📚 Finished reading: Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson.
This is one of the more famous biographies of Elon Musk so far. Reading it is part of my ill-fated efforts to understand what on Earth is driving the people who are causing life in 2025 to be far more horrific than it needs to be; to comprehend the incomprehensible. See also: Hillbilly Elegy.
Although when an unwitting colleague found out I had mainlined my reading straight from Vance into Musk they gently enquired whether perhaps I needed a wellness check. I’m sure they’re right.
Of course the biography wasn’t written yesterday. It was published in 2023 - so somewhat before the guy in question fully started literally dancing like a puppet on Trump’s election stage and using a chainsaw to diminish the power and reputation of the former world superpower known as the United States.
That said, the book is recent enough to describe some of his descent into conspiracy madness and new-found affiliation with some of illiberal ideas and powerbrokers of today - along with his ability to make extremely cringe and society-destroying tweets.
At one point his brother apparently felt compelled to lock Elon’s phone in a hotel safe to keep him away from overnight text-based destruction. Presumably unable to survive even one night without the ability to type “interesting” underneath a random proto-Nazi tweet, Musk called hotel security to bust into the safe.
It certainly covers his acquisition of Twitter in detail, along with SpaceX, Tesla, Paypal and the other businesses that made him rich and famous. Most of these things weren’t his invention of course. The guy who sued people to make them call him Tesla’s founder as opposed to what he really was, an early investor, is not shy of taking credit for all the great wonders of the world.
But of course none of these Great Men of Modern HIstory were really self-made. He did not invent Paypal, nor Tesla, nor Twitter. In fact his association with Paypal was really down to his own attempt to create a company doing something similar, called - wait for it - x.com - failed. Unfortunately he still owns the URL as it turns out.
Of course, whatever one’s opinion of Elon is, I don’t mean to give him no credit. Indisputably some of his particular talents drove progress on some of these projects onwards. And (some of) this may have been a wonderful thing if the original missions around saving humanity, helping the environment and so on had remained his focus. And we ignore the way he abused people along the way.
Of course it is extremely hard for me to read the book without a certain amount of prejudice and bias, knowing what came next. That said, I think I would, even without Musk’s recent ventures into what passes for politics these days, have felt the author gave him a bit too easy of a time. Perhaps this comes from the fact it’s clear that
The general vibe once we get past his childhood is that of a tortured genius. That he might abuse his workers, his family, his friends, especially when overtaken by one of his dark moods.
Elon’s moods would cycle through light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as “demon mode.”
He might take shortcuts that don’t work out, break laws, inadvertently blow up things, fall out with his family and the like. But that it’s all in the service of something greater.
This emotional shutoff valve could make him callous, but it also made him a risk-seeking innovator. “He learned to shut down fear,” she says. “If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”
The takeaway seems to be that we should somehow tolerate the harm and havoc he wreaks on those around him - at least the the chunks of his impulsivity and cruelty that are detailed here - because we need the visionary successes that those allowances permit him to make.
But do we? Do we actually? Even now?
Some of this bias probably comes from who the author had access to. The book is very detailed and he clearly had access to a ton of the high-powered folk that surrounded Elon. So it’s useful and educational on that front. But there’s not so much from for instance a random worker on the Tesla manufacture floor or the group of people that wanted to unionise. To be fair there is a mention of the workplace injury rate being higher than elsewhere, but it’s not really dug into.
It’s certainly not that the book doesn’t document his business and personal failings. It’s just that it seems to very often excuse them. Although there is enough detail that I think if you just knew Elon as a genius inventor who simply wants to save humanity you will learn a lot about how and why he does what he does, and the flaws that come along for the ride.
Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an asshole? The answer is no, of course not. One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth. As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex.
Even the best people, he wrote, are “molded out of faults”
I did learn some things from this book that could be useful in understanding what came next.
His childhood seems to have been very difficult, growing up in a challenging place at a violent time with an extraordinarily abusive father.
Errol Musk, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist who to this day bedevils Elon. … He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was. Elon would just have to stand there, not allowed to leave. “It was mental torture,”
He was horribly bullied by his peers and his parents. Isaacson suggests that this why he became obsessed with owning the grown-up playground of bullies that is Twitter.
But there were two other reasons, I think, that Musk wanted to own Twitter. The first was a simple one. It was fun, like an amusement park. It offered political smackdowns, intellectual gladiator matches, dopey memes, important public announcements, valuable marketing, bad puns, and unfiltered opinions. Are you not entertained?
And second, I believe there was a psychological, personal yearing. Twitter was the ultimate playground. As a kid, he was beaten and bullied on the playground, never having been endowed with the emotional dexterity needed to thrive on that rugged terrain. It instilled a deep pain and sometimes caused him to react to slights far too emotionally, but it also is what girded him to be able to face the world and fight every battle fiercely. When he felt dinged up, cornered, bullied, either online or in person, it took him back to a place that was super painful, where he was dissed by his father and bullied by his classmates. But now he could own the playground.
He at least self-identifies as having certain issues of the mind. Along with I think Asperger’s Syndrome, although it isn’t clear to me that he was ever diagnosed with it, or anything else that he seems to be exhibiting the signs of.
There’s plenty detailed about his way of working that clearly foreshadowed what he would do to the US state, not that it seems there was really a way of avoiding this unelected leader of a fake government department doing what he does.
Musk is a big fan of removing things, deleting things, cancelling and cutting anything that might not be technically essential given the laws of physics. He will bully engineers to do that no matter how much of a bad idea they think it is. If it goes wrong then, fine, it goes wrong. In the book he repeatedly states that he believes that if you’re not having to undo 10% of the cuts you make then you’re not cutting enough.
This of course might work well for developing a new flange for a car or whatever, but I’m not so sure it’s so easy to undo, for instance, mass firings within the public sector. He is drawn to, obsessed by, taking risks. When it comes to public “service” and society though, perhaps some risks are not worth taking.
His penchant for censorship and persecution, despite his hypocritical pronouncements on free speech is likewise nothing new. After he purchased Twitter:
They agreed that the next priority would be identifying and firing those who were not trustworthy, or more specifically, those who did not seem to be completely loyal to Musk.
The team began going over the Slack messages and social media postings of Twitter employees, focusing on those who had high levels of access to the software stack. “He told us to find the people who might be disgruntled or a threat,” Dhaval says. They searched for keywords, including “Elon,” on the public Slack channel.
