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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..

A $47 Billion Pay Deal: Despite   facing criticism that Tesla is overly beholden to Elon Musk , its board of directors said that the company would essentially give him everything he wanted, including the biggest pay package in corporate history.

Tesla: The company has agreed to recall nearly 4,000  of its Cybertruck pickups to fix an accelerator pedal that can get stuck, raising the risk of crashes, a federal safety agency said.

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.

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 .  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson

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

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

Share this story

The trouble began days before the biography was even published.

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

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

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

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

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

I wanted to know if Isaacson had done his homework

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

 In his book, Isaacson writes:

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

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

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

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

Isaacson caved immediately :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Skipping how dependent Musk is on Texas is a howler

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

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

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

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

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

If you know these details, Musk looks like a dolt

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

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

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

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

Justine Musk and Amber Heard are both disparaged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The later chapters aren’t very revealing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Book Review: ‘Elon Musk’ offers a revealing but not surprising portrait of tech mogul

This cover image released by Simon & Schuster shows “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson. (Simon & Schuster via AP)

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For those who have been paying attention to Elon Musk for at least the past couple years, Walter Isaacson’s biography of the tech billionaire doesn’t feel that surprising.

Isaacson’s biography “Elon Musk” does a good job hammering home the portrayal of the SpaceX founder and now owner of X — formerly Twitter — as a visionary but mercurial figure who’s given to mood swings and self-destructive behavior.

It’s a familiar descriptor for Musk’s fans and detractors, but Isaacson’s biography still offers plenty of revealing details about the tech mogul.

In the opening pages of the book on Musk’s childhood, he’s described as someone “not hardwired to have empathy,” a characteristic that comes into play throughout his work endeavors and personal life.

What Isaacson doesn’t conclude is whether those characteristics are propelling Musk’s success or undoing it.

The Musk biography is a fitting addition to Isaacson’s works chronicling the lives of major figures in science and technology, including Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Jennifer Doudna and Steve Jobs.

As with those books, Isaacson deftly handles complicated matters like the development of electric vehicles, rockets and artificial intelligence while also deeply exploring Musk’s background and family.

By shadowing the billionaire over two years and through interviews with Musk’s family and colleagues, Isaacson is also able to show how Musk’s risk-taking may work well in designing electric cars and rockets but hasn’t fit well with running a social media platform.

Isaacson provides insight into how badly Musk misjudged his ability to run Twitter and the consequences of his missteps. He also offers his own theories on why the billionaire wanted to take over the social media platform. In part, Isaacson writes, it was a chance for someone who was beaten up on the playground as a kid to now own “the ultimate playground.”

The book has already made headlines, including Isaacson walking back his initial reporting in the book on Musk not allowing Ukraine to use Starlink internet services to launch a surprise attack on Russian forces in Crimea. Isaacson’s book initially reported that Musk secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast as Ukraine was launching the attack. Isaacson has since posted on X the coverage hadn’t been activated over Crimea.

The book has also gained attention for previously undisclosed details about Musk’s family life. The news generated by Isaacson’s book underscores just how much Musk’s legacy remains in flux and the difficulty any biographer faces in assessing it.

But the most fascinating parts are early on, as Isaacson delves into Musk’s upbringing, particularly his father. Musk’s father is portrayed in the book as a conspiracy-minded, verbally abusive Jekyll-and-Hyde figure. Musk’s fear that, as his mother puts it, “he might become his father,” is identified early on as a specter and possibly a driver of his success.

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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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May 9, 2024

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Ultra Hardcore

January 18, 2024 issue

Elon Musk; illustration by Yann Kebbi

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To be a man is to dominate others. This is what I absorbed as a boy: masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it. One of the many tragedies of this arrangement is that the people it makes miserable can nonetheless become its most loyal defenders. An extreme example from recent years is the incel phenomenon, whereby men who feel excluded from conventional masculinity develop a violent attachment to it. Nerd culture as a whole often exhibits the same dynamic. The nerd is not the opposite of the jock but a different iteration of the same logic. Nerds have their own flavor of macho. Rather than relinquishing the script, they find alternative ways to perform it.

When he was a boy, Elon Musk became a nerd. It started the usual way. Small and socially awkward, he got beat up a lot. Once, a group of kids at his school in South Africa kicked him in the head so many times that his brother didn’t recognize him. This gruesome detail appears early on in Elon Musk , the new authorized biography by the journalist and author Walter Isaacson, and there are many others like it. The young Musk was incessantly bullied, above all by his “swaggering and manly” father, Errol, an electromechanical engineer with a predilection for zany side hustles. Most successful was his illegal emerald business, which involved smuggling the stones out of Zambia, getting them cut in South Africa, and selling them to jewelers overseas. Less successful was his attempt to cheat the local casino in Pretoria by manipulating a roulette wheel with microwave energy. “His career had many ups and downs,” Isaacson writes, and these shifting fortunes, coupled with Errol’s extravagant tastes—for a period, he drove a Rolls-Royce convertible—kept the family sliding between the upper and lower rungs of the middle class. Regardless, Errol always found time to terrorize his eldest son. He never tired of telling Elon how worthless he was.

Musk took refuge in the repertoire of nerddom: science fiction, Dungeons and Dragons , video games, computer programming. These were avenues of escape for someone who was “bad at picking up social cues,” whose incomprehension of his fellow humans made him “like an observer from a different planet,” Isaacson writes. But they also, it seems, provided a terrain where the mandates of masculinity could be fulfilled, via conquests of a more cerebral sort. Strategy games became an obsession. He “relished the complex planning and competitive management of resources” involved in forging empires and extinguishing rivals in games like Civilization and Warcraft . “I am wired for war,” we hear Musk tell a friend at one point, just as he’s about to annihilate him virtually.

For nerds who dream of world domination, there is no better place to be than Silicon Valley. So that’s where Musk eventually ended up after leaving South Africa, joined by his brother, Kimbal. The two young men settled in Palo Alto at the perfect time: in the spring of 1995, just as the dot-com boom was about to begin. Netscape went public in August of that year. A paroxysm of venture capital investment ensued as everyone scrambled to carve out a lucrative piece of the swiftly commercializing Internet. With money from their parents, Musk and Kimbal founded Zip2, a company that made online city guides. They engaged in the usual start-up heroics: sleeping in their office, showering at the local Y, eating fast food for almost every meal.

As Zip2 grew, Musk got his first experience of being a boss. Isaacson describes him as a “demanding manager” who “drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations” and “expected others to do the same.” He was also ruthless in his criticism of subordinates, with a fondness for humiliating them in front of their coworkers. Isaacson attributes Musk’s management style to his “weak empathy gene.” Elsewhere he elaborates that Musk lacks “the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth” and that “his neural nets have trouble when dealing with human feelings.”

It is easy to believe that Musk is not a kind person, even if Isaacson’s framing of this fact relies a little too strongly on the quasi-clinical language that has become the preferred way to account for the behavior of unpleasant men. But perhaps Musk’s meanness is explained not only by the absence of empathy but by the presence of something else: the desire to dominate. Isaacson’s book is brimming with scenes of Musk acting the tyrant with his employees in the same way that his father did with him. Isaacson does not draw this connection, but he does supply a telling quote from Musk’s father, who, after proudly describing his parenting as “an extremely stern streetwise autocracy,” adds, “Elon would later apply that same stern autocracy to himself and others.”

Romantic relationships seem to have offered another proving ground for the budding autocrat. “There is no democracy in any love relation: only mercy,” the philosopher Gillian Rose observed. One suspects that is a selling point for Musk, who appears to be as despotic in love as he is in work. “I am the alpha in this relationship,” he whispered to his first wife, Justine, while dancing at their wedding. Later, he would often tell her, “If you were my employee, I would fire you.” Here Isaacson makes the influence of Errol clear: both of Musk’s ex-wives confide that Musk, when angry, would utter the same words of abuse that his father once used with him. “Inside the man,” says Talulah Riley, his second wife, “he’s still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad.”

In 1999 Compaq bought Zip2. Musk made $22 million and promptly bought a $1 million sports car—the McLaren F 1—to celebrate. Then he rolled most of the rest into a new venture, X.com, which he hoped to turn into an online financial services juggernaut. In those days, many people still balked at entrusting their money to an Internet bank, and the name X.com didn’t help; focus groups said it sounded a little porny. But one feature in particular took off: the ability to send money through e-mail, which became popular on eBay.

A year later, the prospects for dot-coms darkened as the bubble began to deflate. Musk reluctantly agreed to a merger with his competitor Confinity. He would become the new firm’s largest shareholder and its CEO . Within months the board of directors had ousted him for a number of reasons, his domineering personality among them. Overthrown, Musk raged—“I had thoughts of assassination running through my head,” he confesses—but under the leadership of Peter Thiel, a Confinity cofounder who replaced Musk as CEO , the company thrived. In 2001 it was renamed PayPal; the following year, it was purchased by eBay. Musk had retained his stake in the firm, and the sale made him properly wealthy, with a payout of $250 million. Mollified, he made peace with Thiel, David Sacks, and the rest of the so-called PayPal Mafia, as the circle of founders and former employees is known, several of whom would come to play important parts in his later endeavors.

Silicon Valley is full of people who are rich because they were lucky. Until 2002 one could say the same of Musk. But it would be the two ventures that followed—SpaceX and Tesla—that confirmed his talent. The other members of the PayPal Mafia went on to become venture capitalists or create more websites. Musk, by contrast, poured millions into a rocket company and an electric car maker. “Silicon Valley wisdom would be that these were both incredibly crazy bets,” Thiel tells Isaacson. The bets paid off: SpaceX is currently exploring a sale of insider shares that would value the company at $175 billion; Tesla is worth around $800 billion.

How did Musk do it? How did a dot-commer become a titan of the aerospace and automotive industries? Isaacson also wrote the authorized biography of Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk is clearly intended as a sequel of sorts: even the cover art looks the same. The resemblance between the two men is frequently asserted by Isaacson, and there are, to be sure, clear similarities, such as their shared commitment to managerial ruthlessness. But at root, Jobs and Musk are very different figures who embody very different styles of capitalism.

Jobs was a postindustrial figure. He obsessed over the design of his products down to the last detail, but he didn’t take an interest in how they were manufactured. As Isaacson notes, the Apple cofounder “never visited his factories in China.” A native son of Silicon Valley—his summer job, at age twelve, was at a Hewlett-Packard plant—Jobs symbolized, and to some extent facilitated, its evolution from a region defined by the production of physical things to one organized around the creation of intellectual property. For the value of such property to be realized, plenty of physical things still had to be produced, but now production would be carried out elsewhere, by small armies of low-wage, subcontracted labor stationed all over the world. Behind Cupertino sits Zhengzhou, where workers assemble phones for Apple; behind Mountain View sits Nairobi, where workers moderate content for Facebook.

Musk broke with this trend. Soon after starting SpaceX in 2002, he discovered that it would be cheaper to make his own parts than to purchase them from third parties. Within a few years, Isaacson reports, the firm was “making in-house 70 percent of the components of its rockets.” Tesla would adopt the same strategy after Musk became its lead investor and chairman in 2004. Musk also insisted on keeping manufacturing local so as to maximize his control over the minutiae of production. When he needed batteries for his electric cars, he built a factory in Nevada to make them. Then he used the same factory to start making batteries for home energy storage, and shortly afterward bought a company that installs residential solar arrays that power the batteries. He wants an empire, not a niche.

As Isaacson remarks, this emphasis on vertical integration recalls the era of Henry Ford, before the car industry began to disaggregate into networks of suppliers in the 1970s. In fact, Fordism is the foundation of Musk’s business model. Putting everything under one roof enables him to indulge his enthusiasm for efficiency across the largest possible domain. This is what, it turns out, he is good at. Musk is not an especially creative futurist. (His greatest aspiration and his greatest fear—the colonization of Mars and artificial intelligence run amok, respectively—have been science fiction mainstays since the genre’s inception.) Nor is he a brilliant scientific mind. He is, however, an inspired rationalizer, with a fevered, all-devouring drive to optimize industrial processes.

Throughout the book we see Musk striding down factory floors, optimizing. When the assembly line keeps getting halted by safety sensors, he rips them out. When a robot is performing a task too slowly, he replaces it with humans. When he sees four bolts being drilled onto the underside of a chassis, he wants to know, can we try it with two? “Delete any part or process you can,” counsels one of Musk’s commandments. “Simplify and optimize,” instructs another.

But this is only half the story behind Musk’s success. The other essential ingredient, less emphasized by Isaacson, is his interpersonal prowess. Musk is extremely good at persuading other people that he is a genius. It may seem odd that someone so manifestly devoid of social graces can nonetheless be adept at winning people’s admiration and trust. But just as there are men whose ugliness can make them sexy (Serge Gainsbourg being the paradigmatic example), so there are men whose awkwardness can make them endearing. Watching old interviews with Musk, you can see the deft needlepoint of his anticharisma up close: the halting diction, the long pauses, the restless hands.

A white man with these qualities is culturally coded as intelligent, and Musk has made very lucrative use of this fact throughout his career. It has helped him secure big checks from friends and investors to keep his companies afloat during difficult moments. It has also enabled him to recruit a large and loyal fan base. He has always understood the importance of publicity, but the starring role is reserved for him, not this car or that rocket: live streaming his space launches is fine, but what really draws eyeballs is his commanding performance as a brilliant weirdo. This is the contemporary aspect of Musk that complements his old-school Fordism: if his industrialism evokes the previous century, his hypermediated persona places him firmly in our own.

Silicon Valley moguls like to claim that they are motivated by mission, not money. But in Musk’s case, you believe it. Although smirking adolescent irony is one of his favorite modes, he is equally prone to late-night dorm-room earnestness, especially when it comes to his entrepreneurial ambitions. “One of Elon’s greatest skills is the ability to pass off his vision as a mandate from heaven,” says Max Levchin of the Paypal Mafia, and this quality is in evidence throughout Isaacson’s biography. Musk is constantly talking about saving humanity, which he believes to be facing numerous existential threats: not just climate change but declining birth rates and, most pressingly, the prospect that a superintelligent AI will kill us all. Thus the need to colonize other planets and make the human race “multiplanetary.”

“My biggest concern is our trajectory,” he tells Mark Juncosa, a SpaceX executive, as reported by Isaacson. “Are we on a trajectory to get to Mars before civilization crumbles?” Yet the urgency that Musk brings to his business ventures seems to be driven less by the need to preserve the species than to preserve his sanity. According to Isaacson, Musk periodically suffers episodes of “depressive paralysis.” In one such episode from 2017, Tesla’s president, Jon McNeill, found Musk lying on the floor of a dark conference room. “It took McNeill a half-hour to get him moving,” Isaacson writes. If he didn’t think the fate of the world rested on his shoulders, he might never get up.

Then there are what Isaacson calls his “surges.” When Musk isn’t catatonically depressed, he is susceptible to bouts of mania. “In times of emotional darkness, Musk throws himself into his work,” Isaacson writes. He throws everyone else in, too. One of his favorite words as a boss is “hardcore,” by which he means having his workers work harder. “Please prepare yourself for a level of intensity that is greater than anything most of you have experienced before,” he warned Tesla employees before a speedup in 2012, in an email that Isaacson dubs a “quintessential” statement of Musk’s “creed.” The subject line: “Ultra hardcore.”

The purpose of going hardcore, Musk claims, is to “extrude shit out of the system.” (The anus is, incidentally, a major theme for him: if you say “Open butthole” to a Tesla, its charging port pops open. “For humans, orifices are a big deal,” says Musk.) Waste must be expunged, whether in the form of inefficiency, complacency, or laziness. During one such surge at SpaceX, he got a number of his employees out of bed in the middle of the night and demanded they race down to south Texas to stack a spacecraft and its booster rocket on top of a launchpad. There was no practical reason—it wasn’t ready to fly. But the “ginned-up crisis,” Isaacson writes, made Musk feel better. “I feel renewed faith in the future of humanity,” he announced.

The portrait presented in Elon Musk , then, is not only of a rationalizer but of something stranger: an irrational rationalizer. Musk is, on the one hand, the classic capitalist: boosting efficiency, squeezing his workers, pushing costs down and profits up. He serves the logic of capital accumulation with priestly devotion. But what compels this devotion is a doomed, frantic attempt to manage the symptoms of what one can only conclude is a profound sadness. He is desperate to extrude shit from the system, to be clean, to achieve the purifying discipline of the perfect factory. He believes the future of humanity depends on it. The problem is that the shit persists, no matter how strenuous his efforts at expelling it. If he ever actually succeeded, if the final catharsis were ever attained, you get the sense that he would die; that it would be him, along with his rockets, ejected into the void. “I am like a ripe shit, and the world is a gigantic asshole,” Martin Luther once declared, depressed and close to death. “We will both probably let go of each other soon.”

Why did Isaacson write a book about Musk? One answer is that he was asked. Isaacson has written several best-selling biographies of Great Men (and one Woman—the Nobel Prize–winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna), and Musk wanted to join the pantheon. He promised total access and ceded all control, just as Jobs had. What emerges from all those hours spent in the billionaire’s company and confidence is an admiring account, dominated by Musk’s voice and point of view, sharing its subject’s faith in his own greatness.

Isaacson does not deny that Musk has issues. Far from it: he is “callous,” “churlish,” “ruthless,” “authoritarian,” “abrasive.” But the core argument of the biography is that Musk is a genius and that these qualities are the price that must be paid:

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. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.

The last sentence is a nod to Jobs, whose famous line—“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”—is one of the book’s epigraphs. The quote comes from the “Think Different” advertising campaign launched by Apple in 1997, which featured a voiceover from Richard Dreyfuss extolling countercultural values, accompanied by images of Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Amelia Earhart, among others. Isaacson is keen to place Musk in the Jobsian line of “misfits,” “rebels,” and “troublemakers” who, as the commercial puts it, “have no respect for the status quo.”

At first glance, there is something incongruous about Isaacson’s embrace of Musk as an enemy of the establishment, given the author’s high standing within it. Isaacson is the consummate insider, well networked in the worlds of media and politics, with a résumé that includes stints running Time , CNN , and the Aspen Institute, a prominent think tank that convenes a Davos-like gathering in Colorado every year. If Musk endangers the status quo, Isaacson would have a lot to lose.

But Musk, on closer inspection, is a particular kind of rebel. He has defied some aspects of capitalist conventional wisdom—namely, that cars and rockets are bad businesses—but only in the service of becoming a better capitalist. This is the sort of bounded contrarianism that gets you invited to the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Still, Musk’s petulance threatens to make him a hard sell as a ruling-class sage. The belief in the benevolence of the elite, which is the chief ideological product marketed by the masters of the universe at their regular caucuses in the Rockies and the Alps, is difficult to sustain in the face of Musk’s propensity for malice. Isaacson is well aware; his response is that the benefits Musk provides to society outweigh the costs. “Could he have been more chill and still be the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future?” Isaacson asks. The answer, we are led to believe, is no.

A more sober view of the magnitude of Musk’s accomplishments might alter the calculus. There is no doubt that Tesla is the leader of the current electric vehicle boom. It sells the most units worldwide, although perhaps not for long: Chinese firms now account for half of all electric vehicles sold globally. But battery-powered cars are an old technology—the first one appeared in the 1880s—and it seems likely that they would have gone mainstream at some point, given the need to reduce carbon emissions. Interestingly, Musk agrees. “Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable,” he tells Isaacson. “It would have happened without me.”

“But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable,” he continues. It requires “human agency”; namely, him. Musk is moved to this reflection after SpaceX completed a launch that put four people into orbit in 2021. This was not exactly a world-historical achievement: the Soviets managed to do the same with Yuri Gagarin sixty years earlier. Musk is not operating at the bleeding edge of space exploration—it is NASA , which Isaacson maligns as a bunch of hapless hidebound bureaucrats, that has performed multiple unmanned Mars landings, as well as dozens of other successful missions that have increased our understanding of the solar system. Rather, what distinguishes SpaceX is its efficiency. Thanks to Musk’s relentless economizing, the company has found a way to get stuff into orbit more cheaply, which has enabled it to become a major government contractor—outcompeting less efficient rivals like Boeing—and start a satellite Internet service called Starlink. Changing the cost structure of the launch industry may someday enable Musk to colonize Mars, but this outcome is far from assured.

If Isaacson inflates the scale of Musk’s contributions to humanity, he also understates the amount of damage inflicted on actual humans along the way. While the entrepreneur’s personality flaws are discussed in detail, the fallout in Elon Musk mostly consists of people getting their feelings hurt. The more severe forms of injury that follow from Musk’s behavior, such as the mangling of production workers at his plants, receive far less attention. Isaacson makes a passing mention of the high injury rate at the Fremont assembly line, but the unsafe working conditions at Tesla factories—an issue raised repeatedly by government officials and union organizers in the US and overseas—does not interest him. Among the 129 interviews he lists in the back of the book, friends, investors, executives, and managers predominate; not a single assembly-line worker is included. Isaacson also neglects to discuss the long, well-documented history of anti-Black racism at the Fremont factory, which is now the subject of a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The federal agency claims that Black workers have endured “racial abuse, pervasive stereotyping, and hostility” since 2015, including being called “variations of the N-word, ‘monkey,’ ‘boy,’ and ‘black b*tch.’”

Isaacson’s cost-benefit analysis of Musk as moderately heinous but indispensable to the human race is most acutely tested in the book’s final hundred pages, which deal with the billionaire’s acquisition of Twitter. Musk is an inveterate and intemperate tweeter. Social media has long been an important factor in his success: like Donald Trump, he has used it to make a spectacle of himself, allowing him to cultivate a wide following and ensure a permanent place in the news cycle.

Also like Trump, Musk tweets without inhibition, presenting a high-definition look at the deeper folds of his psyche. His purchase and subsequent overhaul of the social network have offered further insight into precisely what kind of a person he is. In another writer’s hands, the saga would’ve presented a rich store of material with which to clarify the full contours of Musk’s character. In Isaacson’s, it causes a certain awkwardness. What he wants to give us is Musk as antihero: dark, defective, but our protagonist nonetheless. Inconveniently, the Twitter affair is the story of a villain.

Nobody knows why Musk bought Twitter, not even Musk. But we know what he’s done with it since. He fired 75 percent of the workforce within the first three weeks. He extended working hours, slashed benefits, and imposed his “hardcore” work tempo. He also conducted a witch hunt to purge internal critics, Isaacson discloses, instructing his lieutenants to comb through the Slack messages and social media posts of Twitter workers for signs of disloyalty.

But it is in the realm of content moderation—the vexed matter of what actually appears on the site—that Musk has been most keen to exercise his sovereignty. To talk clearly about how Musk has changed Twitter’s content, one has to be able to talk clearly about Musk’s politics. They are not complicated. He was once a typical tech-baron centrist who disliked taxes and regulations and liked Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Then, around 2020, he became openly reactionary. He denounced Covid restrictions as “fascist,” started inveighing against the “woke mind virus,” and began promoting conspiracy theories incubated on far-right message boards. Transphobia came to occupy a central place in his worldview—a development not unrelated to the fact that he has a trans daughter who wants nothing to do with him. (She hates him because she’s a “communist,” Musk informs Isaacson.)

Since purchasing Twitter, Musk has remolded the social network to align more closely with his beliefs. His first moves were to reinstate two right-wing accounts—belonging to the humor site The Babylon Bee and the pundit Jordan Peterson—that had been suspended for transphobic tweets. Many more followed. Within two months of the Musk acquisition, NBC News reported that hundreds of “right-wing activists and QAnon adherents” had seen their accounts restored, while “a series of bans of left-wing accounts” had taken place. The result has been a predictable surge in racism, homophobia, and other bigotries. In April 2023 a team led by the computer scientist Keith Burghardt published a peer-reviewed study that found “hate speech rose dramatically” after Musk bought the platform, an assessment that has been echoed by several other researchers and organizations.

Isaacson agrees that Musk has gone through a “political evolution,” but he is reluctant to say what exactly Musk has evolved into. He concedes Musk’s “anti-woke fervor and occasional endorsements of alt-right conspiracy theories” but insists that these are intermittent, “not his default setting”—a by-product of his “mercurial” and “impulsive” nature rather than any coherent ideological commitments. Since Isaacson cannot admit that Musk is right-wing, his account of Twitter’s transformation is similarly evasive. Musk’s new content regime is described as an effort “to open the aperture to more raucous free speech.”

Further, Isaacson thinks Musk’s approach has been vindicated. Twitter, despite predictions of its imminent demise after the takeover, is still standing, Isaacson notes, its staff winnowed to a “kernel of driven engineers,” adding “features faster than it ever had before.” But by any measure, Musk’s tenure has been disastrous. Financially, the company is a mess: once a stable if stagnant business, it now needs to cover the interest payments on the $12.5 billion in debt that Musk incurred for the purchase, at the same time as cash flow is cratering due to an advertiser exodus. In October 2023 Reuters reported that ad revenue had declined each month since Musk’s takeover—at least 55 percent year over year. Usage has fallen while service outages have increased. When Musk cohosted Ron DeSantis’s launch of his presidential campaign in May 2023, the event was derailed by technical glitches. According to Fidelity, Twitter is now worth only $15 billion, about a third of the $44 billion that Musk paid for it back in October 2022.

Musk has vaporized an immense amount of value in a remarkably short period of time, and he can’t seem to help himself from going further. His renaming of Twitter to X in July 2023 “wiped out anywhere between $4 billion and $20 billion,” Bloomberg reported. This is creative destruction at its finest: one would be hard-pressed to find a destroyer more creative than Musk. The world’s richest man is dismembering one of the world’s most important websites in large part because he believes letting people choose their pronouns will prevent the human race from colonizing Mars. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary,” Musk says to Isaacson.

Musk’s mental state has grown steadily more surrealistic in the months since the biography appeared. Onstage at the New York Times DealBook Summit in November 2023, when asked about companies pulling ads from X after his endorsement of an antisemitic conspiracy theory, Musk responded with indignation. “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money, go fuck yourself,” he told a perplexed Andrew Ross Sorkin. Musk has evidently reached the point in his development where even the slightest check on his sovereignty infuriates. For years he had managed to bind his will to power and the profit motive together into a productive partnership. The ongoing Twitter debacle suggests that this concordance is coming apart, that his inner despot is disencumbering itself of the discipline of capital.

One of the reasons that people become entrepreneurs, the economist Joseph Schumpeter once wrote, is because they want to possess a “private kingdom.” “What may be attained by industrial or commercial success is still the nearest approach to medieval lordship possible to modern man,” he argued. There is an anti-modern impulse to Musk, a craving for lordship that can’t be entirely satisfied within the confines of a capitalist economy. A king doesn’t have advertisers or shareholders or customers, and Musk, if he continues on his current trajectory, may very well be abandoned by all three. Aristotle says a good ending should be surprising but inevitable. It’s possible to imagine multiple finales for Musk that meet these criteria, but the story always begins the same way. Once upon a time in Pretoria, there was a boy who wanted to be a man.

January 18, 2024

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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 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

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by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

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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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Musk the messiah (or a very naughty boy?)

What’s worse: working for him, living with him or simply being him you’ll find the (at times disturbing) answers in this mesmerising new biography of the monty python-obsessed elon musk, writes sean o’grady, article bookmarked.

Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile

Elon Musk, as is widely acknowledged, is not a very nice man. But I’m not quite sure which of the experiences mesmerisingly portrayed in Walter Isaacson’s superb biography is worse: working for Elon Musk; being related to, or in a relationship with Musk; or actually being Musk, who makes being the richest person in the world (worth about $300bn) much less fun than it might be.

Getting employed by Musk is certainly incompatible with the pursuit of human happiness, at least if you end up at close quarters with this emotionless slave-driving workaholic. Isaacson was very wise to break his meaty 616-page work into 95 chapters, plus a prologue (“Muse of Fire”, which hints at Isaacson’s very occasional slides into idolatry). Such is the complexity of Musk’s personality, business dealings and personal life that they can only be digested in the form of anecdotal, often first-hand vignettes; in effect, 96 glimpses of Musk. The author was allowed to bum around with “the most controversial innovator of our era” for two years, read his texts and emails, interview his friends and enemies, his family and associates. He forms his own conclusions, which are mostly admirably balanced and mature. It’s not an “authorised” biography – at least, not in the worst sense of the term – and given Musk’s tendency to control, it is remarkable Musk didn’t even read the manuscript pre-publication. At any rate, it’s the best we’re going to get for a while.

Even so, sometimes the narrative does get repetitive. Once you have vicariously witnessed Musk bullying some hapless executive with impossible demands, you don’t really want many encores, but it is such a central feature of the Musk way of doing things that it does take up quite a bit of the book. It’s how he got the biggest rocket in history into orbit, I suppose, though I’m not convinced that is essential. It is always the same routine. Fixing them in his sci-fi laser-style stare, Musk will tell someone to put a chip into a pig’s brain that will transmit thoughts to a laptop, and complete it by the weekend. If they are stupid enough to “push back”, Elon tells them to do it anyway or their “resignation will be accepted”. I exaggerate only slightly. There’s a lot of that in the book, and the demanding deadlines are dished out to friends, relatives and strangers with equal indifference to personal circumstances. Isaacson, in his quest for a comprehensive audit of the Musk phenomenon, errs slightly on the side of the voyeur in these encounters, but I can’t blame him. It’s quite the spectacle.

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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 Hardcover – September 12, 2023

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• Print length 688 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster
• Publication date September 12, 2023
• Dimensions 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1982181281
• ISBN-13 978-1982181284
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982181281
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982181284
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.28 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
• #1 in Computer & Technology 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 Biographer Is ‘Too Close to His Subject,’ Reviewers Say

 “It’s the book Musk would have written himself,” L.A. Times columnist Brian Merchant writes

While Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk does include embarrassing anecdotes about the Tesla founder and X owner, it too often avoids tough topics like Musk’s estrangement from his trans daughter and claims of racial discrimination at his Tesla plant, according to reviewers who’ve read the book.

“It’s the book Musk would have written himself,” LA Times columnist Brian Merchant wrote.

Isaacson has previously written bestselling biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein. Merchant argues in his review that the author’s same “great man” approach toward the tech entrepreneur is entirely too soft, despite revelations such as the existence of Musk’s third child with singer Grimes.

For example, Musk’s antisemitic grandfather, who relocated the family to South Africa while apartheid was still the law, is referred to as having “quirky conservative views.” According to Merchant, Isaacson missed the opportunity to examine Musk’s own antisemitic beliefs. Musk’s Twitter takeover has led to dramatically increased hate speech on the social media platform and he currently blames the Jewish Anti-Defamation League for X’s advertiser exodus.

The book, titled “Elon Musk,” also fails to question Musk’s decisions at Tesla and SpaceX and with other proposed tech innovations. “Isaacson mostly accepts Musk’s confident prognostications as gospel,” Merchant wrote.

In The Washington Post , Will Oremus agreed that the author failed to apply a “sophisticated critical lens” to his subject.

“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,” Oremus wrote.

In The New York Times , reviewer Jennifer Szalai also felt Isaacson took it too easy on Musk. After the X owner’s rant against the “woke-mind virus,” which is preventing civilization from becoming “multiplanetary,” she wrote, “It would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean?”

Despite the assertion that Isaacson’s bio is too flattering, others, like tech journalist and Recode co-founder Kara Swisher, wrote that Musk comes off as “a petty jerk” in the book. Swisher previously called Musk “ a professional adult toddler .”

My mini review of Musk bio: Sad & smart son slowly morphs into mentally abusive father he abhors except with rockets, cars & more money. Often right, sometimes wrong, petty jerk always. Might be crazy in good way, but also a bad way. Pile o’ babies. Not Steve Jobs. You’re… pic.twitter.com/wDmCY9LK7w — Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) September 11, 2023

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Lionsgate television signs production head gary goodman to new multi-year deal, elon musk biography yields intriguing vignettes about ari emanuel and larry david, but many poor reviews have accompanied strong early sales.

By Dade Hayes

Business Editor

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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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‘Abigail’ Review: A Remake of ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ Turns Into a Brutally Monotonous Genre Mashup

It's full of grousing kidnappers and blood-vomiting action, little of which is compelling.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

• ‘Rebel Moon — Part Two: The Scargiver’ Review: An Even More Rote Story, but a Bigger and Better Battle 4 days ago
• ‘Abigail’ Review: A Remake of ‘Dracula’s Daughter’ Turns Into a Brutally Monotonous Genre Mashup 6 days ago
• Why I Wasn’t Scared by ‘Civil War’ 1 week ago

From the moment the film was announced a year ago, “ Abigail ” has been marketed as a remake of “Dracula’s Daughter,” the 1936 Universal Pictures curio. So it’s no spoiler to say that the title character of “Abigail” is…Dracula’s daughter. Yet if you went in not knowing that, it might be the only real surprise in the movie, apart from what a brutally monotonous blood-vomiting genre mashup it is.  

Popular on Variety

“Dracula’s Daughter,” made to cash in on the original “Dracula’s” success (though it had none of the same actors), was a rather stodgy London-fog monster movie starring Gloria Holden, who plays the title character like Greta Garbo as an aristocratic mesmerist. Yet the film has a cult dimension; there’s a scene with Holden and the woman she fastens on to model for a painting that has homoerotic overtones (at least, for 1936). I hadn’t seen the movie in decades, but it reminded me of something I’ve always liked about studio-system horror films — that there’s a dramatic lightness to them, even when they’re all about the darkness. Whereas “Abigail” is so heavy and excessive that if Sam Peckinpah saw it he might say, “Jesus! Tone it down.”

As played by Dan Stevens, who italicizes everything, Frank, the leader of the gang (though even he’s just a thug for hire), is the most tedious. He’s an embattled yuppie nerd, testy and rancorous, and he never stops yelling. The other characters yell back. I make a point of this because there’s so much oppositional energy in “Abigail” that it tamps down our impulse to identify with anyone. Sammy (Kathryn Newton) the Catholic punk, Peter (Kevin Durand) the sullen hulk who’s like Elon Musk played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Frank the dick — these are characters who seem programmed to annoy us. Angus Cloud, in his final performance, plays Dean, who is blitzed but mellow, a real Cloud combination — you feel the presence that was lost. And Melissa Barrera, from “In the Heights” and the last two “Scream” films, grows more forceful as the movie goes on. She plays Joey, a druggie who is given a maudlin and ineffective backstory (about the son she abandoned), but she’s the one actor on hand who seems to understand the value of toning down the noise.

“Abigail” was directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who made those last two “Scream” films, and though I was impressed, to a degree, by what they brought off there, this movie feels like a step backward into overwrought generic schlock. Why does a vampire movie need to be so relentlessly physical, with whacked limbs and decapitations and bodies slammed into walls? Dracula, among other things, is the most metaphorical character in horror-film history, and I guess his daughter could be too, but not in a film that turns bloodsucking into a form of professional wrestling.

VIP+ Analysis: Can ‘Abigail’ Up Horror’s Theatrical Strength?

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, New York, April 17, 2024. MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 109 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release of a Project X Entertainment, Vinson Films, Radio Silence production. Producers: William Sherak, James Vanderbilt, Paul Neinstein, Tripp Vinson, Chad Villella. Executive producers: Ron Lynch, Macdara Kelleher.
• Crew: Directors: Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett. Screenplay: Stephen Shields, Guy Busick. Camera: Aaron Morton. Editor: Michael P. Shawver. Music: Brian Tyler.
• With: Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Will Catlett, Kevin Durand, Angus Cloud, Alisha Weir, Matthew Goode, Giancarlo Esposito.

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Elon Musk's wealth has crashed by over $175 billion from its peak as Tesla's problems pile up

• Tesla shares have tumbled 66% from their peak as investors gear up for a growth slowdown.
• The stock drop has fueled an estimated $176 billion decline in Elon Musk's net worth.
• The Tesla CEO is now worth about $164 billion, down from $340 billion in November 2021.

Tesla 's mounting troubles have dealt a heavy blow to Elon Musk 's net worth.

In November 2021, the Tesla CEO held the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index , and seemed untouchable with an estimated fortune of $340 billion . He was more than three times richer than Warren Buffett at that point.

However, Musk's net worth has plunged by about $176 billion since then to $164 billion at Monday's close. The key driver has been Tesla stock, which has tumbled from a split-adjusted peak of $415 in 2021 to $142 — a 66% decline.

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The share-price slump has slashed Tesla's market capitalization from north of $1.2 trillion to below $450 billion. Musk's net worth has taken a big hit from the decline because his 13% stake in the automaker makes up a big chunk of his wealth.

Musk's start to this year has also been dismal relative to his peers in the 12-digit club. He topped the Bloomberg rich list with a $229 billion fortune in January, but his net worth has crashed by $65 billion, or 28%, since then.

The Tesla and SpaceX CEO now ranks fourth in the wealth rankings, behind LVMH's Bernard Arnault , Amazon's Jeff Bezos , and Meta's Mark Zuckerberg .

Moreover, Musk is the only one of the world's 11 richest people whose net worth has declined this year. He's lost more money on paper than anyone on the list has gained, including Zuckerberg who's up $43 billion.

Tesla's stock has tumbled in recent months due to mounting concerns about the company. Musk told employees this month that more than 10% of the company's global workforce would be laid off, signaling demand for EVs is faltering.

The automaker delivered fewer cars than expected to customers last quarter, and has made price cuts that threaten to erode its profit margins.

Moreover, Musk is fending off fierce competition from Chinese rivals like Buffett-backed BYD, and has repeatedly underscored the painful impact of higher interest rates on customer demand.

Musk's fortune isn't completely tied to Tesla. He also owns an estimated 42% stake in SpaceX, the space exploration company valued at $180 billion in December, and a roughly 79% stake in X after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and rebranded it last year.

Watch: How Elon Musk makes and spends his billions

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A Complete History of Elon Musk’s Fascination with the Magic Number 420

Elon musk loves everything related to 420..

It’s April 20, the unofficial holiday in cannabis culture dedicated to advocating for the legalization of marijuana. The date is strongly associated with Elon Musk , as the Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX CEO frequently made references to the number 420 in tweets and interviews in recent years—sometimes in a humorous manner but other times completely serious. Here is a look back at Musk’s well-documented fascination with the magic number over the years.

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Proposing taking Tesla private at $420 a share

In August 2018, Musk famously tweeted that he was considering taking Tesla private at $420 per share —a significant premium over Tesla’s stock price at the time—and claimed he had “funding secured.” This tweet eventually landed him in legal trouble with the Securities and Exchange Commission for potential market manipulation, a charge he later settled. 

During a trial of the case i n January 2023, the Tesla CEO testified that his choice of the $420 price point was not a joke  but a well thought-out business decision. “There is some karma around 420 although I should question if that is good or bad karma at this point,” he told the attorney representing a group of Tesla shareholders.

Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2018

Joe Rogan Podcast appearance and Twitter bio update

A month after his controversial Tesla tweet rattled Wall Street, Musk was invited as a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. He got so comfortable in the setting that at one point he was seen puffing a joint  on camera . For a brief period after the podcast aired, Musk changed his Twitter bio to read “420” before reverting it to its original state that read “Engineer.”

The incidents sparked widespread discussion about the significance of the number 420. Musk had previously expressed his views on marijuana legalization, suggesting that he’s not opposed to its use.

Embedding the number in Tesla products

Musk has displayed a tendency to incorporate the number 420 into his company’s products whenever he can. In October 2020, he announced on Twitter that Tesla would drop the price of its Model S sedan from about $72,000 to $69,420—a nod at another of his favorite numbers, 69.

Musk also initially targeted a 420-mile driving range for Tesla’s Model S Plaid, a high-end version of the Model S. But at the vehicle’s launch in June 2021, its window sticker said 405 miles, and the final EPA-rated range was slightly lower than 396 miles. 

Last year, Musk suggested in a Twitter conversation that he wanted to name an important version of Tesla’s FSD (Full Self-Driving) software Beta 11.420.

The gauntlet has been thrown down! The prophecy will be fulfilled. Model S price changes to $69,420 tonight! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 14, 2020

They are actually much more than point releases, but the team is reserving 11.420 for the big one — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 21, 2023

Pricing SpaceX at $420 a share during fundraising

In early 2021, SpaceX raised $850 million in a private equity funding round that valued the space company at $76 billion. The company reportedly sold shares at $419.99 apiece, just one cent below its CEO’s lucky number.

Launching Starship’s maiden test flight on 4/20

In Musk’s eye, April 20 is also a lucky date for rocket launches .  On this day last year, Musk watched SpaceX test launch a prototype of Starship from the company’s test ground in Boca Chica, Texas. It was the first attempted orbital flight of Starship.

Acquiring Twitter for $54.20 a share 

In October 2023, Musk acquired Twitter, now X, for $54.20 per share in a transaction that valued the social media company at $44 billion, about 25 percent higher than its market value at the time. Musk at one point attempted to walk away from the deal, but a federal judge eventually nudged him into going through with it eventually.

Random “420” tweets 

Sometime Musk just appeared to want to compose 420-themed tweets for no obvious reasons. In April of last year, he posted that the “final date for removing [Twitter’s] legacy blue checks is 4/20.” Earlier this year, he replied to a post about Tesla’s EV market share being 4.20 percent at the end of 2023 by noting, “I was born 69 days after 4/20.” Here are a few other examples:

420 is ten times better than 42 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 6, 2020

There are now 420 operational Starlink satellites 🛰 😉 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 22, 2020

420 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 4, 2023

Due to inflation 420 has gone up by 69 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 15, 2021

69.420% of statistics are false — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 9, 2022

• SEE ALSO : FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel Supports TikTok Ban, Calls Lack of Oversight ‘Stunning’

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What Tesla CEO (Elon Musk Or Otherwise) Should Be Doing — Reader Comment

The following is a reader comment under my article published earlier today. It’s such a superb list of what the CEO of Tesla should be doing that I had to give it its own platform here. It may be completely focused on what a new CEO should do, but even if Elon Musk remains CEO, I think it’s a perfect list. That said, I think it’s clear Elon Musk wouldn’t give 3 seconds of thought to some of the core items on the list. In any case, below is the comment. Go ahead and add your own bullet points in the comments under the article to modify or add to this list! On to cliff’s comment :

Tesla is a large company and needs to start behaving like a large company. Things the next CEO should do:

• Start a marketing company that understands branding and narrative.
• Reconfirm Tesla in the mind of the public as a barrier breaking company moving the world to sustainable energy.
• Have a rapid response and media team that pushes back on mainstream media (backed by oil/gas, traditional auto advertising dollar) FUD
• Clearly articulate a consistent strategy when it comes to pricing, new vehicle launches, etc.
• Advertising should be targeted in states with strong auto dealer lobbies. Make it clear that they want to sell direct to consumers and are not allowed to.
• Move forward full speed on Tesla Semi and Model 2.
• Create a competitor to the ETransit and Rivian Delivery Van. There is clearly a huge market for last mile commercial EVs and Tesla should be in the game.
• Create a turnkey engineering division that can be contracted out to add out large charging infrastructure. Megawatt charging for semi trucks will require a lot of power, engineering, design, utility coordination, etc. Making this as easy as possible for customers should be key.
• Build out solar canopies at all Tesla superchargers. Start with the Southern states that could use shade for their car parking. Make money as an energy company as opposed to a car company.
• Robotaxi/FSD. Maintain investment but build it out organically as markets, governments, etc. allow instead of a moonshot/bet the company on it type of idea.
• Require the CEO to show up 40 hours a week to work. It sets a horrible example that the leader of the company can spread himself thin and only dip a toe in when needed.

I honestly think that’s the best list I could imagine — or, actually, significantly better than what I’d come up with. However, with countless brilliant and thoughtful readers, I’d love to see the suggestions continue down in the comments!

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Tesla Asks Shareholders To Re-Approve Elon Musk's $56B Pay Package

Krisztian Bocsi / Bloomberg via Getty Images

Key Takeaways

• Tesla shareholders will vote on whether to re-certify CEO Elon Musk's $55.8 billion compensation package at the company's annual shareholder meeting in June.
• Earlier this year, a Delaware judge ruled in favor of an investor who sued Tesla over the package, calling it "excessive."
• Shareholders will also vote on whether to reincorporate Tesla in Texas from Delaware.

Tesla ( TSLA ) shareholders will vote on a number of issues at the electric vehicle (EV) maker's annual shareholder meeting in June, including whether to re-approve Chief Executive Officer (CEO ) Elon Musk's massive compensation deal.

Earlier this year , a Delaware judge called the package "excessive," siding with an investor who had sued Tesla over the idea that Musk was worth a $55.8 billion pay package.

Musk's $55.8 Billion Pay Package

Board chair Robyn Denholm wrote in a proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC ) Wednesday that the Delaware judgment "second-guessed" the will of Tesla shareholders, and said the board continues to stand behind the pay package it originally approved in 2018.

"We do not agree with what the Delaware Court decided, and we do not think that what the Delaware Court said is how corporate law should or does work," Denholm wrote. "So we are coming to you now so you can help fix this issue—which is a matter of fundamental fairness and respect to our CEO."

The company argues in the proxy that Musk has effectively not been paid for the last six years of his work at Tesla, and that various provisions like holding periods before he could sell any vested stock and performance goals for the company incentivize Musk to continue working to make Tesla a more valuable company.

In January, the Delaware court said the package was excessive because it was "250 times larger than the contemporaneous median peer compensation plan and over 33 times larger than the plan’s closest comparison, which was Musk’s prior compensation plan."

Tesla said that "dozens" of institutional investors have expressed their support for the compensation package since the Delaware court's decision, with four of the top 10 shareholders meeting with Tesla's board to discuss the ruling since it was issued Jan. 30.

Appealing the decision or devising a new package entirely could take months and cost the company additional millions of dollars, which is why the board said it preferred to simply re-approve the 2018 package to address concerns that it was not in the best interest of the company and the shareholders the first time.

Analysts Say 'Clock Has Struck Midnight,' Time for Tesla To Give Growth Plans

Wedbush analysts said in a Wednesday note that they expect the package to be re-approved, and that the Delaware ruling would be effectively rendered irrelevant if Tesla reincorporates in Texas.

However, they also said the "clock has struck midnight" for Musk and Tesla to explain recent decisions like layoffs , in addition to providing a plan for Tesla's continued growth and areas of focus, like whether the company is truly abandoning a lower-cost "Model 2" that has been a company goal for years, or if it wants to focus on other projects like the fully autonomous " robotaxi " Musk wants to build.

Shareholders Also To Vote on Reincorporating in Texas, Re-electing Board Members

Shareholders will also have the chance to vote on a number of other issues, including whether to move Tesla's incorporation to Texas—where Musk has moved operations for several of his other companies—from Delaware, as well as the re-election of two board directors: Musk's brother, Kimbal, and James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

Other issues that will be voted on at the June 13 shareholder meeting include proposals to reduce director terms to one year, to allow unionization efforts, and to commit to a moratorium on sourcing materials from deep-sea mining, according to the SEC filing.

Tesla stock has been battered so far this year, losing more than a third of its value since 2024 began. Shares were down about 1.8% to $154.22 as of 10:53 a.m. ET Wednesday.

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Elon Musk and Tesla: Is the CEO’s controversial behavior responsible for company’s struggles?

The richest man in the world says and does what he wants. And often, it’s contentious and provocative.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has attacked U.S. election integrity, embraced white-supremacist propaganda and accused President Joe Biden of treason. He even smoked pot on Joe Rogan’s provocative podcast.

Today, the pioneering electric-car company Musk built in Silicon Valley — headquartered in Texas after he moved it from Palo Alto, California — is struggling. This month, Tesla posted its first drop in car deliveries in four years, and Musk told employees that more than 10% of them would be laid off . Two key executives promptly ran for the hills. The company’s stock price has been plunging, even before its Cybertrucks were recalled last week to fix their accelerator pedals.

How much blame does Musk deserve for Tesla’s troubles? Experts say the CEO’s behavior probably turns off some potential customers, but bigger problems are buffeting his company. And with other car makers rapidly broadening electric options, his divisive persona could inflict heavier damage down the line, they say.

“It didn’t make so much of a difference when Tesla was the best game in town for EVs,” said Jo-Ellen Pozner, a management professor at Santa Clara University’s Leavey business school. “But now that there are so many competitors not just in the U.S. but globally, it might become a liability.”

Tesla and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk’s polarizing presence at the top of Tesla is so unusual for a corporate leader that experts in business management grasp for comparisons: anti-Semitic fellow car-pioneer Henry Ford, perhaps, said AutoPacific chief analyst Ed Kim. Maybe billionaire casino magnate and Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, suggested Jennifer Chatman, a University of California-Berkeley Haas business school management professor.

However, Ford “didn’t make that kind of a central thing about who he is, whereas Elon Musk makes his politics very, very much at the forefront of his public persona,” Kim said. And Adelson, was “not nearly as outspoken as Elon Musk,” and “not as identifiable with a particular company,” Chatman said.

Daniel Ives, senior equity analyst at Wedbush Securities, said “Musk’s antics” have had a significant effect on U.S consumers’ car-buying behavior.

“There is no doubt in our view that Musk has been a negative swing factor for many consumers in their (electric vehicle) purchase decisions,” Ives said.

San Jose business development director Marian Ross is one of those consumers.

“I would never consider a Tesla because it’s Elon Musk,” Ross said, criticizing the CEO’s relatively recent public embrace of right-wing politics while she charged her Kia electric SUV at Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara. “It’s a big no.”

Musk has allowed neo-Nazi content to proliferate on his social media platform X, and criticism of his views on race have also focused on his comments about immigration. The Tesla CEO in February tweeted that Democrats “ won’t deport , because every illegal is a highly likely vote at some point.” The claim, central to the groundless White supremacist “great replacement” theory, was starkly refuted by the 500,000 deportations under President Joe Biden during the previous nine months. Musk has accused U.S. media, elite colleges and high schools of being “racist against whites & Asians.”

Musk has also sought to undermine legitimacy of American elections , calling mail-in ballots and voting without government-issued identification “insane” in an echo of former President Donald Trump’s baseless attacks, despite no evidence of significant fraud. He falsely claimed, in a tweet that remains on his platform , that undocumented people “are not prevented from voting in federal elections,” a right-wing conspiracy theory. While Musk has not endorsed Trump for a second presidential term, he met with him in March, and has accused Biden of “treason” over his administration’s handling of migrants.

Meanwhile, Tesla remains embroiled in multiple lawsuits, including by the California and federal governments , alleging rampant racism at the Fremont factory where four car models are made.

However, factors outside Musk’s control weigh more heavily on Tesla than its CEO’s politics, Kim and Ives pointed out. U.S buyers’ transition to electric vehicles has slowed over the past year amid consumer worries about EV technology. And Tesla faces exploding EV competition in the U.S. and China.

While Musk may be tarnishing Tesla’s reputation among some consumers, “reputation is really about product and how reliable and or desirable that product is,” Pozner said.

Auto buyers’ decision-making is generally tightly focused on the vehicle, AutoPacific’s Kim said.

“Most consumers, even conscientious consumers, often don’t actually make their purchasing decision based on the politics of the head of the company,” Kim said.

Some people, even Tesla owners, do not even know Musk heads the company, or pay attention to controversies around him.

“Is he still the CEO?” asked Tesla Model S owner Rafael Alhambra, a 30-year-old pharmacy technician from Sunnyvale. “I don’t ever watch his interviews or anything.”

In public statements, Musk has charted a recent, sharp political turn from left to right. In May 2022 he said he used to vote for Democrats , but “they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican.” Musk in January told CNBC he voted for Biden in 2020 , but, “I cannot see myself voting for Biden this time.”

Prospective CEOs in elite business schools like Berkeley’s Haas are taught to present a neutral public face to avoid alienating customers, but Musk enjoys provocation, said Chatman, the management professor.

“It’s part of his character to be impulsive and to express his views,” Chatman said. “He believes that even if he doesn’t have all the information he’s so brilliant that whatever he says is going to be important.”

As Tesla’s competition escalates, Musk’s inflammatory rhetoric could prove more costly, business experts said. “At some point shareholders are going to get very unhappy if they believe that Musk is having a detrimental impact on the company’s success,” Chatman said.

San Jose State University engineering technology student Cameron Squire bought his Tesla Model 3 in 2018. His admiration for Musk as a figure akin to the Iron Man superhero has waned only slightly as the CEO has become more “eccentric,” he said.

“I don’t hate him,” Squire said. “But if I wanted to put bumper stickers on this car I’d get the, ‘I bought this before I knew Elon was crazy’ sticker.”

More than 65,000 Spokane-area workers soon will begin building WA Cares benefits

In every community across Washington, families are facing the challenge of accessing and affording long-term care.