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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 ‏ : ‎ 1.78 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
• #1 in Computer & Technology Biographies
• #2 in Scientist Biographies
• #3 in Business Professional's 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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Eight things we learned from the Elon Musk biography

Widespread access to world’s richest man allowed biographer Walter Isaacson to detail a number of illuminating anecdotes

A new biography of Elon Musk was published on Tuesday and contains colourful details of the life of the world’s richest man.

Musk afforded widespread access to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, the author of the bestselling biography of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and the book contains a series of illuminating anecdotes about Musk. Here are eight things we learned from the book.

1. Musk’s difficult relationship with his father

Musk, 52, was born and raised in South Africa and endured a fraught relationship with his father, Errol, an engineer. Isaacson writes that Errol “bedevils Elon”.

Musk’s brother, Kimbal, says the worst memory of his life was watching Errol berate Musk after he was hospitalised after a fight at school (the book says Musk was still getting corrective surgery for the injuries decades later). “My father just lost it,” says Kimbal.

Musk and Kimbal, who are estranged from their father, describe Errol as a “volatile fabulist”. Interviewed by Isaacson, Errol admits he encouraged a “physical and emotional toughness” in his sons.

Grimes, the artist who is mother to three of his 10 children, says PTSD from Musk’s childhood shaped an aversion to contentment: “I just don’t think he knows how to savor success and smell the flowers.” Musk tells Isaacson he agrees: “Adversity shaped me. My pain threshold became very high.”

2. Elon Musk has an issue with the ‘woke mind virus’

Shortly before taking over Twitter, or X as it is now called, Musk told Isaacson that the “woke mind virus” – a derogatory term for progressive politics and culture – would prevent extraplanetary settlement (one of Musk’s fixations).

“Unless the woke mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-human in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary,” said Musk.

3. Musk gave Twitter executives short shrift

Musk fired Twitter’s executive team as soon as he completed the takeover of Twitter in October last year and it had been coming. When Musk bought a significant stake in Twitter months before, he agreed to meet the CEO, Parag Agrawal. After the meeting, Musk said: “What Twitter needs is a fire-breathing dragon and Parag is not that.”

They soon fell out. Agrawal texted Musk to say his tweet asking if Twitter was “dying” was not helpful. Musk, on a break in Hawaii, replied: “What did you get done this week?” He added: “I’m not joining the board. This is a waste of time. Will make an offer to take Twitter private.”

This was during discussions about Musk joining the board. Agrawal’s reply underlined the power imbalance, and Twitter’s fear of Musk. He texted: “Can we talk?” Musk soon lodged an official bid for Twitter, which he tried unsuccessfully to wriggle out of, but the die was cast for Agrawal and his colleagues.

4. Sam Bankman-Fried tried to get in on the Twitter takeover

The founder and CEO of the fallen cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, offered via his banker to put $5bn (£4.1bn) into the Twitter takeover, the book claims. Bankman-Fried also wanted to discuss putting Twitter on a blockchain – the technological underpinning for cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin.

A subsequent call between Musk and Bankman-Fried in May 2022 went badly, Isaacson wrote. “My bullshit detector went off like red alert on a Geiger counter,” Musk is quoted as saying.

Bankman-Fried’s offer to invest or to roll over $100m of Twitter stock that he claimed he had invested, came to nothing.

5. Musk tried to recruit Rudy Giuliani as an adviser

In his early tycoon career, Musk pondered recruiting the then mayor of New York as a political fixer to help him turn his PayPal business into a bank in 2001. Musk sought a meeting with Giuliani, then coming to the end of his tenure in office, because he wanted to turn PayPal – an online payments company – into a “social network that would disrupt the whole banking industry”.

In 2001, Musk and an investor, Michael Moritz, went to New York to see if they could hire Giuliani to guide them through the process of turning PayPal into a bank. It didn’t go well.

“It was like walking into a mob scene,” Moritz says in the book. Giuliani “was surrounded by goonish confidantes. He didn’t have any idea whatsoever about Silicon Valley, but he and his henchmen were eager to line their pockets”.

“‘This guy occupies a different planet,’ Musk told Moritz.”

6. Musk is concerned about a dwindling human population

One of Musk’s reasons for founding a new artificial intelligence company , xAI, is addressing the threat of population collapse. In one face-to-face conversation with Isaacson, the multi-billionaire said human intelligence was in danger of being surmounted by digital intelligence.

“The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was levelling off because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially, like Moore’s law on steroids. At some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.”

This conversation was conducted at the Austin, Texas house of Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s Neuralink business who is the mother of two of his children. Zilis told Isaacson she agreed to have children with Musk via IVF after listening to his arguments about having children as a “kind of social duty”. She said: “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to.”

7. Musk is very concerned about AI

Musk tells Isaacson that human consciousness is under threat from the prospect of super-intelligent, and uncontrollable, AI systems.

He says: “What can be done to make AI safe? I keep wrestling with that. What actions can we take to minimize AI danger and assure that human consciousness survives?”

8. Musk’s complicated role in the Ukraine conflict

Musk’s satellite communications unit, Starlink, has a key role in Ukraine’s defence against the Russian invasion. When a Russian cyber-attack crippled Ukraine’s satellite comms network an hour before the invasion, Musk stepped in following an appeal for help from Ukrainian officials and the country’s deputy prime minister.

However, the book alleges that Musk told his engineers to “turn off” Starlink coverage that would have facilitated an attack by drone submarines on Russia’s navy at the Sevastopol base in Crimea.

However, Isaacson has subsequently clarified this excerpt after Musk used his X platform to state that there was no Starlink coverage in that area and he refused a Ukrainian request to activate it. Musk posted: “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is published by Simon & Schuster. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Elon Musk on WSJ story: If drugs helped my productivity, I would take them.

“if drugs actually helped improve my net productivity over time, i would definitely take them” — elon musk, tesla ceo, on x.

That was businessman and inventor Elon Musk responding on his X platform, to an article by The Wall Street Journal that discussed alleged illegal drug use by the Tesla CEO.

Shares of Tesla were trading down around 0.6% in early action on Monday.

Citing sources, the article that published on Saturday said Musk had used cocaine, ketamine, psychedelic mushrooms and other substances, and that some board members were worried about potential problems for his health and the empire he watches over.

Musk responded to one X user whose mother told him about Italian news stations reporting nonstop about the drug allegations. The billionaire cracked that meanwhile, he was successfully leading “Tesla to be the world’s most valuable car company” and SpaceX “the most valuable space company.”

“Whatever I’m doing, I should just keep doing it,” he said.

Musk didn’t respond to The Wall Street Journal story at the time of reporting, but the article quoted his attorney Alex Spiro, who said the executive had been “regularly and randomly drug tested at  SpaceX  and has never failed a test.” Spiro also said the story contained “other false facts,” without providing details.

Another X user joked that he would “have whatever you’re having! Who’s your dealer? lol.”

“If drugs actually helped improve my net productivity over time, I would definitely take them!” Musk responded .

The world’s wealthiest man, who was worth $219 billion as of Monday, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index , also made a swipe at The Wall Street Journal, saying on X : “TMZ has vastly higher standards than the WSJ (actually).”

TMZ is a tabloid publication that is owned by Fox Corp. which shares common ownership with Wall Street Journal and MarketWatch parent News Corp.

Tesla shares had a blockbuster year in 2023, though Musk himself was under pressure as his X platform lost several high-profile advertisers such as Walt Disney Co.  and Apple Inc.   over inflammatory comments by the executive and concerns over increasing prevalence of extremist content and disinformation on X.

Some have worried at times that Tesla could suffer spillover brand damage.

Twitter regrets and glass houses: 8 things we learned from the Musk bio

Walter isaacson’s book sheds new light on some old questions about the quixotic tesla and spacex ceo.

Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk has made headlines for its now-disputed account of how Musk supposedly scuttled a Ukrainian drone attack by pulling the plug on the Starlink satellite internet service guiding the drones. Both Musk and Isaacson now say the service was already limited in a way that prevented the attack.

But the 688-page tome, for which Isaacson spent two years shadowing Musk, also fills in some other details about Musk’s life and career that have garnered less attention. Here are some of the questions about the billionaire Tesla and SpaceX CEO that the book answers, or at least sheds light on — and that Musk has not disputed, at least so far.

Did Musk’s father own an emerald mine?

Musk’s image as a self-made innovator who bootstrapped his way to Silicon Valley riches has been challenged at times by reports that his father, Errol Musk, was the wealthy owner of an emerald mine in South Africa.

Musk has repeatedly denied the claim. But Isaacson reports that Errol Musk did once swap a small private airplane for a share of the emeralds from three “small” black-market mines in Zambia. Errol Musk sold the emeralds to jewelers, raking in some $210,000, but the mines went bankrupt in the 1980s and little of the money ever made its way to Elon or his siblings. Elon Musk’s parents did invest some money in his first start-ups, though not a decisive amount.

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

Why did Musk have Tesla buy SolarCity?

In 2016, Tesla shareholders had been queasy about Musk’s plan to acquire SolarCity, a debt-laden solar-panel company run by his cousins in which Musk had a large personal stake. Musk floated the idea of a futuristic “solar roof” to help justify buying the company.

While Musk may have believed in the idea at first, the company struggled to execute his vision. That became a problem for Musk in 2021, when Tesla shareholders sued him over the SolarCity acquisition. Isaacson reports that Musk made the solar roof his top priority — until he won the lawsuit, after which “his fervor to solve the problem receded.”

Is Musk building a ‘glass house’ in Texas?

Musk has denied reports in the Wall Street Journal that he is building a glass house in Texas and that Tesla was possibly going to pay for it. But Isaacson reports what might be a nugget of truth to the allegation: Musk bought a horse farm across the river from Tesla’s Giga Texas factory and began working with architect Norman Foster, who designed Apple’s futuristic headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., on plans to build a house there. At one point Musk suggested that it should resemble a “shard of glass” coming out of the water, accessible from the shore by a tunnel. But Isaacson says Musk later described it as “more an art project than a house” and opted to “put off building it.” The book does not address allegations that Musk or someone else at Tesla may have misused company funds to acquire the glass for the structure.

How many offspring does Elon Musk have, and with whom?

Isaacson’s book reveals that Musk and his sometimes girlfriend Grimes secretly had a third child in June 2022, named Techno Mechanicus Musk, or Tau for short. Tau is Musk’s third child with Grimes and brings the tally of Musk’s known children to 11. Two of those are the twins he fathered with one of his employees, Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis, as Insider first reported last year. The pair kept that information from Grimes, who considered Zilis a friend. Isaacson reports Zilis’s pregnancy was via in vitro fertilization, with Musk as the sperm donor. “Because Neuralink is a privately owned company,” he writes, “it’s unclear how the evolving rules surrounding workplace relationships applied.”

Musk has justified his large brood by warning of an “underpopulation crisis” as educated women have fewer children. Zilis tells Isaacson that Musk “really wants smart people to have kids,” a stance that could be characterized as a form of eugenics.

Why did Musk buy Twitter?

Isaacson’s book depicts Musk’s decision to buy Twitter, now known as X, as impulsive and driven more by his psychological demons than logic. At various points, he theorizes that Musk wanted to “own the playground” after being bullied in school; that Musk’s life was going too smoothly at the time and he craved a new crisis; and that he made the decision to buy the company outright rather than simply joining its board while he was in a “manic mood,” pulling an all-nighter on a visit to Oracle chairman Larry Ellison’s Hawaiian island.

Musk expressed regret at the move on several occasions, according to the book. In a November meeting with a Tesla design team that was working on the company’s idea for self-driving “robotaxis,” a “tired and dejected” Musk said of the Twitter acquisition: “I don’t know why I did it. The judge basically said I have to buy Twitter or else, and now I’m like, okay, [expletive].”

Why did Twitter botch the Ron DeSantis presidential announcement?

In the final days of 2022, after Musk had laid off most of Twitter’s staff, the site began crashing entirely for many users. It continued to suffer occasional glitches and outages over the next several months, and in May a high-profile Twitter Spaces interview involving Musk and Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was derailed by repeated crashes.

Isaacson’s book points to Musk himself as the culprit. Against employees’ warnings, Musk had insisted on moving entire banks of servers from a data center in Sacramento to one in Oregon to save money. When they wouldn’t do it over the Christmas holiday, Musk and a carful of friends and family members decided to drive to Sacramento and start moving the racks themselves.

They managed to move the servers to Portland, Ore., but Twitter was “destabilized” for months afterward, and the crash that plagued the DeSantis announcement was one of the results. Musk admitted to Isaacson in March: “In retrospect, the whole Sacramento shutdown was a mistake.”

Why did Bari Weiss stop contributing to the ‘Twitter Files’?

Musk hired journalists Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi to comb through the company’s internal records for evidence that Twitter had gone too far in suppressing conservatives’ speech. As they tweeted their findings in December 2022, Musk cheered them on. But he publicly broke with Weiss after she criticized him for banning other journalists, including The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, a move she found incompatible with Musk’s claims to be a “free speech absolutist.”

Isaacson fills in the backstory. Weiss had irked Musk in one of their first meetings by asking how Tesla’s business interests in China might affect the way he managed Twitter. “Musk got annoyed,” Isaacson writes. When she persisted, “Musk said that Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China, because Tesla’s business could be threatened. China’s repression of the Uyghurs, he said, had two sides.”

Then, when Weiss was working on her Twitter Files installment focused on how the company suppressed some users’ tweets without telling them, she found that Musk had done that himself to an account that tracked the whereabouts of his private jet. Weiss found that “hypocritical” and spoke out when Musk banned the account and began suspending journalists who reported on the ban. Musk promptly cut her access to the Twitter Files.

Why did Musk go to the World Cup in Qatar?

Musk isn’t known to be a soccer fan, so there was surprise when he was photographed at the World Cup final in Qatar in December alongside former president Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and a number of Qatari leaders. Isaacson reveals that Musk agreed to appear at the World Cup final as part of a deal with a Qatar-based investment fund to help bankroll his purchase of Twitter to the tune of $375 million.

South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.

Who Is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur and businessman who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003. Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company, Zip2, to a division of Compaq Computers.

In January 2021, Musk reportedly surpassed Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest man in the world.

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. As a child, Musk was so lost in his daydreams about inventions that his parents and doctors ordered a test to check his hearing.

At about the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 10, Musk developed an interest in computers. He taught himself how to program, and when he was 12 he sold his first software: a game he created called Blastar.

In grade school, Musk was short, introverted and bookish. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling.

Musk’s mother, Maye Musk , is a Canadian model and the oldest woman to star in a Covergirl campaign. When Musk was growing up, she worked five jobs at one point to support her family.

Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is a wealthy South African engineer.

Musk spent his early childhood with his brother Kimbal and sister Tosca in South Africa. His parents divorced when he was 10.

At age 17, in 1989, Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk obtained his Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship via that path.

In 1992, Musk left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.

After leaving Penn, Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, his move was timed perfectly with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Zip2 Corporation

Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995 with his brother, Kimbal Musk. An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune . In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.

In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used the money from their sale of Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com acquisition the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today.

In October 2002, Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Before the sale, Musk owned 11 percent of PayPal stock.

Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station—with plans for astronaut transport in the future—in a move to replace NASA’s own space shuttle missions.

Falcon 9 Rockets

On May 22, 2012, Musk and SpaceX made history when the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule. The vehicle was sent to the International Space Station with 1,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts stationed there, marking the first time a private company had sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Of the launch, Musk was quoted as saying, "I feel very lucky. ... For us, it's like winning the Super Bowl."

In December 2013, a Falcon 9 successfully carried a satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit, a distance at which the satellite would lock into an orbital path that matched the Earth's rotation. In February 2015, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 fitted with the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, aiming to observe the extreme emissions from the sun that affect power grids and communications systems on Earth.

In March 2017, SpaceX saw the successful test flight and landing of a Falcon 9 rocket made from reusable parts, a development that opened the door for more affordable space travel.

A setback came in November 2017, when an explosion occurred during a test of the company's new Block 5 Merlin engine. SpaceX reported that no one was hurt, and that the issue would not hamper its planned rollout of a future generation of Falcon 9 rockets.

The company enjoyed another milestone moment in February 2018 with the successful test launch of the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. Armed with additional Falcon 9 boosters, the Falcon Heavy was designed to carry immense payloads into orbit and potentially serve as a vessel for deep space missions. For the test launch, the Falcon Heavy was given a payload of Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster, equipped with cameras to "provide some epic views" for the vehicle's planned orbit around the sun.

In July 2018, Space X enjoyed the successful landing of a new Block 5 Falcon rocket, which touched down on a drone ship less than 9 minutes after liftoff.

BFR Mission to Mars

In September 2017, Musk presented an updated design plan for his BFR (an acronym for either "Big F---ing Rocket" or "Big Falcon Rocket"), a 31-engine behemoth topped by a spaceship capable of carrying at least 100 people. He revealed that SpaceX was aiming to launch the first cargo missions to Mars with the vehicle in 2022, as part of his overarching goal of colonizing the Red Planet.

In March 2018, the entrepreneur told an audience at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that he hoped to have the BFR ready for short flights early the following year, while delivering a knowing nod at his previous problems with meeting deadlines.

The following month, it was announced that SpaceX would construct a facility at the Port of Los Angeles to build and house the BFR. The port property presented an ideal location for SpaceX, as its mammoth rocket will only be movable by barge or ship when completed.

Starlink Internet Satellites

In late March 2018, SpaceX received permission from the U.S. government to launch a fleet of satellites into low orbit for the purpose of providing Internet service. The satellite network, named Starlink, would ideally make broadband service more accessible in rural areas, while also boosting competition in heavily populated markets that are typically dominated by one or two providers.

SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 satellites in May 2019, and followed with another payload of 60 satellites that November. While this represented significant progress for the Starlink venture, the appearance of these bright orbiters in the night sky, with the potential of thousands more to come, worried astronomers who felt that a proliferation of satellites would increase the difficulty of studying distant objects in space.

Tesla Motors

Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company formed in 2003 that is dedicated to producing affordable, mass-market electric cars as well as battery products and solar roofs. Musk oversees all product development, engineering and design of the company's products.

Five years after its formation, in March 2008, Tesla unveiled the Roadster, a sports car capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, as well as traveling nearly 250 miles between charges of its lithium ion battery.

With a stake in the company taken by Daimler and a strategic partnership with Toyota, Tesla Motors launched its initial public offering in June 2010, raising $226 million.

In August 2008, Tesla announced plans for its Model S, the company's first electric sedan that was reportedly meant to take on the BMW 5 series. In 2012, the Model S finally entered production at a starting price of $58,570. Capable of covering 265 miles between charges, it was honored as the 2013 Car of the Year by Motor Trend magazine .

In April 2017, Tesla announced that it surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker. The news was an obvious boon to Tesla, which was looking to ramp up production and release its Model 3 sedan later that year.

In September 2019, using what Musk described as a "Plaid powertrain," a Model S set a speed record for four-door sedan at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey County, California.

The Model 3 was officially launched in early 2019 following extensive production delays. The car was initially priced at $35,000, a much more accessible price point than the $69,500 and up for its Model S and X electric sedans.

After initially aiming to produce 5,000 new Model 3 cars per week by December 2017, Musk pushed that goal back to March 2018, and then to June with the start of the new year. The announced delay didn't surprise industry experts, who were well aware of the company's production problems, though some questioned how long investors would remain patient with the process. It also didn't prevent Musk from garnering a radical new compensation package as CEO, in which he would be paid after reaching milestones of growing valuation based on $50 billion increments.

By April 2018, with Tesla expected to fall short of first-quarter production forecasts, news surfaced that Musk had pushed aside the head of engineering to personally oversee efforts in that division. In a Twitter exchange with a reporter, Musk said it was important to "divide and conquer" to meet production goals and was "back to sleeping at factory."

After signaling that the company would reorganize its management structure, Musk in June announced that Tesla was laying off 9 percent of its workforce, though its production department would remain intact. In an email to employees, Musk explained his decision to eliminate some "duplication of roles" to cut costs, admitting it was time to take serious steps toward turning a profit.

The restructuring appeared to pay dividends, as it was announced that Tesla had met its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 cars per week by the end of June 2018, while churning out another 2,000 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. "We did it!" Musk wrote in a celebratory email to the company. "What an incredible job by an amazing team."

The following February, Musk announced that the company was finally rolling out its standard Model 3. Musk also said that Tesla was shifting to all-online sales, and offering customers the chance to return their cars within seven days or 1,000 miles for a full refund.

In November 2017, Musk made another splash with the unveiling of the new Tesla Semi and Roadster at the company's design studio. The semi-truck, which was expected to enter into production in 2019 before being delayed, boasts 500 miles of range as well as a battery and motors built to last 1 million miles.

Model Y and Roadster

In March 2019, Musk unveiled Tesla’s long-awaited Model Y. The compact crossover, which began arriving for customers in March 2020, has a driving range of 300 miles and a 0 to 60 mph time of 3.5 seconds.

The Roadster, also set to be released in 2020, will become the fastest production car ever made, with a 0 to 60 time of 1.9 seconds.

In August 2016, in Musk’s continuing effort to promote and advance sustainable energy and products for a wider consumer base, a $2.6 billion dollar deal was solidified to combine his electric car and solar energy companies. His Tesla Motors Inc. announced an all-stock deal purchase of SolarCity Corp., a company Musk had helped his cousins start in 2006. He is a majority shareholder in each entity.

“Solar and storage are at their best when they're combined. As one company, Tesla (storage) and SolarCity (solar) can create fully integrated residential, commercial and grid-scale products that improve the way that energy is generated, stored and consumed,” read a statement on Tesla’s website about the deal.

The Boring Company

In January 2017, Musk launched The Boring Company, a company devoted to boring and building tunnels in order to reduce street traffic. He began with a test dig on the SpaceX property in Los Angeles.

In late October of that year, Musk posted the first photo of his company's progress to his Instagram page. He said the 500-foot tunnel, which would generally run parallel to Interstate 405, would reach a length of two miles in approximately four months.

In May 2019 the company, now known as TBC, landed a $48.7 million contract from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to build an underground Loop system to shuttle people around the Las Vegas Convention Center.

In October 2022, Musk officially bought Twitter and became the social media company's CEO after months of back and forth.

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Musk’s Tweet and SEC Investigation

On August 7, 2018, Musk dropped a bombshell via a tweet: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." The announcement opened the door for legal action against the company and its founder, as the SEC began inquiring about whether Musk had indeed secured the funding as claimed. Several investors filed lawsuits on the grounds that Musk was looking to manipulate stock prices and ambush short sellers with his tweet.

Musk’s tweet initially sent Tesla stock spiking, before it closed the day up 11 percent. The CEO followed up with a letter on the company blog, calling the move to go private "the best path forward." He promised to retain his stake in the company, and added that he would create a special fund to help all current investors remain on board.

Six days later, Musk sought to clarify his position with a statement in which he pointed to discussions with the managing director of the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund as the source of his "funding secured" declaration. He later tweeted that he was working on a proposal to take Tesla private with Goldman Sachs and Silver Lake as financial advisers.

The saga took a bizarre turn that day when rapper Azealia Banks wrote on Instagram that, as a guest at Musk's home at the time, she learned that he was under the influence of LSD when he fired off his headline-grabbing tweet. Banks said she overheard Musk making phone calls to drum up the funding he promised was already in place.

The news quickly turned serious again when it was reported that Tesla's outside directors had retained two law firms to deal with the SEC inquiry and the CEO's plans to take the company private.

On August 24, one day after meeting with the board, Musk announced that he had reversed course and would not be taking the company private. Among his reasons, he cited the preference of most directors to keep Tesla public, as well as the difficulty of retaining some of the large shareholders who were prohibited from investing in a private company. Others suggested that Musk was also influenced by the poor optics of an electric car company being funded by Saudi Arabia, a country heavily involved in the oil industry.

On September 29, 2018, it was announced that Musk would pay a $20 million fine and step down as chairman of Tesla's board for three years as part of an agreement with the SEC.

Inventions and Innovations

In August 2013, Musk released a concept for a new form of transportation called the "Hyperloop," an invention that would foster commuting between major cities while severely cutting travel time. Ideally resistant to weather and powered by renewable energy, the Hyperloop would propel riders in pods through a network of low-pressure tubes at speeds reaching more than 700 mph. Musk noted that the Hyperloop could take from seven to 10 years to be built and ready for use.

Although he introduced the Hyperloop with claims that it would be safer than a plane or train, with an estimated cost of $6 billion — approximately one-tenth of the cost for the rail system planned by the state of California — Musk's concept has drawn skepticism. Nevertheless, the entrepreneur has sought to encourage the development of this idea.

After he announced a competition for teams to submit their designs for a Hyperloop pod prototype, the first Hyperloop Pod Competition was held at the SpaceX facility in January 2017. A speed record of 284 mph was set by a German student engineering team at competition No. 3 in 2018, with the same team pushing the record to 287 mph the next year.

AI and Neuralink

Musk has pursued an interest in artificial intelligence, becoming co-chair of the nonprofit OpenAI. The research company launched in late 2015 with the stated mission of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity.

In 2017, it was also reported that Musk was backing a venture called Neuralink, which intends to create devices to be implanted in the human brain and help people merge with software. He expanded on the company's progress during a July 2019 discussion, revealing that its devices will consist of a microscopic chip that connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone.

High-Speed Train

In late November 2017, after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked for proposals to build and operate a high-speed rail line that would transport passengers from O'Hare Airport to downtown Chicago in 20 minutes or less, Musk tweeted that he was all-in on the competition with The Boring Company. He said that the concept of the Chicago loop would be different from his Hyperloop, its relatively short route not requiring the need for drawing a vacuum to eliminate air friction.

In summer 2018 Musk announced he would cover the estimated $1 billion needed to dig the 17-mile tunnel from the airport to downtown Chicago. However, in late 2019 he tweeted that TBC would focus on completing the commercial tunnel in Las Vegas before turning to other projects, suggesting that plans for Chicago would remain in limbo for the immediate future.

Flamethrower

Musk also reportedly found a market for The Boring Company's flamethrowers. After announcing they were going on sale for $500 apiece in late January 2018, he claimed to have sold 10,000 of them within a day.

Relationship with Donald Trump

In December 2016, Musk was named to President Trump’s Strategy and Policy Forum; the following January, he joined Trump's Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. Following Trump’s election, Musk found himself on common ground with the new president and his advisers as the president announced plans to pursue massive infrastructure developments.

While sometimes at odds with the president's controversial measures, such as a proposed ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, Musk defended his involvement with the new administration. "My goals," he tweeted in early 2017, "are to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and to help make humanity a multi-planet civilization, a consequence of which will be the creating of hundreds of thousands of jobs and a more inspiring future for all."

On June 1, following Trump's announcement that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, Musk stepped down from his advisory roles.

Personal Life

Wives and children.

Musk has been married twice. He wed Justine Wilson in 2000, and the couple had six children together. In 2002, their first son died at 10 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Musk and Wilson had five additional sons together: twins Griffin and Xavier (born in 2004) and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian (born in 2006).

After a contentious divorce from Wilson, Musk met actress Talulah Riley. The couple married in 2010. They split in 2012 but married each other again in 2013. Their relationship ultimately ended in divorce in 2016.

Girlfriends

Musk reportedly began dating actress Amber Heard in 2016 after finalizing his divorce with Riley and Heard finalized her divorce from Johnny Depp . Their busy schedules caused the couple to break up in August 2017; they got back together in January 2018 and split again one month later.

In May 2018, Musk began dating musician Grimes (born Claire Boucher). That month, Grimes announced that she had changed her name to “ c ,” the symbol for the speed of light, reportedly on the encouragement of Musk. Fans criticized the feminist performer for dating a billionaire whose company has been described as a “predator zone” among accusations of sexual harassment.

The couple discussed their love for one another in a March 2019 feature in the Wall Street Journal Magazine , with Grimes saying “Look, I love him, he’s great...I mean, he’s a super-interesting goddamn person.” Musk, for his part, told the Journal, “I love c’s wild fae artistic creativity and hyper-intense work ethic.”

Grimes gave birth to their son on May 4, 2020, with Musk announcing that they had named the boy "X Æ A-12." Later in the month, after it was reported that the State of California wouldn't accept a name with a number, the couple said they were changing their son's name to "X Æ A-Xii."

Musk and Grimes welcomed their second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, in December 2021. The child was delivered via a surrogate.

Nonprofit Work

The boundless potential of space exploration and the preservation of the future of the human race have become the cornerstones of Musk's abiding interests, and toward these, he has founded the Musk Foundation, which is dedicated to space exploration and the discovery of renewable and clean energy sources.

In October 2019 Musk pledged to donate $1 million to the #TeamTrees campaign, which aims to plant 20 million trees around the world by 2020. He even changed his Twitter name to Treelon for the occasion.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Elon Musk
• Birth Year: 1971
• Birth date: June 28, 1971
• Birth City: Pretoria
• Birth Country: South Africa
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.
• Space Exploration
• Internet/Computing
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• University of Pennsylania
• Queen's University, Ontario
• Stanford University
• Nacionalities
• South African
• Interesting Facts
• Elon Musk left Stanford after two days to take advantage of the Internet boom.
• In April 2017, Musk's Tesla Motors surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker.

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Elon Musk Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/elon-musk
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 31, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I'm very pro-environment, but let's figure out how to do it better and not jump through a dozen hoops to achieve what is obvious in the first place.
• Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

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Elon Musk co-founded and leads Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company.

As the co-founder and CEO of Tesla, Elon leads all product design, engineering and global manufacturing of the company's electric vehicles, battery products and solar energy products.

Since the company’s inception in 2003, Tesla’s mission has been to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy. The first Tesla product, the Roadster sports car, debuted in 2008, followed by the Model S sedan, which was introduced in 2012, and the Model X SUV, which launched in 2015. Model S received Consumer Reports’ Best Overall Car and has been named the Ultimate Car of the Year by Motor Trend, while Model X was the first SUV ever to earn 5-star safety ratings in every category and sub-category in the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s tests. In 2017, Tesla began deliveries of Model 3 , a mass-market electric vehicle with more than 320 miles of range, and unveiled Tesla Semi , which is designed to save owners at least $200,000 over a million miles based on fuel costs alone. In 2019, Tesla unveiled Cybertruck , which will have better utility than a traditional truck and more performance than a sports car, as well as the Model Y compact SUV, which began customer deliveries in early 2020.

Tesla also produces three energy storage products, the Powerwall home battery, the Powerpack commercial-scale battery, and Megapack , which is designed for utility-scale installations. In 2016, Tesla became the world’s first vertically-integrated sustainable energy company with the acquisition of SolarCity, the leading provider of solar power systems in the United States, and in 2017 released Solar Roof – a beautiful and affordable energy generation product.

As lead designer at SpaceX , Elon oversees the development of rockets and spacecraft for missions to Earth orbit and ultimately to other planets. In 2008, the SpaceX Falcon 1 was the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to reach orbit, and SpaceX made further history in 2017 by re-flying both a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft for the first time. Soon after, Falcon Heavy , the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two, completed its first flight in 2018. In 2019, SpaceX’s crew-capable version of the Dragon spacecraft completed its first demonstration mission, and the company will fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station for the first time in 2020. Building on these achievements, SpaceX is developing Starship – a fully reusable transportation system that will carry crew and cargo to the Moon, Mars and beyond ­– and Starlink , which will deliver high speed broadband internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive, or completely unavailable. By pioneering reusable rockets, SpaceX is pursuing the long-term goal of making humans a multi-planet species by creating a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Elon is also CEO of Neuralink , which is developing ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect the human brain to computers.

He also launched The Boring Company , which combines fast, affordable tunneling technology with an all-electric public transportation system in order to alleviate soul-crushing urban congestion and enable high-speed, long-distance travel. The Boring Company built a 1.15 mile R&D tunnel in Hawthorne, and is currently constructing Vegas Loop, a public transportation system at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

Previously, Elon co-founded and sold PayPal, the world's leading Internet payment system, and Zip2, one of the first internet maps and directions services.

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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.

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

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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Elon Musk’s Daughter 'Doesn’t Want to Spend Time with Me,' He Says in New Biography: Report

"She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil," Musk reportedly said of his 19-year-old daughter

Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty

Elon Musk has opened up about the rift between him and his 19-year-old daughter, according to The   Wall Street Journal 's excerpt of  Elon Musk , the highly anticipated biography by author Walter Isaacson due Sept. 12 .

Published on Thursday, the excerpt largely explores Musk’s whirlwind takeover of X , the platform formerly known as Twitter, but also sheds light on his relationship with his eldest daughter.

“Hey, I’m transgender, and my name is now Jenna,” the then-16-year-old once texted the wife of Musk's brother, according to the excerpt. “Don’t tell my dad.”

In June 2020, a California court granted the then-18-year-old permission to legally change her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson. At the time, she decided to take mother Justine Musk' s maiden name. The judge also recognized her gender as female and ruled for the issuance of a new birth certificate to reflect the changes, according to court documents obtained by PEOPLE.

According to court documents, she said the change was due to "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."

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“She went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil,” said Musk, 52, per the WSJ excerpt.

As Isaacson wrote, "The rift pained him more than anything in his life since the infant death of his firstborn child Nevada ," referencing the child Musk had with Justine, who tragically died at 10 weeks from sudden infant death syndrome.

“I’ve made many overtures,” Musk said of attempts to connect with his daughter, per the excerpt, “but she doesn’t want to spend time with me.”

Isaacson wrote that Musk believes Jenna's political views were shaped at a progressive school she attended in Los Angeles. The comments were similar to remarks Musk gave during an interview with the  Financial Times last year.

In the interview, the dad of 10 went on to add that while their relationship may have changed, he had "very good relationships with all the others [children]." On Father's Day 2022, about a month after his daughter's petition, the billionaire shared in a social media message that he loves "all my kids so much."

Musk has been vocal on Twitter regarding his opinions about preferred pronouns for transgender and nonbinary people. After being criticized in December 2020 for a since-deleted tweet seemingly mocking the use of preferred pronouns, the SpaceX CEO said that while he "absolutely" supported transgender people, he believed "all these pronouns are an esthetic nightmare."

In May 2022, one month after his daughter's court filing, Musk also said that he plans to  vote for Republican candidates  moving forward, specifically  showing support  for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the controversial "Parental Rights in Education" bill, denounced as  the "Don't Say Gay" law .

Simon & Schuster's  Elon Musk  by Walter Isaacson is due out Sept. 12, and is available for pre-order now.

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Tesla Reaches Deals in China on Self-Driving Cars

Elon Musk met with the country’s premier, a longtime Tesla ally, and secured regulatory nods and a necessary partnership with a Chinese tech company.

By Keith Bradsher and Jack Ewing

Keith Bradsher reported from Beijing, and Jack Ewing from New York.

Tesla has concluded a series of arrangements with regulators and a Chinese artificial intelligence company during a quick trip to Beijing on Sunday and Monday by Elon Musk, the carmaker’s chief executive, potentially clearing the way for the company to offer its most advanced self-driving software on cars in China.

Tesla had faced a couple of hurdles to offering the latest level of autonomous driving, which it calls supervised Full Self-Driving. It has needed approval from Chinese regulators, who questioned whether the company took adequate precautions to protect data. And it has needed access to extremely high-resolution maps across the country.

The timing of Mr. Musk’s trip was significant. He arrived in China days after he identified self-driving technology and artificial intelligence as critical to Tesla’s future. Tesla is not just a car company, Mr. Musk told investors last week, saying, “We should be thought of as an A.I. robotics company.”

Approval of the technology in China would give Mr. Musk a much-needed win after regulators in the United States issued a harsh assessment of the system’s safety and performance in a report released on Friday.

Mr. Musk flew on his private jet to Beijing on Sunday morning and met almost immediately with Premier Li Qiang, China’s No. 2 official after Xi Jinping. Mr. Li is a longtime ally of Mr. Musk who, when he served as Communist Party secretary in Shanghai, helped clear the way for Tesla’s construction there of what is now the company’s largest car assembly plant.

The government-linked China Association of Automobile Manufacturers later announced that Tesla and five Chinese automakers had obtained approval from authorities and the association for their data security precautions on dozens of car models. The rules bar automakers in China from using software that would identify the face of anyone outside his or her vehicle, and include many other restrictions. Self-driving systems use cameras to guide vehicles.

The cars included Tesla’s Model 3 and Model Y. The five Chinese manufacturers included BYD , which is China’s dominant electric vehicle company and Tesla’s primary global rival, and Nio , a longtime player in China’s auto sector.

Tesla has run a data center in Shanghai for the past three years that handles the extensive information accumulated by the cars it has sold in China as they navigate the country’s roads. China has tightened its data security regulations in recent years to severely limit information leaving the country.

Tesla has separately concluded a deal with one of China’s largest tech companies, Baidu, to obtain high-resolution maps of road lanes, according to a person familiar with the deal who was not authorized to speak about it publicly. Tesla cars in China have used Baidu maps for four years for basic navigation, directing drivers where to turn, but have not previously had access to the higher-resolution maps.

Baidu is one of about 20 Chinese companies with the necessary credentials from the Chinese government to obtain access to high-resolution mapping data. Automakers are required to team up with one of these companies or be forced to rely heavily on cameras on their vehicles to create their own maps, as Tesla has done until now.

No details were immediately available on Monday on what Tesla has agreed to do in exchange for the approvals. China has a long history of urging multinationals to share considerable technology in exchange for access to its market. But the Chinese government insists that it does not force foreign companies to surrender their commercial secrets, and promised the Trump administration it would not do so.

Tesla’s stock jumped Monday on the news of the approvals in China. The company last week reported that its profit plunged 55 percent in the first three months of the year, while its revenue fell 9 percent. Days earlier, Tesla announced that it would lay off 10 percent of its worldwide work force, or about 14,000 employees .

As Chinese automakers introduce large numbers of their own electric car models this year, Tesla is doubling down on self-driving capabilities, putting the features into cars ahead of other automakers, despite concerns by regulators and safety experts about the capability of the company’s technology.

Tesla already offers what it calls “supervised Full Self Driving” in the United States. The company charges $99 a month to upgrade Tesla cars from its Autopilot or Enhanced Autopilot driver-assistance systems to the new level.

The main traffic safety regulator in the United States said on Friday that it was investigating Tesla’s recall of its Autopilot driver-assistance system because of concerns that the company had not done enough to ensure that drivers remained attentive while using the technology.

The regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said there had been at least 29 fatal accidents involving Autopilot and Full Self-Driving from January 2018 to August 2023. The analysis did not assess whether the number of deaths was more or fewer than if humans had been driving without those systems in use. Technology used by other carmakers does a better job of making sure that drivers are paying attention, the highway safety agency said.

Tesla’s use of the term autopilot “may lead drivers to believe that the automation has greater capabilities than it does and invite drivers to overly trust the automation,” the agency said.

The agency is also investigating two fatal crashes involving Ford Motors’ BlueCruise system, which allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel on many U.S. highways.

China has also had deaths from mistakes made by self-driving cars, which are now offered by numerous Chinese companies as well as Tesla. But crashes involving errors by human drivers are the frequent subject of viral videos in China, feeding a popular perception that self-driving cars may be safer.

Joy Dong contributed research.

Keith Bradsher is the Beijing bureau chief for The Times. He previously served as bureau chief in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Detroit and as a Washington correspondent. He has lived and reported in mainland China through the pandemic. More about Keith Bradsher

Jack Ewing writes about the auto industry with an emphasis on electric vehicles. More about Jack Ewing

The World of Elon Musk

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

Tesla: Elon Musk has gutted the part of the carmaking company responsible for building charging stations for electric vehicles , sowing uncertainty about the future of the largest and most reliable U.S. charging network.

X: An Australian court extended an injunction ordering the social media platform to remove videos depicting the recent stabbing of a bishop , setting the country’s judicial system up for a clash with Musk.

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

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 Musk ultrarich. Now, his reliance on the country may give Beijing leverage .  

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

• Elon Musk  had a strange way of phrasing a job offer to a former Twitter exec.
• Kayvon Beykpour, ex-head of product, recalled Musk's "hilarious" offer on Lenny's Podcast.
• Beykpour said Musk asked if he wanted to "swipe right" and "hang out and work on the product."

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

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

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

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

Beykpour notes biographer Walter Isaacson was also present in the room, silently observing all the while, before approaching him at the end of the conversation to ask for his contact information for potential follow-up questions. ( Isaacson published a biography on Musk last year.)

During one of their conversations, Musk asked if Beykpour would be interested in continuing to work on product at Twitter.

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"Elon was very cool about it," Beykpour said. "He actually used this phrase at the end of our conversation which I still find hilarious. He was just like, 'Do you want to just like come — You seem like you care about the product and you don't have dumb ideas. Do you want to come hang out?'"

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

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

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

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

Beykpour ultimately declined Musk's offer.

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

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

Beykpour did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Watch: 5 ways Elon Musk shook up Twitter as CEO

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