elon musk biography 2023 review

Elon Musk has his demons. Walter Isaacson does his best to dissect them.

Isaacson’s new biography, ‘elon musk,’ attempts to reconcile the tech billionaire’s flaws with his achievements.

If you were trying to reverse-engineer from Elon Musk’s life a blueprint for creating the sort of tech icon who, at 52 years old, merits a 688-page biography by Walter Isaacson, the resulting plans would be fairly straightforward — just rather hard to execute.

Take a bright, exceedingly headstrong, socially maladjusted young boy and forge his character in an abusive, friendless childhood. For solace, give him only science fiction novels, superhero comics, and a cadre of younger siblings and cousins to boss around, imbuing him with delusions of grandeur and a taste for unchecked power.

If he survives that, send him to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. Give him a relentless work ethic, an addiction to risk and a moral compass that puts his own interests at its magnetic north pole. Add a keen eye for brilliant engineering minds he can mine for ideas and push to achieve the seemingly impossible, while he hogs the profits and credit. And then hope that he gets very lucky at pivotal moments along the way, so that his compulsive risk-taking doesn’t blow up in his face, even when his rockets do.

The traits that conspired to make Musk the world’s richest man were all in evidence when Isaacson decided in 2021 to make him the subject of his next biography. “ Elon Musk ,” being published Tuesday, must have seemed a natural extension of Isaacson’s “great man” canon, which includes biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs . (Isaacson’s subjects are almost all men.)

But Einstein, Franklin and Jobs were dead by the time Isaacson’s biographies hit bookstores (albeit by just weeks in Jobs’s case), whereas Musk — chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X (formerly Twitter) — remains very alive. In the past two years, Musk’s public image has morphed from that of the hard-charging high-tech visionary who inspired Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark in “ Iron Man ” into something more disturbing and polarizing.

How do you take the full measure of an increasingly troubled figure whose life’s work and legacy still hang in the balance? At stake is not just Musk’s place in history, but also his place in the present and the future. If Isaacson fails to pin that down in a satisfying way, it might be because Musk is such a fast-moving target, and Isaacson prioritizes revealing anecdotes and behind-the-scenes reportage over a sophisticated critical lens.

Fortunately, the juicy details are plentiful, especially in the book’s final third, which covers the two especially volatile years Isaacson spent shadowing Musk. (There are wild capers and personal dramas worthy of a soap opera throughout, but most of the ones you’ll encounter earlier in the book have been well documented before, including in Ashlee Vance’s thorough 2015 Musk biography.)

New details include that Musk single-handedly scuttled a Ukrainian sneak attack on a Russian naval fleet in Crimea (more on that below). We learn that Musk’s girlfriend Grimes was in an Austin hospital visiting a surrogate pregnant with their then-secret second child in 2021 at the same time Musk’s employee Shivon Zilis was in the same hospital pregnant with then-secret twins fathered by Musk via IVF, unbeknownst to Grimes. (“Perhaps it is no surprise,” Isaacson deadpans, “that Musk decided to fly west that Thanksgiving weekend to deal with the simpler issues of rocket engineering.”) And we discover that Musk and Grimes have a third, previously unreported child, named Techno Mechanicus Musk, bringing Musk’s tally of known offspring to 11.

This being an Isaacson biography, though, it’s clear he intends for “Elon Musk” to be more than a bunch of interesting stories about a controversial guy. He frames it as a character study, a quest to understand and perhaps reconcile the contradictions at Musk’s core. But the central question he sets out to answer in the book’s prologue feels a bit too easy. It’s the same one that lay at the heart of “ Steve Jobs ”: Are Musk’s personal demons and flaws also what make his spectacular achievements possible? Seven pages in, there are no prizes for guessing what Isaacson’s answer will be. Though the destination lacks suspense, the ride is entertaining enough, particularly for those who haven’t closely followed Musk’s high jinks. And despite the book’s length, it zips along thanks to Isaacson’s economical prose and short chapters.

Musk, who at age 5 traipsed solo across Pretoria to reach a cousin’s birthday party after his parents left him home as a punishment, has always had a little crazy in him. To help explain it, Isaacson introduces us early on to Elon’s brutal, “Jekyll-and-Hyde” father, Errol Musk. He’s a man Elon mostly despises but also, in his worst moments, resembles. When Musk’s first wife, Justine, reached her wit’s end with him, she would warn, “You’re turning into your father.”

Elon’s childhood in South Africa reads like the origin story for a superhero, or maybe a supervillain, at least as he and his family members tell it. That may be by design: Musk has a penchant for self-mythologizing, casting himself as the sole hero of complex origin stories like that of Tesla’s founding.

Already, one of the book’s critical passages has sparked geopolitical drama — and an embarrassing public walk-back by Isaacson. In an excerpt from the book published in The Washington Post on Friday , Isaacson recounts how Musk single-handedly foiled a Ukrainian sneak attack on a Russian naval fleet in Crimea by cutting off the Starlink satellite internet service Ukraine’s drones were relying on. Isaacson writes that Musk made the decision because he feared that the attack could lead to nuclear war, based on his conversation weeks earlier with a Russian ambassador.

But when CNN obtained the excerpt and reported on it, Musk tweeted a different account. He said he didn’t cut Ukraine’s Starlink service in Crimea; it was already deactivated there, and he refused the Ukrainians’ emergency request to activate it so they could carry out the attack. Isaacson tweeted Friday that Musk’s version of the story was accurate, meaning the passage in his book is misleading.

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. And the majority of tales about his exploits cast him as the genius protagonist even as they expose his self-destructive tendencies or his capacity for cruelty.

To the author’s credit, the book boasts a large number of citations for sources and interviews. Isaacson also takes care to include corroborating or conflicting accounts of controversial episodes, such as Musk’s vicious grudge against Tesla’s original founders. (If you ever want to make an enemy for life, try standing between Musk and full credit for a project he was involved in.) And, contrary to some of his most adamant critics, Musk really does seem to possess a remarkable brain for physics, engineering and business — if perhaps not for running a social media firm. Isaacson persuasively dismisses the notion that Musk owes his success largely to inherited wealth, or that he’s a huckster profiting only from the inventions of others. Musk’s companies have thrived both because of and in spite of him.

Isaacson at times interjects his own, sometimes dryly funny, counterpoints to some of Musk’s more outlandish claims. After he quotes Musk enthusing about his far-fetched Hyperloop plan, “This is going to change everything,” Isaacson begins the next paragraph: “It didn’t change everything.” (What it did change, by some reckonings, were California’s plans to build a high-speed rail line, which Musk has acknowledged he sought to undermine.)

In one of his most entertaining and revealing bits of original reporting, Isaacson fills in the backstory behind a series of technical glitches that plagued Twitter in late 2022 and early 2023, and it does not disappoint.

Read an excerpt from “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson

Steamrolling past Twitter employees’ warnings, Musk insisted on immediately moving thousands of the company’s computer servers from a Sacramento data center to another facility to save money. When they balked, insisting it would take months to do safely, Musk dragooned a carful of friends and family into canceling their Christmas plans to drive to Sacramento, where he personally disconnected one of the servers with the help of a security guard’s pocket knife. He then called in a team of employees to start loading the rest onto a semi truck and some moving vans.

On many occasions over the years, Musk has horrified deputies with these sorts of stunts, only to be vindicated when they pay off handsomely. But in this case it turned out the employees, whom he had threatened to fire for their timidity, had been right. The move caused cascading glitches in Twitter’s software, including the ones that afflicted a highly anticipated live audio event with presidential candidate Ron DeSantis the following May.

The Musk we know today is different from the Musk Isaacson began following in 2021. Since then, he has lurched rightward politically, embracing conspiracy theories and railing that the “woke mind virus” could unravel civilization; staged a dramatic takeover of Twitter, restoring banned accounts including Donald Trump’s while alienating advertisers and the mainstream media; been accused of sexual misdeeds and revealed as the secret father of multiple additional children; founded a new AI company; and become a power broker in both the Ukraine war and Republican politics. And that’s leaving out a lot.

Isaacson pins the changes at least partly on the pandemic, which drew out Musk’s conspiratorial side, supercharged his Twitter addiction and amped up his natural mistrust of bureaucratic regulations as covid-19 restrictions hampered Tesla production in California and China. In some ways, as Isaacson points out, Musk is becoming more like his father, Errol, whom Isaacson has found in recent years to be descending into full-on paranoia, conspiracism and overt racism.

So what does Isaacson ultimately make of Elon? In a brief, final assessment, Isaacson takes us back to where he started. The tech tycoon’s “epic feats” don’t excuse his “bad behavior,” but “it’s important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly.”

A harder but more fruitful question than how to reconcile Musk’s idealism and remarkable achievements with his “demon mode,” as Grimes calls it, might have been: What does it say about our world today that so much depends on a man like Musk? That the fate of electric vehicles, self-driving cars, public infrastructure projects, global space exploration, the rules of online discourse, and military combatants can be altered at the whim of a notoriously whimsical man? And if he ever does go full Errol, will there be anything we can do about it?

By Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster. 688 pp. $35

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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.

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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.

Elon Musk goes ‘absolutely hard core’ in another round of Tesla layoffs

Razer made a million dollars selling a mask with rgb, and the ftc is not pleased, binance founder’s sentencing hearing, fcc fines at&t, sprint, t-mobile, and verizon nearly $200 million for illegally sharing location data, automatic emergency braking at speeds up to 90mph required under new rule.

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By Jill Lepore

In 2021, Elon Musk became the world’s richest man (no woman came close), and Time named him Person of the Year: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen ’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.” Right about when Time was preparing that giddy announcement, three women whose ovaries and uteruses were involved in passing down the madcap man-god’s genes were in the maternity ward of a hospital in Austin. Musk believes a declining birth rate is a threat to civilization and, with his trademark tirelessness, is doing his visionary edgelord best to ward off that threat. Shivon Zilis, a thirty-five-year-old venture capitalist and executive at Musk’s company Neuralink, was pregnant with twins, conceived with Musk by in-vitro fertilization, and was experiencing complications. “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” Zilis said. In a nearby room, a woman serving as a surrogate for Musk and his thirty-three-year-old ex-wife, Claire Boucher, a musician better known as Grimes, was suffering from pregnancy complications, too, and Grimes was staying with her.

“I really wanted him to have a daughter so bad,” Grimes said. At the time, Musk had had seven sons, including, with Grimes, a child named X. Grimes did not know that Zilis, a friend of hers, was down the hall, or that Zilis was pregnant by Musk. Zilis’s twins were born seven weeks premature; the surrogate delivered safely a few weeks later. In mid-December, Grimes’s new baby came home and met her brother X. An hour later, Musk took X to New York and dandled him on his knee while being photographed for Time .

“He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable,” the magazine’s Person of the Year announcement read. Musk and Grimes called the baby, Musk’s tenth, Y, or sometimes “Why?,” or just “?”—a reference to Musk’s favorite book, Douglas Adams’s “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ,” because, Grimes explained, it’s a book about how knowing the question is more important than knowing the answer.

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Elon Musk is currently at or near the helm of six companies: Tesla, SpaceX (which includes Starlink), the Boring Company, Neuralink, X (formerly known as Twitter), and X.AI, an artificial-intelligence company that he founded, earlier this year, because he believes that human intelligence isn’t reproducing fast enough, while artificial intelligence is getting more artificially intelligent exponentially. Call it Musk’s Law: the answer to killer robots is more Musk babies. Plus, more Musk companies. “I can’t just sit around and do nothing,” Musk says, fretting about A.I., in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “ Elon Musk ” (Simon & Schuster), a book that can scarcely contain its subject, in that it raises infinitely more questions than it answers.

“Are you sincerely trying to save the world?” Stephen Colbert once asked Musk on “The Late Show.” “Well, I’m trying to do good things, yeah, saving the world is not, I mean . . . ,” Musk said, mumbling. “But you’re trying to do good things, and you’re a billionaire,” Colbert interrupted. “Yeah,” Musk said, nodding. Colbert said, “That seems a little like superhero or supervillain. You have to choose one.” Musk paused, his face blank. That was eight years, several companies, and as many children ago. Things have got a lot weirder since. More Lex Luthor, less Tony Stark.

Musk controls the very tiniest things, and the very biggest. He oversees companies, valued at more than a trillion dollars, whose engineers have built or are building, among other things, reusable rocket ships, a humanoid robot, hyperloops for rapid transit, and a man-machine interface to be implanted in human brains. He is an entrepreneur, a media mogul, a political provocateur, and, not least, a defense contractor: SpaceX has received not only billions of dollars in government contracts for space missions but also more than a hundred million dollars in military contracts for missile-tracking satellites, and Starlink’s network of four thousand satellites— which provides Pentagon-funded services to Ukraine —now offers a military service called Starshield. Day by day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure, and its energy supply.

And yet. At a jury trial earlier this year, Musk’s lawyer repeatedly referred to his client, a middle-aged man, as a “kid.” The Wall Street Journal has described him as suffering from “tantrums.” The Independent has alleged that selling Twitter to Musk was “like handing a toddler a loaded gun.”

“I’m not evil,” Musk said on “Saturday Night Live” a couple of years ago, playing the dastardly Nintendo villain Wario, on trial for murdering Mario. “I’m just misunderstood.” How does a biographer begin to write about such a man? Some years back, after Isaacson had published a biography of Benjamin Franklin and was known to be writing one of Albert Einstein, the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called him up and asked him to write his biography; Isaacson says he wondered, half jokingly, whether Jobs “saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.” I don’t think Musk sees himself as a natural successor to anyone. As I read it, Isaacson found much to like and admire in Jobs but is decidedly uncomfortable with Musk. (He calls him, at one point, “an asshole.”) Still, Isaacson’s descriptions of Jobs and Musk are often interchangeable. “His passions, perfectionism, demons, desires, artistry, devilry, and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business and the products that resulted.” (That’s Jobs.) “It was in his nature to want total control.” (Musk.) “He didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked.” (Musk.) “He was not a model boss or human being.” (Jobs.) “This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries.” I ask you: Which?

“Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training,” Isaacson concludes in the last lines of his life of Musk. “They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.” It’s a disconcerting thing to read on page 615 of a biography of a fifty-two-year-old man about whom a case could be made that he wields more power than any other person on the planet who isn’t in charge of a nuclear arsenal. Not potty-trained? Boys will be . . . toddlers?

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971. His grandfather J. N. Haldeman was a staunch anti-Communist from Canada who in the nineteen-thirties and forties had been a leader of the anti-democratic and quasi-fascist Technocracy movement. (Technocrats believed that scientists and engineers should rule.) “In 1950, he decided to move to South Africa,” Isaacson writes, “which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.” In fact, apartheid had been declared only in 1948, and the regime was soon recruiting white settlers from North America, promising restless men such as Haldeman that they could live like princes. Isaacson calls Haldeman’s politics “quirky.” In 1960, Haldeman self-published a tract, “The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship & the Menace to South Africa,” that blamed the two World Wars on the machinations of Jewish financiers.

Musk’s mother, Maye Haldeman, was a finalist for Miss South Africa during her tumultuous courtship with his father, Errol Musk, an engineer and an aviator. In 2019, she published a memoir titled “A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success.” For all that she writes about growing up in South Africa in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, she never once mentions apartheid.

Isaacson, in his account of Elon Musk’s childhood, barely mentions apartheid himself. He writes at length and with compassion about the indignities heaped upon young Elon by schoolmates. Elon, an awkward, lonely boy, was bored in school and had a tendency to call other kids “stupid”; he was also very often beaten up, and his father frequently berated him, but when he was ten, a few years after his parents divorced, he chose to live with him. (Musk is now estranged from his father, a conspiracist who has called Joe Biden a “pedophile President,” and who has two children by his own stepdaughter; he has said that “the only thing we are here for is to reproduce.” Recently, he warned Elon, in an e-mail, that “with no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees.”)

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Musk’s childhood sounds bad, but Isaacson’s telling leaves out rather a lot about the world in which Musk grew up. In the South Africa of “Elon Musk,” there are Musks and Haldemans—Elon and his younger brother and sister and his many cousins—and there are animals, including the elephants and monkeys who prove to be a nuisance at a construction project of Errol’s. There are no other people, and there are certainly no Black people, the nannies, cooks, gardeners, cleaners, and construction workers who built, for white South Africans, a fantasy world. And so, for instance, we don’t learn that in 1976, when Elon was four, some twenty thousand Black schoolchildren in Soweto staged a protest and heavily armed police killed as many as seven hundred. Instead, we’re told, “As a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk knew pain and learned how to survive it.”

Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:

And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.

Douglas Adams wrote “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” on a typewriter that had on its side a sticker that read “End Apartheid.” He wasn’t crafting an instruction manual for mega-rich luxury planet builders.

Biographers don’t generally have a will to power. Robert Caro is not Robert Moses and would seem to have very little in common with Lyndon the “B” is for “bastard” Johnson. Walter Isaacson is a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer. This year, he was presented with the National Humanities Medal. But, as a former editor of Time and a former C.E.O. of CNN and of the Aspen Institute, Isaacson also has an executive’s affinity for the C-suite, which would seem to make it a challenge to keep a certain distance from the world view of his subject. Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years and interviewed dozens of people, but they tend to have titles like C.E.O., C.F.O., president, V.P., and founder. The book upholds a core conviction of many executives: sometimes to get shit done you have to be a dick. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable . For the rest of us, Musk’s pettiness, arrogance, and swaggering viciousness are harder to take, and their necessity less clear.

Isaacson is interested in how innovation happens. In addition to biographies of Franklin, Einstein, Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci , he has also written about figures in the digital revolution and in gene editing. Isaacson puts innovation first: This man might be a monster, but look at what he built! Whereas Mary Shelley, for instance, put innovation second: The man who built this is a monster! The political theorist Judith Shklar once wrote an essay called “ Putting Cruelty First .” Montaigne put cruelty first, identifying it as the worst thing people do; Machiavelli did not. As for “the usual excuse for our most unspeakable public acts,” the excuse “that they are necessary,” Shklar knew this to be nonsense. “Much of what passed under these names was merely princely wilfulness,” as Shklar put it. This is always the problem with princes.

Elon Musk started college at the University of Pretoria but left South Africa in 1989, at seventeen. He went first to Canada and, after two years at Queen’s University in Ontario, transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and economics, and wrote a senior paper titled “The Importance of Being Solar.” He had done internships in Silicon Valley and, after graduating, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in materials science at Stanford, but he deferred admission and never went. It was 1995, the year the Internet opened to commercial traffic. All around him, frogs were turning into princes. He wanted to start a startup. Musk and his brother Kimball, with money from their parents, launched Zip2, an early online Yellow Pages that sold its services to newspaper publishers. In 1999, during the dot-com boom, they sold it to Compaq for more than three hundred million dollars. Musk, with his share of the money, launched one of the earliest online banking companies. He called it X.com. “I think X.com could absolutely be a multibillion-dollar bonanza,” he told CNN, but, meanwhile, “I’d like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone .” That would have to wait for a few years, but in 1999 Salon announced, “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” in a profile that advanced what was already a hackneyed set of journalistic conventions about the man-boy man-gods of Northern California: “The showiness, the chutzpah, the streak of self-promotion and the urge to create a dramatic public persona are major elements of what makes up the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. . . . Musk’s ego has gotten him in trouble before, and it may get him in trouble again, yet it is also part and parcel of what it means to be a hotshot entrepreneur.” Five months later, Musk married his college girlfriend, Justine Wilson. During their first dance at their wedding, he whispered in her ear, “I am the alpha in this relationship.”

“ Big Ego of Hotshot Entrepreneur Gets Him Into Trouble ” is more or less the running headline of Musk’s life. In 2000, Peter Thiel’s company Confinity merged with X.com, and Musk regretted that the new company was called PayPal, instead of X . (He later bought the domain x.com, and for years he kept it as a kind of shrine, a blank white page with nothing but a tiny letter “x” on the screen.) In 2002, eBay paid $1.5 billion for the company, and Musk drew on his share of the sale to start SpaceX. Two years later, he invested around $6.5 million in Tesla; he became both its largest shareholder and its chairman. Around then, in his Marvel Iron Man phase, Musk left Northern California for Los Angeles, to swan with starlets. Courted by Ted Cruz during COVID , he moved to Texas, because he dislikes regulation, and because he objected to California’s lockdowns and mask mandates.

Musk’s accomplishments as the head of a series of pioneering engineering firms are unrivalled. Isaacson takes on each of Musk’s ventures, venture by venture, chapter by chapter, emphasizing the ferocity and the velocity and the effectiveness of Musk’s management style—“A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principles” is a workplace rule. “How the fuck can it take so long?” Musk asked an engineer working on SpaceX’s Merlin engines. “This is stupid. Cut it in half.” He pushed SpaceX through years of failures, crash after crash, with the confidence that success would come. “Until today, all electric cars sucked,” Musk said, launching Tesla’s Roadster, leaving every other electric car and most gas cars in the dust. No automotive company had broken into that industry in something like a century. Like SpaceX, Tesla went through very hard times. Musk steered it to triumph, a miracle amid fossil fuel’s stranglehold. “Fuck oil,” he said.

“Comradery is dangerous” is another of Musk’s workplace maxims. He was ousted as PayPal’s C.E.O. and ousted as Tesla’s chairman. He’s opposed to unions, pushed workers back to the Tesla plants at the height of the Covid pandemic—some four hundred and fifty reportedly got infected—and has thwarted workers’ rights at every turn.

Musk has run through companies and he has run through wives. In some families, domestic relations are just another kind of labor relations. He pushed his first wife, Justine, to dye her hair blonder. After they lost their firstborn son, Nevada, in infancy, Justine gave birth to twins (one of whom they named Xavier, in part for Professor Xavier, from “X-Men”) and then to triplets. When the couple fought, he told her, “If you were my employee, I would fire you.” He divorced her and soon proposed to Talulah Riley, a twenty-two-year-old British actress who had only just moved out of her parents’ house. She said her job was to stop Musk from going “king-crazy”: “People become king, and then they go crazy.” They married, divorced, married, and divorced. But “you’re my Mr. Rochester,” she told him. “And if Thornfield Hall burns down and you are blind, I’ll come and take care of you.” He dated Amber Heard, after her separation from Johnny Depp. Then he met Grimes. “I’m just a fool for love,” Musk tells Isaacson. “I am often a fool, but especially for love.”

He is also a fool for Twitter. His Twitter account first got him into real trouble in 2018, when he baselessly called a British diver, who helped rescue Thai children trapped in a flooded cave, a “pedo” and was sued for defamation. That same year, he tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420,” making a pot joke. “Funding secured.” (“I kill me,” he says about his sense of humor.) The S.E.C. charged him with fraud, and Tesla stock fell more than thirteen per cent. Tesla shareholders sued him, alleging that his tweets had caused their stock to lose value. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he went king-crazy, lighting up a joint. He looked at his phone. “You getting text messages from chicks?” Rogan asked. “I’m getting text messages from friends saying, ‘What the hell are you doing smoking weed?’ ”

“Musk’s goofy mode is the flip side of his demon mode,” Isaacson writes. Musk likes this kind of cover. “I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship,” he said in his “S.N.L.” monologue, in 2021. “Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” In that monologue, he also said that he has Asperger’s. A writer in Newsweek applauded this announcement as a “milestone in the history of neurodiversity.” But, in Slate, Sara Luterman, who is autistic, was less impressed; she denounced Musk’s “coming out” as “self-serving and hollow, a poor attempt at laundering his image as a heartless billionaire more concerned with cryptocurrency and rocket ships than the lives of others.” She put cruelty first.

Musk’s interest in acquiring Twitter dates to 2022. That year, he and Grimes had another child. His name is Techno Mechanicus Musk, but his parents call him Tau, for the irrational number. But Musk also lost a child. His twins with Justine turned eighteen in 2022 and one of them, who had apparently become a Marxist, told Musk, “I hate you and everything you stand for.” It was, to some degree, in an anguished attempt to heal this developing rift that, in 2020, Musk tweeted, “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.” That didn’t work. In 2022, his disaffected child petitioned a California court for a name change, to Vivian Jenna Wilson, citing, as the reason for the petition, “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” She refuses to see him. Musk told Isaacson he puts some of the blame for this on her progressive Los Angeles high school. Lamenting the “woke-mind virus,” he decided to buy Twitter. I just can’t sit around and do nothing .

Musk’s estrangement from his daughter is sad, but of far greater consequence is his seeming estrangement from humanity itself. When Musk decided to buy Twitter, he wrote a letter to its board. “I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he explained, but “I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.” This is flimflam. Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold. Twitter does not operate on the principle of representation, which is the cornerstone of democratic governance. It has no concept of the “civil” in “civil society.” Nor has Elon Musk, at any point in his career, displayed any commitment to either democratic governance or the freedom of expression.

Musk gave Isaacson a different explanation for buying the company: “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.” It’s as if Musk had come to believe the sorts of mission statements that the man-boy gods of Silicon Valley had long been peddling. “At first, I thought it didn’t fit into my primary large missions,” he told Isaacson, about Twitter. “But I’ve come to believe it can be part of the mission of preserving civilization, buying our society more time to become multiplanetary.”

Elon Musk plans to make the world safe for democracy, save civilization from itself, and bring the light of human consciousness to the stars in a ship he will call the Heart of Gold, for a spaceship fuelled by an Improbability Drive in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In case you’ve never read it, what actually happens in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is that the Heart of Gold is stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is the President of the Galaxy, has two heads and three arms, is the inventor of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, has been named, by “the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6,” the “Biggest Bang Since the Big One,” and, according to his private brain-care specialist, Gag Halfrunt, “has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.” Person of the Year material, for sure. All the same, as a Vogon Fleet prepares to shoot down the Heart of Gold with Beeblebrox on board, Halfrunt muses that “it will be a pity to lose him,” but, “well, Zaphod’s just this guy, you know?” ♦

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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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The big Elon Musk biography asks all the wrong questions

In Walter Isaacson’s buzzy new biography, Elon Musk emerges as a callous, chaos-loving man without empathy. 

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There’s a recurring phrase in Walter Isaacson’s new biography Elon Musk . Certain things, Isaacson writes again and again in his dense and thoroughly reported book, are simply “in Musk’s nature,” while others are “not in his nature.” This is a book in which Elon Musk — the richest man in history and surely one of the most infuriating, too — is driven by an immovable internal essence that no one can alter, least of all Musk himself.

Things that are in Musk’s nature according to Isaacson: the desire for total control; obsession; resistance to rules and regulations; insensitivity; a love of drama and chaos and urgency.

Things that are not in Musk’s nature according to Isaacson: deference; empathy; restraint; the ability to collaborate; the instinct to think about how the things he says impact the people around him; doting on his children; vacations.

“He didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked. He was not hardwired to have empathy,” Isaacson writes. “Or, to put it in less technical terms, he could be an asshole.”

The great question of Isaacson’s book is more or less the same question he posed in his 2011 biography of Steve Jobs : Is the innovation worth the assholery? Can we excuse Jobs’s cruelty to his partner Steve Wozniak because we have the iPhone? Can we excuse Musks’s many sins — his capricious firings, his callousness, his willingness to move fast and break things even when the things that get broken are human lives — because after all, he opened up the electric car market and reinvigorated the possibility for American space travel? Is it okay that Musk is an asshole if he’s also accomplishing big things?

“Would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound?” Isaacson muses in the final sentences of the book. “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.”

A hundred pages earlier, Isaacson depicted the man he describes as “resisting potty training” personally making the call that Ukraine should cede Crimea to Russia and on those grounds declining to extend satellite services to the Ukrainian military in the disputed territory.

“Risk of WW3 becomes very high,” Musk explained in a private exchange with Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

“We look through the eyes of Ukrainians,” Fedorov responded, “and you from the position of a person who wants to save humanity. And not just wants, but does more than anybody else for this.”

The risk-seeking man-child has amassed the power to have world leaders fawn over his unilateral judgment.

Isaacson portrays Musk as someone who loves chaos and has no empathy

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971. His mother was a model who spent most of her time at work; his father was an engineer and a wheeler-dealer with a violent temper. They sent Elon to nursery school when he was 3 because he seemed intelligent.

Musk was not, however, socially gifted. Isolated and friendless, he was prone to calling his peers stupid, at which point they would beat him up. He took refuge reading his father’s encyclopedia, plus comic books and science fiction novels about single-minded heroes who saved mankind.

For Isaacson, all this is the kind of foreshadowing biographers dream of. Most foreboding is the existence of Musk’s father, Errol, who Isaacson describes as having a “Jekyll and Hyde personality” that mirrors Musk’s own.

“One minute he would be super friendly,” says Elon’s brother Kimbal of Errol, “and the next he would be screaming at you, lecturing you for hours — literally two or three hours while he forced you to just stand there — calling you worthless, pathetic, making scarring and evil comments, not allowing you to leave.”

From Errol, Isaacson intimates, Musk inherited his explosive temper and fondness for dismissing anything that displeases him as stupid. He also learned to crave crisis, to the point that decades later, as CEO of six companies, he would develop a practice of arbitrarily picking one of those companies to send into panic mode. A rule he makes his executives intone like a religious litany is to “work with a maniacal sense of urgency.”

Another one of Musk’s rules is that empathy is not an asset, largely because he himself claims not to experience it. For Isaacson, this is one of the other foundations of Musk’s character, part of that unchangeable nature that was created by the mingled forces of Musk’s traumatic childhood and his neurodivergence. The lack of empathy, he argues, is hardwired in, probably due to the condition Musk describes as Asperger’s. (Asperger’s syndrome is a form of autism spectrum disorder that is no longer an official diagnosis . Musk is self-diagnosed.)

Studies suggest that people with autism actually experience just as much affective empathy as neurotypical people , but that is not a possibility either Musk or Isaacson ever discuss. For the narrative of this book, Musk’s callousness must be something beyond his control, one of the fundamental differences that sets him apart from the kinder, smaller people who make up the rest of the human race.

Musk goes through companies as rapidly as he goes through women

After high school, Musk fled: first to Canada, where his mother was born, and next to America. Over two years at Queen’s University and two at Penn, he earned a dual degree: in physics, so he could work as an engineer with an understanding of the fundamentals, and in business, so he would never have to work for anyone but himself. Upon graduating, he turned down a spot at Stanford’s PhD program to start his first business, an early online business directory called Zip2.

At Zip2, we see the beginnings of Musk’s maniacal work ethic take hold — that, and his inability to work well with others. He and his brother Kimbal sleep on futons in their office and shower at the Y down the street. When new engineers come in, Musk devotes extra time to “fixing their stupid fucking code.” He and Kimbal get into physical knockdown fights in the office; once, Musk has to go to the hospital for a tetanus shot after Kimbal bites him. They sell the company after two years for $300 million.

Zip2 establishes the pattern that will follow Musk throughout his professional career. He works exceptionally long hours, frequently camping out in his office, and he rages at anyone who does not. He tends to dismiss all his collaborators as stupid and will get into furious fights with them (albeit mostly not physical). He will end up having alienated a lot of people, created a pretty interesting product, and made a hell of a lot of money.

From Zip2, Musk moved on to X.com, an early online banking company. Musk had grand plans of using X.com to reinvent banking writ large, but he was pushed out when X merged with PayPal to develop a product he saw, disgustedly, as niche.

Licking his wounds, Musk decided that he would focus his energies only on companies that were truly changing the world. To make humankind an interplanetary species, in 2001 he founded SpaceX, with a mission of bringing humans to Mars. To help stave off the worst of climate change, in 2003 he brought together a group of engineers working on the electric car to amp up the fledgling company that was Tesla.

As Isaacson is always noting, it was not in Musk’s nature to give up control. After briefly experimenting with having other CEOs, he took personal control of both SpaceX and Tesla. Today, he’s CEO of six companies. In addition to Tesla and SpaceX, he’s got the Boring Company (for tunnels), Neuralink (for technology that can interface between human brains and machines), X (formerly known as Twitter), and X.AI, an artificial intelligence company he founded earlier this year. Musk goes through companies fast.

He also goes through women. Isaacson chronicles the four major romantic relationships of Musk’s adult life with a shamelessly misogynistic binary. All Musk’s girlfriends in this book are either devils or angels, and accordingly they bring out either the devil or angel in Musk’s uncontrollable nature.

His college girlfriend and first wife, fantasy novelist Justine Wilson, is one of the devils: “She has no redeeming features,” insists Musk’s mother. Per Isaacson, she thrives on drama and brings out Musk’s control freak side. He pushes her to dye her hair platinum blonde and act the part of the new millionaire’s trophy wife. “I am the alpha in this relationship,” he whispers into her ear as they dance on their wedding night.

Musk’s second wife, the English actress Talulah Riley, is meanwhile an angel. She dotes on Musk’s children with Justine, tells the press she sees it as her job to keep Musk from going “king-crazy,” and throws him elaborate theatrical parties. “If he had liked stability more than storm and drama,” Isaacson writes, “she would have been perfect for him.”

It goes on like that. Actress Amber Heard, who Musk dates for a tumultuous year after divorcing Riley, is a devil who “drew him into a dark vortex.” Musician Grimes, with whom he has three children, is an angel, “chaotic good” to Heard’s “chaotic evil.” (Musk repays her chaotic goodness by secretly fathering more children with one of Neuralink’s executives, a friend of Grimes’s, at the same time that he and Grimes are working with a surrogate to have their second child.) The idea that it might be Musk’s responsibility to control his nature, rather than the responsibility of his romantic partners, appears nowhere in this book.

The book’s big problem is that it ignores systemic problems for individual

In 2018, Musk became the richest man in the world and Time’s Person of the Year. From there he spiraled. His political views veered sharply to the right wing and paranoid. His tweets got weirder. Then he outright bought Twitter and commenced polarizing an already polarized user base. He’s still making the rockets that supply the International Space Station and he’s still building the most successful electric car in the world, but his reputation has taken a palpable hit.

In Isaacson’s narrative, Musk’s social downfall is part of his Shakespearean hubris, the tragic flaw that drives him to continually inflict pain on himself: the lack of empathy coupled with the craving for excitement; the genuine intelligence matched by over-the-top arrogance. It drives him to achieve great things and to mess up badly.

For Isaacson, this binary illustrates why Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was destined for trouble. “He thought of it as a technology company” within his realm of expertise, Isaacson writes, and didn’t understand that it was “an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships,” and thus well outside his lane. What does the man who doesn’t believe in empathy know about connecting human beings to one another? But how could the man who needs chaos to function resist the internet’s most visibly chaotic platform?

That’s a genuine insight, but by and large, Isaacson’s focus in this book is not on analysis. Elon Musk is strictly a book of reportage, based on the two years Isaacson spent shadowing Musk and the scores of interviews he did with Musk’s associates. His reporting is rigorous and dogged; you can see the sweat on the pages. If his prose occasionally clunks (Isaacson cites the “feverish fervor” of Musk’s fans and critics), that’s not really the point of this kind of book. Instead, Isaacson’s great weakness shows itself in his blind spots, in the places where he declines to train his dutiful reporter’s eye.

Isaacson spends a significant amount of page time covering one of Musk’s signature moves: ignoring the rules. Part of the “algorithm” he makes his engineers run on every project involves finding the specific person who wrote each regulation they slam up against as they build and then interrogating the person as to what the regulation is supposed to do. All regulations are believed by default to be “dumb,” and Musk does not accept “safety” as a reason for a regulation to exist.

At one point, Isaacson describes Musk becoming enraged when, working on the Tesla Model S, he finds a government-mandated warning about child airbag safety on the passenger-side visor. “Get rid of them,” he demands. “People aren’t stupid. These stickers are stupid.” Tesla faces recall notices because of the change, Isaacson reports, but Musk “didn’t back down.”

What Isaacson doesn’t mention is that Musk consistently ignores safety regulations whenever they clash with his own aesthetic sense, to consistently dangerous results.

According to a 2018 investigation from the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal , Musk demanded Tesla factories minimize the auto industry standard practice of painting hazard zones yellow and indicating caution with signs and beeps and flashing lights, on the grounds he doesn’t particularly care for any of those things. As a result, Tesla factories mostly distinguish caution zones from other zones with different shades of gray.

Isaacson does report that Musk removed safety sensors from the Tesla production lines because he thought they were slowing down the work, and that his managers worried that his process was unsafe. “There was some truth to the complaints,” Isaacson allows. “Tesla’s injury rate was 30 percent higher than the rest of the industry.” He does not report that Tesla’s injury rate is in fact on par with the injury rate at slaughterhouses, or that it apparently cooked its books to cover up its high injury rate .

Isaacson is vague about exactly what kind of injuries occur in the factories Musk runs. Nowhere does he mention anything along the lines of what Reveal reports as Tesla workers “sliced by machinery, crushed by forklifts, burned in electrical explosions, and sprayed with molten metal.” He notes that Musk violated public safety orders to keep Tesla factories open after the Covid-19 lockdown had begun, but claims that “the factory experienced no serious Covid outbreak.” In fact, the factory Musk illegally opened would report 450 positive Covid cases .

No one can accuse the biographer who frankly admits that his subject is an asshole of ignoring his flaws. Yet Isaacson does regularly ignore the moments at which Musk’s flaws scale . He has no interest in the many, many times when Musk did something mavericky and counterintuitive and, because of his power and wealth and platform and reach, it ended up hurting a whole lot of people.

Instead, Isaacson seems most interested in Musk’s cruelty when it’s confined to the level of the individual. He likes the drama of Musk telling his cousin that his solar roof prototype is “total fucking shit” and then pushing him out of the company, or of Musk scrambling to fire Twitter’s executive team before they can resign so he doesn’t have to pay out their severance packages. Those are the moments of this book with real juice to them.

Ultimately, it’s this blind spot that prevents Isaacson from fully exploring the question at the core of Elon Musk : Is Elon Musk’s cruelty worth it since he’s creating technology that might change the world? Because Isaacson is only interested in Musk’s cruelty when it’s personal, in this book, that question looks like: If SpaceX ends up taking us all to Mars and saving humanity, will it matter that Musk was really mean to his cousin?

Widen the scope, and the whole thing becomes much more interesting and urgent. If Elon Musk consistently endangers the people who work for him and the people who buy his products and the people who stand in his way, does it matter if he thinks he’s saving the human race?

Isaacson compares Musk to a “man-child who resists potty-training.” If we look closely at the amount of damage he is positioned to do, how comfortable are we with the power Elon Musk currently has?

Correction, September 15, 11:30 am: A previous version of this story misstated a university Musk attended. It is Queen’s University.

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Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson review – arrested development

Walter Isaacson’s insight-free doorstop makes at least one thing clear: the richest man in the world has a lot of growing up to do

W ho or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer. Throughout the tome, Musk’s confidantes, co-workers, ex-wives and girlfriends present a DSM-5 ’s worth of psychiatric and other theories for the “demon moods” that darken the lives of his subordinates, and increasingly the rest of us, among them bipolar disorder, OCD, and the form of autism formerly known as Asperger’s. But the idea that any of these conditions are what makes Musk an “asshole” (another frequently used descriptor of him in the book), while also making him successful in his many pursuits, is an insult to all those affected by them who manage to change the world without leaving a trail of wounded people, failing social networks and general despair behind them. The answer, then, must lie elsewhere.

There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the “his eyes lit up” school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter. It feels as though, for instance, there are hundreds of pages from start to finish relaying the same scene: Musk trying to reduce the cost of various mundane objects so that he can make more money and fulfil his dream of moving himself (and possibly the lot of us) to Mars, where one or two examples would have been enough. To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best.

The prologue to the book contains what in Hollywood writers’ rooms and lesser MFA programmes is called “the inciting incident”. On a playground in 1980s South Africa, Musk was beaten so severely by a pack of bullies that his nose required corrective surgery even decades later. According to Isaacson, his father sided with the bullies. These are acts of violence and betrayal that do have lifelong consequences, as Musk himself has said (and as my own often-punched nose can attest to). What’s both fascinating and depressing is how Musk has internalised these acts of bullying. Twitter (now known as X) was a slime pit of racist and misogynistic savagery even before Musk bought it, but he has given the bullies all but carte blanche and is now planning to remove the block feature , so that users who are being metaphorically punched in the nose will not be able to lift their arms in defence.

The biggest revelation here involves Musk allegedly telling engineers to “turn off” the coverage of his Starlink satellite systems in Crimea just as Ukrainian drone subs were approaching the Russian fleet in Sevastopol. In response to reporting of this episode in the book, Musk took to X to say: “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” Isaacson himself went on to “ clarify ” his own book and to claim that the Starlink coverage never extended to Crimea in the first place. “Musk did not enable it,” he wrote, “because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.” But in echoing Musk’s statements, Isaacson became a propagator of Russian messaging about Ukraine’s actions leading to a wider war (“Seek peace while you have the upper hand” General Musk bullied the Ukrainians) – a supposition that has been disproven countless times and that marks those who believe in it as useful idiots for the Kremlin.

This wasn’t the first time I held Isaacson’s judgment in low regard. Vaccine sceptic Joe Rogan is “knowledgeable”. Musk’s humour – he took the “w” out of the Twitter sign in San Francisco because “tit” is so inherently funny – has “many levels”. Linda Yaccarino, Musk’s almost comically bumbling CEO of X is “wickedly smart”. The amount of time devoted to the points of view of Musk and his acolytes can’t help but distort the narrative in his favour, especially because Musk is the ultimate unreliable narrator. “Elon didn’t just exaggerate, he made it up,” a former colleague tells us.

Highest on the list of things Musk won’t shut up about is Mars. “We need to get to Mars before I die.” “We got to give this a shot, or we’re stuck on earth forever.” The messianic part of the Muskiverse is his attempt to put 140m miles between himself and his father as he tries to turn humanity into a “multiplanetary civilization” even though we are having a hard enough time making it as a uniplanetary one. But Musk also knows what’s keeping us from reaching the lifeless faraway planet, and he’s not afraid of telling us: “Unless the woke-mind virus … is stopped, civilisation will never become interplanetary.” There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your saviour turns out to be the world’s loudest crank?

So who or what is responsible for Elon Musk ? “Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal,” Musk says, and there’s a whiff of desperate masculinity floating through the book, as rank as a Pretoria boys’ locker room. It is not a coincidence that the back jacket features a fully erect penis (some may argue it is actually one of Musk’s rockets, but I remain unconvinced).

When his parents divorced, a young Musk chose to live with a father he describes as having subjected him to “mental torture”, over his imperfect but loving mother. He will keep coming back to that darkness, and is likely to submerge himself into it all the more as the realities of mortality enfold him. When you are as messed up as our hero, there is a lot of psychological work to be done to stop the downward spiral, work more boring than building a rocket. Work even more boring than this book.

It is no wonder that Musk has renamed Twitter “X” after his favourite letter. X is also a crossing out, the opposite of a tick, and that is what Musk has been steadily doing to his legacy. Isaacson’s book constantly tries to build dramatic tension between the species-saving visionary and the beaten bullied boy. But we know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win.

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We Don’t Need Another Antihero

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, the focus on psychology diverts us from the questions we should be asking about the world’s richest man.

This past December, Elon Musk’s extended family gathered for Christmas. As was their tradition, they pondered a question of the year, which seemed strategically designed for Elon to answer: “What regrets do you have?”

By that point in 2022, Musk had personally intervened in Russia’s war by controlling Ukraine’s internet access; had failed to tell his on-and-off girlfriend and co-parent Grimes that he had also fathered twins with one of his employees, and had been forced by a judge to follow through on a $44 billion purchase of Twitter; then fired most of its staff and alienated most of its advertisers. His main regret, he told his family, according to an account in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk , “is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.”

In Isaacson’s study of the world’s richest man, the reader is consistently reminded that Musk is powerless over his own impulses. Musk cannot control his desperate need to stir up drama and urgency when things are going well, Isaacson explains. He fails to show any kind of remorse for the multiple instances of brutally insulting his subordinates or lovers. He gets stuck in what Grimes has dubbed “demon mode”—an anger-induced unleashing of insults and demands, during which he resembles his father Errol, whom Isaacson describes as emotionally abusive.

To report the book, Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years, answering his late-night text messages, accompanying him to Twitter’s office post-acquisition, attending his meetings and intimate family moments, watching him berate people. Reading the book is like hearing what Musk’s many accomplishments and scandals would sound like from the perspective of his therapist, if he ever sought one out (rather than do that, he prefers to “take the pain,” he says—though he has diagnosed himself at various moments as having Asperger’s syndrome or bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder).

Choosing to use this access mostly for pop psychology may appeal to an American audience that loves a good antihero, but it’s a missed opportunity. Unlike the subjects of most of Isaacson’s other big biographies, including Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci, Musk is still alive, his influence still growing. We don’t need to understand how he thinks and feels as much as we need to understand how he managed to amass so much power, and the broad societal impact of his choices—in short, how thoroughly this mercurial leader of six companies has become an architect of our future.

What does it mean that Musk can adjust a country’s internet access during a war? (The book only concludes that it makes him uncomfortable.) How should we feel about the fact that the man putting self-driving cars on our roads tells staff that most safety and legal requirements are “wrong and dumb”? How will Musk’s many business interests eventually, inevitably conflict? (At one point, Musk—a self-described champion of free speech—concedes that Twitter will have to be careful about how it moderates China-related content, because pissing off the government could threaten Tesla’s sales there. Isaacson doesn’t press further.)

The cover of Elon Musk shows Musk’s face in high contrast staring straight, with hands folded as if in prayer, evoking a Great Man of History and a visual echo of the Jobs volume. Isaacson’s central question seems to be whether Musk could have achieved such greatness if he were less cruel and more humane. But this is no time for a retrospective.

Read: Demon mode activated

As readers of the book are asked to reflect on the drama of Musk’s past romantic dalliances, he is meeting with heads of state and negotiating behind closed doors. Last Monday, Musk convened with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; on Tuesday, Israel’s prime minister publicly called him the “unofficial president” of the United States. Also, Neuralink, Musk’s brain-implant start-up—mostly discussed in the book as the employer of one of the mothers of Musk's 11 known children—was given approval from an independent review board to begin recruiting participants for human trials. The book does have a few admiring pages on Neuralink’s technology, but doesn’t address a 2022 Reuters report that the company had killed an estimated 1,500 experimented-on animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, since 2018. (Musk has said that the monkeys chosen for the experiments were already close to death ; a gruesome Wired story published Wednesday reported otherwise .)

Isaacson seems to expect major further innovation from Musk—who is already sending civilians into space, running an influential social network, shaping the future of artificial-intelligence development, and reviving the electric-car market. How these developments might come about and what they will mean for humanity seems far more important to probe than Isaacson’s preferred focus on explaining Musk’s abusive, erratic, impetuous behavior.

In 2018, Musk called the man who rescued children in Thailand’s caves a “pedo guy,” which led to a defamation suit—a well-known story. A few weeks later, he claimed that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share, attracting the scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Isaacson covers these events by diagnosing Musk as unstable during that period and, according to his brother, still getting over his tumultuous breakup with the actor Amber Heard. (Ah, the toxic-woman excuse.) He was also, according to his lawyer Alex Spiro, “an impulsive kid with a terrible Twitter habit.” Isaacson calls that assessment “true”—one of the many times he compares Musk, now 52, to a child in the book.

The people whose perspectives Isaacson seems to draw on most in the book are those whom Musk arranged for him to talk with. So the book’s biggest reveal may be the extent to which his loved ones and confidants distrust his ability to be calm and rational, and feel the need to work around him. A close friend, Antonio Gracias, once locked Musk’s phone in a hotel safe to keep him from tweeting; in the middle of the night, Musk got hotel security to open it.

All of this seems reminiscent of the ways Donald Trump’s inner circle executed his whims, justifying his behavior and managing their relationship with him, lest they be cut out from the action. Every one of Trump’s precedent-defying decisions during his presidency was picked apart by the media: What were his motivations? Is there a strategy here? Is he mentally fit to serve? Does he really mean what he’s tweeting? The simplest answer was often the correct one: The last person he talked to (or saw on Fox News) made him angry.

Read: What Russia got by scaring Elon Musk

Musk is no Trump fan, according to Isaacson. But he’s the media’s new main character, just as capable of getting triggered and sparking shock waves through a tweet. That’s partially why Isaacson’s presentation of the World’s Most Powerful Victim is not all that revelatory for those who are paying attention: Musk exposes what he’s thinking at all hours of the day and night to his 157.6 million followers.

In Isaacson’s introduction to Elon Musk , he explains that the man is “not hardwired to have empathy.” Musk’s role as a visionary with a messianic passion seems to excuse this lack. The thinking goes like this: All of his demands for people to come solve a problem right now or you’re fired are bringing us one step closer to Mars travel, or the end of our dependence on oil, or the preservation of human consciousness itself. His comfort with skirting the law and cutting corners in product development also serves a higher purpose: Musk believes, and preaches in a mantra to employees at all of his companies, that “the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

By presenting Musk’s mindset as fully formed and his behavior as unalterable, Isaacson’s book doesn’t give us many tools for the future—besides, perhaps, being able to rank the next Musk blowup against a now well-documented history of such incidents. Instead of narrowing our critical lens to Musk’s brain, we need to widen it, in order to understand the consequences of his influence. Only then can we challenge him to do right by his power.

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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.

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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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Elon Musk and Naomi Klein Are Complicated

Our critic jennifer szalai discusses walter isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur along with her recent profile of klein, the canadian writer and activist..

Hosted by Gilbert Cruz

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Elon Musk, the billionaire South Africa-born entrepreneur whose business interests include the electric car company Tesla, the private rocket company SpaceX and the social media platform X (formerly Twitter), is the richest person in the world — and the subject of an expansive new biography by Walter Isaacson, whose earlier subjects famously include the Apple founder Steve Jobs. Our critic Jennifer Szalai reviewed the Musk biography for The Times, and on the podcast this week she tells the host Gilbert Cruz that at several points in the book Isaacson circles back to Jobs, for good reason.

“Jobs, of course, could be known as a prickly, demanding boss who was extremely ambitious when it came to what Apple could do not just for technology but for the world,” she says. “And so in a figure like Musk we also have somebody who is known to be a prickly, obsessive, demanding boss who wants to change the world. But in this case it’s not just the world but multiplanetary civilization, which is a term Musk uses at one point.”

Szalai also discusses her recent Times Magazine profile of the writer and activist Naomi Klein, whose new book, “Doppelganger,” examines the “mirror world” of online conspiracy theories and paranoia, and its effect on real-world politics.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected] .

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Empathy Is Not an Asset

Elon musk doesn’t tell us much about elon musk, but it just might tell you plenty about your next boss..

Who, exactly, is going to read a 600-page book about Elon Musk? That’s the real question raised by the publication of Walter Isaacson’s doorstop biography on Tuesday, and it’s not merely rhetorical. The book’s release may have provided critics and observers with the opportunity to muse on Musk’s character , to comb Isaacson’s reporting for sensational (and in one instance, incorrect ) scoops, and to unload a bunch of zingers at the expense of both the billionaire and his Boswell. But Elon Musk doesn’t contain much in the way of genuine revelation, because Musk himself, while volatile, isn’t especially deep or complicated. In place of self-reflection, he offers up armchair diagnoses to explain his own personality—Asperger’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, ADHD—but it’s not as if he’s prepared to do anything about that, and the Musk that Isaacson introduces in the first few chapters of the book is virtually the same man by the end.

Just as Musk idolators refuse to believe that he sometimes doesn’t know what he’s doing, people repelled by Musk’s politics and boorish behavior like to insist that he’s little more than a huckster who hijacks other people’s innovations and then markets himself as a genius. Perhaps the exhaustive accounts Isaacson offers of SpaceX launches and Tesla product development processes are meant to dispel this notion. He certainly substantiates the picture of Musk as brilliant and talented, albeit across a somewhat narrow spectrum. Isaacson’s Musk is less an inventor than a perfecter, a specialist in what Musk calls “building the machine that makes the machine,” honing rockets and cars down to their essentials and designing factories that can produce them quickly at drastically reduced cost. At the same time, Musk’s jejune notion of “coolness,” derived from science-fiction novels and video games, attunes him to the 12-year-old boy inside every man who can’t bring himself to buy an electric vehicle unless it looks like a sleek spaceship rather than a golf cart.

There’s more of this procedural material in Elon Musk than there is dish about its subject’s florid personal life—the abusive father, the celebrity pals and girlfriends, the rivalry with Jeff Bezos, the ranting about “the woke mind virus,” etc. This might seem a misplaced emphasis to those who view Musk primarily as a player in the culture wars. But people like that are not the people who will buy Isaacson’s book, which will surely chart on the bestseller lists released next week. Isaacson isn’t writing for other journalists or critics. Far more interesting than the portrait Elon Musk offers of its subject is the detectable outline of its intended reader. That shadowy figure may be even more disturbing than Musk at his worst.

By Walter Isaacson. Simon and Schuster.

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The former editor in chief of Time, with its coveted Person-of-the-Year issue, and the former president of the Aspen Institute, with its TED-like annual Ideas Festival, Isaacson has long drawn from the lucrative wells of the great man theory—the belief that history is shaped by extraordinary individuals rather than larger structural or economic forces. You can buy his bestselling 2011 biography of Steve Jobs in a box set with Isaacson’s biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci, marketed as “ The Genius Biographies .” They resemble traditional biographies superficially, but are clearly meant to be read with a more utilitarian purpose. An Amazon reviewer who praises the books for presenting “a wealth of knowledge I’m already implementing to enrich my life” puts it well. These books are less biography as literature than biography as self-help. They’re aimed at a readership of strivers whose gender makeup can be inferred by the fact that Isaacson’s 2021 biography of the Nobel Prize–winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna—a work that admirably aims to counter the great man theory—isn’t included in the pack.

Elon Musk is Isaacson’s return to the more popular vein of Steve Jobs . Even the biography’s cover emphasizes the parallel (and probably delights Musk). Isaacson repeatedly compares Musk with Jobs: in his meticulous attention to detail, in his emphasis on elegant design as an indispensable element of a product’s success, in the seeming impossible deadlines he imposed on his staff. Both men engaged in behavior that epitomizes a set of entrepreneurial and Silicon Valley beliefs, even if Musk wasn’t really in the tech industry during the 22-year period after he got pushed out of PayPal and before he bought Twitter. Isaacson uses buzz phrases like “move fast and break things” and lauds Musk’s hunger for risk as the font of his ability to “innovate.” (An odd thing about the way business gurus go on and on about innovation is that they can’t seem to describe it without using the most tired, chewed-up clichés.)

As he did with Steve Jobs , Isaacson organizes his Musk biography around the central question of whether his subject could have been such a genius if he weren’t also such an asshole. “Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged?” he writes. Don’t you have to be kind of crazy not just to believe you can “change the world”—the ultimate Silicon Valley cliché—but to actually change it? Maybe the only way to obtain “excellence” from one’s workers is to berate and intimidate them, to demand that they work 14-hour days and ditch birthday parties and family holidays the minute the boss crooks his finger. In Musk’s case, Isaacson speculates, “one can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly.” Isaacson claims that Musk’s “epic feats” don’t excuse his worst behavior, but really, that’s what Elon Musk is: a 600-page excuse.

Is it true that the space-travel industry had become so sleepy and “sclerotic” that it needed a renegade like Musk to jar it awake? Very likely. Did Musk’s Tesla give the electric car market—and with it progress toward a sustainable-energy economy—a tremendous boost forward? Yes. But these genuine successes are partly the result of peculiarities in Musk’s character, such as his comprehensive grasp of materials science (a subject he considered going to graduate school to study), his ability to remember almost everything he reads, his obsessive immersion in the task at hand, and his persistence, which borders on the superhuman. His bad treatment of those around him is often a byproduct of these traits, but whether it’s a necessary byproduct is open to question—a question Isaacson never really gets around to asking. Somehow, the fetishizing of change and innovation always stops short of a revolution in interpersonal relations.

The danger with books like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk is that they encourage the lazy reversal of Isaacson’s formula: If a boss abuses and exploits his staff and family, then he must be a genius transforming the world! As Slate’s Nitish Pahwa recently pointed out, every CEO talks like Elon Musk now—firing employees on a whim, piling impossible workloads on those who remain, and demanding a degree of commitment and loyalty that they have no intention of reciprocating. No doubt they feel validated in this by an example like Musk. But such CEOs forget that Musk is an engineer at heart, overseeing a workforce of fellow engineers and above all giving them a chance to work on the kinds of projects that they dreamed about being a part of as kids. It’s one thing to ask someone to give 400 percent when the goal is to fire a rocket into outer space and colonize Mars. It’s another kettle of fish if you’re complaining about workers’ lack of wholehearted commitment to your luxury real estate firm. Isaacson interviewed several SpaceX and Tesla employees who said they tolerated Musk’s erratic and sometimes brutal management style only because the projects themselves were so thrilling. Even so, some of them still quit after a year or two of turmoil.

Furthermore, like many engineers—who tend to see themselves as the only truly practical and effective people in their workplaces—Musk overestimates how many of life’s problems can be solved by engineers. At Twitter, he has made a string of mistakes and miscalculations as a result of this blind spot, from launching Twitter Blue without sufficient safeguards to prevent impersonators, to failing to anticipate that advertisers don’t want to be associated with the sort of toxic content that flooded the site after he rolled back much of the moderation. Addicted to Twitter himself— Elon Musk features more than one scene in which Musk checks out of an intimate family moment to tweet—Musk can’t seem to see how his self-professed inability to “read social cues” or consider other people’s feelings might be a bit of an liability in trying to run a social network.

Isaacson acknowledges all these shortcomings. But compared to the pages and pages of admiring descriptions of SpaceX launches—the glamor of space travel can dazzle writers as well as engineers—this amounts to a tiny caveat. What goes unstated in Elon Musk is that luck, timing, and (before Twitter) a focus on enterprises to which his freakish talents are uniquely suited also explain much of Musk’s success. How could he serve as a role model for anyone but Elon Musk? The readers—and there will be many of them—who come away from Isaacson’s biography thinking they’ve gleaned such valuable managerial principles as “empathy is not an asset” may, indeed, end up changing the world. But they won’t be changing it for the better.

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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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Walter Isaacson on Almost All the Criticism of His Elon Musk Book

Kara swisher grills the author about whether or not he actually likes musk..

Kara Swisher couldn’t wait to interview — and cross-examine — her longtime friend Walter Isaacson about his new biography of Elon Musk , but she did wait to do so until after the reviews, and fact checks, had all come out. In the latest episode of On With Kara Swisher , she finally gets her showdown, armed with not only her own criticism but everyone else’s as well. Below is the full transcript of their long conversation, in which Kara presses Isaacson on how and why he wrote the book and tries to get him to respond to nearly all of the complaints thus far.

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Kara Swisher: So I’ve really been looking forward to this. I really have. I first want to say congratulations on the book. It’s getting a ton of attention and will no doubt be a best seller for many weeks ahead, or months. But I have to say it’s turned out as I expected it would when we talked in New Orleans. As you remember, we had kind of a tough interview and we had disagreements, which is fine. Let me just be clear. Walter and I are friends. We have disagreements, just like friends, and this is a professional disagreement. So, I just want to know: Are you ready for a hard-core interview?! Because hard-core is what life’s all about, apparently.

Walter Isaacson: Hard-core is what Musk keeps talking about.

Swisher: That’s ridiculous.

Isaacson: When I walked into that Twitter headquarters, everybody was psychologically nurturing and friendly.

Swisher: Yes.

Isaacson: And he said, “We got to be hard-core.” I guess I can expect you’re going to do that.

Swisher: Please — it’s hustle porn, is what I like to call it, along with entrepreneur porn and everything else. But let me read you my mini-review of your Musk bio: “Sad and smart son slowly morphs into mentally abusive father he abhors, except with rockets, cars, and more money. Often right, sometimes wrong, petty jerk always. Might be crazy in a good way, but also a bad way. Pile O’babies. Not Steve Jobs. You’re welcome.” And that is my review of your product.

Isaacson: I read it.

Swisher: And?

Isaacson: I sort of nodded.

Swisher: Yeah.

Isaacson: And I said, “Okay, let me go through each and every word.” It’s like, wow. Maybe I should have had you write the last chapter.

Swisher: Yes, I should have. So let’s talk about it. How would you characterize the reception and reaction of the book in general? How would you characterize it?

Isaacson: Well, he’s got so many fanboys that think he walks on water, and he’s got so many enemies that think he’s truly evil. And I was kind of surprised that most of the reviews and most of the discussion was pretty straightforward. I mean, there were some critical reviews, like the one on The Guardian that I think you pointed out. That was a thoughtful, legitimate criticism of the book. Now, maybe because my wife is shielding me from it or something, I haven’t seen things that were massively unfair. But let me tell you something. My daughter told me, “After the book comes out, just shut off reading what is now called X.” So, I haven’t seen what may be either wet kisses or darts being slung at me on that platform.

Swisher: So, you’re not on X. You’re not on X right now.

Isaacson: I’m on, but I haven’t gone —

Swisher: Gone searching for yourself.

Isaacson: I don’t go through the notifications anymore.

Swisher: Right. Well, it’s mixed, I would say. And a lot focused on you. Have you heard from Elon about the book?

Isaacson: No. A couple of text messages … I mean, a couple of postings he did on X. I know I either read or saw where he said that he hadn’t read the book, and jokingly said Walter told him not to read it, which of course has some virtue of truth because I said that “I want to ride along with you; I want you to be totally transparent. Let me in every meeting, but you have no control over this book, and I don’t want you to read it in advance.”

Swisher: Right. So, no private exchanges. I know you were with him a few days ago with Lex Friedman, right?

Isaacson: I did the Lex podcast, and afterwards we were together, and somewhat oddly he didn’t talk about the book. I didn’t talk about the book. It was, um —

Swisher: So, you ended cordially, you have ended —

Isaacson: I guess. Elon Musk is not an emotionally connective, nurturing, or whatever, person. It was a little bit … just very professional as it’s always been. It hasn’t been like he either hugs me or slugs me.

Swisher: Not yet. Have you heard from other sources, like Errol Musk, his father?

Isaacson: Yeah.

Swisher: What has he had to say?

Isaacson: I think he sent me pictures of the kids when they were young, looking fit, and he said, “How could anybody think that I treated them badly or psychologically badly?” That said, I’ve had many communications with him over there, because he is somewhat of a Darth Vader, I guess, in the book. And he sent me many pictures over the years. And I tried, in the book, to allow him to have his say, even though Kimbal Musk, Elon Musk, Tosca Musk, Maye Musk obviously say that he was very psychologically dark at times.

Swisher: Absolutely. We’ll get to that a little bit more in this. But I first I’ve got to go to the news, actually, the factual accuracy about Elon’s decisions about Starlink in the Ukraine in September ’22. In the book, you detail — it was an inaccuracy, actually. You detail, upon discovering the Ukrainian military was planning an attack on Crimea using drones powered by Starlink, Elon “secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast. Elon denied this, saying there was no coverage to turn on.” Instead, he said, he refused to act upon a request, from Ukraine presumably, to reopen the Starlink access.

Isaacson: And let me just tell you a story, because I’ve tried to be as transparent as I can. It was one evening, and he told me that they were launching the secret attack, a drone attack, drone submarines, using Starlink. And he was not going to allow it. He was not allowing it to happen, that the subs were going to wash ashore because he wasn’t going to allow them to use Starlink.

I made a mistake of thinking he made that decision that night. In fact, what he did that night was he just reaffirmed that decision. As you’ve seen in the book, there are all these text messages: “You got to turn it on.” And he was saying, “No.” So I should have said it, and I’d now say, instead of “He turned it off,” that he reaffirmed the decision to have it geofenced.

And I do think … I’m not trying to be too defensive, because I’ve tried to be real open about this. I don’t think it really changes it — that that night, he gets to decide whether or not Ukraine gets to attack Crimea, and who put this power in his hands? And if you read the rest of it, because it’s all text messages, it’s not just Crimea, the 100-kilometer geofencing there, which he reaffirmed, as opposed to started, that night. But he’s actually changing in the Donbas, in Eastern Ukraine.

Swisher: Yes. That’s right.

Isaacson: And better off as saying things like, “This is my home village, my parents are there. You can’t tell me that’s an offensive thing when we go there.” So it’s larger, and I wanted to make very clear: Okay, the geofencing had been in place and the decision that night was to deny the Ukrainian request — but it gave him a lot of power.

Swisher: Yes, it certainly did. It obviously required a correction because it was a Washington Post excerpt, and you have said you’ve made a mistake here. You went online to tweet a correction or clarification: “They asked Elon to enable it for their drone sub-attack for the Russian fleet. Musk then did not enable it because he thought, probably correctly, it would cause a major war.” I get the need for the correction. But did you have to add “probably correctly”? It seemed that really —

Isaacson: Yeah, I don’t know.

Swisher: That struck me as —

Isaacson: First of all, one point that I was trying to make, which is why it was so dramatic at the time, is the Ukrainians did not know it was geofenced. They did not know that there was a policy in place saying, “100 kilometers, your subs are going to go out.” That’s why they thought that this had just happened that night.

What Musk told me, and he’s apocalyptic, as you know. He believes that everything is either the end of the world or the greatest success for humanity. And so he believed that had there been a Pearl Harbor–like sneak attack that sunk the Russian fleet in Crimea, that that would’ve led, he said, “to a nuclear war.”

Swisher: Why did you say —

Isaacson: I did not believe that, and that’s why I didn’t put in, “Probably correctly, a nuclear war.” I just said it was going to lead to “major …”

Swisher: All right, but why would you say “probably correctly”? Because it was a major war. They invaded their country. It was —

Isaacson: Definitely a major war, yeah, that Russia invaded Ukraine. The question is whether then all of NATO, and it becomes a much wider war with perhaps tactical nuclear weapons. I’ve got a lot of interest in the Ukraine War, and I support Ukraine. I do know that there is a Russian law and doctrine, that an attack on the homeland will lead to a certain type of response, including … I don’t want to —

Swisher: Which they’ve done elsewhere, and it hasn’t led to nuclear war.

Isaacson: Right, right. And I think, had the entire Russian fleet in Sevastopol been sunk by a whatever you call, sneak attack, Pearl Harbor–like attack, that that would have escalated things.

Swisher: All right. Let me get to a better question. What does it reveal about his power intentions and why is he in this position, of which he’s entirely unqualified? It’s just guessing, Walter. Come on. He doesn’t have —

Isaacson: Why is he in the position to turn off or on —

Swisher: Specifically. What does it reveal about his power? DOD should be making these mistakes or non-mistakes. He shouldn’t be in that position.

Isaacson: Yeah. I mean, I don’t give him advice, but that night I said, like any normal person, “Have you talked to General Mark Milley, the head of the Joint Chiefs? Have you talked to Jake Sullivan, national …” And he goes, “Yeah.” And they ended up talking. Now, he has said, and I don’t know this because he didn’t tell me, but he said it subsequently, in the past few days, that had they made a request for him to turn on Starlink, he would have done so. I don’t know. I’m just telling you that this is his mind-set about the power.

But I thought it was weird that he had this much power. And so what he does after talking to them, and I think — but you may push back at me — it was the right decision, which is: “All right, I’m going to make a deal. SpaceX is going to make a deal with the U.S. Defense Department and its intelligence agencies, and we are going to outright sell a certain number of Starlinks to the Defense Department, to the CIA, and we’re even going to create a military version of it, which I don’t know exactly the difference, except for that it’s more sharply focused, and call it Starshield, and the U.S. government gets to decide how it’s done.”

Swisher: Right.

Isaacson: Well, that’s actually the right outcome.

Swisher: Yes, presumably. It’s another issue of why the Defense Department found itself in this really uncomfortable situation.

Isaacson: Now, let me go there if you don’t mind.

Swisher: Sure.

Isaacson: Because you asked, “How did we get in this position?” And this is not a defense of Elon trying to bestride the world. But why is it that when Russia invades Ukraine, ViaSat doesn’t work? These are just denial-of-service attacks the Russians are doing. The U.S. military has no, Ukrainian military has no communication, there’s only one set of communication satellites that withstand the attacks by the Russians. And so one reason he’s in this position —

Swisher: Or maybe they didn’t attack it, but go ahead.

Isaacson: No, no. As far as he told me —

Swisher: He told you.

Isaacson: And you could say, he said, “We had hundreds and hundreds of attempted attacks from the Russians, but Starlink didn’t go down.” The Russians were trying, of course they were trying to take it down. I mean, they were trying to knock it out and they didn’t. So this is not a defense of him bestriding the world, but what the hell is NASA doing? What the hell is the Defense … Why can’t ViaSat? Why can’t Boeing? The solution to this is other people should be able to make — Jeff Bezos and Amazon, they’ve not got any of their satellites in orbit.

He’s in this position. And by the way, U.S. intelligence satellites, the ones the CIA and the intelligence [community] put up into high-Earth orbit, the only way they can get into high-Earth orbit is the Falcon Heavy. And SpaceX.

Swisher: Yes, I’m aware.

Isaacson: NASA can’t launch them. Boeing can’t launch them. So if you want to fix it, you got to have competing companies, and you also have to understand, for better or worse, how did Musk end up being the only person who’s got 5,000 satellites, got rockets that can take things into high-Earth orbit, rockets that can reland and reuse themselves? That’s what the book is about too. And I know that seems like I’m praising him. But it is true. Boeing — I’m sure it’s run by really nice people — but Boeing can’t get astronauts into orbit.

Swisher: I think one of the things I am finding missing, even though you say it, it’s not quite as explicit as I expect it, which is it doesn’t grapple with all the different kinds of power in the hands of one unelected, unaccountable, and I go so far as to say, unstable, in many ways, individual. We’re seeing it writ large constantly on Twitter, even if it might be performance art. Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article did grapple directly with this, “As a matter of consequence for our national security and democracy.” Did you feel you should have leaned into this more?

Isaacson: I think you’re right that — I do say it in the book — and I think you could say it’s a valid criticism. I don’t lean into it more and say it much more vibrantly. But I do, I’ll say it right now: I think an unelected official having control over the only communication satellite, and deciding on that night whether to enable disable or not enable, as I got right in the book, both the attack on the Crimea and also in the Donbas … I don’t think it should be in the hands of one unelected person.

And I’ll say it even further: an unelected person who is mercurial, has a … global epic sense. And I say it, and if you want to, and your criticism I know is I should say it more loudly and say it more often. Someday I’m going to write a book called Burn Book , and I’m going to say everything really loudly.

Swisher: Well, I’m going to be really loud, but is he unqualified? Do you think he’s unqualified to make these decisions?

Isaacson: I think yeah. I think I’m unqualified. I think that anybody … now, who thought that somebody of your or my generation would say we should leave this to the CIA and not … I grew up worrying about that. But now I think, No, the U.S. government, its intelligence agencies have the intelligence, meaning the information, to make decisions like this. It shouldn’t be me. It shouldn’t be Jeff Bezos. It shouldn’t be Elon Musk, and I’ll put Elon Musk even more in that category because he’s more mercurial. And of course in Burn Book , you would use a tougher word than that than most people.

Swisher: Well, we’ll get to that.

All right. One theory offered by that L.A. Times review by Brian Merchant was this kind of idle framing of Elon Musk, which happens. He describes there may be 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.’”

Is there an “Isaacson Accord”?

Isaacson: I didn’t read all that. I didn’t read it, but there’s some merit there.

Swisher: That made me laugh.

Isaacson: I can’t remember the, uh — I’m not sure I want to dub it that — but we’ll call it the accord. I haven’t seen that. But yeah, you read the first part, which is that I share or recount or tell a lot of stories that show the dark side and how bad he is. And then I think the commentary is that I also then show that he is an important, influential, consequential larger-than-life person. I think I cop a plea to that, meaning I hope I show over and over again the lack of empathy, the jerkiness, there’s a word that begins with A that I’m sure is in Burn Book .

Swisher: Asshole. You can say it.

Isaacson: That I actually use in my book many times, about —

Swisher: He called me an asshole.

Isaacson: He called you one?

Swisher: Oh sure, yeah. In an email.

Isaacson: Okay. But I do talk about him being not only mercurial but at times just going from weird personality to weird personality. And I think there are enough tales, probably more than enough, that show the difficulty, the assholicness or whatever the adjective is, in the book. And yeah, as you say, the essay you quote says in return, I, we talk about he has had —

Swisher: It’s a deal you make to get that access. I mean, I think it’s over access journalism.

Isaacson: I do think he’s had an incredibly large impact as well.

Swisher: Certainly. Yeah.

Isaacson: So I don’t know exactly the nuances of what that commentary is. But yes, it’s true that I wouldn’t be writing about Elon Musk had he not been the only person who can get astronauts into the Space Station.

Swisher: Sure. But let me ask you about the accusation of access journalism — listen, I’ve been subject to it, But in this unique way, is this the danger of access journalism that you, one, start to like the person or gets more sympathetic?

Isaacson: Well, no, I don’t go around liking Musk. Here’s the question of access journalism: You’ve got to keep in mind every moment of the day and every paragraph that you write that you’re writing for the reader, not the subject. And you’ve got to sometimes hold yourself back because you’re not caring, what’s he going to say after the book comes out, or what is he going to feel about it? And I do that, but it’s hard. I mean, you’ve got to work at that. And if you read the book, as you said, there are enough stories that show the dark side, the mercurial side, the problematic side, the way he treats people. And I don’t try to excuse it.And yeah, when you have access, that can be a problem. But I learned that when I first worked at The Times-Picayune and then Sunday Times of London , I used to think you had to get close. And sometimes journalists these days don’t do that as well, meaning just sit and listen and just watch and make sure you can be up close.

But I learned from the late Harry Evans, who was my editor in London, that you can have access as he did to the top realms of power. But then you could put out the story as you saw it. I’ve watched some of the great access journalists, people only I can remember like Hugh Sidey, even Ben Bradley.

Swisher: Certainly he was accused of that with John F. Kennedy.

Isaacson: And then watch Woodward and Bernstein, and you try to make sure you can be a little bit more like Woodward and Bernstein, which is get people to talk, but try to keep the reader in mind.

Swisher: Although he’s been accused of, recently, access journalism by — you can see who he likes and who he talked to in a lot of his books. But I want to get to your reflections on the process in a minute. We’re going to jump into the book. Walk me through your framing. You set it all up. It was interesting when I read the beginning in your prologue with Elon’s upbringing and obviously chronological start to the biography. You continue to reference it constantly in the book, this childhood in South Africa, bullying, violence. Why did you start with this? Because it started to feel by the end of the book like an excuse, and I kept thinking: I had a bad stepfather, I don’t do these things. So many people have bad childhoods.

Isaacson: A lot of people have bad childhoods. And they probably have a few demons in their head. I’m not sure you do.

Swisher: Not these kind of demons. No. Why did you start with this?

Isaacson: At the very beginning I talked to his mother, Maye Musk, and she says, “Here’s the issue for your book: The danger for Elon is that he becomes his father.” And I talked to Kimbal Musk. He’s like, “He’s a drama addict, he’s addicted to storm and it comes from this deep violent childhood.” I don’t know that it seems like it excuses him because it shows this inability to just sit back and savor success. That he is addicted to having dramatic confrontations. And even I don’t know whether it’s Grimes or Talulah Riley, it’s in the book, his second wife or his on-again-off-again girlfriend, who says from his childhood, he associates love with drama and sometimes harshness.

Swisher: So you feel like it’s explaining it. Did it make you — spending time with Errol helps you understand this? Obviously I try to meet everybody’s parents because I think ultimately it sometimes boils down to that quite easily.

Isaacson: Can I quote Obama? And I’m sorry to interrupt you.

Swisher: Go ahead.

Isaacson: It is true. One of the things every biographer knows is it’s all about the parents. And Obama has that at the beginning of his memoirs, I think every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of his father. And in my case it’s both. I think whether it’s Nixon opening his memoirs with a sentence; I’m not sure he understood the meaning of it. It was a simple sentence, which is, “I was born in a house my father built.” Or Bill Clinton’s opening sentence. A lot of powerful people who have demons in their head — it goes back to Rosebud.

Swisher: Yeah, but does it make you more sympathetic? I mean, I do know his mother too, who can be a handful, let me just say.

Isaacson: And so can you.

Swisher: Yes, I get it. But it does feel like it’s a bit of an excuse. You use the word manchild in the book. I have used the word adult toddler to describe Elon. I do grok that childhood defines us. I absolutely do. I think it’s critically important. But do you worry this framing of Elon as a child absolves him of the accountability he deserves as a 52-year-old man?

Isaacson: Well, (a) it doesn’t absolve him. And so let me make that clear. And I think it’s clear in the book with many anecdotes. But this is a complicated thing — and I think you and I talked about it in New Orleans back when we were eating crawfish and drinking whiskey — which was, when you understand a person, in other words you try hard to understand, does that morph into a gray area where you’re trying to justify? And I kind of try to understand the demons that dance around in his head. Does that justify him being an asshole to people? I hope I can say, “No, no, no, no, no.” But part of the job of a biographer is to say, “I want you to understand where all this is coming from.”

Swisher: Yes, I get it. But you also allow everyone else to say it as if it’s the only thing. And every time I read one of them saying, “Oh, but it’s his demons,” whether it was Grimes or whatever, I’m like, Get him to get therapy for fuck sake.

Isaacson: He doesn’t go to therapy.

Swisher: No, really? You’re kidding. You’re kidding. He doesn’t go to therapy.

Well, these people are continually making excuses — and one of the issues I have is they’re all paid by him. But one of the things that I also wondered about is fact-checking these stories. I know from my own family, everyone’s family, everyone has a different point of view of what happened. There was a kid that punched Elon and Errol tells you that the kid’s father had just died, and I believe of suicide, and Elon told him he was stupid, and Elon and his brother dispute that and say the kid ended up in juvie.

Talk about your sourcing, and do you think the brother of your subject is a credible second source, for example? Because I have heard Elon call people stupid over and over and over again and I can imagine if someone’s father just died, there might be something happening there. But that’s populated by his side.

Isaacson: I think you’ve recounted what I did in the book accurately, which is I tell the story as Elon saw it, then I talked to Errol. And in that case I have to lay it out for the reader: Errol says, “No, no, he called the boy stupid. Of course I took the side of the boy and here’s why.” And you know what, Musk once said to me that in any situation with a police and a perpetrator, you have three stories: one side, the other, and the truth. I sometimes have to say to the reader: Here’s what Kimbal says. Here’s what Elon says. Errol says it differently.

Swisher: Did you call this kid? Or call the juvenile-detention center?

Isaacson: That was, you know, 45 years ago, and I was not able, or I don’t know whether the kid’s still around. But you write, on things like that you try … Look, I talked to, what is it, 150 people? Every time he did something … and you move on — if I can move on a second from the childhood — he does this over and over again. He said he learned to punch people in the nose, and I show him punching people in the nose. So when it happens to say John McNeil, when it happened to Martin Eberhard, co-founder of Tesla, John McNeil, former president of Tesla, when it happened, I can go through —

Swisher: You did go back to that. Well, the only reason is because he hangs a lot on that he was bullied. And then if you didn’t talk to the kid or the juvenile-detention center, why put it in there if you can’t confirm either one of their —

Isaacson: Well, first, all sides, even Errol says he was beaten up, he was in the hospital.

Swisher: Yes, I get that. I get that.

Isaacson: His face got smashed.

Swisher: I get it.

Isaacson: The only question is, should you take the side of the guy who smashed his face —

Swisher: Or explain it, or explain that part.

Isaacson: Or explain it. I did. And I said that according to Errol, Musk called him stupid. And you know what? You’re right. Musk does it. So does Bill Gates. So does Bezos. They use the word “stupid” a lot. And so it’s understandable there, and there is no doubt that all of this bullying and getting beaten up happens as nobody says … Errol said, “Oh, but I gave him a great childhood. But yeah, this Veld School, this wilderness camp, of course, people sat on you and they beat you up. That’s the way we were in South Africa.”

Swisher: I wouldn’t have put it in if I couldn’t confirm it, I wouldn’t have, but that’s just me.

Isaacson: Well wait, wait, wait. I don’t want to fight too much. But nobody denied that the whole incident happened. And I let Errol say, almost confirming what Elon says. Elon says, “I had to stand there and my father betrayed me and took the bully’s side.” And Errol said, “Yeah, he had to stand there. I berated him. I took the guy who beat him up’s side.”

Swisher: Yes he did.

Isaacson: So I think everybody has the same story there. It’s just — should the dad have taken the side of the guy who beat him up even if Elon called the guy stupid?

Swisher: Yep, I get it. I get it.

Isaacson: Which he probably did. I agree with you on that.

Swisher: It does give Elon sympathy from the beginning.

But I want to do a lightning round of things that were not in the book actually and understand why they were omitted. It seems like you didn’t speak to Elon’s daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson, who is trans.

Isaacson: I tried. Yeah, I tried, and I don’t want to go too much into it, but communications through family members … and so there are quotes from her. And what she said, and the messages even on Christmas and —

Swisher: Why didn’t you want to go into it, given he has posted several, what I would characterize as anti-trans statements?

Isaacson: Oh yeah, no, I do go into all that. I’m just not sure I want to tell you who gave me her text messages.

Swisher: Okay. Did you try to reach out to her directly?

Isaacson: Yeah, I asked people, “Can I get to her?”

Swisher: And you couldn’t?

Isaacson: Couldn’t.

Swisher: Okay. Brian Merchant pointed out that there was also “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.” There were a lot of sexual harassment allegations at Tesla. Why not go into this more?

Isaacson: Yeah, I think that’s a valid — there are lawsuits against it, I probably could have gone more into that. It wasn’t something that anybody accused Musk of specifically or personally or anything. It was just things that happened at the Fremont factory. And I’ll cop a plea. Except for that, there was really no Musk involvement. If I’d been writing a book about Tesla, it would’ve been more important, but —

Swisher: Okay, well I think the DNA of every company is the DNA of its founder, but he’s not the founder —

Isaacson: He’s got seven companies, too.

Swisher: Yeah, that’s true.

All right. [Musk’s] use of drugs seems to be missing, which has been written about a lot about recently. You mentioned he smoked weed on Joe Rogan’s podcast, but there’ve been multiple reports on the effects of ketamine and Ambien. He’s even talked about Ambien use and perhaps more. It seemed nowhere to be found.

Isaacson: Well, I think there was some stuff, and then you and I talked about it.

Swisher: Yeah, we did.

Isaacson: You had stronger evidence than for better or worse —

Swisher: I just heard from people, I wish someone would report it. And then the Journal finally did. The Journal finally did.

Isaacson: Yeah. The Journal did some stuff. I have in the book, about drugs and prescription drugs and Ambien and everything else. Ketamine, he says, is an effective treatment for depression, and it’s prescribed. So he does prescription, whether it be ketamine, prescription serotonin-uptake inhibitors. I have him talking about maybe being bipolar, but not being diagnosed.

Swisher: He has said this about himself.

Isaacson: Right. And so that’s all in the book. And he does, well, let’s say self-medicate, but with prescriptions.

Swisher: Is it being used in a clinical setting for him by a real doctor, not I want some ketamine. I’m going to prescribe it myself ?

Isaacson: You can be a judge of real doctors, but there are people who have doctors who prescribe it.

Swisher: Michael Jackson had a doctor — that didn’t turn out very well.

Isaacson: Yeah. Look, one thing I will say is because of SpaceX clearances, security clearances, ever since the Joe Rogan thing where he smoked dope on the podcast, he is subject to random drug tests for illegal drugs. Now, that doesn’t mean it would pick up ketamine, nor would it say, “Hey, that doctor who prescribed it, was that sort of a charlatan doctor you just found and paid or is that a real doctor?”

Swisher: Right. You never went to raves with him or the stuff he likes to go to you? I don’t mean to say parties.

Isaacson: Raves?

Swisher: He likes to go to raves.

Isaacson: Yeah. Okay.

Swisher: You didn’t socialize with him, correct?

Isaacson: I had to keep a bit of a line, and I watched some people around him and some people who worked with him who kind of crossed the line a bit and late at night would think, Okay, I’m his party pal. And I had to make some judgments. There are times I went out to dinner with him, but I didn’t want to pretend to be some pal who partied with him. And if I crossed that line and started going to late-night parties … But let me say something else —

Swisher: Yeah, Walter Isaacson at a rave is not something I want to see.

Isaacson: No, it wouldn’t be a pretty sight.

Swisher: No.

Isaacson: Look, I’ve got gray hair. I’ll take you to Jazz Fest.

But look, I’ve been a reporter a whole lot and you always hear these stories of, “Oh, somebody” — not Musk — “went to Jeffrey Epstein’s island or had wild sex orgies with whole lots of drugs and they spent all night having sex orgies.” You asked me how do I put in the fact that both his father and he say he was beaten up by a bully and they have different opinions on whether he deserved it? You can’t throw in that “Somebody says,” “Somebody said,” “I went to a —”

Swisher: I’m wondering if you discussed it directly with him, use of drugs.

Isaacson: Yeah. He actually talks about that he’s not as much of a party person, that he goes down to Cabo and he doesn’t like it and he flies back. I suspect, because I’ve asked him about it … that he’s far less of a party animal than people say. But maybe that’s projecting because I’m not as much of a party animal as some of your friends.

Swisher: Okay. All right. I’m just curious. There’s a lot more talk of it lately, that’s why. One of the other ones was [what] Jennifer Szalai raised in her review in New York Times , when Elon was rambling onto you about the “woke mind virus.” This is in the way of his ambitions for multi-planetary civilization. She says, “it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean?”

Isaacson: Look, people, you say the “woke mind virus” and people say, “What do you mean by that?” And I try to explain it, but again, I’m progressive. I know that wokeness is one of those subjects that means you say the word and everybody scatters all over the place. I think I make it pretty clear in the book what had gotten him upset and also make it pretty clear I think it’s a weird apocalyptic thing for him to be worrying about.

Swisher: Yeah. Okay. Another one is from Vox’s Constance Grady . She writes “he goes through women. Isaacson chronicles the four major romantic relationships of Musk’s adult life with a shamelessly misogynistic binary. All Musk’s girlfriends in this book are either devils or angels, and accordingly they bring out either the devil or angel in Musk’s uncontrollable nature.”

You had written, “he developed a fervor that blocked his goofiness and a goofiness that cloaked his fervor.” I think you were harder on Amber Heard. And I don’t know Amber Heard.

Isaacson: I think you tweeted that out. I think I saw that.

Swisher: Yeah. But go ahead.

Isaacson: Amber Heard I talked to quite a bit and her sides in the book. Look, I’m not an expert on this, but in the periphery of my vision, I kind of followed the Johnny Depp–Amber Heard thing. We’re talking about people that are excitable. I don’t know what you want to say. So that whole situation with Johnny Depp, you can see that she’s dramatic. Now, Musk talks about her in the book as playing wonderful things, roleplaying as his favorite whatever video-game character. And I have scenes of her picking flowers by the side of the road and hiding in the Tesla factory to surprise him on his birthday.

But the storm and turmoil that both sides tell me about, this is not a matter of dispute, that was part of the attraction. And I’m telling that as part of a theme, that this guy — even leave aside Errol Musk and say maybe I do too much on childhood. Part of the theme of this life is this person is attracted to drama and storm. When things are calm, he surges, he buys Twitter or whatever. So this is true of the relationship with Amber. Nothing hurt him more than that relationship, and there’s a scene at the end when they just have a — not knockdown, because we’re not talking physically here — but brutal fight in Rio de Janeiro and she’s claiming that “he’s locked up my passport.” I get her side. I get his side. I get the security guard’s side. I get everybody’s side. And in the end I talk about her saying, she sends me pictures of that night after they made up, and there’s a picture in the book and they’re kissing on a balcony in Rio at midnight on New Year’s Eve. So I’m trying to illustrate not Amber Heard. I’m giving her, I hope, her say and the benefit of the doubt, and I think she says something like, “Elon loves playing with fire and sometimes it burned him.”

Swisher: Yeah. I get it. I get it.

Isaacson: This is all an explanation of a guy addicted to drama and storm.

Swisher: Okay. So one of the things in that regard is this cruelty and asshole behavior seems somewhat excused because he manages, somehow, to replace a rocket part with a toilet latch. Wow. Amazing. I fully understand.

Isaacson: Wait, wait. I’m not going to cop a plea of that. Whoa, I’m going to stop you. I don’t say you get to be an asshole if you get to make a rocket latch or whatever. I say this is a person who’s doing all these things and you have to figure out, how does the fabric weave together?

Swisher: And you don’t think you give him a pass. Some of his partners do with, I think it was Grimes saying, “I tried to stop him from being king crazy.” I was like, “Why is he king crazy?”

Isaacson: I know. I love that.

Swisher: Except — why is he like that? Why? Why does he need a lady to help him not be an asshole? That, to me —

Isaacson: Why is he king crazy? I mean, that’s what the book is about.

Swisher: No, what I mean is that abrogates his responsibility as a man.

Isaacson: By the way, it was Talulah who gets credit for trying to keep him from being king crazy. I like Talulah. I like Grimes a lot too, but —

Swisher: So you don’t believe the cruelty has to be linked to his accomplishments.

Isaacson: No, I don’t think the cruelty is justified at all, but with complex people you’ve got to tell the complex story, and I don’t think, and I know you and I talked about this a year ago and so it helped me write the book, which is don’t put any sentence in that says that this cruelty was in any way justifiable because he made a latch to a rocket hatch better.

Swisher: Thank you. I’m going to bring in Steve Jobs here because sometimes you do seem to be arguing that their demons create the creation, I guess. Many people have excused Elon’s behavior to me like this. Marc Benioff and I had a long back-and-forth. He basically said it’s okay because he lands rockets on a surfboard, except when I actually pointed out the homophobic remark he made, and then he’s like, “Oh,that’s not good.” And I’m like, “No, it’s not.”

Isaacson: It’s not.

Swisher: I can think of many geniuses who aren’t assholes. How far does the, and I’m not necessarily just accusing you of doing this, go to support toxic assholic behavior in people? You have a quote, I think from Grimes: “Demon mode causes a lot of chaos but it also gets a lot of shit done.” Do you believe you have to be an asshole to get things done?

Isaacson: No. And I have written many books, from Jennifer Doudna to Ben Franklin, of people who are as nice and nurturing as you can be. In fact, if you have a criticism of Benjamin Franklin, meaning John Adams does, it’s that he was too ingratiating and insinuating. In other words, he tried to be too nice, seemed to get people to like him. What Steve Jobs once said to me, he said, “People like you” — I mean, he was talking about me — “who wear velvet gloves and live on the East Coast.” I don’t think he’d been down to New Orleans with us knowing which coast I actually live on. He said, “You’re always trying to get the people in front of you to like you, and you’re always being empathetic, and you always want to be their friends, and you never want to get them mad, and you think that’s being nice. Well, that’s kind of egotistic. It’s being nice to yourself because you’re not caring that much about the enterprise.”

I think there’s some balance, and I’m going to get personal here for a moment and you can decide it’s too boring. When I ran Time magazine, you remember back in those days. They were nice magazines on paper and stuff.

Swisher: They were. Yeah.

Isaacson: I knew everybody there and I just loved all the people I worked with.

Swisher: You have a very nice reputation there.

Isaacson: Yeah. And it was sweet and we never had to fire anybody because the magazine was doing well, and then I get moved to CNN, which is owned by the same company, and — once again, I don’t want to get people mad. I want to be known as being nice. But you know what? I was really bad at running CNN. It needed to be disrupted. People needed, I won’t name names, but you can think of some of the anchors and some of the people there. I needed to have been more of a disruptor, more of an asshole than I could be.

Swisher: I don’t know if you need to —

Isaacson: But I needed, actually, to leave CNN as well.

Swisher: Okay, that’s exactly … remember I told you that.

Isaacson: Thank you. I’ve taken your advice many times in life. That’s why I was surprised you criticized me.

Swisher: No. That’s okay. This is the ’90s and aughts, by the way. Nineties for Time and early aughts for CNN, for people who —

Isaacson: Your listeners don’t even remember that century.

Swisher: Yeah. Don’t remember it. Yeah. I’m not even going to bring up what you did with Pathfinder.

Isaacson: You just did.

Swisher: Let’s talk about Steve Jobs, because I thought you were much harder on him for much lesser behaviors and zero crazy tweets, none of which spilled out into the public. I don’t find him anything like Steve Jobs, and you, I mean —

Isaacson: I don’t either. And by the way, look, I thought one of your criticisms would be — because I saw you wrote about that — I don’t apply too many judgments. I tend to have my own judgments.

Isaacson: I weave some of them in, but I let a reader say, “Okay. I’ve just read this story. Here’s what I feel.” I tried to do that with Jobs. I really liked Jobs. I really respected him.

Swisher: Me too.

Isaacson: I thought he did an amazing thing. I thought he parked in the handicap space, and I thought, But that’s not tweeting, what you’re talking about.

So most people who read the Jobs book, I sell — I mean even last night, I was at the 92nd Street Y and everybody’s bringing me the Jobs book to sign. They said, “This changed my life. This guy totally inspired me. This is the most important book because I just wanted to be like Steve Jobs. I fell in love with him.”

So I don’t think you come away from the Jobs book, other than saying he gets mad at the person making the smoothies at the Whole Food or he parks in the handicap spot … I think Jobs is very much exalted as an epoch-changing character who had his rough spots. Elon Musk is at least one order of magnitude more — more in being rough and in some ways more in running six or seven companies doing all sorts of weird things. If you read this book, about a third of the people who read this book will come away hating him more and a third will come away liking him, and I think a third will maybe say, “All right. That was a really weird narrative and I’m going to have to process it.”

Swisher: I think actually Jobs would’ve abhorred Musk. Actually, I say that. I think he would’ve because of the way he behaves in public particularly. What do you think Jobs would’ve thought of Elon Musk?

Isaacson: I think he would’ve truly not liked the political and public non-niceness. I don’t think that the way he treats Andy Krebs on the rocket launch pad and yells at him or the way he treats Don McNeil sometimes, when he’s lying on the floor of the conference room in a catatonic state. But I think there was a spiritual quality to Steve Jobs that had a gentleness when it came to, I don’t know, public matters. Help me here.

Swisher: Yes, he was. He was actually a very wise person. I’ve been listening to a lot of our recordings and his interviews and he’s thoughtful and doesn’t say … I agree he could be a jerk to people.

Isaacson: Yeah. I mean, Musk is very hard-core, and I think especially when Musk veers off to his late-night politics, I’ll call it, because there are times when you’re with Musk even —

Swisher: Very reasonable.

Isaacson: Today he’s with Chuck Schumer, or yesterday —

Swisher: He was calm.

Isaacson: — With Chuck Schumer and Chris Coons, the democratic senator from Delaware, and he’s saying, there’ll be times he said to me, “I really want to get a party of the center. I want to bring people to … I think we’ve lost the center in this country.”

Swisher: He is lying to you.

Isaacson: Then late at night he’s drinking Red Bull and taking Ambien and he’s amplifying the fringes.

Swisher: There’s an expression, does the drunk agree with the sober? I think he’s lying to you when he’s sober. I think the drunk is exactly who he’s become.

Isaacson: I think that they’re actually different personalities, and I sometimes think that one personality hardly remembers things that, especially when he gets into the Mr. Hyde mode of Jekyll and Hyde.

Swisher: Sure. I get that, but he’s not Mr. Hyde and he’s not … It’s like, again, I’m in the “seek therapy” mode of this. Now, let me ask you this. You said in one interview you were silent in the reporting. And I utterly, completely — that’s exactly the way to go, like a camera even. That’s what you were trying to do.

But now I want you to be a photograph. I would like you to take a position on him. Going away from two years of spending time with this man, what do you think of him? And let me just say, when my book — I come to conclusions about people I like. I have a whole chapter of people I like because I think you have to have that. Sam Altman. I personally like Reid Hoffman, Brian Chesky.

Specifically, do you like this person and what did you come away feeling about him when you finished?

Isaacson: Well, a couple of points. You’re right to say I don’t want to get in the way of the reader making his or her own judgments. And so sometimes I’m telling you the story, I’m quiet, you get … You know, one of the first great biographies, the first great biography I ever read was when I was about 17 years old. T. Harry Williams on Huey Long. And it begins with an amazing, funny anecdote of Huey Long. He’s a Baptist from upstate Louisiana going down to Cajun country where it’s Catholic and talking about Sunday mornings and hitching up the horse to the wagon so he could take his Catholic grandmother to mass. And finally his campaign manager said, “Huey, you never told us you had a Catholic grandmother.” And he says, “Hell, we didn’t even have a horse.” He lied. And then — but T. Harry Williams doesn’t say, “So he was a liar,” or doesn’t say, “He was a lovable rogue.”

Swisher: Okay. Right.

Isaacson: You get to read these angles. So I’m not trying to say to the reader, “Here’s your conclusion.”

Now you’ve asked me a question about —

Swisher: The book is written, Walter. You don’t need to talk to Elon Musk anymore. There’s a point —

Isaacson: He’s not listening to your podcast, I suspect.

Swisher: Yeah. I doubt it.

Isaacson: And no, but I’m telling you because I know you and I have had this discussion, which is how come you don’t tell us your conclusions on everything?

Swisher: Yes, I would like a conclusion from you.

Isaacson: And I don’t write Burn Book , I write a narrative, I walk a person you can help me state —

Swisher: Okay. All right. But what about on a personal level on this show?

Isaacson: On a personal level, first of all the word “like” — it’s such an anodyne word. I mean, I don’t quite … I mean, likability is not in the top 500 adjectives one uses. And I know you don’t fully buy into what I’m saying here, but there actually are different … As Grimes said, “It depends on which Elon you happen to be with.” And there are times when he really is inspiring about his mission.

Swisher: Absolutely.

Isaacson: Okay. And you’ve seen it. You’ve written that.

Swisher: I like SpaceX Elon. Sure.

Isaacson: And he’s inspiring about the missions and the very first when he was doing that, I thought: This is a type of pontification you do on pep talks for your team or on podcasts. He doesn’t really believe that we have to be multi-planetary. And after a while I’m going, You know what? It may seem crazy, but he actually believes that we should be space adventurers or we should move to the era of electric fields.

Isaacson: I like, once again to use an anodyne word, when I’m watching him do that, when I’m watching him be really funny, when I’m watching him make a pretty major decision about how you’re going to switch a line on the assembly line to, I mean, a station on the assembly, I go, “Whoa. I’m impressed by that.” Then there’ll be times when, I mean, I’m surprised he’s letting me sit in the room, but he’s just reaming somebody out for not knowing the what he calls the idiot index of a part, which is how much the material costs versus the final product. I’m going, “Man, how can you do that to that guy?” “Don’t like that?” “No, I didn’t like that Musk.” Am I supposed to tout up all the times I liked and respected and all the times I flinched at a fault?

Isaacson: Yeah, it was —

Swisher: Let me give you an easier … Scott Galloway calls it an idolatry of innovators that excuses cruelty, that excuses antisemitism, excuses misogyny, excuses being quite frankly not an ideal father as long as you’re really fucking rich. Is it an apologist not to come to a conclusion or not? You don’t have to disagree with —

Isaacson: You know, I mean, I come to a lot and I let the reader come to a lot of conclusions in this book, which is a lot of the things … look. You’ve read those Twitter chapters. What he did, the hypocritical things of trying to ban reporters on the Washington Post after he says he’s for free speech. A lot of those things he does, I think, clearly, is not me apologizing for him. It gets back to this saying of, “Okay, if you send rockets to Mars, does that allow you to be an asshole?” And no, I don’t defend being an asshole, but he is also an interesting character and even Scott would say, and certainly you would, that he’s been able to recreate the internet in low-Earth orbit. He’s been able to make rockets that not only get satellites into orbit and humans into orbit, unlike NASA, but they land and he can reuse them.

Swisher: Sure, but Walter —

Isaacson: I go on and on. That doesn’t excuse him being a jerk, but you got to tell the whole story.

Swisher: Jennifer Doudna will have more impact on the human race and she’s a lovely person.

Isaacson: I loved writing that book and I would love you to tell your readers if you don’t like Elon Musk, buy The Code Breaker because she does —

Swisher: No, none of this. All right. Okay. You won’t take a position on him. That’s fine. We’re almost done. I want this to be very quick, so I need to answer yes or no or if you have one little thing to say, do it.

Isaacson: I got it.

Swisher: Do you think Elon has a point about the woke mind virus, yes or no?

Isaacson: I’m sorry. I’ll try. I think it’s overblown. Do you mind me answering just enough?

Swisher: Sure. Please. Go ahead.

Isaacson: And I’ll be pretty crisp. I thought he was totally wrong when he was appalled that, at Twitter, they had suppressed or kicked off people who said that the lockdowns are ridiculous or that it could have been a lab leak or that, these things. And then I began to think, Well, maybe we should have had that debate on lockdowns and mask mandates. Do I think the woke mind virus is a problem? In some places. Is it in the top 100 problems this nation has? Probably not.

Swisher: Okay.

Isaacson: I’m sorry, that’s not one of them.

Swisher: That’s okay. That’s good. Do you think he should rectify how he treated Twitter employees, in particular people like Yoel Roth, whom he made a dangerous target, or Paul Pelosi, for example, who he lied about after his attack?

Isaacson: Yes.

Swisher: Yes. Okay.

Isaacson: I could survive with the one word answer there.

Isaacson: Yes on both counts.

Swisher: Will he?

Isaacson: He kind of says he … He deleted the Pelosi tweet and said he apologized.

Swisher: He did publicly, but he didn’t. He said he also told somebody he called him, but he didn’t. Just didn’t.

Isaacson: Yeah, he did it publicly, but sort of, yes, whatever. I do think he knows that it was absolutely a really bad thing to have tweeted, but that doesn’t mean that he’s apologizing for it.

Swisher: A month later he’s doing someone else —

Isaacson: On Yoel, there’s a lot on Yoel in the book. This is a truly decent person.

Swisher: Yes, yes. Indeed.

Isaacson: And Elon gets along very well with him for a very long time, including defending him from being a Hillary supporter and attacking Trump — and then Musk turns on him in a way that just still makes me flinch. And I know you don’t like me going back to childhood, but it’s being at that wilderness camp and just punching people in the nose unnecessarily. And yeah, the Yoel thing, if you think I’m sugarcoating and being too nice to Elon Musk, read the whole part on Yoel Roth, who was a good man.

Swisher: I get that. I get it. I think he was a piece of shit to do that. That’s what I think.

Isaacson: I heard you on that, yeah.

Swisher: And there’s no excuse. Elon was a piece of shit to do that.

Do you think his fear of population decline and the need to repopulate the planet Earth is rational? I have four kids, he has 11, but —

Isaacson: I do think that the danger of overpopulation is incorrect. That declining birth rates are a problem.

Swisher: Okay. Do you think we need to be a multi-planetary civilization, Walter?

Isaacson: Man, that would be so cool. Yes.

Swisher: Yes. Okay. Where do you think Tesla will be in five years given quickly increasing competition from across the globe, especially in China? Do you think it’ll be tough?

Isaacson: I think they will have a low-price global car under $25,000. That’ll be huge. I think he will not conquer full self-driving as quickly as he thinks. You and I both have joked about his … but he has just switched, as you know from one of the final chapters of my book, to AI machine learning and that has made FSD 12 particularly good. So I think Tesla —

Swisher: You think Tesla will be dominant in five years?

Isaacson: Yeah. So, I mean, you look at what happened with the charging network.

Swisher: No, dominant?

Isaacson: Dominant meaning I think it will —

Swisher: Low-margin business.

Isaacson: Huh?

Swisher: It’s a low-margin business, but okay.

Isaacson: I know, but now GM and Ford are having to say we’re going to use the Tesla Supercharger network, which, that’s into the Starlink thing. It gives him more control.

Swisher: Gives him, okay, but Tesla will be dominant compared to all the competitors.

Isaacson: I don’t know what you exactly mean by dominant, but it will be —

Swisher: What he is now.

Isaacson: Well, he’s now more valuable than all other car companies combined, all other —

Swisher: I’m going to take the other side of that bet. I think China’s going to run right over him. And then there’ll be competition for everyone.

Isaacson: Okay, okay. The good thing about being a biographer is you get to write about what’s happened.

Swisher: Blaming of the ADL for the Twitter ad falloff and now he’s meeting with Netanyahu because he needs someone to make him look like he doesn’t dislike Jewish people. What do you think of that?

Isaacson: Wrong. Totally wrong. And the falloff on Twitter ads is not because of the ADLs, it’s because he’s made it so it’s too controversial that no brand wants to be there. So wrong, no, or whatever the answer is.

Swisher: What do you thinking of them dragging Netanyahu in to make him look good?

Isaacson: My sympathies for Netanyahu having to do things or whatever it is. Not the highest on my list today.

Swisher: Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Do you wish that he hadn’t done the Twitter thing while you were writing the book because it took so much away from the other story?

Isaacson: Well, it certainly made for a really rollicking, amazing, complex roller coaster.

Swisher: Okay. Too much.

Isaacson: But yeah, if I wanted to have lived an easier life, it would’ve been more fun to write just about batteries and cars and rockets.

Swisher: Comment on his recent comments on China, which were also reflected in your book about the Uyghurs and the need to placate China.

Isaacson: Yeah. He is more in the camp of, let’s placate China. He has obviously both huge amounts of sales and factories there, but I’m not sure it’s just financially motivated. I think he actually believes a confrontational stance to China is, and I think I agree with that, I think is not a great idea. I think we’ve got to figure out how to have a modus vivendi with China.

Swisher: Interesting. I think we need to get along. We also need to punch them in the nose. See? We have a different opinion.

Isaacson: Hey, well, in some ways I think we might be —

Swisher: In the nose. See, we have different opinions.

Isaacson: Hey, well, in some ways, I think we might be agreeing there, which is compete and …

Swisher: A real punch in the nose, actually.

Isaacson: Oh, I’m not sure the punch in the nose leads to a great end of the movie.

Swisher: That’s true. Fair point. How do you assess the Twitter files now that he made such a big deal of, which proved pretty much a goose egg?

Isaacson: I think it was way overblown, and I disagreed with the premise that it showed the U.S. government forcing Twitter executives to do things. Even though I do think Twitter’s suppressed, a little bit too much, the range of speech. But what I feel is not that the government violated and tried to suppress it, but that the Twitter executives went along willingly, day after day, banning people per request. And I thought that was a bad act. I mean, not a great thing that the previous Twitter management did, and I’m kind of glad it all got exposed. But it was as you say.

Swisher: Do you think he’s let too many people back on and is not moderating correctly, which is leading to the ad falloff, for example?

Isaacson: I think the ad falloff is because it’s become more controversial. I’m not sure … He has a thing about freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.

Swisher: That’s not his. That’s an old, old —

Isaacson: No, I know.

Swisher: By the way. I love when he takes credit for it, but it’s not true.

Isaacson: Well, okay. I’ll give whoever credit for it.

Swisher: Years ago.

Isaacson: Letting more people on doesn’t bother me. What bothers me is when he amplifies the people, or likes or engages with the people who engage with people who are antisemitic or white supremacist or whatever. I don’t think Musk is that way. I’m not even sure you should keep Donald. I don’t think you should keep Donald Trump off. But if there are people saying bad things, I think the big problem is he’s kind of engaging with them and letting them be amplified in reach.

Swisher: In letting them, he’s amplifying himself. All right. Having spent two years with Elon, would you let this man have access to your brain via Neuralink? Would you hand him your personal emotion for an everything app?

Isaacson: I’m not as big of a privacy … I mean, let’s leave it aside, it being Elon.

Swisher: No, I don’t want to leave aside.

Isaacson: Okay. Well, I don’t think Elon’s going to be sitting there saying “Here’s what Walter spent money on last night.” I’m like my daughter and her generation, I’m not as much of a privacy … I mean, I love privacy. I just meant, I’m not worried about people having some access to my data as long as I can turn it off.

Swisher: All right. Okay, last one. Do you think there’s ever a time Elon wasn’t trying to manipulate you during the interviews? Was that a difficult thing? He’s very persuasive.

Isaacson: It was pretty odd that he almost did not seem to … or at times, did not even seem aware of my presence. I know you’re going to think that’s weird, but I’d be sitting there, he’d be doing things that I wouldn’t do in front of my wife. I wouldn’t do in front of myself.

Swisher: Tell me what.

Isaacson: Oh, reaming people out, saying weird things. I worried about the Heisenberg principle that by observing things I would affect the things, and I was stunned and people around him were stunned. They said, “We thought if you were around it would affect him, but it hasn’t.”

Swisher: So you were just a fly on the wall. All right, let me ask you, I have only three more questions. Who does Elon really listen to? You mentioned open-loop warning when he’s behaving badly that his brother does. Who do you consider his actual advisers who, let me just say, are not bought and paid for?

Isaacson: Yeah, the open-loop warning is interesting, because there’s an agreement amongst friends and brothers and other people that when you go really bad —  and this starts in 2018 —  you think there’s been kind of wackiness?

Swisher: No, I remember 2018.

Isaacson: Yeah, 2018. Pedo tweet, take private, smoking dope on Joe Rogan. And that’s when his brother Kimball uses the phrase they use, which is “open-loop warning” — which means you don’t have a feedback loop.

Swisher: He’s looping, yeah.

Isaacson: You’re shooting off something and it’s not an iterative feedback loop. The people who have that ability with him are Antonio Gracias, who’s been there since the very beginning.

Swisher: On the board.

Isaacson: And has tried to take his phone and put it in the hotel safe and punch in a code so he couldn’t tweet at night and says, “You’ve got to stop doing things.” Kimbal, but I’ll also say he doesn’t have enough. There aren’t enough people to give him negative feedback, and he sometimes cuts them off, cuts Kimbal off in the book for months on end. So obviously being more open to negative feedback and restraining influences would be —

Swisher: So just two people?

Isaacson: You would add to the mix if you could.

Swisher: You were mentioning just two people. All right. Where will he be in 30 years?

Isaacson: Well, I can throw —

Swisher: Okay, who else?

Isaacson: Well, they’re a crowd that you’re not particularly fond of that’s like, David Sachs.

Swisher: So you think they have an influence on him?

Isaacson: I don’t think David Sachs is in any way controlling his thinking. Musk does that.

Swisher: No, an influence, that’s all.

Isaacson: But he talks to him a lot, and I could … I think Ken Howery, but I also think his … Well, Grimes, sometimes, or Shivon. He has people around him. But I’m agreeing with you. Look, I got a lot of people around me who every time I go on a podcast like yours, listen to it and say, “Man, you shouldn’t have said that.” Or, “For God’s sake, don’t …” I get a lot of feedback. I don’t think that he gets as much.

Swisher: No, he doesn’t get very much at all. Where do you think he’ll be in 30 years when he’s as old as Biden? I’m thinking Howard Hughes.

Isaacson: Howard Hughes. He keeps pushing all of his chips back in, and there’s going to be explosions. There’s going to be debris that falls, just like there was in 2008 when he blows up his first three rockets. Just like there was in 2017, 2018, when he goes through the hell that’s described in the book.

I think certain things will flame out and blow up. If you ask me my prediction on the first, I think that the platform now known as X will be a payments platform, will have content creators putting stuff up, but will be an environment that advertisers don’t want to be in, and it’s going to be a mess. But every week —

Swisher: What about him personally?

Isaacson: Oh, I think he’s been through these things before. He’s been through 2008, he’s been through 2018. He relishes storm and drama.

Swisher: So no evolvement of this. That you saw with Jobs, you certainly saw him maturing. So no evolvement?

Isaacson: Yeah, although when Jobs came back from the liver transplant, read that chapter again. It was like, they thought he was going to be mellow, but he wasn’t mellow. But he was still … Will Musk mellow? The one-word answer? No.

Swisher: No. Okay. Did you ever hear him apologize to anyone for an outburst during that time you were with him?

Isaacson: No. In fact, it’s particularly interesting in the book, because I go … I mean, you say, “Do you check with other people?” I circled back so many times in the book. He reams out a guy named Andy at Starbucks, Lucas on the finance team, or whatever. So I circle back, and at one point he promotes Andy, after he’s, like, really reamed him out. Likewise Milan Kovač, who does autopilot and Optimus the robot — just reams him out. And both of them, and there are a couple more in the book, I say: “All right. Did he?” And I’m there, and I’m going, “Holy shit.” And so I say to Milan, and I say to Andy, “Did he ever apologize?” Both of them said, “The odd thing is, he was promoting me. He was very nice to me later.”

And I finally said to him, “Do you remember when?” And he kind of looks at me blankly as if he doesn’t even quite remember it.

Swisher: Oh no. Come on. He’s 52, he’s a man, he’s an adult. “Doesn’t remember it”? Come on.

Isaacson: I think there are things he does when he gets into his zone of a dark mood in which, when he comes out later, he thinks, That wasn’t personal, that wasn’t me, it’s just me giving honest feedback, and his mind moves to other things. I’m not apologizing. I’m not saying it’s good.

Swisher: It’s called “seek therapy” — is what it is.

Isaacson: You asked me, “Does he ever apologize to these people?” I’m telling you, no, he didn’t.

Swisher: He doesn’t. That’s happened to me. He wrote me a bunch of mean emails and then was like, “Why don’t we talk?” I was like, “You wrote me a bunch of mean emails.”

Isaacson: You see? Okay. And do you think that he’s going to apologize? No.

Swisher: Walter, I think there’s two kinds of people. People who lie, which he does quite a bit. And people who lie to themselves, which he does almost all the time. That’s what I think.

Isaacson: Yeah. And in the book I think you’ll see more complexity in that.

Swisher: All right, there’s two lines I want to talk to you about. It’s my last two questions. The last line of your book, where you said, “Sometimes they’re crazy ones,” but then you say, “Crazy enough to change the world.” And I’m saying, “Walter, you cannot have it two ways,” but you did. Why did you end it like that?

Isaacson: You have a good criticism that sometimes I try to have it two ways, and I guess the plea I will cop is I actually believe that he’s crazy, that he’s messed up — it’s a problem. But why the hell can’t Boeing have a communication system? Why can’t it get out? What is it about him? I mean, he is changing the world, whether you like it or not.

Swisher: I got it. I have said this over and over again.

Isaacson: And you’ve said it over and over. He brought us, more than any single individual, into the era of electric vehicles, in the era of space travel, in the era of internet and outer space. So it is true that his craziness did help lead him to change the world.

Swisher: Did it? Maybe it hindered him. Anyway, we can argue about it, but let me say, fast cars, rockets, women, blowing things up with no repercussions whatsoever. Would you trade places with him?

Isaacson: Oh God, no. No, no. Look, I had a happy childhood. Nobody’s ever going to write my biography, but I grew up in New Orleans, a magical place, with two parents who were the kindest people I ever knew. I tend to be congenitally suited to being the detached observer who’s a storyteller. As you heard me say in New Orleans a year ago, I had a mentor, Walker Percy, the great novelist. His picture is sort of back there, if you can see it.

Swisher: I’m aware of Walter Percy.

Isaacson: And he said, “There are two types of people coming out of Louisiana: preachers and storytellers.”

Swisher: Yes, I’ve heard you tell this story.

Isaacson: “For heaven’s sake, be a storyteller, the world’s got too many preachers.” I know I’m not a person in the arena. I know I’m not going to send up a rocket.

Swisher: Last question. What impact does writing the Elon biography, or some people say, a hagiography — someone called it that to me, as some have called it …

Isaacson: No, no, no. I’m not going to let you get away with that.

Swisher: All right, I’m not going to say it.

Isaacson: You’re forcing that off on somebody else’s opinion.

Swisher: You’re right. Unfair.

Isaacson: Okay, thank you.

Swisher: I think you were far too nice to him. What impact does the Elon biography have on the Walter Isaacson legacy?

Isaacson: Look, if I had cared about my legacy, I would’ve taken a less controversial character. There are going to be people who say, “You took a totally controversial person,” and as you just said, it is not hagiography but that I was too nice to him. This ain’t going to help. And there are people who think I was too mean to him. Maybe next time I do a book I’m going to go into the Wayback Machine and do somebody who’s beautiful and dead.

Swisher: Yes, I was just going to suggest. I was like, “Walter, if I have one piece of advice: dead .”

Isaacson: I’ll probably do it, but I did not do this book … I kind of stumbled into this book. I wasn’t really planning to, and it kind of happened. I did not do this book because it would enhance my legacy. I did it because, “Whoa, this is …” Well, I first did it — because he hadn’t even thought about buying Twitter. I said, “Man, the guy’s shooting off rockets, doing electric cars. I love technology. Do the book.”

I think in the end there’ll be a lot of people who say I was far too nice to him. There’ll be people who say, “Oh, you were mean and you didn’t understand his greatness.” If I wanted to have a less controversial impact on my career, there’s 10,000 people I could have picked other than Elon Musk to have written about.

Swisher: Howard Hughes. I hear he’s dead.

Isaacson: Edison.

Swisher: Dead.

Isaacson: Bill Gates. Jeff Bezos.

Swisher: Edison was an asshole. No, do not do live people. Stop. You can’t. They’re not done yet.

Isaacson: In this podcast, we’ve done four different instances where you’ve given me advice and I’ve actually taken it. Because I’m not an open-loop. I get feedback.

Swisher: Okay, good. Dead.

Isaacson: I think I’ll promise you. Not sure, but I’ll promise you the next one will be somebody who’s been dead for at least a century.

Swisher: Anyone dead, Walter, please, for the love of God. Anyway, I really appreciate it.

Isaacson: Love you.

Swisher: You’ve been a very good sport about this.

Isaacson: And do remember, when your Burn Book comes out, I get to turn the table.

Swisher: You can track, you can burn me as much as you want.

Isaacson: No, I get to get you onstage.

Swisher: You know what? It’s funny. It’s actually funny. It’s tough, but it’s very funny, so I think you’ll enjoy it. But we’ll see. You can tell me honestly.

Isaacson: I can’t wait.

Swisher: And I will take your honest feedback completely, and I’m fine if you don’t like it, fine if you do. As long as I sell books, as you know.

Isaacson: No, and here’s another thing I don’t believe. I don’t believe you’re happy only if it sells books.

Swisher: I don’t care.

Isaacson: I think you’re going to want to make sure that people, maybe not me, but people like me kind of say, “All right, that was pretty good. I like that.”

Swisher: Yeah, that is correct.

Isaacson: You got more of an ego than you have a pocketbook.

Swisher: Oh, are you kidding? Are you kidding? I have an enormous ego and I’m also … I don’t know if I’m a narcissist, but I’m an egomaniac. Anyway, Walter, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

On With Kara Swisher is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Cristian Castro Rossel, and Megan Burney , with mixing by Fernando Arruda, engineering by Christopher Shurtleff, and theme music by Trackademics. New episodes will drop every Monday and Thursday. Follow the show on  Apple Podcasts ,  Spotify , or  wherever you get your podcasts .

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Elon Musk Biography Yields Intriguing Vignettes About Ari Emanuel And Larry David, But Many Poor Reviews Have Accompanied Strong Early Sales

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Walter Isaacson ‘s new biography of Elon Musk includes a number of intriguing vignettes involving everyone from Bill Gates to Google co-founder Sergei Brin. Two in particular involve Endeavor chief Ari Emanuel , who reportedly proposed running Twitter for $100 million, not long after Larry David had chastised Musk to his face after officiating Emanuel’s wedding. (For more about both, read on.)

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Isaacson’s pedigree has evidently helped give an early commercial boost to the 688-page Simon & Schuster title, which is already No. 3 on the Amazon charts. Yet its publication Tuesday has also been greeted by many strikingly negative reviews. Novelist Gary Shtyngart, writing in The Guardian , panned the book as an “insight-free doorstop,” while Brian Merchant in the LA Times assailed what he felt was Isaacson’s bias, concluding that “it’s time to retire the entire genre of ‘great innovator’ biographies.” Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway also tore into the book on their top-rated podcast Pivot . “I wanted a little more analysis, from the smart person that Walter is,” Swisher observes. “It actually makes Elon boring … and it doesn’t feel soaring in any way.” Galloway complains that the book’s “idolatry” ends up marginalizing or excusing cruelty, misogyny, anti-Semitism and other dark aspects of the story.

Of course, the review game is not what it once was, and vox populi support tends to drown out establishment criticism, just as it is in the movie business and elsewhere. On Goodreads and Amazon, the book currently has 4.5 stars out of 5, with most readers having a similar response to that of Will Oremus in his review for the Washington Post . “Isaacson prioritized revealing anecdotes and behind-the-scenes reportage over a sophisticated critical lens,” he wrote in a mixed-to-positive notice.

The response? Musk lieutenant Jared Birchall quickly shot down the idea, according to the book, calling Emanuel’s outreach via the encrypted text service Signal ““the most insulting, demeaning, insane message.”

The other moment occurred during Emanuel’s 2022 wedding to Sarah Staudinger in St. Tropez, France, Larry David officiated the nuptials, and Isaacson describes a scene in which David and Musk wound up seated next to each other at a table. Pleasantries were not exchanged; rather, a sequence worthy of Curb Your Enthusiasm reportedly unfolded — minus the comedy.

“Do you want to murder kids in school?” David asked Musk, according to Isaacson. The comment was referring to a mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, TX, which killed 19 students and two teachers.

“His tweets about voting Republican because Democrats were the party of division and hate were sticking in my craw. Even if Uvalde never happened, I probably would have brought it up, because I was angry and offended,” David told Isaacson.

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Elon Musk (2023)

Issacson’s elon musk serves more as a sequel/companion to his own steve jobs biography than a character study of its controversial subject..

• Author: Walter Isaacson
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• ISBN: 978-1982181284
• Release Date: September 12, 2023

No stranger to crafting biographies about creative people many consider among the world’s most innovative and influential, Walter Issacson (Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo Da Vinci) now turns his attention to Elon Musk, a man many feel is both admirable and deplorable, a Gen Xer more likely to find inspiration from Mel Brooks and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy than the Great Books of the Western World.

Whether you consider Elon Musk (the man) a hero or villain could depend largely on your personal politics, or your appetite for hero worship. With Elon Musk (the book), Issacson chronicles his journey as a gifted student from a wealthy South African family, his migration to North America, parlaying early success into becoming the world’s richest man, and among its most controversial.

He is the rarest of celebrities; an industrialist engineer as likely to check over code as he was to get his hands dirty with wrenches and bolt-cutters, a couch surfer who preferred a two-bedroom apartment over multi-level mansions. More than anyone of his generation, Musk has embodied the ideal that it is the responsibility of true innovators not to work towards the status quo but to change it. By any means necessary, some might add, though not as a compliment.

In many ways Issacson’s book is positioned as the spiritual sequel to his own 2011 Steve Jobs biography, probably by design. The book opens with a line from Musk’s opening monologue hosting Saturday Night Live in 2021 contrasted with Jobs’ famous quote about crazy people changing the world. Even the cover showing a steely-eyed Musk, hands pressed together in contemplative fashion, evokes Jobs’ iconic chin pinching portrait. It’s a comparison the author will make often as he positions Musk as Jobs’ rightful heir to our culture’s de facto iconoclast inventor.

Or, more appropriately, an iconoclast that actually gets things done. Example after example has Issacson reminding us that Musk is the person most responsible for innovating, often creating, new paradigms for digital payments, electric and self-autonomous vehicles, space rockets, satellite internet, electrical brain interfaces, AI, and, perhaps one day, interplanetary travel. As he quipped on SNL, “ Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude? ”

It’s not so much the “why” that Issacson is concerned with, though, but the “how” Musk was able to influence so much in so little time. Early chapters have Issacson attempting to draw parallels between Musk and his father Errol, a dominant and often cruel figure he would work hard to distance himself from. While the two share many similarities (high intelligence, temper, fertility), father and son would have a lifelong toxic relationship, and remain largely estranged to this day.

Issacson suggests that while both father and son share similar sociopathic personalities, it was Elon who would attempt to channel them into the greater good, with occasional stumbles. It’s here where Issacson recalibrates his efforts to examine how Musk’s abrasiveness allowed him to avoid the pull of adulation and focus on the tasks at hand. As an adult Musk would self-diagnose himself with Asperger’s syndrome, and in his world basic empathy could be seen as a disability, the desire to be “liked” by others a wasteful ambition. As a child this made him the object of bullying; as an adult, perpetrator of the bullying.

It’s yet another area where similar temperamental traits/defects (Jobs’ fabled “reality distortion field” with Musk’s “weak empathy gene”) may explain the dynamic sway both men had on those around them. Issacson labels Musk (like Jobs) a “drama addict”, which attracted him to other intensely talented people, some willing to tolerate his abrasive attitude and behavior and some not so much.

Michael Marks, an early Tesla investor and whom Musk appointed the company’s interim CEO, reinforced this connection better than most. “ Some people are just assholes, ” he says of Jobs and Musk, but concedes “ they accomplish so much that I just have to sit back and say, ‘That seems to be a package.’  ” The type of success one can both admire yet not aspire to.

But there is one big difference; Issacson’s biography on Apple’s late founder was released just weeks following his death in 2011, whereas Elon Musk is still very much alive, and very much still making headlines. Earlier this year he’d become embroiled in a pugilistic pissing match with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and the week of the book’s publishing questions arose regarding his personal involvement regarding Ukraine’s Starlink military access while tweeting his opinions about Bethesda’s Starfield game.

Even in these times of social media excess the world may not be ready for having the thoughts and opinions of those capable of substantially affecting the world served daily, sometimes on the hour; many of us would prefer to stay ignorant of how the sausage is made. Like it or not, this intimacy has affected how many view the game changers of the world, and through his prolific tweeting Musk has caused many to question if it’s possible to distance the art from the artist.

Nothing showcased this better than his interactions with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whom Musk thought a hypocrite for publicly touting climate change initiatives yet privately betting against Tesla by short-changing its stock for financial gain. Like Jobs, Musk has demonstrated little interest in public philanthropy, and like Jobs didn’t suffer fools easily. Only Musk would (and still does) vent his frustrations publicly on Twitter for all to see.

After dismissing his concerns Musk would tweet an unflattering photo of Gates, calling him a boner-killer. “ At this point, I am convinced that he is categorically insane (and an asshole to the core). ” Gates would continue to praise Musk with platitudes that suggested he’d rather avoid the subject than have others begin to challenge this ethical discrepancy. Issacson calls Gates’ response “gracious”, but it honestly sounds more facetious.

Again and again it would be Musk’s singular focus on optimization that would see him through his greatest accomplishments, usually the result of noticing what worked and what didn’t. Musk saw how California’s failed mandate to have “zero-emission” vehicles by 2003 was proof that true innovation couldn’t be legislated but must be aggressively implemented by those best in positions to implement real change. And who better than him?

He’d take this stance in everything, questioning the necessity of everything and anything. Like how questioning the cooling-off period of steel (“Can steel be like a cookie, baked hard on the outside and gooey in the middle?”) resulted in faster manufacturing of Tesla vehicles or his son Saxon asking “Why doesn’t the future look like the future?” led to the polygonal Cybertruck. Question everything, he demanded, his edicts to what he thought wasteful or excessive was simple yet ruthless: delete, delete, delete.

Issacson would diagnose employees who survived his missives as suffering from post-Musk distress disorder, though is quick to add this process usually led them to reexamining their way at looking at problems, so see new possibilities of solutions – usually with positive results.

Regrettably, yet understandably, Issacson spends an inordinate amount of time focusing on the most recent of Musk’s adventures, his acquisition of Twitter (to which he would resurrect and apply his original intended name for PayPal, “X”). It’s understandable because of the obvious: few things have ignited the tech world as much as the world’s richest man taking over one of the world’s biggest social media platforms on the basis of “saving free speech”, especially in the wake of 2020’s presidential election.

It’s here that Issacson argues, persuasively, that few moments in Musk’s career would see his myriad of personal and professional strengths and weaknesses so intertwined, some working in tandem and others in opposition.

It’s also regrettable because, as we’ve also seen, this saga is still very much in motion. Intentional or not, the fervor around Twitter’s new boss has revealed a disproportionate bias against Musk by many who once exhibited bias towards him, with little to explain the change other than crass politics. He’d develop a persecution complex, but one with some validity, behaviors that were at one time openly celebrated by many of the same people now castigating his every move and tweet.

Did you know he was the model for Tony Stark / Iron Man (played by Robert Downey Jr.) in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, “a celebrity industrialist and engineer”, who would cameo as himself in Iron Man 2? He’d even appear on a popular episode of The Simpsons (“possibly the greatest living inventor!”) as himself, of course.

Since then the fawning coverage has mostly stopped, with even positive or neutral news about Musk or his companies spun negatively – if covered at all. Independent observers might say they were actively wanting him to fail, maybe influencing news coverage to guarantee it. These lapses in journalistic integrity aside, in regards to Twitter almost none of the many doomsday scenarios “experts” predicted have come to pass.

One area Issacson spends some time exploring but, ironically, not enough analyzing is just how important videogames were to Musk’s development and management style. He taught himself to program at a young age, discovered ways to “hack” arcade machines, and spent countless hours playing videogames as both respite from the real world and perhaps as virtual roadmaps to change it.

For Musk, qualities he found desirable could be honed in the world-building of Civilization, the twitch-like accuracy of Quake , the precision timing of Street Fighter , the brutal survival ethos of Elden Ring , and, among his favorites, the limited-resource management of Polytopia. To someone who lacked “empathy” it’s not a stretch they might see reality itself as a videogame, a massive simulation where someone could exercise godlike powers over fictional worlds and those within them.

As with most of Issacon’s biographies Elon Musk does a good job demonstrating “why” we should care about the man behind many of the greatest industrial pushes of the 21st century, but his desire to create a sequel/companion to his own Steve Jobs biography results in a surprisingly detached overview of his accomplishments that probably won’t fully satisfy the Musk devout or disbelievers. Such is the peril of documenting a life and career that’s still unfolding, still holding the potential for greater success – and possible failure.

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Elon Musk had a 'hilarious' way of asking if an ex-Twitter exec wanted to work for him

• Elon Musk had a strange way of phrasing a job offer to a former Twitter exec.
• Kayvon Beykpour, ex-head of product, recalled Musk's "hilarious" offer on Lenny's Podcast.

Elon Musk had an interesting way of phrasing a job offer, according to a former Twitter exec who met with him after he purchased the social media company.

Kayvon Beykpour, the former head of product at Twitter, recalled his first in-person meeting with Musk on an episode of Lenny's Podcast released Sunday.

Beykpour said he was let go from Twitter by former CEO Parag Agrawal right before Musk bought the company in 2022, but says Musk made him an offer of sorts to keep working on the platform. Beykpour first joined Twitter in 2015 when it acquired his video live-streaming company, Periscope , for $86.6 million.

Beykpour says he first met Musk over FaceTime before they arranged an in-person meeting at Twitter's headquarters. During a two-hour conversation with Musk there, they discussed "the past, the future of Twitter, the good, the bad, the ugly."

Musk asked Beykpour to "swipe right on whether you want to be here," the Periscope cofounder said.

"I was like, 'What would my job be?' And he was like 'Dunno, just like hang out and you can swipe left or swipe right.' He used the swipe right, swipe left Tinder metaphor and I thought that was kind of hilarious coming from him," Beykpour said.

"He was like, 'We don't have to make this a thing. Just like do you want to hang out and work on the product with us?'" he added.

Musk famously swiped left on a majority of Twitter's staff after buying the company. Musk has said Twitter laid off more than 6,000 employees , roughly 80% of its workforce, since he bought it. Several former execs at the company, including former CEO Parag Agrawal, have filed a lawsuit alleging Musk owes them more than $128 million in severance. A former HR boss at Twitter says the company failed to pay $500 million in severance to laid-off staff .

Beykpour ultimately declined Musk's offer.

"I sort of ended up deciding that actually, I'm just ready to move on," he said. "I've spent enough time at this company, at this product, trying to shape it into something that I was passionate about, and I think it's someone else's turn, especially Elon. If you buy it, it's your turn. You can do whatever you want with it."

Today, he's "building something in the consumer space" after starting a company with some cofounders late last year, he added on the podcast.

Beykpour did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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3 Surprising Moves Elon Musk Made in His Career That Worked — And Why You Should Start Making Them Today

E lon Musk is the third richest man on the planet, with a net worth standing at a whopping $179 billion, according to Bloomberg Billionaires Index (though that net worth dropped by $50.4 billion year-to-date).

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Musk is –deep breath — the founder, chairman, CEO and chief technology officer of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, Inc., owner, chairman and CTO of X Corp., founder of the Boring Company and xAI, co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI, and president of the Musk Foundation. Last but not least, Musk bought X — formerly Twitter – for an eye-popping $44 billion in 2022.

Musk, who is known for not being afraid of speaking his mind and has sparked several controversies, has made several moves in his career that worked well, and which could also resonate with a larger audience:

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1. Getting in Early on Trends

Musk tends to get in early on trends, especially when it comes to technology shifts.

“He basically took a start-up type of attitude (innovative, high chance of failure) to cars and rockets, which had both become stagnant industries dominated by aversion to risk andc hange, and run by bean counters instead of engineers,” according to a Quora user.

This was once again demonstrated most recently with his foray into artificial intelligence (AI), with the newest company, xAI, which is working on “building artificial intelligence to accelerate human scientific discovery,” according to its website.

2. Focusing on Costs

The Wall Street Journal reported that Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk (“Elon Musk”), shows the extreme attention Musk has had on costs — especially at SpaceX.

“Musk once ordered engineers to develop an in-house valve after a supplier quoted a price he deemed too high. Another time, he ordered the company to make an actuator for $5,000 after SpaceX was quoted an outside price of $120,000,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

3. Diversifying

Musk, unlike many of his fellow billionaires, took a very different approach to amass his extraordinary wealth thanks to several and diversified business operations instead of a single success path, according to History Computer.

From electric vehicles, to rockets and from social media to AI, Musk seemingly has a hand in several sectors, which might be helping him protect against risk — and potential losses.

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In turn, he has also been able to re-invest some of his profits. Most recently for instance, he had pledged 58% of his Tesla shares as collateral to secure personal indebtedness for the 2022 $44 billion Twitter acquisition, according to Bloomberg.

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This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com : 3 Surprising Moves Elon Musk Made in His Career That Worked — And Why You Should Start Making Them Today

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Who are Elon Musk's 11 children?

Elon Musk is a tech entrepreneur, space pioneer, one-time “Saturday Night Live” host and controversial figure .

Musk wears many different hats, and in addition to the above, he’s also a father of 11 children that he's had with three different women.

The X owner shares three kids with the musician Grimes, twins with tech executive Shivon Zilis and five children, a set of twins and triplets, with his ex-wife, Justine Wilson.

“He believes that people should have many more children,” author Walter Isaacson, who published both a biography and Time magazine cover story about Musk in September 2023, said while appearing on TODAY Sept. 11, 2023. Isaacson added that Musk "wants to have a lot of children.”

Here’s a look at all of Musk’s children.

Strider and Azure

Musk shares twins Strider and Azure with Zilis, 38, an AI specialist and executive at Neuralink, a company that Musk co-founded. Isaacson describes Zilis in his Time cover story as Musk's "intellectual companion on artificial intelligence since the founding of OpenAI eight years earlier."

Isaacson also revealed in the Time cover story the names of the twins, who were born in November 2021, and shared a photo of them.

On Sept. 8, 2023, Zilis shared an adorable video on X of her twins running around, with one of them yelling, “I love you.”

X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno

Grimes and Musk had a son in May 2020. Originally named X Æ A-12 , the child, whom they call X, had to have his name officially changed to X Æ A-Xii in order to be in line with California laws about birth certificates.

The child’s name is pronounced “X Ash A Twelve,” Musk said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast shortly after his birth.

“First of all, my partner’s the one that mostly came up with the name,” he said . “It’s just X, the letter X, and then the ‘Æ’ is pronounced, ‘Ash,’ and then, ‘A-12’ is my contribution.”

He and Grimes split in September 2021 , only to get back together.

Elon Musk and singer Grimes welcomed a baby girl named Exa Dark Sideræl with the help of a surrogate in December 2021. Grimes, whose birth name is Claire Elise Boucher, told Vanity Fair in a March 2022 feature that the baby’s name is pronounced “sigh-deer-ee-el,” but nicknamed Y.

“There’s no real word for it,” she shared with the outlet when asked about her relationship status with Musk at the time. “I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid. We live in separate houses. We’re best friends. We see each other all the time. ... We just have our own thing going on, and I don’t expect other people to understand it.”

She also said she and Musk hoped to have more kids.

“We’ve always wanted at least three or four,” she told Vanity Fair.

On March 10, 2022, after the article was released, Grimes tweeted that she and Musk had broken up, again.

In September 2023, a New York Times review of Isaacson’s Musk biography revealed that Musk and Grimes had welcomed a third child, Techno. Grimes also mentioned Techno in a lengthy X post , writing, in part, “I wish I could show u how cute little Techno is but my priority rn is keeping my babies out of the public eye.”

Adding, “Plz respect that at this time.”

In September 2023, Grimes filed a court petition to establish parental rights after they broke up.

Griffin, Vivian and Nevada

The business mogul and his first wife, Wilson, share twins Griffin and Vivian, born in 2004. The birth of their twins came after the couple had a son named Nevada in 2002 who died from sudden infant death syndrome.

“My firstborn son died in my arms,” Musk wrote in  an email exchange reported by Business Inside r India  in February 2022. “I felt his heartbeat.”

Kai, Saxon and Damian

After having twins, Musk and Wilson had triplets — all boys — in 2006. Musk and Wilson divorced in 2008.

Following his divorce from Wilson, he married actor Talulah Riley in 2010. They divorced in 2012, married again in 2013, then divorced a second time in 2016.

CORRECTIONS (April 27, 2024, 4:13 p.m.):  A previous version of this story misspelled Talulah Riley's first name. It has been corrected. Also, a previous version of this story stated that Musk and Grimes’ son,  X Æ A-Xii , was born in May 2021, and their daughter, Exa Dark Sideræl , was born in December 2020. X was born in May 2020, and Exa was born in December 2021. Additionally, a previous version of this story stated that Grimes filed a court petition to establish parental rights in October 2023. She filed the court petition in September 2023. 

Drew Weisholtz is a reporter for TODAY Digital, focusing on pop culture, nostalgia and trending stories. He has seen every episode of “Saved by the Bell” at least 50 times, longs to perfect the crane kick from “The Karate Kid” and performs stand-up comedy, while also cheering on the New York Yankees and New York Giants. A graduate of Rutgers University, he is the married father of two kids who believe he is ridiculous.