Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson

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The book was written by Walter Isaacson, a former executive at CNN, TIME and the Aspen Institute who had previously written best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci. 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. Sure, access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk lots of chances to sell his own mythology. 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.

This reporting did not pass the smell test to me, and I said so at the time; I wondered about the sourcing. 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). Remember when Musk said, “ I might pump but I don’t dump,” and then Tesla sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin? 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. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.Jill Lepore of The New Yorker wrote that "Isaacson's new biography depicts a man who wields more power than almost any other person on the planet but seems estranged from humanity itself". 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. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue and charismatic fantasist. 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? In his listed sources, we have only the text messages of one Ukrainian, who, for diplomatic purposes, may be obscuring what he knows.

It debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending September 16, 2023.While the stories are fascinating and guaranteed to spark a mountain of coverage, founders and entrepreneurs will also unearth valuable lessons.

But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist. Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother and sometimes business partner, is quoted as saying, “This is the wrong person for you. Brian Merchant of the Los Angeles Times criticized Isaacson's "great man" biography format as extremely dated and took issue with his persistent framing of Musk as a "moody but brilliant world-mover", writing, "The author will unearth unflattering personal anecdotes and share stories about the subject's capacity to be cruel. He really said he’d replace the rear seats with thrusters, and journalists spent time trying to figure out what the fuck that meant. There is even a “genius” boxed set of his biographies that includes Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and — somewhat incongruously — Steve Jobs.The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress? So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast.