Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has his fingers in lots of pies, none of them your commonplace 4 and Twenty – area exploration, electrical automobiles, AI and social media, amongst others.
He turned a world chief in area exploration when NASA had nearly vacated the sector, and his electrical automobile firm Tesla, headquartered within the gas-guzzling United States, has by far the largest market capitalisation of any automobile producer on this planet, but he has few formal {qualifications} in both subject.
Overview: Elon Musk: A Biography – Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster)
Many see Musk as a Twenty first-century fool savant. Others, watching him cut back an essential social media platform – Twitter – to cyber-rubble, consider him merely as an fool. Possibly each are true, or possibly different readings of his life are true. Aged 52, Musk actually deserves an excellent, looking out biography.
Walter Isaacson appears effectively credentialed for the duty. He has written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci which have received awards or change into bestsellers, or each.
Isaacson started his working life as a journalist. He spent greater than twenty years at Time throughout the journal’s heyday, rising to change into editor in 1996. Since then, he has been chief govt of the CNN cable tv community, headed the Aspen Institute (a longstanding non-profit suppose tank), change into a professor of historical past at Tulane College, and executed numerous jobs for each Republican and Democrat governments.
This 12 months he was awarded the Nationwide Humanities Medal by US President Joe Biden.
Isaacson’s advantage as a biographer is his reporter’s capability to assemble monumental quantities of fabric and rapidly render it as a (usually) clean and readable account of a life bursting with dramatic occasions. His venture solely started in 2021 and covers occasions as much as House X’s unsuccessful Starship rocket launch in April 2023.
Musk made himself obtainable for quite a few interviews. He gave Isaacson entry to locations and other people at key moments, equivalent to the acquisition of Twitter (now often called X), and frequently emailed Isaacson at 3am along with his ideas – and thought bubbles.
Isaacson additionally interviewed 130 different individuals, and his labours have uncovered newsworthy info that has been broadly reported – and, in a single case, corrected – because the e book’s publication.
As an illustration, Isaacson builds on earlier reporting by the Washington Publish to disclose the extent to which Musk’s Starlink satellite tv for pc community has been essential to the Ukrainian navy’s capability to battle Russia’s invasion, offering them with continued entry to the web on the battlefield after the Russians destroyed entry to different web companies. He reveals how Musk was persuaded by the Russians to quickly reduce off the Starlink entry after he believed their entreaties that any additional victories by Ukraine would provoke nuclear warfare.
The implications of those exceptional revelations have been examined by the ABC’s Matt Bevan in a latest episode of his If You’re Listening podcast. However though Isaacson revealed this info, he doesn’t pause to debate it in any element. That’s one of many shortcomings of this e book.
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Lord of the Flies on steroids
Maybe seduced by Musk’s obvious candour or a writer’s stress to hurry to print, Isaacson accepts his topic’s phrases with out enough scepticism. As an illustration, Musk’s childhood experiences at a veldskool in Nineteen Seventies South Africa learn like Lord of the Flies on steroids. Bullying was the norm and youngsters have been inspired to battle over meagre meals rations. “Each few years, one of many youngsters would die,” writes Isaacson.
Actually? Says who? Musk, apparently. Nobody from the college is listed within the supply notes, to verify or refute this account. All through the e book, Musk comes off as a shameless self-dramatiser, however that doesn’t imply his biographer ought to succumb to it.
Isaacson is an adherent of the “grand man” college of historical past. He has written just one biography of a girl – the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna. He’s far much less concerned about, or comfy with, the function constructions and techniques play in shaping occasions.
As Jill Lepore identified within the New Yorker, Isaacson additionally has “an govt’s affinity for the C-suite”, which means he pays little consideration to the individuals who work for Musk or the influence of his actions on their lives.
The core query driving the biography is: has Elon Musk needed to be such an “asshole” (Isaacson’s time period) to attain what he has? Isaacson acknowledges it’s a lot the identical query he requested about Steve Jobs in his earlier biography of the Apple cofounder.
I misplaced rely of the instances the query, or a variation of it, was posed throughout the e book’s 670 pages, however in basic Time-style both-sidesing, Isaacson retains toggling between admonishing Musk for behaving like an “asshole” and admiring his capability to get outcomes. He hardly ever if ever lifts his gaze past this binary, which implies he ignores classes realized from all these individuals, previous and current, who’ve achieved issues with out treating individuals appallingly.
It additionally means achievements are seen solely via the prism of 1 individual’s actions. In a perceptive article in Vox, Constance Grady reminds us that Musk’s dedication to override security considerations in Tesla factories has led to employee damage charges equal to these in a slaughterhouse.
Grady permits that Isaacson stories the elevated damage charges, however notes his vagueness about precisely what sort of accidents occurred. Citing 2018 work by the Heart for Investigative Reporting, she reveals Tesla employees have been “sliced by equipment, crushed by forklifts, burned in electrical explosions, and sprayed with molten metallic”.
She additionally notes Isaacson downplaying the corporate’s expertise of COVID-19. Musk, a fervent libertarian allergic to any type of regulation, saved the manufacturing facility operating throughout the international pandemic. Isaacson says “the manufacturing facility skilled no critical COVID outbreak”, however Grady stories there have been 450 optimistic circumstances.
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From Twitter to X
Musk has an immense work ethic and expects everybody working for him to share it. By relentlessly questioning all assumptions – “the legal guidelines of physics are unbreakable; the whole lot else is a advice” – Musk and people working in his corporations have certainly achieved quite a bit.
I’m not actually in any place to evaluate Musk’s contribution to area exploration, AI or automobile manufacturing. However I’m keen to just accept the proof of Isaacson’s biography that they’ve been substantial – or, within the case of AI, promise to be.
I really feel higher capable of assess Musk’s contribution to social media. Right here, the proof offered by Isaacson and lots of others is that Musk has broken, maybe irretrievably, Twitter – which he has renamed X, a letter of the alphabet to which he appears inordinately connected. Not solely has he named one in all his kids X, he waves away the letter’s different connotations.
In 1999, Musk cofounded the net financial institution X.com. He quickly realized there was one other firm aimed toward revolutionising on-line transactions, PayPal, based at across the identical time by Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and Luke Nosek.
The businesses merged in 2000, amid a basic Silicon Valley phallus-waving battle over who had the concept first and who ought to take over whom. Levchin derided X.com as a “seedy website you wouldn’t speak about in well mannered firm”. “If you wish to take over the world’s monetary system,” Musk rebutted, “then X is the higher identify.”
Musk misplaced the nomenclature warfare then, however realised his dream greater than twenty years later when he purchased Twitter for US$44 billion and will name it no matter he favored.
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Impulsive, decided, clueless
The image of Musk that emerges in Isaacson’s e book is of an impulsive, completely decided one who is genuinely gifted as a physicist and businessperson, and genuinely clueless in relation to human relationships. He both doesn’t get individuals or doesn’t care about them – or, extra seemingly, each.
He dotes on his kids, particularly X (I suppose that you must do one thing to compensate for naming a toddler after a letter), but he’s able to breathtaking callousness and rank sexism. He whispered in his first spouse’s ear on their marriage ceremony evening that he was the alpha male within the relationship.
In 2021, Musk’s third spouse, Shivon Zilis, was pregnant with twins conceived with Musk by in-vitro fertilisation, and was in a hospital in Texas experiencing problems. On the identical time, and in the identical hospital, a girl serving as a surrogate for Musk and his ex-wife, Claire Boucher – higher often called the Canadian-born musician Grimes – was additionally experiencing being pregnant problems.
Zilis and Boucher, to not point out the surrogate, didn’t know concerning the different’s being pregnant.
As Isaacson drolly feedback elsewhere within the e book:
Musk developed an aura that made him appear, at instances, like an alien, as if his Mars mission have been an aspiration to return residence, and his need to construct humanoid robots have been a quest for kinship.
Musk is on report saying humanity is in peril of not having sufficient good individuals and it’s his obligation to populate the planet with as lots of them as attainable. Thus far, he has 11 kids. If that notion sounds disturbingly like eugenics, it isn’t one thing Isaacson displays on as he studiously paperwork Musk’s chaotic love life.
Nor does he delay his rat-a-tat-tat narration of each twist and switch in Musk’s dramatic life to query his topic’s burning need to make humanity a “multi-planet civilisation” by colonising Mars. Musk is obsessive about this purpose as a result of he’s anxious concerning the prospect of our planet being destroyed by the accelerating penalties of local weather change.
A laudable ambition, little question. However neither he nor his biographer stops to ask: if humanity fails so badly that it destroys this world, why would you suppose it might make life higher on one other, already inhospitable planet?
NASA/JPL, Public area, through Wikimedia Commons
Startling achievements and infantile petulance
It’s straightforward and tempting to poke enjoyable at Musk. Maybe it’s because his character combines grandiose visions with arrested growth, startling achievements with infantile petulance. His concept of weight-reduction plan is to pay money for the diabetes remedy Ozempic – the dieter’s drug du jour – start an intermittent fasting regime, then make his first meal of the day a bacon-and-cheese burger and sweet-potato fries topped with a cookie-dough ice-cream milkshake.
Or do you keep in mind how Musk responded in 2018 to a light rebuke of his frenetic need to play the hero rescuing kids trapped in a collapse Thailand with a purpose-built mini-craft? That’s proper, by labelling one of many precise rescuers a “pedo man”.
However it’s dangerously straightforward. Social media performs an essential function in trendy society. No matter its advantages, and they’re many, the algorithms embedded in social media platforms – by their homeowners, let’s not overlook – neatly sidestep nuance and motive in debate, turbo-charge battle and emotion, and play a job within the unfold of misinformation and disinformation.
Musk is now the proprietor of 1 such social media platform. However since shopping for Twitter final 12 months, he has not been capable of bend it to his will. His mistake – maybe deadly, based on Isaacson – seems to be that he sees it as a expertise firm, one thing he understands, when it’s actually an “promoting medium based mostly on human feelings and relationships”, one thing he doesn’t perceive.
Musk proclaims himself a free-speech advocate, however he has already displayed flagrant biases. He allowed Ye (previously Kanye West) to tweet anti-Semitic remarks. He tweeted a florid conspiracy principle concerning the savage assault on Paul Pelosi, husband of the then speaker of the US Home of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi. And he has asserted China’s repression of the Uyghurs was a problem that “had two sides” – maybe as a result of China was essential to his automobile firm, Tesla.
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Musk has change into obsessed by what he calls the “woke-mind virus”, which he believes is infecting social discourse. Regardless of the excesses and blind spots of these on the progressive facet of politics, Musk sees this virus nearly all over the place.
A longtime devotee of comics and science fiction, he has more and more given rein to his conspiratorial tendencies, as if he actually thinks The Matrix trilogy was a documentary collection. In one in all his 3am tweets, Musk wrote: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci”. As Isaacson trenchantly feedback:
It made little sense, wasn’t humorous, and managed, in simply 5 phrases, to mock
transgender individuals, conjure up conspiracies concerning the 81-year-old public well being
official Anthony Fauci, scare off extra advertisers, and create a brand new handful of
enemies who would now by no means purchase Tesla.
Nor does Musk’s perception in free speech lengthen to the social media postings of Twitter workers or their feedback on inside Slack messaging. He trampled on the corporate’s inside tradition of wholesome dissent, peremptorily firing three dozen workers who had criticised the corporate.
His longstanding, largely profitable mantra of getting issues executed cheaply and rapidly, no matter impediments, lastly ran aground after he proposed chopping the corporate’s workforce by 75%.
Simply earlier than Christmas final 12 months he determined it was crucial to maneuver all the corporate’s servers from Sacramento to Oregon as a approach of saving cash. Keep in mind how presidential aspirant Ron De Santis’ large dwell interview on X went horribly unsuitable earlier this 12 months? That was due to issues with the servers, writes Isaacson.
Extra lately, the drastic chopping of the location’s moderators led to floods of misinformation following the assault on Israel by Hamas on October 7.
Musk has additionally begun to understand that promoting, which beforehand comprised 90% of Twitter’s income, is inclined to public perceptions. It fell by greater than half within the first six months of Musk’s possession, based on Isaacson.
Geopolitical implications
As talked about earlier, Musk has discovered himself taking part in a key function in a warfare with geopolitical implications.
Instantly earlier than invading Ukraine in early 2022, Russia launched a malware assault that crippled the US satellite tv for pc firm offering web service to Ukraine. Its deputy prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, reached out to Musk through Twitter, interesting for assist.
Musk did, donating US$80 million price of expertise to Ukrainian forces, together with Starlink’s photo voltaic and battery kits, which have been capable of defeat Russian efforts to jam them.
Musk’s intervention was broadly praised, however in September 2022, when the Ukrainians deliberate to make use of Starlink to information a drone assault on the Russian naval fleet at Sevastopol in Crimea, he refused to assist. He had been listening to the Russian ambassador, who had reached out to him just a few weeks earlier than.
Russia had annexed Crimea in 2014 and the ambassador persuaded him not solely of Russia’s inalienable proper to Crimea, however of the prospect of nuclear warfare if the Ukrainians have been allowed to try to retake it. He advised Isaacson he had been learning international coverage and navy historical past: “Musk defined to me the small print of Russian legislation and doctrine that decreed such a response.”
Has expertise put a person non-public citizen in such a place earlier than?
Particular person corporations, such because the Krupp manufacturing firm, notoriously performed an essential function in arming Nazi Germany. Particular person media proprietors, equivalent to Rupert Murdoch, have performed a job in encouraging warfare, as when Murdoch’s media shops overwhelmingly editorialised in favour of america invading Iraq in 2003.
The mixture of recent international communication applied sciences and a long time of unwillingness by governments to search out methods to manage them adequately has now put one unelected citizen, as childishly impulsive as he’s sensible, in a uncommon place.
The query shouldn’t be merely, is he outfitted to make such selections, however how and why has it come to this?
Matthew Ricketson doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.