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Elon Musk By Walter Isaacson

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Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur depicts a mercurial “man-child” with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match.

Credit... Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller; Photo reference by Steven Ferdman/Getty Images

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By Jennifer Szalai

• Published Sept. 9, 2023 Updated Sept. 11, 2023
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ELON MUSK , by Walter Isaacson

At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person , the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.” As the people closest to him will attest, he lacks empathy — something that Isaacson describes as a “gene” that’s “hard-wired.”

Yet even as Musk struggles to relate to the actual humans around him, his plans for humanity are grand. “A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single-planet civilization and being a multiplanet one”: Musk would “maniacally” repeat this message to his staff at SpaceX, his spacecraft and satellite company, where every decision is motivated by his determination to get earthlings to Mars. He pushes employees at his companies — he now runs six, including X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — to slash costs and meet brutal deadlines because he needs to pour resources into the moonshot of colonizing space “before civilization crumbles.” Disaster could come from climate change, from declining birthrates, from artificial intelligence. Isaacson describes Musk stalking the factory floor of Tesla, his electric car company, issuing orders on the fly. “If I don’t make decisions,” Musk explained, “we die.”

By “we,” Musk presumably meant Tesla in that instance. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure. Isaacson, whose previous biographical subjects include Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, is a patient chronicler of obsession; in the case of Musk, he can occasionally seem too patient — a hazard for any biographer who is given extraordinary access. At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he declares, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.” There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but 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 has ably conveyed that Musk doesn’t truly like pushback. Some of his lieutenants insist that he will eventually listen to reason, but Isaacson sees firsthand Musk’s habit of deriding as a saboteur or an idiot anyone who resists him. The musician Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children (the existence of the third, Techno Mechanicus, nicknamed Tau, has been kept private until now), calls his roiling anger “demon mode” — a mind-set that “causes a lot of chaos.” She also insists that it allows him to get stuff done.

It’s a convenient assessment, one that Isaacson seems mostly to accept. “As Shakespeare teaches us,” he writes, “all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex.” Well, yes — but couldn’t this describe anyone? What is there to say specifically about Musk himself?

For that we can turn to Isaacson’s reporting, of which there is plenty. (Another thoroughly reported biography, by Ashlee Vance , was published in 2015 — four years before SpaceX started launching Starlink satellites and seven years before Musk acquired Twitter.) Isaacson even managed to get Errol, Elon’s intermittently estranged father, to talk — though mostly what Errol offers are rambling bigoted comments (while insisting he isn’t racist) and self-aggrandizing tales (at least one of which turns out to be “provably false”).

Errol has two children with his stepdaughter. As for Elon, he has 10 children with three women, one of whom — Shivon Zilis, who bore his twins in 2021 — is an executive at one of his companies. (Another child, Musk’s first, born in 2002, died from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome when he was 10 weeks old.)

“He really wants smart people to have kids,” Zilis said of Musk, who offered to be her sperm donor so that, Isaacson adds, “the kids would be genetically his.” At the time, Grimes and Musk were expecting their second child, a girl. Musk didn’t tell Grimes that he had just had twins with one of his employees.

But the details of such domestic intrigues are, in the book and in Musk’s life, largely beside the point. He is mostly preoccupied with his businesses, where he expects his staff to abide by “the algorithm,” his workplace creed, which commands them to “question every requirement” from a department, including “the legal department” and “the safety department”; and to “delete any part or process” they can. “Comradery is dangerous,” is one of the corollaries. So is this: “The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

Still, Musk has accrued enough power to dictate his own rules. In one of the book’s biggest scoops, Isaacson describes Musk secretly instructing his engineers to “turn off” Starlink satellite internet coverage to prevent Ukraine from launching a surprise drone attack on Russian forces in Crimea. ( Isaacson has since posted on X that contrary to what he writes in the book, Musk didn’t shut down coverage but denied a request to extend the network’s range.) Musk decided that he was saving humanity from a nuclear war. When Ukraine’s vice prime minister texted him to say that Starlink service was “a matter of life and death,” Musk instructed him to “seek peace while you have the upper hand.”

Counseling the Ukrainians to “seek peace” sounds especially rich coming from someone who is “energized,” Isaacson says, by “dire threats.” But then the overall sense you get from this biography is that for all of Musk’s talk about the world-changing magic of “the algorithm,” he ultimately does what he wants. He will order his companies to scrimp fanatically on some things while insisting that they spend lavishly on others. At Tesla, Musk’s obsession with the minutiae of automotive design inflated costs and drained the company of cash. At SpaceX, instead of spending $1,500 for the kind of latch used by NASA, an engineer figured out how to modify a $30 latch intended for a bathroom stall. When Musk acquired Twitter last year, he eliminated 75 percent of the staff.

Since Musk’s acquisition, hate speech on the platform has proliferated while ad sales have plunged . Reading this book, one begins to wonder if the old bird-site will be Musk’s Waterloo. “He thought of it as a technology company,” Isaacson writes, “when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships.” Isaacson believes that Musk wanted to buy Twitter because he had been so bullied as a kid and “now he could own the playground.” It’s an awkward metaphor, but that’s also what makes it perfect. Owning a playground won’t stop you from getting bullied. If you think about it, owning a playground won’t get you much of anything at all.

ELON MUSK | By Walter Isaacson | Illustrated | 670 pp. | Simon & Schuster | $35

Jennifer Szalai is the nonfiction book critic for The Times. More about Jennifer Szalai

The World of Elon Musk

The billionaire’s portfolio includes the world’s most valuable automaker, an innovative rocket company and plenty of drama..

SpaceX: President Biden wants companies that use American airspace for rocket launches to start paying taxes into a federal fund  that finances the work of air traffic controllers.

Tesla: The maker of electric vehicles appeared to be losing command of the market it effectively created after reporting a stunning drop in quarterly sales , raising fresh questions about Elon Musk’s leadership of the company.

Business With China : Tesla and China built a symbiotic relationship that made Elon Musk ultrarich. Now, his reliance on the country may give Beijing leverage .  

A Testy Interview:  In the wake of a rough interview with Elon Musk that touched upon Donald Trump, his reported drug use and hate speech on X,  the former television anchor Don Lemon said that his deal for a new talk show on X was called off  just days before it was scheduled to air.

The Musk Foundation: After making billions in tax-deductible donations to his charity, Musk has failed recently to donate the minimum required to justify a tax break  — and what he did give often supported his interests.

OpenAI: Musk, who helped found the A.I. start-up in 2015, has filed a lawsuit  accusing the company and its chief executive  of breaching a contract  by putting profits and commercial interests ahead of the public good.

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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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Elon Musk Hardcover – Sept. 12 2023

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• Print length 688 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster
• Publication date Sept. 12 2023
• Dimensions 15.56 x 4.83 x 23.5 cm
• ISBN-10 1982181281
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (Sept. 12 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982181281
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982181284
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 1.02 kg
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.56 x 4.83 x 23.5 cm
• #1 in Captains of Industry
• #2 in Computing Industry History
• #2 in Business Biographies (Books)

About the author

Walter isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Elon Musk. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race; Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He is a Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine.

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Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson Hardcover – 12 Sept. 2023

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• Print length 688 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster UK
• Publication date 12 Sept. 2023
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster UK; 1st edition (12 Sept. 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1398527491
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1398527492
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.3 x 4.4 x 23.4 cm
• 2 in Computer Scientist Biographies
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About the author

Walter isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Elon Musk. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race; Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He is a Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine.

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Elon Musk Hardcover – 12 September 2023

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For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?

• Print length 688 pages
• Language English
• Publication date 12 September 2023
• ISBN-10 1982181281
• ISBN-13 978-1982181284
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"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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• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982181281
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982181284
• 8 in Scientist Biographies
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• 12 in Business Biographies & Memoirs

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

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

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

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

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

Here are eight things we learned from the biography.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musk can be a difficult person to date.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he has a tender side too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The biography is in stores now.

• Main content

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

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

By Anna Tingley

Anna Tingley

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

Popular on Variety

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

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

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

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

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

Elon Musk $33.07   $28.94 Buy Now On Amazon

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Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson review – pillock, genius, or both?

The tech mogul is portrayed as a brutal visionary with father issues in this comprehensive biography

T he big question in the public mind about Elon Musk, as a London cabbie once put it to me, is whether he’s “a pillock or a genius”. The quick answer is that he’s both; a better answer is that there’s a lot of detail between those two extremes – so much so, in fact, that it takes Walter Isaacson 688 pages to cram it all in. But cram it in he does.

Isaacson is an experienced biographer, with lives of Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Jennifer Doudna and Steve Jobs to his credit. With the benefit of hindsight, that last volume looks like a practice run for a life of Elon Musk, who, like Jobs, makes people wonder whether appalling personal behaviour can be separated from the relentless drive that has made him successful.

But at least Jobs was not a Twitter troll, whereas Musk likes shit-posting so much that he bought the company (which may turn out to be the worst decision he’s ever made). And it’s that particular social media addiction that has shaped public perceptions of him, leading people – and the media – to regard him purely as a pillock and overlook his remarkable achievements.

Like what? Well, as he said, introducing himself to the audience of Saturday Night Live : “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” But the full roll-call of Musk’s achievements runs like this: PayPal (of which he was a co-founder), Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink (now providing internet links to Ukrainian forces), Neuralink, the Boring Company (a large-scale tunnelling operation) and a new AI company called xAI . Of these, the only really mundane business is the tunnelling company.

One of the merits of Isaacson’s book is the way he delves into how these formidable organisations came into being. It’s clear from his account that none of them would have happened without Musk’s distinctive combination of vision, maniacal determination, personal commitment and ruthlessness. Anyone who thinks, for example, that mass production of cars is easy has never worked in the industry. And in the teeth of the contemptuous derision of the automobile industry, Musk’s firm is now one of the world’s leading car manufacturers.

Similarly, SpaceX is an incredible feat: the engineering challenges of building reliable and reusable rockets are formidable enough. But doing so within budgets that are a fraction of those enjoyed by the American aerospace giants who have been accustomed to “cost-plus” contracts is equally remarkable. The main reason the US is still in the space race, for example, is because Nasa’s stuff rides on SpaceX’s rockets. “When in 2014,” Isaacson writes, “Nasa awarded SpaceX the contract to build a rocket that would take astronauts to the space station, it had on the same day given a competing contract, with 40% more funding, to Boeing. By the time SpaceX succeeded in 2020, Boeing had not even been able to get an unmanned test flight to dock with the station.”

Much of Musk’s industrial success comes from his persistent attention to engineering detail and willingness to overturn practices that had congealed into holy writ in these industries. He is a great believer in “vertical integration” – making things yourself rather than outsourcing to others – for example. So Tesla writes all its own software whereas other car manufacturers outsource theirs to Silicon Valley giants. Musk believes that there must be no barriers between design and manufacturing: designers’ desks should be physically close to the production line. He believes that in redesigning many industrial processes automation is the last thing you should do, not the first. So just as Henry Ford is remembered not so much for the Model T but for the production line that made it, Musk will probably be celebrated for his obsession with “the machine that builds the machine”.

There is, however, a dark side to this industrial creativity. The term that comes continually to mind from reading Isaacson’s account of how Musk runs his pioneering enterprises is “brutal”. A fanatical worker himself, he doesn’t give a toss about employees’ work-life balance. He believes that if people want to prioritise their comfort and leisure they should leave his employment. He emails employees reminding them that “a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle”. Isaacson’s study of Musk’s management style is filled with sudden dismissals, capricious decision-making and apparently sociopathic indifference to the feelings of other people. As one of his oldest friends from university put it: you can work with him or be his friend, but not both.

And yet at least some of his employees also see him as an inspirational figure. This could be because his goals and aspirations are unfailingly ambitious and bold (and sometimes plain wacky). Or it could have something to do with the fact that in a crisis he will pitch in wholeheartedly himself. During the crisis of the production of early Model 3 Teslas, for example, it is said that he slept by the production line for several weeks. (Which, among other things, must make him the oddest billionaire ever.)

What shaped this extraordinary individual? Isaacson seeks an explanation in his early childhood – to being a very bright boy with undiagnosed Asperger’s who was savagely bullied at school and had a sociopathic father, Errol. Errol was “a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure” who would regularly launch into “an hour or more of unrelenting abuse” directed at his young son who would “just have to stand there, not allowed to leave”. Isaacson wonders whether the adult Elon’s mood swings – “light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as ‘demon mode’” – are a product of this traumatic upbringing. And going back to that question of whether bad behaviour is linked to success, maybe it really is true that nice guys finish last?

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About the author

Walter isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Elon Musk. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race; Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He is a Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine.

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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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Elon Musk Didn’t Want His Latest Deposition Released. Here It Is.

Senior Reporter, HuffPost

Elon Musk was deposed last month over his role in allegedly promoting a false conspiracy theory that a 22-year-old Jewish man participated in a neo-Nazi brawl.

Musk tried to keep the deposition from going public, and perhaps for good reason: It did not go well for him.

“There’s some risk that what I say is incorrect, but one has to balance that against having a chilling effect on free speech in general, which would undermine the entire foundation of our democracy,” Musk, the owner of X (formerly Twitter), said during the deposition.

The lawsuit against the billionaire, filed in October , alleges that Musk used his colossal social media platform to amplify a false far-right conspiracy theory linking 22-year-old Ben Brody to a brawl in Oregon between the neo-Nazi group Rose City Nationalists and the Proud Boys, a neo-fascist fight club . The brawl occurred during Oregon City’s first Pride Night Fest, when both groups came to disrupt the event and spew anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric.

Brody wasn’t even in the same state when the June 24 brawl occurred. But his world was turned upside down when far-right X accounts, magnified by Musk, falsely identified him as a member of Rose City Nationalists (and an undercover federal agent) and posted his personal information online.

Musk amplified the conspiracy theory repeatedly to his more than 180 million followers, suggesting Brody was a fresh-faced federal agent pretending to be a neo-Nazi in a “false flag situation,” a phrase used to suggest a harmful event was deliberately set up to misrepresent a group or person.

“Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt) and another is maybe an Antifa member, but nonetheless a probable false flag situation,” Musk posted to X after Brody had been falsely identified as a Rose City Nationalists member. The post remains on X.

Brody said he and his family were forced to flee their home amid the fallout from Musk’s posts. He’s seeking more than $1 million in damages. The next court hearing is scheduled for April 22.

On March 27, Musk sat for a two-hour deposition with attorneys from both parties over Zoom. Following the testimony, Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro, filed multiple emergency motions in an attempt to keep the deposition sealed.

“I’m asking that this transcript be marked as confidential,” Spiro said at the end of Musk’s deposition, according to the transcript. “That’s what I’m asking for, OK?”

Spiro’s efforts failed after a judge struck down his motions. Though video of the deposition has not been made public, HuffPost obtained a copy of the full transcript, which was made public Monday.

You can read Musk’s full testimony here.

During his deposition, Musk admitted he has a “limited understanding” of the lawsuit against him, said he thought Brody’s attorney was the one suing him, and revealed he did no research in determining whether Brody was involved in the brawl after seeing the accusations on X.

Musk also made broader admissions about his failures with X — which has plummeted in value since his takeover in 2022 — saying he “may have done more to financially impair” the social media site than help it. Musk also confirmed that he once used a burner account on X seemingly to role-play as his toddler son.

“I’m guilty of many self-inflicted wounds,” Musk testified.

‘Actually, Mr. Musk, I’m An Attorney. Did You Know That?’

From the outset of the deposition, Spiro traded barbs with Brody’s attorney, Mark Bankston, as Musk attempted to answer basic questions about the case.

“Do you think you did anything wrong to Ben Brody?” asked Bankston, who’s based in Houston.

Spiro interjected, saying this “isn’t a question you’re allowed to ask by the court.”

It was the start of what would be a contentious back-and-forth between two high-profile attorneys. Spiro, who has represented celebrities such as Jay-Z and Megan Thee Stallion, previously won a defamation case for Musk after the billionaire called a man who helped rescue children trapped in a cave in Thailand a “pedo guy” in 2018.

“You keep filing these silly, frivolous shake-down cases, I’ll keep trying to think of Texas lawyers to bring to your depositions,” Spiro told Bankston.

Bankston, of the Texas law firm Farrar & Ball, previously represented two Sandy Hook parents who won $45 million in damages against conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after Jones spent years falsely claiming the 2012 school shooting never happened.

Spiro did not respond to a request for comment on this story. Bankston declined to comment.

Throughout his testimony, Musk showed little understanding about the lawsuit he was testifying for, and even said he believed it was Bankston — not Brody — who was suing him.

“I think you’re the one suing,” Musk told Bankston, according to the transcript.

“Actually, Mr. Musk, I’m an attorney,” Bankston explained. “Did you know that? I’m an attorney representing Mr. Brody.”

Asked if Musk understood what the lawsuit was about, Musk admitted he had “a limited understanding of that — of what the lawsuit is about” but suggested again that this was simply a money grab by Brody’s attorney.

“My — what I want to think it’s really about is about you getting a lot of money,” said Musk, who paid $44 billion for Twitter in 2022 .

From An Anti-Semitic Account To Elon Musk

Musk learned of the conspiracy theory about Brody from what the lawsuit describes as a fringe X account with more than 30,000 followers that “features extreme rightwing memes, neo-Nazi apologia/nostalgia, juvenile and cringe-worthy attempts at bigoted humor, low effort bait tweets, delusional panics over lazy hoaxes, and a cavalcade of absurdly false information.”

“The account is the social media equivalent of gutter sludge,” the lawsuit says.

The anonymous account, named Dr Frensor, posted a photo of Brody with his personal information found on his college fraternity’s social media page. The caption on the photo of Brody read, “After graduation he plans to work for the government,” which Dr Frensor used to suggest Brody was at the brawl and a federal plant.

“Very odd,” Musk responded. As it goes whenever Musk interacts with a post on X, this one quickly went viral.

In his deposition, Musk was asked whether he’d seen other posts from the Dr Frensor account.

“I wasn’t trying to assess their credibility,” Musk responded.

Bankston showed Musk a meme Dr Frensor had posted the same day the account posted about Brody. More from the transcript:

Bankston : And here it says at the top, ‘Is this meme insensitive to Jewish persons?’ And then there’s a meme of the United Nations’ logo that says, “Founded in 1945 to end all wars, the United Nations. The world has been at war ever since.’ Do you know if you saw this? Musk : I have not seen this. B : Okay. Would this have triggered a red flag as to this person’s credibility? Spiro : Objection to form. M : I mean, I think it’s a dubious post, but it suggests anti-Semitism. B : Correct. … I think we all know it reflects anti-Semitism. I’m asking, does this trigger red flags to this person’s reliability? M : I would say, yes, it probably does.

Still, Musk defended his response to the anti-Semitic account.

“But if you’re suggesting that in order to reply to anyone, you have to scroll through all their posts, that would make it impossible to use the system,” he said of his website.

A Billionaire’s Fact-Checking Process

Contrary to his earlier statements, Musk suggested later on in the deposition that he researches discourse before he joins it.

“If you care about the truth, you have to go look about it,” Musk said.

Musk’s own testimony reveals he did little to seek out the truth.

“Would it be fair for me to say that, other than the tweets that you interacted with, you did not secure other information about this unmasked brawler?” Bankston asked at one point.

“I don’t recall securing other information,” Musk responded.

During his testimony, Musk criticized what he called the “traditional legacy news industry” while lauding X’s Community Notes, a website tool that allows users to add corrections or additional context to misleading or untrue posts.

Musk called Community Notes “the best system on the internet” for fact-checking, and said he tagged Community Notes in his post referencing Brody as a show of “good faith,” the transcript shows.

“And I think — I think I really did this in good faith, because I would not ask for a fact-check which is what I do by adding Community Notes,” Musk said, according to the transcript.

Musk did tag Community Notes in his post about Brody, but a note was never added to the false claim. The post remains on X today without a correction.

Musk was also asked about his interactions with posts on X, which can make an otherwise invisible post go instantly viral. Bankston pointed out that his post on X referring to a “college student who wants to join the govt” was seen more than a million times, according to X’s metrics.

Musk downplayed the number and argued that his post was merely a reply to someone else, which attracted less viewership than his own post would.

From the transcript:

Bankston : You do understand that the amount of people who saw this, who have viewed this, is equivalent to all 30 major league baseball stadiums filled to capacity? You wouldn’t dispute that? I mean, we’re talking over a million people. Spiro : Objection to form. Musk : Yeah, that’s actually – that may seem like a large number, but it is not compared to the fact – I believe there are something on the order of five to eight trillion views per year so a million is really – B : Not a big deal? M : – hit or miss, yeah. B : Not a big deal that this went out to that many people? M : Correct .

Musk’s ‘Self-Inflicted Wounds’

Over the course of his testimony, Musk acknowledged his lack of restraint in posting on X and the negative impact it’s had on his company.

He called them “self-inflicted wounds,” a reference to his own quote in Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography about him, though he says he hasn’t read it.

“I certainly — I would say that I — you know, I’m guilty of many self-inflicted wounds,” Musk testified.

Last year, Motherboard and other internet sleuths traced a bizarre account on X to Musk himself. The account, @ermnmusk, appeared to be role-playing as Musk’s toddler son.

“I will finally turn 3 on May 4th!” one post read.

“I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs. They sound so fun,” read another.

Though the account’s name is not mentioned in the transcript, Monday’s court filing contained an exhibit of the @ermnmusk account that was shown to Musk during his testimony. In the filing, Bankston alleges that Musk deleted the account in February on the same day of the court’s discovery order.

Asked about the account by Bankston during the deposition, Musk confirmed it was his, but dismissed it as a “test account.”

“No, I would not use this account,” Musk testified. “It was just used for — for testing.”

Later in the deposition, Musk again reflected on those “self-inflicted wounds.”

“The — and going back to the sort of self-inflicted wounds, the Kevlar shoes, I think there’s — I’ve probably done — I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it, but certainly I — I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public,” he said.

A day after Brody had been falsely linked to neo-Nazis, the recent college graduate uploaded a video to Instagram begging for the harassment to stop.

“My family and I are just being harassed completely, and I would be more than happy to clear up any confusion if necessary,” Brody says in the video. “This is just so ridiculous and I just really can’t believe this is happening to me right now.”

Near the end of the deposition, Bankston asked Musk if he believed he owed it to Brody to be accurate. Musk said: “I aspire to be accurate no matter who the person is.”

“Do you think you lived up to that duty to Ben Brody or do you think you failed him?” Bankston asked.

“I don’t think — I don’t think — I don’t think he has been meaningfully harmed by this,” Musk replied.

Bankston pushed Musk on the question, leading to another argument between the two lawyers. Finally, Musk answered, reiterating his belief that he didn’t harm Brody.

“People are attacked all the time in the media, online media, social media, but it is rare that that actually has a meaningful negative impact on their life,” Musk testified.

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From our partner, more in u.s. news.

A deposition Elon Musk fought to keep confidential was released. Read the most interesting quotes.

• Elon Musk's deposition from a lawsuit alleging he falsely boosted a conspiracy theory was released.
• Musk's lawyers had attempted to prevent the deposition from being released, HuffPost reported.
• In the deposition, Musk said he might have financially impaired X more than helping it.

A deposition that Elon Musk's lawyer fought to keep from the public eye was released on Monday.

Musk sat for a deposition in March over a lawsuit that alleges the billionaire boosted a conspiracy theory that falsely affiliated 22-year-old Ben Brody with a neo-Nazi group.

Brody filed the lawsuit last fall after Musk promoted posts on his social media site X that falsely identified Brody as a man who had engaged in a brawl at a Pride event that had occurred between the two far-right groups: the Rose City Nationalists and the Proud Boys. The groups had intended to interrupt the LGBTQ+ event.

Last year, Musk responded to a series of posts on X about the incident that appeared to indicate Brody was one of the individuals from a video of the incident.

"Looks like one is a college student (who wants to join the govt) and another is maybe an Antifa member," Must wrote on X . "But nonetheless a probable false flag situation."

Brody is suing for $1 million in damages, accusing Musk of damaging his reputation. The 22-year-old said he was doxxed, harassed, and even forced to flee his home at one point due to the fallout from the posts on social media.

HuffPost was the first to report on the transcript of the deposition, which was released on Monday. A judge denied Musk's lawyer's efforts to mark the transcript as "confidential," the publication reported.

Take a look at some of the most interesting quotes from the two-hour deposition.

Musk says he 'may have done more to financially impair' X than to help it

In the deposition, Bankston asked Musk about a quote from Walter Isaacson's biography of the Tesla CEO.

In the book, Isaacson quotes Musk as saying: "I've shot myself in the foot so often, I ought to buy some Kevlar boots."

Musk said in the deposition that he's "guilty of many self-inflicted wounds."

"I may have done more to financially impair the company than to help it, but I certainly I — I do not guide my posts by what is financially beneficial but what I believe is interesting or important or entertaining to the public," Musk later said in response to a question from Bankston regarding whether he'd used his posts on X to boost the social media company formerly called Twitter.

Since Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the company has reportedly lost many of its biggest advertisers and Musk has faced criticism for some of his posts on the site, including one where he appeared to boost a post promoting the "great replacement" conspiracy theory that is commonly spread by white supremacists.

Fidelity lowered the value of its stake in Musk's social-media company in February — suggesting its valuation of X has dropped 73% since Musk bought the platform for $44 billion.

'One is my main account and the other is baby smoke 9000'

Musk admitted he'd briefly used "test account" on X in 2023, and appeared to say he also posted to an alternate account regularly called "baby smoke 9000."

Motherboard was the first to report on one of the suspected accounts, @ermnmusk, last year after Musk posted a screenshot of his Twitter account. Some users were able to track down the suspected additional account that appeared to be visible in the photo.

Musk appears to have used the @ermnmusk account to post on X from the perspective of his three-year-old son, also named X.

"I will finally turn 3 on May 4th!" the account posted in April 2023, according to Motherboard.

Musk's son with Grimes, X Æ A-12, was born on May 4.

"I wish I was old enough to go to nightclubs," another tweet from the account in 2023 read, according to Motherboard. "They sound so fun."

Musk said during his deposition that he'd used the alternate account for testing, but it was no longer in use.

"I briefly used this as a test account," Musk said. "There are only two accounts that I use on a regular basis. One is my main account and the other is baby smoke 9,000."

As far as Musk's mention of "baby smoke 9,000," it's not clear if Musk was referring to a username that's literally @babysmoke9000, but if he is, X currently lists that handle as not being in use.

The account @ermnmusk, on the other hand, posted on X as recently as Monday under the name "Elon Test."

'I rely upon Community Notes for fact-checking'

The X owner said he doesn't use any of the company's internal tools to verify the legitimacy of a post on the site before he interacts with it. Instead, he posts things with the intent of X's Community Notes feature allowing users to correct inaccuracies.

When asked by the lawyer if he'd tried to look into the information regarding Brody before he boosted posts on X that appeared to reference him, Musk said he hadn't.

"I don't recall securing other information," Musk responded.

"I think I really did this in good faith, because I would not ask for a fact-check which is what I do by adding Community Notes," Musk said, referencing how he had tagged Community Notes in his post.

The feature allows users to add notes to a post on X, but the note is only shown if enough people vote to have the note added and it "requires people who historically have disagreed to agree," Musk told Bankston.

"I rely upon Community Notes for fact-checking," Musk said. "I find it to be the best system on the internet."

' … the real plaintiff is the lawyer seeking money'

Musk also took some digs at the lawyer asking him questions.

When Bankston asked the billionaire if he understood that Brody was suing him, Musk said it was really Brody's lawyer who'd sued him.

"I view many cases, and probably this one too, that the real plaintiff is the lawyer seeking money, like you," Musk said.

Musk said social media attacks rarely have a 'meaningful negative impact' on someone's life

When asked whether he felt his posts involving Brody had negatively impacted the 22-year-old, Musk said he didn't think they had.

"People are attacked all the time in the media, online media, social media, but it is rare that that actually has a meaningful negative impact on their life," Musk said.

Musk and his attorney Alex Spiro did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bankston declined to comment.

If you enjoyed this story, be sure to follow Business Insider on Microsoft Start.

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Elon Musk says he does not micromanage people but pays attention to detail

Elon musk, during an interview, said that he does not micromanage people but pays attention to detail. he added that smart people manage themselves..

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In a conversation with Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of Norway's wealth fund, Elon Musk, opened up about his approach of managing people and said that even though he believes in paying attention to details, he does not micromanage people. He said, "I wouldn’t call it micro management, it’s just insisting on attention to detail. If you’re trying to make a perfect product, then attention to detail is essential."

Musk also added that he believes in empowering smart people by setting clear goals and letting them find their own path to achieve them. "Smart people, they manage themselves," he said and explained that those who have talent and are intelligence can go and work anywhere. He added that the way to keep such people happy is to just set goals and let them decide how to achieve them.

"So I say, ‘Look, this is the goal we’re after and this is what we’re trying to achieve. If you agree with that goal, then let’s try to get it done,’" he added.

He clarified that while he typically allows autonomy, there are occasions when he steps in and asserts authority, stating, "Once in a while, you have to say, ‘Guys, you have to trust me on this one," he added.

On a related note, American journalist and author Walter Isaacson launched Musk's biography in September last year. The book had also shed light on Musk's management style and had quotes from people who had worked with him in the past.

SpaceX co-founder Tom Mueller, who worked with Musk for over 20 years, was quoted saying in the book that Musk didn’t like when people told him something wasn’t possible. He said that he learnt to never say no to the billionaire and always tell him that he will try. Later, if things didn’t work out, he would explain the reason to Musk.

Tesla reportedly drops plan to build $25K EV

Tesla is reportedly abandoning its plan to build a lower-cost EV, thought to be priced around $25,000, according to Reuters , despite that vehicle’s status as a pivotal product for the company’s overall growth.

The company will instead focus its efforts on a planned robotaxi that is being built on the same small EV platform that was supposed to power the lower-cost vehicle.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk claimed, without proof, that Reuters is “lying” in a post on his social media platform, X, and did not dispute any specific details. He also responded with an eyes emoji to another post that effectively summed up the Reuters report in different words.

Tesla has reportedly been working on these two vehicles for a few years. But Musk has wavered on whether to prioritize a typical car or one with no steering wheel or pedals, despite not having yet produced a fully autonomous car.

Musk first teased the idea of a truly low-cost Tesla in 2020 . But by early 2022, he said Tesla had stopped work on the car because it had too much else to do .

That didn’t last long. The project spun back up, but the company and its CEO were split on whether it should be a typical car or a futuristic robotaxi.

In Walter Isaacson’s recent biography of Musk, he described the CEO pushing back in mid-2022 against his engineers’ insistence on referencing a car with a steering wheel and pedals. “This vehicle must be designed as a clean robotaxi. We’re going to take that risk, it’s my fault if it fucks up,” Isaacson quoted Musk as saying. A few weeks after that, Isaacson said, he quoted Musk saying the robotaxi will “transform everything” and make Tesla a “ten-trillion [dollar] company.”

But even after all that, Isaacson wrote that lead designer Franz von Holzhausen and engineering VP Lars Moravy kept the more traditional car version alive as a “shadow project.” In September 2022, Isaacson wrote, Moravy and von Holzhausen made the pitch to Musk that they needed an inexpensive, small car in order to grow at Musk’s stated goal of 50% per year. They also laid out the plan to use the same platform to power both distinct models.

Musk still said, according to Isaacson, that the $25,000 car was “really not that exciting of a project” — despite it being the ultimate goal of his famed original “ master plan ” for Tesla. But by early 2023, Musk had agreed to move forward with the plan laid out by his lieutenants.

That plan is now in question as Reuters cites internal documents showing that work has stopped on the traditional car project in favor of the robotaxi approach.

Things have changed since Musk agreed to that plan in 2023. Isaacson’s book explains that Musk’s reason for trying to spin up a factory in Mexico had to do with wanting to make both vehicles there. But Musk quickly pivoted to building the two vehicles in Texas instead. Musk has since told investors that Tesla has backed away from going “full tilt” in developing the Mexico plant in part because of high interest rates. And Tesla has spent the last year slashing prices on its best-selling models in an effort to stay competitive in China and maintain its huge advantage over the competition outside of that country.

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A LIFE IN LIMELIGHT AND THE PURSUIT OF TRUTH: Don Lemon and Elon Musk Interview That Ignited A Media Firestorm Kindle Edition

This captivating biography journeys into the multifaceted career of Don Lemon, a journalist who has become a powerful voice for social justice and a prominent figure in the media landscape. Exploring his journey from his early days in journalism to his rise to prominence, the book examines his unwavering commitment to investigative journalism and his dedication to amplifying the voices of marginalized communities.

However, Don Lemon's legacy is not without its complexities. The book delves into a pivotal moment in his career: the highly controversial interview with Elon Musk that sparked a media firestorm. This chapter serves as a microcosm of Lemon's journalistic approach, raising questions about the role of journalists in a polarized media environment and the delicate balance between holding powerful figures accountable and fostering constructive dialogue.

A Life in Limelight and The Pursuit of Truth offers a nuanced and insightful examination of Don Lemon's impact on journalism, social justice movements, and the way we consume information in the 21st century.

• Print length 43 pages
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• File size 1037 KB
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• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0CW1FHXRC
• Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 15, 2024
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• File size ‏ : ‎ 1037 KB
• Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Unlimited
• Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
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