous biographies — traces the billionaire's journey from a bullied kid in South Africa to a billionaire, who has built up sprawling businesses.

"This is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era – a rule-breaking visionary, who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter," the publisher said on its website.

The "About the Book" portion on the publisher's website throws light on Musk's tormented childhood. He was regularly beaten up by bullies and was once pushed down concrete steps and kicked until his face was a swollen ball of flesh.

The book also details the wounds his "rogue" and "charismatic fantasist" father inflicted on him. It was due to these travails, Musk developed into a "tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive."

See Also: How Elon Musk Made His Money

These scars explain his interest in lapping up Twitter. "Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground," the publishers said. The excerpts said he was drawn into accumulating shares in Twitter because it was the ultimate playground and he had the chance to own the playground.

The publishers said Isaacson spent two years on the book to produce the "revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?"

Isaacson is widely recognized for his in-depth and highly acclaimed biographies of influential figures from history and technology. Some of his most notable works include biographies of Steve Jobs , Albert Einstein , Benjamin Franklin , and Leonardo da Vinci.

When, Where To Buy: The book will be made available on Sept. 12 through retailers, including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and Bookshop. The hard-cover version is priced at $35.

The eBook version of it is priced at $16.99 and will be available through Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Google Play and Rakuten Kobo.

The unabridged Audio download is priced at $34.99 and is available through Audible, audiobooks, Google Play, Libro.fm, Apple Books etc. The unabridged compact disk, priced at $64.99, is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million and Bookshop, among others.

Read Next: Elon Musk Sees ‘No Winter For AI’ Despite Constant Calls To Freeze Development

Photo courtesy: Simon & Schuster

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