Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson

Product Information

The Washington Post followed it up, publishing the excerpt where Isaacson claimed Musk had essentially shut down a military offensive on a personal whim. 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". One of the other things Isaacson doesn’t mention is the alleged racist working conditions at Tesla’s Fremont factory. Sure, access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk lots of chances to sell his own mythology.

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. Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training," Isaacson concludes in the last lines of his life of Musk.In the following paragraph, Isaacson quotes text messages from Fedorov, who had “secretly shared with him [Musk] the details of how the drone subs were crucial” to the Ukrainians. One of the things that anyone covering Elon Musk for long enough has to reckon with is that he loves to tell hilarious lies. What Isaacson’s biography reveals through its personalized lens on Musk’s work with Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, and more is not only what Musk wants, but how and why he plans to do it. CNN had a story summarizing an excerpt of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk that claimed Musk had shut down SpaceX’s satellite network, Starlink, to prevent a “Ukrainian sneak attack” on the Russian navy. While writing that it is "strictly a book of reportage" and that "[Isaacson's] reporting is rigorous and dogged", the reviewer noted that the book "asks all the wrong questions".

Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground.We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. The thing you learn after a while on the Musk beat is that his most self-aggrandizing statements usually bear the least resemblance to reality. Within the first three paragraphs of the book, Isaacson describes a wilderness survival camp Musk attended, where “every few years, one of the kids would die. On November 10, 2023, it was announced that A24 had purchased the film rights for an adaptation to be directed by Darren Aronofsky. He now says that the policy had been implemented earlier, but the Ukrainians did not know it, and that night he simply reaffirmed the policy.

There was a way to find out what’s true here, and it would have been to interview more sources, both Ukrainian and US military ones. Isaacson later said in an interview that "Elon is very mercurial, but he never told me not to put anything in the book. Arguably the entire Musk family has an interest in presenting Elon Musk as preternaturally tough and also as using his tough childhood as an excuse for his continuing bad behavior. Over the years, the criticism has been that Tesla has gotten a great deal of assistance from state, federal, and local governments, sometimes screwing them in the process, as demonstrated by the Buffalo Gigafactory.Similarly, Isaacson falls flat on racial issues — the existence of apartheid in Musk’s youth is barely mentioned. Haldeman’s beliefs are characterized by Isaacson as “quirky conservative populist views,” which… led him to immigrate to Pretoria, South Africa, which was ruled by the racist apartheid regime.

He really said he’d replace the rear seats with thrusters, and journalists spent time trying to figure out what the fuck that meant. Some of his lieutenants insist that he will eventually listen to reason, but Isaacson sees firsthand Musk’s habit of deriding as a saboteur or an idiot anyone who resists him. Yet even as Musk struggles to relate to the actual humans around him, his plans for humanity are grand. Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, published Monday, delivers as promised — a comprehensive, deeply reported chronicle of the world-shaping tech mogul’s life, a twin to the author’s similarly thick 2011 biography of Steve Jobs.The portrait that emerges is one that resembles a hard-charging, frequently alienating Gilded Age-style captain of industry, with a particular fixation on AI that ties everything together. A painstakingly excavation of the tortured unquiet mind of the world’s richest man… Isaacson’s book is not a soaring portrait of a captain of industry, but rather an exhausting ride through the life of a man who seems incapable of happiness. One of the greatest biographers in America has written a massive book about the richest man in the world. Is achieving the specific vision Musk has for the world worth the injuries he’s inflicted on his workforce?