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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
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982181281
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982181284
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.25 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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Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

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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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About The Book

About the author.

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of  Time . He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
• Length: 688 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982181284

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Raves and Reviews

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year "Whatever you think of Mr. Musk, he is a man worth understanding— which makes this a book worth reading." — The Economist "With Elon Musk , Walter Isaacson offers both an engaging chronicle of his subject’s busy life so far and some compelling answers..." — Wall Street Journal "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 . Details ranging from the personally salacious to the geopolitically volatile have already made the rounds — the rare example of a major book publication causing a news cycle in its own right...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. 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....Isaacson’s book is like a decoder ring, tying the mercurial Musk’s various obsessions into a coherent worldview with a startlingly concrete goal at its center." — Politico "[The book] has everything you'd expect from a book on Musk—stories of tragedy, triumph, and turmoil.... While the stories are fascinating and guaranteed to spark a mountain of coverage, founders and entrepreneurs will also unearth valuable lessons." — Inc. "Isaacson has gathered information from the man’s admirers and critics. He lays all of it out.... The book is bursting with stories....A deeply engrossing tale of a spectacular American innovator. " — New York Journal of Books "One of the greatest biographers in America has written a massive book about the richest man in the world. This fast-paced biography, based on more than a hundred interviews...[is] a head-spinning tale about a vain, brilliant, sometimes cruel figure whose ambitions are actively shaping the future of human life." —Ron Charles on CBS Sunday Morning "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." — The Sunday Times "An experienced biographer’s comprehensive study." —The Observer "Walter Isaacson’s all-access biography… Its portrait of the tech maverick is fascinating." —The Telegraph "Isaacson boils Musk down to two men… the result is a beat-by-beat book that follows him insider important rooms and explores obscure regions of his mind." —The Times

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

Isaacson’s new biography, ‘elon musk,’ attempts to reconcile the tech billionaire’s flaws with his achievements.

If you were trying to reverse-engineer from Elon Musk’s life a blueprint for creating the sort of tech icon who, at 52 years old, merits a 688-page biography by Walter Isaacson, the resulting plans would be fairly straightforward — just rather hard to execute.

Take a bright, exceedingly headstrong, socially maladjusted young boy and forge his character in an abusive, friendless childhood. For solace, give him only science fiction novels, superhero comics, and a cadre of younger siblings and cousins to boss around, imbuing him with delusions of grandeur and a taste for unchecked power.

If he survives that, send him to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. Give him a relentless work ethic, an addiction to risk and a moral compass that puts his own interests at its magnetic north pole. Add a keen eye for brilliant engineering minds he can mine for ideas and push to achieve the seemingly impossible, while he hogs the profits and credit. And then hope that he gets very lucky at pivotal moments along the way, so that his compulsive risk-taking doesn’t blow up in his face, even when his rockets do.

The traits that conspired to make Musk the world’s richest man were all in evidence when Isaacson decided in 2021 to make him the subject of his next biography. “ Elon Musk ,” being published Tuesday, must have seemed a natural extension of Isaacson’s “great man” canon, which includes biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs . (Isaacson’s subjects are almost all men.)

But Einstein, Franklin and Jobs were dead by the time Isaacson’s biographies hit bookstores (albeit by just weeks in Jobs’s case), whereas Musk — chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X (formerly Twitter) — remains very alive. In the past two years, Musk’s public image has morphed from that of the hard-charging high-tech visionary who inspired Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark in “ Iron Man ” into something more disturbing and polarizing.

How do you take the full measure of an increasingly troubled figure whose life’s work and legacy still hang in the balance? At stake is not just Musk’s place in history, but also his place in the present and the future. If Isaacson fails to pin that down in a satisfying way, it might be because Musk is such a fast-moving target, and Isaacson prioritizes revealing anecdotes and behind-the-scenes reportage over a sophisticated critical lens.

Fortunately, the juicy details are plentiful, especially in the book’s final third, which covers the two especially volatile years Isaacson spent shadowing Musk. (There are wild capers and personal dramas worthy of a soap opera throughout, but most of the ones you’ll encounter earlier in the book have been well documented before, including in Ashlee Vance’s thorough 2015 Musk biography.)

New details include that Musk single-handedly scuttled a Ukrainian sneak attack on a Russian naval fleet in Crimea (more on that below). We learn that Musk’s girlfriend Grimes was in an Austin hospital visiting a surrogate pregnant with their then-secret second child in 2021 at the same time Musk’s employee Shivon Zilis was in the same hospital pregnant with then-secret twins fathered by Musk via IVF, unbeknownst to Grimes. (“Perhaps it is no surprise,” Isaacson deadpans, “that Musk decided to fly west that Thanksgiving weekend to deal with the simpler issues of rocket engineering.”) And we discover that Musk and Grimes have a third, previously unreported child, named Techno Mechanicus Musk, bringing Musk’s tally of known offspring to 11.

This being an Isaacson biography, though, it’s clear he intends for “Elon Musk” to be more than a bunch of interesting stories about a controversial guy. He frames it as a character study, a quest to understand and perhaps reconcile the contradictions at Musk’s core. But the central question he sets out to answer in the book’s prologue feels a bit too easy. It’s the same one that lay at the heart of “ Steve Jobs ”: Are Musk’s personal demons and flaws also what make his spectacular achievements possible? Seven pages in, there are no prizes for guessing what Isaacson’s answer will be. Though the destination lacks suspense, the ride is entertaining enough, particularly for those who haven’t closely followed Musk’s high jinks. And despite the book’s length, it zips along thanks to Isaacson’s economical prose and short chapters.

Musk, who at age 5 traipsed solo across Pretoria to reach a cousin’s birthday party after his parents left him home as a punishment, has always had a little crazy in him. To help explain it, Isaacson introduces us early on to Elon’s brutal, “Jekyll-and-Hyde” father, Errol Musk. He’s a man Elon mostly despises but also, in his worst moments, resembles. When Musk’s first wife, Justine, reached her wit’s end with him, she would warn, “You’re turning into your father.”

Elon’s childhood in South Africa reads like the origin story for a superhero, or maybe a supervillain, at least as he and his family members tell it. That may be by design: Musk has a penchant for self-mythologizing, casting himself as the sole hero of complex origin stories like that of Tesla’s founding.

Already, one of the book’s critical passages has sparked geopolitical drama — and an embarrassing public walk-back by Isaacson. In an excerpt from the book published in The Washington Post on Friday , Isaacson recounts how Musk single-handedly foiled a Ukrainian sneak attack on a Russian naval fleet in Crimea by cutting off the Starlink satellite internet service Ukraine’s drones were relying on. Isaacson writes that Musk made the decision because he feared that the attack could lead to nuclear war, based on his conversation weeks earlier with a Russian ambassador.

But when CNN obtained the excerpt and reported on it, Musk tweeted a different account. He said he didn’t cut Ukraine’s Starlink service in Crimea; it was already deactivated there, and he refused the Ukrainians’ emergency request to activate it so they could carry out the attack. Isaacson tweeted Friday that Musk’s version of the story was accurate, meaning the passage in his book is misleading.

The larger concern is whether Isaacson’s heavy reliance on Musk as a primary source throughout his reporting kept him too close to his subject. Swaths of the book are told largely through Musk’s eyes and those of his confidants. And the majority of tales about his exploits cast him as the genius protagonist even as they expose his self-destructive tendencies or his capacity for cruelty.

To the author’s credit, the book boasts a large number of citations for sources and interviews. Isaacson also takes care to include corroborating or conflicting accounts of controversial episodes, such as Musk’s vicious grudge against Tesla’s original founders. (If you ever want to make an enemy for life, try standing between Musk and full credit for a project he was involved in.) And, contrary to some of his most adamant critics, Musk really does seem to possess a remarkable brain for physics, engineering and business — if perhaps not for running a social media firm. Isaacson persuasively dismisses the notion that Musk owes his success largely to inherited wealth, or that he’s a huckster profiting only from the inventions of others. Musk’s companies have thrived both because of and in spite of him.

Isaacson at times interjects his own, sometimes dryly funny, counterpoints to some of Musk’s more outlandish claims. After he quotes Musk enthusing about his far-fetched Hyperloop plan, “This is going to change everything,” Isaacson begins the next paragraph: “It didn’t change everything.” (What it did change, by some reckonings, were California’s plans to build a high-speed rail line, which Musk has acknowledged he sought to undermine.)

In one of his most entertaining and revealing bits of original reporting, Isaacson fills in the backstory behind a series of technical glitches that plagued Twitter in late 2022 and early 2023, and it does not disappoint.

Read an excerpt from “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson

Steamrolling past Twitter employees’ warnings, Musk insisted on immediately moving thousands of the company’s computer servers from a Sacramento data center to another facility to save money. When they balked, insisting it would take months to do safely, Musk dragooned a carful of friends and family into canceling their Christmas plans to drive to Sacramento, where he personally disconnected one of the servers with the help of a security guard’s pocket knife. He then called in a team of employees to start loading the rest onto a semi truck and some moving vans.

On many occasions over the years, Musk has horrified deputies with these sorts of stunts, only to be vindicated when they pay off handsomely. But in this case it turned out the employees, whom he had threatened to fire for their timidity, had been right. The move caused cascading glitches in Twitter’s software, including the ones that afflicted a highly anticipated live audio event with presidential candidate Ron DeSantis the following May.

The Musk we know today is different from the Musk Isaacson began following in 2021. Since then, he has lurched rightward politically, embracing conspiracy theories and railing that the “woke mind virus” could unravel civilization; staged a dramatic takeover of Twitter, restoring banned accounts including Donald Trump’s while alienating advertisers and the mainstream media; been accused of sexual misdeeds and revealed as the secret father of multiple additional children; founded a new AI company; and become a power broker in both the Ukraine war and Republican politics. And that’s leaving out a lot.

Isaacson pins the changes at least partly on the pandemic, which drew out Musk’s conspiratorial side, supercharged his Twitter addiction and amped up his natural mistrust of bureaucratic regulations as covid-19 restrictions hampered Tesla production in California and China. In some ways, as Isaacson points out, Musk is becoming more like his father, Errol, whom Isaacson has found in recent years to be descending into full-on paranoia, conspiracism and overt racism.

So what does Isaacson ultimately make of Elon? In a brief, final assessment, Isaacson takes us back to where he started. The tech tycoon’s “epic feats” don’t excuse his “bad behavior,” but “it’s important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly.”

A harder but more fruitful question than how to reconcile Musk’s idealism and remarkable achievements with his “demon mode,” as Grimes calls it, might have been: What does it say about our world today that so much depends on a man like Musk? That the fate of electric vehicles, self-driving cars, public infrastructure projects, global space exploration, the rules of online discourse, and military combatants can be altered at the whim of a notoriously whimsical man? And if he ever does go full Errol, will there be anything we can do about it?

By Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster. 688 pp. $35

What Makes Elon Musk Tick?

Walter Isaacson, a biographer who has written about Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs, is working on a book about the world’s richest man.

By Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris

What drives Elon Musk?

Musk, the world’s richest man, has long been an object of fascination as the founder of the electric car company Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX. But during the past few weeks, as he flirted with buying Twitter and then offered about $44 billion for the influential social platform, all under blanket media coverage, curiosity about what moves him has grown.

Several biographies dig into his life and work so far, including “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future ,” by Ashlee Vance, which was published in 2015, and “Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century ,” by Tim Higgins, which came out last year.

Another book, which Musk announced last summer — on Twitter — is also in the works, this one by the biographer Walter Isaacson, who has written best sellers on Leonardo da Vinci , Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs . Isaacson’s longtime publisher, Simon & Schuster, plans to release the book, which doesn’t yet have a scheduled publication date.

“I’ve always been interested in innovators and people who push the boundaries, and he’s pushing the most important and difficult boundaries,” Isaacson said.

This week, after Twitter accepted Musk’s bid, Isaacson prepared for a reporting trip that includes traveling with Musk and visiting people from his past. He has already interviewed about 200 people around Musk, Isaacson said, and spent days talking to him and shadowing him.

In a telephone interview on Wednesday, Isaacson spoke about the challenges of writing a biography about a figure who is constantly evolving and expanding his empire: It’s like “trying to take notes while drinking from a fire hose,” he said.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

When did you first approach Musk about a biography?

We started talking about seven, eight months ago.

It wasn’t like I pursued him or he pursued me. We started talking about it, seeing if it would make sense. I have no deal with him, there’s no contract, it was just, “Will you give me access?” And he said, “I’ll do it,” and I said, “Yeah, I think I’ll do it.”

Ten minutes later he tweeted it out.

What do you think makes Musk such a fascinating and complex character, both for the public and to you as a writer?

I’ve always been interested in innovators and people who push the boundaries, and he’s pushing the most important and difficult boundaries, which are electric cars, solar, sustainable energy, space travel and robot and human computer neural link interfaces.

Most of your previous books have been about the lives of historical figures, and your Jobs biography came out after his death, so the arc of their lives and the scope of their accomplishments are clear. But Musk is still making daily news. How does that change your approach as a biographer?

Dealing with his life is like trying to take notes while drinking from a fire hose. It keeps coming fast.

I’m not quite sure how the story unfolds yet. I’ll be driven by events. The good news is, I can let events drive the book, I don’t have to force an artificial deadline.

How do you shape the kind of chaos that Musk creates into a coherent long-form narrative?

It is definitely going to be a challenge. This thing really is a movable feast. But the main thing is just to make it a clear narrative, from a troubled childhood in South Africa to becoming one of the most influential people on the planet.

What kind of access have you gotten to him? He hasn’t always been that cooperative with reporters in the past.

He’s been very, very open, not only him and the people around him, but he’s been very good at allowing me access to people from his past. I’ve had interviews with about 200 different people already, and I have spent, I would say, many days talking to him at length and shadowing him; I’ve been traveling where he goes.

What did you make of the news of his Twitter takeover? Did it seem like a move that was in keeping with your understanding of his character and his ambitions?

He’s always been fascinated by Twitter and deeply understands how it can be used and maybe how it can be improved. His fascination with Twitter doesn’t surprise me.

If his purchase of Twitter goes through, it will hugely expand his business empire and his sphere of influence. How does this news change the scope of your biography?

It adds a new subplot. The important thing is to tie it together into a narrative and show how these missions fit together.

Musk is famous for trolling, making explosive off-the-cuff remarks and reversing consequential statements. How do you handle that in a long form narrative, knowing that his positions could look very different after publication?

I don’t think he’s as random as he allows himself to appear. I think it’s much more thought through.

Does the fact that he’s constantly making news make it harder or easier to write a book about him?

The good thing about Elon Musk is everybody wants to talk about him and everybody’s got thoughts about him.

What are the respective challenges and obstacles of writing about a living versus a dead subject?

Well, it’s a lot more thrilling of a ride.

Alexandra Alter writes about publishing and the literary world. Before joining The Times in 2014, she covered books and culture for The Wall Street Journal. Prior to that, she reported on religion, and the occasional hurricane, for The Miami Herald. More about Alexandra Alter

Elizabeth A. Harris writes about books and publishing for The Times.  More about Elizabeth A. Harris

The World of Elon Musk

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

A Testy Interview:  In the wake of a rough interview with Elon Musk that touched upon Donald Trump, his reported drug use and hate speech on X,  the former television anchor Don Lemon said that his deal for a new talk show on X was called off  just days before it was scheduled to air.

Tesla:  Amid slower car sales and growing competition, investors are growing concerned about the future of the Musk-owned company .

The Musk Foundation: After making billions in tax-deductible donations to his charity, Musk has failed recently to donate the minimum required to justify a tax break  — and what he did give often supported his interests.

OpenAI: Musk, who helped found the A.I. start-up in 2015, has filed a lawsuit  accusing the company and its chief executive  of breaching a contract  by putting profits and commercial interests ahead of the public good.

SpaceX: Musk said that the private rocket company, which he founded in 2002, had switched where it was incorporated to Texas from Delaware , a move that could bolster the Lone Star State’s standing with business .

Neuralink: Neuralink, a company working to develop computer interfaces that can be implanted in human brains, placed its first device in a patient , said Musk, who founded the company.

Elon Musk Biography Shoots to Top of Bestseller List Ahead of Release

Walter Isaacson's latest tome will release on Sept. 12.

By Anna Tingley

Anna Tingley

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If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission.

Best-selling author and historian Walter Isaacson has penned the definitive biographies of some of the most powerful figures in history, from Steve Jobs to Albert Einstein, and this month he’ll finally be releasing his highly anticipated tome about Elon Musk . The biography, simply tiled “Elon Musk, ” officially releases on Sept. 12 and is currently available to pre-order on Amazon , where it’s already a No. 1 bestseller.

For two years, Isaacson followed the billionaire entrepreneur through his SpaceX and Tesla factories and board meetings, while spending hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers and adversaries. In addition to leading the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence, Musk also made the controversial choice to take over Twitter (now X) during the book’s writing.

Musk’s childhood weaves its way through much of the book, as Isaacson has hinted in numerous interviews leading up to its release. Growing up in South Africa, Musk was regularly beaten by bullies and would come home to an emotionally abusive father. As he grew older, the wounds from his tumultuous upbringing lingered, likely explaining his infamous attraction to risk, maniacal intensity and epic sense of mission.

“We start the book with this astonishingly difficult childhood in South Africa with a father who is Darth Vader and who is still alive, but haunts Elon every day,” Isaacson told tech reporter Kara Swisher earlier this month. “He’s the most interesting person on the planet right now doing the most interesting things and driving people crazy in the process.”

One of the biggest bombshells in the book is the revelation that Musk allegedly thwarted a Ukranian drone attack on Russian ships. According to the book, the SpaceX CEO turned off Starlink near Crimea to disrupt Ukraine’s strike against a Russian fleet. As the drones loaded with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.

“Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson is now available to pre-order on Amazon, and is also available on Kindle for $16.99 and Audible for free with this 30-day trial.

Elon Musk $33.07   $28.94 Buy Now On Amazon

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8 major takeaways from the explosive new book about Elon Musk that lifts the lid on the world's richest person

• Walter Isaacson's biography on Elon Musk hit shelves last Tuesday.
• The author trailed the Musk for about three years and provides a peek into the billionaire's mind.
• The book details everything from Musk's relationship with his father to his "hardcore" work ethic and "demon mode."

Elon Musk has dominated headlines for years, but a new book proves there is still plenty to learn about the world's richest man.

After shadowing Musk for three years, Walter Isaacson provided a peek behind the curtain into the life of one of the most powerful men in the world in his biography on the Tesla CEO.

The book hit shelves on September 12 and it had some eye-popping details about the billionaire — from big reveals on his relationship with Ukraine and the birth of his eleventh child to details on Musk's hardcore work ethic and emotional swings.

Here are eight things we learned from the biography.

Musk's moods vary a lot, and those close to him fear his 'demon mode.'

The book explains how Musk's moods can swing wildly .

"He has numerous minds and many fairly distinct personalities," Grimes told Isaacson. "He moves between them at a very rapid pace. You just feel the air in the room change, and suddenly the whole situation is just transferred over to his other state."

Isaacson said that throughout his time with Musk, he'd also witnessed the billionaire's emotional volatility, saying he'd switch between "light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional."

"When we hang out, I make sure I'm with the right Elon," Grimes said. "There are guys in that head who don't like me, and I don't like them." These vary from the version of him "who's down for Burning Man and will sleep on a couch, eat canned soup, and be chill" and his so-called "demon mode" — "when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain."

During these periods, Musk is likely to unleash his rage on employees or order up a work surge, according to Isaacson. Grimes said despite the darkness associated with "demon mode," it's also the mode where he "gets shit done."

Elon Musk's relationship with his father massively affected his personality and outlook on the world.

One character who appears frequently throughout the book is Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk.

The biography is peppered with descriptions of incidents where Elon Musk claims his father bullied and demeaned him ( something Errol Musk has denied ), as well as comments from Elon Musk's former girlfriends and wives about how Errol Musk ultimately influenced his son's personality and outlook on the world.

After his parents divorced, Elon Musk originally lived with his mother before spending about seven years living with his father in Pretoria from the age of 10.

"It turned out to be a really bad idea," Elon Musk told Isaacson. "I didn't yet how how horrible he was."

His younger brother Kimbal Musk told Isaacson that their father had "zero compassion" and often "went ballistic."

"It was mental torture," Elon Musk told Isaacson. "He sure knew how to make anything terrible."

Elon Musk's mother, Maye Musk , said there was a fear her son "might become his father."

Both Elon and Kimbal Musk no longer speak to their father, Isaacson wrote.

But the years that he spent with his father have somewhat shaped Elon Musk's personality, according to the book. 

"I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain," Grimes, Elon Musk's former girlfriend, told Isaacson. She also noted that because of how his father brought him up, Musk sometimes lets himself be treated badly and "associates love with being mean or abusive."  

Justine Musk , Elon Musk's first wife, told Isaacson said that during their arguments, Elon would belittle and insult her, calling her a "moron," an "idiot," or "stupid and crazy."

"When I spent some time with Errol, I realized that's where he'd gotten the vocabulary," Justine Musk told Isaacson. 

Ex-wife Talulah Riley also told Isaacson that Errol Musk's treatment of his son "had a profound effect on how he operates."

"Inside the man, he's still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad ," she said.

Musk's 'hardcore' work ethic has always been a part of him.

Musk is well known for his "hardcore" work mindset , which in some cases involved sleeping and eating in the office. His late-night habits seem to stem from his childhood, when he would stay up until 6 a.m. reading, Isaacson wrote.

While he worked at Zip2, his first business, Musk and his brother slept in the office, showered at the YMCA, and mainly ate at Jack in the Box, the book said. One early Zip2 employee told Isaacson that he even had to tell Musk to go home and shower before customer meetings.

"At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations, and he expected others to do the same," Isaacson wrote. "His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges."

Musk has applied the same intensity to other aspects of his life, too, including learning to fly planes. "I tend to do things very intensely," he told Isaacson.

Musk expects his employees to display the same workaholic nature. At banking company X.com, which later became PayPal following a merger, he told staff that the site would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend and "prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in a nervous and nervous-making frenzy and slept under his desk most nights," Isaacson wrote.

After buying Twitter more than two decades later, he told its staff to commit to an "extremely hardcore" work schedule with "long hours at a high intensity" if they wanted to keep their jobs.

He's been difficult to work with from the start.

Horror stories about working with Elon Musk are hardly a new phenomenon — from quickly laying off over half of Twitter's workforce to forcing some Tesla workers to work through Thanksgiving — working at one of his companies has become the stuff of urban legends. And it turns out tensions were often near a boiling point, even at Musk's first startup.

Musk's brother once "tore off a hunk of flesh" from Musk's hand while the brothers wrestled on the floor in Zip2 's office back in the 90s, according to Isaacson. The biographer said the two men would wrestle during periods of "intense stress."

Similarly, Musk's college dorm-mate quit working at Zip2 just six weeks after starting at the company because he couldn't handle working with Musk, according to the book.

"I knew I could either be working with him or be his friend, but not both," Musk's longtime friend and former dorm-mate, Navaid Farooq, told Isaacson.

Musk later explained the reasoning behind his intensity after he chewed out a SpaceX worker who had lost his child the week prior.

"I give people hardcore feedback, mostly accurate, and I try not to to do it in a way that's ad hominem," Musk told Isaacson. "I try to criticize the action, not the person. We all make mistakes. What matters is whether a person has a good feedback loop, can seek criticism from others, and can improve. Physics does not care about feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right."

Musk reacts physically to stress but it also motivates him. He can't handle peace.

During stressful periods at work and in his personal life, Musk would stay awake at night and vomit, Isaacson wrote.

The biographer said that at one point Musk's stomach pain had a doctor checking for appendicitis. 

In 2008 when Tesla was facing the potential of bankruptcy, Musk's wife at the time, Talulah Riley, told Isaacson she worried the stress would cause Musk to have a heart attack.

"He was having night terrors and just screaming in his sleep and clawing at me," she said. "It would go to his gut, and he would be screaming and retching. I would stand by the toilet and hold his head."

Musk's ex-girlfriend Grimes says she recalls similarly sleepless nights during her relationship with the billionaire.

Musk appears to seek out these periods of high stress, according to some. 

"You don't have to be in a state of war at all times," Shivon Zilis, the mother of two of Musk's children and a director at Neuralink, told Musk when he was gearing up to buy Twitter. "Or is it that you find greater comfort when you're in periods of war?" 

Musk told Zilis it's one of his "default settings."

"I guess I've always wanted to push my chips back on the table or play the next level of the game."

Though, Musk has admitted to Isaacson his intensity has taken a toll on him physically.

"From 2007 onwards, until maybe last year, it's been nonstop pain. There's a gun to your head, make Tesla work, pull a rabbit out of your hat, then pull another rabbit out of the hat," Musk told Isaacson in 2021.

"You can't be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you. But there's something else I've found this year. It's that fighting to survive keeps you going for quite a while. When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it's not that easy to get motivated every day," he added.

Musk can be a difficult person to date.

Isaacson interviewed many of the women Musk used to date or be married to. It becomes clear that Musk can be a difficult person to date because of a range of factors, including his laser focus on his businesses and his lack of empathy and social awareness.

"Elon and I were used to having big arguments in public," Justine Musk told Isaacson. "I don't think you can be in a relationship with Elon and not argue."

Musk postponed his honeymoon with Justine by months so that he could sort out X.com's merger with PayPal , and they had to cut it short amid turmoil at the company.

Justine told Isaacson that Elon Musk told her to dye her hair blonder and that she felt like she was being turned into a "trophy wife."

"I met him when he didn't have much at all," she told Isaacson. "The accumulation of wealth and fame changed the dynamic."

"The strong will and emotional distance that makes him difficult as a husband may be reasons for his success in running a business," she added.

Meanwhile, his emotional volatility and inability to understand other people's emotions at times can be hard to deal with, Grimes told Isaacson.

Isaacson wrote that Musk sent a picture of his then-girlfriend Grimes having a C-section when she had X to their friends and family, including her father and brothers. Grimes said he was "clueless" about why she'd be upset about it.

But he has a tender side too.

Though the book describes Musk's volatile relationships with many people, including relatives, friends, partners, and business associates, it also details how he can be tender at times. In particular, Isaacson paints a picture of Musk as a doting father to X AE A-XII, also known as "baby X," his first child with Grimes .

Isaacson wrote that X "had an otherworldly sweetness that calmed and beguiled Musk, who craved his presence. He took X everywhere."

Musk also moved in with his father aged 10 because he didn't want him to be lonely, Isaacson wrote. Musk's cousin Peter Rive told Isaacson that playing "Dungeons and Dragons" together as a child brought out the "incredibly patient" and "beautiful" parts of Musk's personality.

When a close friend of Musk's ex-wife Talulah Riley died in 2021, he flew over to England to be with her, "and he just made me laugh instead of cry," she told Isaacson.

Musk's politics are beginning to echo his father's.

While Musk has cut off communication with his father, Errol Musk, Isaacson said the billionaire's political stance is beginning to mimic his father's.

Isaacson said Errol's sons were sometimes off-put by their father's political rants. For example in 2022, Errol sent Musk an email in which he called the COVID-19 pandemic "a lie" and dubbed President Joe Biden a '"freak, criminal, pedophile president' who was out to destroy everything that the US stood for, 'including you,'" Isaacson wrote.

The biographer said Musk had begun to show a similar propensity which was in part triggered by his daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson 's decision to cut ties with him. Isaacson said that Musk blamed the disconnect on the "woke mind virus."

Over the past few years Musk has gone from from supporting the Democratic party to publicly dissing President Joe Biden, reposting anti-transgender content on X, and promoting conspiracy theories.

"Musk's tweet showed his growing tendency (like his father) to read wacky fake-news sites purveying conspiracy theories, a problem that Twitter had writ at large," Isaacson wrote of Musk's decision to post about a conspiracy theory related to the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband.

And, like his father, Musk's politics have been met with distaste from much of his family.

"It's not okay," Kimbal Musk told his brother after he tweeted "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci." "It's not funny. You can't do that shit."

The biography is in stores now.

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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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We Don’t Need Another Antihero

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, the focus on psychology diverts us from the questions we should be asking about the world’s richest man.

This past December, Elon Musk’s extended family gathered for Christmas. As was their tradition, they pondered a question of the year, which seemed strategically designed for Elon to answer: “What regrets do you have?”

By that point in 2022, Musk had personally intervened in Russia’s war by controlling Ukraine’s internet access; had failed to tell his on-and-off girlfriend and co-parent Grimes that he had also fathered twins with one of his employees, and had been forced by a judge to follow through on a $44 billion purchase of Twitter; then fired most of its staff and alienated most of its advertisers. His main regret, he told his family, according to an account in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk , “is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.”

In Isaacson’s study of the world’s richest man, the reader is consistently reminded that Musk is powerless over his own impulses. Musk cannot control his desperate need to stir up drama and urgency when things are going well, Isaacson explains. He fails to show any kind of remorse for the multiple instances of brutally insulting his subordinates or lovers. He gets stuck in what Grimes has dubbed “demon mode”—an anger-induced unleashing of insults and demands, during which he resembles his father Errol, whom Isaacson describes as emotionally abusive.

To report the book, Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years, answering his late-night text messages, accompanying him to Twitter’s office post-acquisition, attending his meetings and intimate family moments, watching him berate people. Reading the book is like hearing what Musk’s many accomplishments and scandals would sound like from the perspective of his therapist, if he ever sought one out (rather than do that, he prefers to “take the pain,” he says—though he has diagnosed himself at various moments as having Asperger’s syndrome or bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder).

Choosing to use this access mostly for pop psychology may appeal to an American audience that loves a good antihero, but it’s a missed opportunity. Unlike the subjects of most of Isaacson’s other big biographies, including Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci, Musk is still alive, his influence still growing. We don’t need to understand how he thinks and feels as much as we need to understand how he managed to amass so much power, and the broad societal impact of his choices—in short, how thoroughly this mercurial leader of six companies has become an architect of our future.

What does it mean that Musk can adjust a country’s internet access during a war? (The book only concludes that it makes him uncomfortable.) How should we feel about the fact that the man putting self-driving cars on our roads tells staff that most safety and legal requirements are “wrong and dumb”? How will Musk’s many business interests eventually, inevitably conflict? (At one point, Musk—a self-described champion of free speech—concedes that Twitter will have to be careful about how it moderates China-related content, because pissing off the government could threaten Tesla’s sales there. Isaacson doesn’t press further.)

The cover of Elon Musk shows Musk’s face in high contrast staring straight, with hands folded as if in prayer, evoking a Great Man of History and a visual echo of the Jobs volume. Isaacson’s central question seems to be whether Musk could have achieved such greatness if he were less cruel and more humane. But this is no time for a retrospective.

Read: Demon mode activated

As readers of the book are asked to reflect on the drama of Musk’s past romantic dalliances, he is meeting with heads of state and negotiating behind closed doors. Last Monday, Musk convened with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; on Tuesday, Israel’s prime minister publicly called him the “unofficial president” of the United States. Also, Neuralink, Musk’s brain-implant start-up—mostly discussed in the book as the employer of one of the mothers of Musk's 11 known children—was given approval from an independent review board to begin recruiting participants for human trials. The book does have a few admiring pages on Neuralink’s technology, but doesn’t address a 2022 Reuters report that the company had killed an estimated 1,500 experimented-on animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, since 2018. (Musk has said that the monkeys chosen for the experiments were already close to death ; a gruesome Wired story published Wednesday reported otherwise .)

Isaacson seems to expect major further innovation from Musk—who is already sending civilians into space, running an influential social network, shaping the future of artificial-intelligence development, and reviving the electric-car market. How these developments might come about and what they will mean for humanity seems far more important to probe than Isaacson’s preferred focus on explaining Musk’s abusive, erratic, impetuous behavior.

In 2018, Musk called the man who rescued children in Thailand’s caves a “pedo guy,” which led to a defamation suit—a well-known story. A few weeks later, he claimed that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share, attracting the scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Isaacson covers these events by diagnosing Musk as unstable during that period and, according to his brother, still getting over his tumultuous breakup with the actor Amber Heard. (Ah, the toxic-woman excuse.) He was also, according to his lawyer Alex Spiro, “an impulsive kid with a terrible Twitter habit.” Isaacson calls that assessment “true”—one of the many times he compares Musk, now 52, to a child in the book.

The people whose perspectives Isaacson seems to draw on most in the book are those whom Musk arranged for him to talk with. So the book’s biggest reveal may be the extent to which his loved ones and confidants distrust his ability to be calm and rational, and feel the need to work around him. A close friend, Antonio Gracias, once locked Musk’s phone in a hotel safe to keep him from tweeting; in the middle of the night, Musk got hotel security to open it.

All of this seems reminiscent of the ways Donald Trump’s inner circle executed his whims, justifying his behavior and managing their relationship with him, lest they be cut out from the action. Every one of Trump’s precedent-defying decisions during his presidency was picked apart by the media: What were his motivations? Is there a strategy here? Is he mentally fit to serve? Does he really mean what he’s tweeting? The simplest answer was often the correct one: The last person he talked to (or saw on Fox News) made him angry.

Read: What Russia got by scaring Elon Musk

Musk is no Trump fan, according to Isaacson. But he’s the media’s new main character, just as capable of getting triggered and sparking shock waves through a tweet. That’s partially why Isaacson’s presentation of the World’s Most Powerful Victim is not all that revelatory for those who are paying attention: Musk exposes what he’s thinking at all hours of the day and night to his 157.6 million followers.

In Isaacson’s introduction to Elon Musk , he explains that the man is “not hardwired to have empathy.” Musk’s role as a visionary with a messianic passion seems to excuse this lack. The thinking goes like this: All of his demands for people to come solve a problem right now or you’re fired are bringing us one step closer to Mars travel, or the end of our dependence on oil, or the preservation of human consciousness itself. His comfort with skirting the law and cutting corners in product development also serves a higher purpose: Musk believes, and preaches in a mantra to employees at all of his companies, that “the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

By presenting Musk’s mindset as fully formed and his behavior as unalterable, Isaacson’s book doesn’t give us many tools for the future—besides, perhaps, being able to rank the next Musk blowup against a now well-documented history of such incidents. Instead of narrowing our critical lens to Musk’s brain, we need to widen it, in order to understand the consequences of his influence. Only then can we challenge him to do right by his power.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Grimes Debuts New Relationship with DJ Anyma: ‘Beauty and the Beast'

The singer shares three children with ex Elon Musk, who she split from in 2022

Jon Kopaloff/FilmMagic; Roberto Serra - Iguana Press/Getty

Grimes is going Instagram official with DJ Anyma!

The singer, whose real name is Claire Boucher, unveiled her new romance with DJ Anyma on Saturday as she posted loved-up photos of the pair together on Instagram. 

“Beauty and the Beast,” Grimes, 36, wrote in the caption, referring to her and her new beau.

In the first snap, the pair gazed into each other’s eyes as they stood in front of a circular glowing light installation. Anyma, 35, whose real name is Matteo Milleri, stroked Grimes’ face as she placed her hand on his shoulder. 

The new couple shared a kiss in a second close-up photo and in the last shot the pair were seen staring at each other once again as they leaned into one another. 

Grimes previously collaborated with the Anyma last summer on the song “Welcome To The Opera” from her album Genesys. In July 2023, she performed the track with the New York-born, Italian DJ at Belgium's Tomorrowland music festival.

PEOPLE has reached out to Grimes’ representative for further comment. 

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The musician's new romance comes two years after her split from Elon Musk in March 2022.

Grimes and Musk, 52, first went public with their relationship in May 2018 as they attended the Met Gala together. The pair share three children : daughter Exa Dark Sideræl, 2, and sons X Æ A-Xii, 4, and Techno Mechanicus, who Grimes revealed in her biography last year arrived in 2022. 

On Sept. 29, 2023, Grimes filed a petition to establish a parental relationship with her children, according to online records viewed by PEOPLE. Such a petition is filed as a means of identifying a child's legal parents who aren't married.

Earlier that month, the mom of three shared a post on X (formerly Twitter), which is owned by Musk, in which she asked for privacy of her and her kids . She also addressed the media speculation over her co-parenting relationship with her ex and the recently announced arrival of their son Techno.

"Hey, I wud [sic] prefer to not breathe any more life into this current press cycle but I want to de-escalate the narrative atm," the singer wrote at the time. 

Grimes also addressed her comments toward Shivon Zilis — the Neuralink exec, 37, who shares with Musk 22-month-old twins, Strider and Azure, born just weeks before Exa. "I spoke with Shivon at length finally, which was long overdue," she continued. "... Plz [sic] don't be angry at her! We respect each other a lot and we're excited to become friends and have the kids grow up together."

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Elon Musk’s X cancels partnership with Don Lemon before his new show even begins

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Don Lemon received his first lesson in doing business with Elon Musk, the mercurial owner of social media platform X.

The former CNN host interviewed Musk for the first edition of his new podcast, “The Don Lemon Show,” which was scheduled to launch next week on X, formerly known as Twitter, and other online platforms.

Lemon said Wednesday in an X post that Musk was not happy with the sitdown and killed the deal to carry the program on the platform.

The episode will air Monday on YouTube and other platforms. Lemon said he will post the interview on X as well.

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“This has not changed anything about the show except for my relationship with Elon and X,” Lemon said in a video .

X announced in January that it had a financial deal to premiere “The Don Lemon Show” with additional exclusive content before it becomes available elsewhere.

Lemon invited the billionaire founder of Tesla onto his first program. Musk agreed and the interview was conducted Tuesday with no restrictions.

Lemon said his questions were “respectful and wide ranging,” covering topics that ranged from SpaceX to the presidential election.

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As a nation looks for answers on George Floyd, CNN’s Don Lemon steps up

The Louisiana native, who joined CNN in 2006 and is the only Black cable news anchor in prime time, is clearly energized by having a role in shaping the current national discourse on race relations.

June 10, 2020

“We had a good conversation,” Lemon said in a statement on X . “Clearly he felt differently. His commitment to a global town square where all questions can be asked and all ideas can be shared seems not to include questions of him from people like me.”

In a post that was shared but no longer appears on Musk’s X account, the entrepreneur criticized Lemon’s handling of the interview.

“His approach was basically ‘CNN but on social media,’ which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN is dying,” Musk wrote. “And, instead of it being the real Don Lemon, it was really just Jeff Zucker talking through Don, so lacked authenticity.”

Zucker is the former CNN boss who boosted Lemon’s career at the cable news channel.

Musk’s post added that Lemon is still welcome to use the X platform to build viewership for his new program.

Lemon had a mostly successful 17-year run at CNN, where he became more of a commentator in the later part of his tenure. The network scored the best ratings in its history in 2020 when Lemon held the 10 p.m. time period.

After CNN became part of Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022, the network hired Chris Licht to run the news channel with a mandate to move it more to the political center and feature more Republicans.

Lemon, who is a harsh critic of former President Trump, was moved out of his prime-time role in 2022 and onto a new ensemble morning program after being a solo act for years. The belief within much of CNN is that he was being set up to fail.

Lemon was fired on April 24, 2023. He collected what was left on his CNN salary — believed to be around $20 million — and began looking at the podcast space for his next move.

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Stephen Battaglio writes about television and the media business for the Los Angeles Times out of New York. His coverage of the television industry has appeared in TV Guide, the New York Daily News, the New York Times, Fortune, the Hollywood Reporter, Inside.com and Adweek. He is also the author of three books about television, including a biography of pioneer talk show host and producer David Susskind.

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How Elon Musk broke Twitter as he turned it into X

In November 2022, Elon Musk — just a month into his ownership of Twitter — abruptly announced that he would be welcoming back the social media company’s most notorious and influential user. Donald Trump had been banned from the platform since the days following the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, when the company said it was suspending his account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” But, as Zoë Schiffer reports in her new book, “ Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter ,” that risk wasn’t of much concern to the new billionaire owner. Twitter’s decision to boot Trump had been a “turning point” in Musk’s attitude toward the company, Schiffer writes — a symptom, to his mind, of the unjustified censorship that inspired his effort to rescue his favorite social media platform from what he called the “woke mind virus.”

The reinstatement of @realDonaldTrump didn’t go smoothly. Twitter’s systems weren’t built to quickly restore an account with almost 90 million followers. And most of the engineers who knew how to solve the problem had been laid off — on Musk’s orders.

At first, Musk speculated eagerly about Trump’s return — basking in the outrage from the left and plaudits from the right that attended his decision to allow the former president back on the platform. But even once Trump’s account started working again, it wasn’t the draw that Musk had seemingly hoped. Trump has only posted once since @realDonaldTrump was returned to him.

This episode’s structure is common to many others in “Extremely Hardcore” that illustrate Musk’s leadership: Musk, acting with little regard for the potentially catastrophic downsides, upends a decision by the company’s former leadership, while the beleaguered skeleton crew that remains does its best to mitigate the damage. Looming over it all are Musk’s increasingly far-right politics, indicative of an ugly, violent turn in American life. And, in the end, the scramble can’t secure for Musk what he wants most: attention.

Since Musk first announced his intention to buy Twitter, in April 2022, Schiffer — the managing editor of the technology publication Platformer — has become one of the most indispensable chroniclers of the chaos inside the company. “Extremely Hardcore,” named after the working style Musk quickly said he would require of Twitter’s employees, builds on Schiffer’s earlier reporting to provide the closest look yet at Musk’s destruction of what was once a foundational component of the global public square. Schiffer moves briskly through Musk’s initial quixotic offer to buy the platform; his near-immediate attempt to get out of the $44 billion purchase; the litigation by Twitter’s board that forced him to go through with it anyway; and, in what takes up the bulk of the story, the pandemonium that followed when he ultimately walked through the door.

Like many journalists, I have an unhealthy relationship with Twitter (since renamed, inexplicably, X). Or, more accurately, I had an unhealthy relationship with what Twitter once was: a place where you could follow news rapidly unfolding in the farthest corners of the world, and a place that also had its own distorting effect in determining what the press covered and how. Schiffer is fluent in the peculiar social dynamics of X and conscious of the self-referential nature of reporting on a platform that itself shapes how her coverage is consumed and understood. At one point, she recounts writing about Musk’s demands that engineers rework the platform’s algorithm to promote his own tweets, and how this reporting itself became “an immediate hit on Twitter.” “In some ways,” Schiffer writes, “my story had already played right into his hands, making him the main character of the day.”

Musk’s gravitational self-regard tends to collapse all reporting on him into a character study of his whims. Schiffer does her best to escape that orbit, focusing instead on the experiences of the Twitter employees whose lives were almost unilaterally upended by the takeover. Musk is, quite simply, a terrible boss. He makes unreasonable demands, refuses to listen to advice, and puts his current and former employees in danger with alarming regularity by unleashing armies of his followers to harass those who cross him. In perhaps the best-known instance, Yoel Roth, who formerly led the company’s now-decimated efforts to make the platform’s users safe from hate speech and harassment, received waves of death threats after Musk outrageously implied that he was sympathetic to pedophiles.

Schiffer declares early on that this book “isn’t a biography of Elon Musk.” Instead, she’s writing about the things that Musk broke. But his takeover is also a story about the failures of governance that allowed him to break those things. In a message on the company’s Slack, one employee recounted to colleagues hearing a Musk lawyer dismiss the company’s obligations to abide by a consent decree on user privacy with the Federal Trade Commission. “Elon puts rockets into space,” the employee relayed the lawyer saying. “He’s not afraid of the FTC.”

What matters is money, and Musk has been allowed to acquire enough of it that he appears to be able to do whatever he likes. Even in the instances in “Extremely Hardcore” when Musk is shown being briefly held to account, it’s almost always the influence of money that has led to his comeuppance. His desire to turn Twitter into a playground for the worst parts of human nature has been mitigated only by the squeamishness of advertisers who don’t want their products displayed alongside posts by neo-Nazis. When he was forced to go through with the purchase, it was because of a body of corporate law that privileges the interests of shareholders above all else — an outcome, law professor Ann Lipton has argued, that is “objectively ludicrous” in the case of a platform like Twitter with such “immense social importance.”

Perhaps, then, it shouldn’t be a surprise that so much of Musk’s focus since acquiring the company has been on attacking the few gadflies that remain. This includes former employees like Roth, along with journalists (some of whom he has booted from the site for publishing unflattering stories) and researchers (the vast majority of whom have lost access to valuable data about the platform’s inner workings). Last November, X filed suit against Media Matters for America after the watchdog group released a report about advertisements on the platform appearing alongside far-right material — which was swiftly followed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s announcement that he would launch an investigation into Media Matters as well. The alliance between Musk and the extreme edge of the Republican Party speaks to the importance of understanding Musk’s X not just as the wrecking ball of one wealthy and powerful man’s whims, but also as a product of a broader right-wing backlash against any institutional structure that seeks to constrain the whims of wealthy and powerful men.

On that front, this election year will be a testing ground, even if Trump doesn’t return to regularly posting on X. Musk has dismantled many of the structures developed inside the company to help prevent the spread of potentially damaging falsehoods — like the propaganda that helped lead to Jan. 6. Schiffer ends her book in the fall of 2023, a year into Musk’s time atop X but in some sense only halfway through the story. I confess I’m nervous to see what she might be reporting on this coming November.

Quinta Jurecic, a Book World contributing writer, is a senior editor at Lawfare and a fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Extremely Hardcore

Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter

By Zoë Schiffer

Portfolio. 330 pp. $30

In Full Interview, Elon Musk Tells Don Lemon He’s Learned Nothing

National Reporter, HuffPost

Don Lemon has published his full interview with Elon Musk , and it’s exactly the wide-ranging doozy you’d expect ― with an extra dash of racist conspiracy theories.

The at-times chippy conversation released Monday was both the first and last in an exclusive content deal Lemon claims Musk had pitched him. That deal ended hours after the interview earlier this month.

But Lemon insists he hasn’t been “canceled,” despite saying literally exactly that last week.

“Contrary to what you might have heard, we weren’t canceled by X,” he said in the show’s introduction. “Yes, after months of begging me, wooing me to offer some exclusive content on his platform, Elon Musk decided to scrap the deal.”

The former CNN anchor kicked off the hourlong discussion with a question about X (formerly Twitter) and its role in the future of journalism, which Musk used to trumpet his platform’s numbers.

“X is already the No. 1 source of news in the world,” he replied, without any data to support the claim. “It’s the No. 1 way people are informed about any kind of news.”

That led to a longer conversation about the type of content X now tends to boost, including posts from Musk himself, who forced advertisers to flee last year after he amplified an antisemitic conspiracy theory and called it “the actual truth.” Readers may recall Musk pledging to sue the Anti-Defamation League for defamation over the lost revenue and also telling companies who paused ad buys to “go fuck yourself.”

After the uproar, Musk did damage control by visiting the site of the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, where he conceded he’d been “naïve” about the prevalence of antisemitism, claiming he sees almost none “in the circles that I move in.”

The Don Lemon Show episode 1: Elon Musk TIMESTAMPS: (02:23) News on X (10:07) Donald Trump and Endorsing a Candidate (13:04) The New Tesla Roadster (16:46) Relaxation and Video Games (17:54) Tweeting and Drug Use (23:19) The Great Replacement Theory (30:03) Content Moderation… pic.twitter.com/bLRae4DhyO — Don Lemon (@donlemon) March 18, 2024

But none of that seemed to register in the interview Lemon shared.

“You went to Auschwitz with [conservative podcaster] Ben Shapiro,” Lemon opened. “You said you learned your lesson. What did you learn?”

“I said I learned my lesson?” a baffled Musk responded.

Lemon then walked Musk through several racist terror attacks in recent years motivated by “great replacement theory” ― which the tech billionaire distanced himself from because he’d only retweeted the theory, not authored the tweets himself.

“Great replacement theory is a neo-Nazi trope,” Lemon said. “It’s in the neo-Nazi manifesto... It’s referenced by the Buffalo mass shooter in his manifesto where 10 Black people were murdered in Buffalo. It’s the actual title of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. Fifty-one people in the Muslim mosque were murdered. Twenty-three people murdered in El Paso by a shooter who uses the same language that you use — in that manifesto when you say ‘Hispanic invasion.’”

“I don’t say ‘Hispanic invasion,’” Musk interjected.

Informed that he had in fact quoted a tweet that used the term, Musk quibbled: “If I quote something, that doesn’t mean I agree with everything in it. It’s just something that I want... I think... this is something people should consider.”

The racist “great replacement theory” posits that white Christians are being intentionally replaced by immigrants, people of color and non-Christians.

Musk, on the defense, then dismissed Lemon’s suggestion that he moderate his conduct to avoid similarly embarrassing questions from reporters in the future.

“I don’t have to answer these questions,” he fired back. “I don’t have to answer questions from reporters. Don, the only reason I’m in this interview is because you’re on the X platform and you asked for it. Otherwise I would not do this interview.

“I’m criticized constantly. I could care less.”

After the interview, Musk abruptly canceled a partnership between X and Lemon to produce exclusive content for the platform. While Lemon said he thought they had “a good conversation,” “clearly [Musk] felt differently.”

Musk responded by throwing shade at Lemon’s former employer, CNN .

″[Lemon’s] approach was basically just ‘ CNN, but on social media ’, which doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that CNN is dying.”

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Elon Musk Spotted on Rare Father-Son Outing With His and Grimes’ Son X Æ A-XII

Amid elon musk and grimes’ ongoing custody battle, the tesla ceo stepped out with his 3-year-old son x æ a-xii at the company’s car plant in germany..

Elon Musk is getting his son into the family business. 

In fact, the Tesla CEO stepped out with his son X Æ A-Xii at the company's electric car plant in Gruenheide, Germany on March 13. 

Elon—who shares his 3-year-old son with Canadian singer Grimes —donned a black Gigafactory T-shirt with the words "We are the future" on the front and matching black jeans. Meanwhile, X wore blue jeans and a gray short sleeve henley shirt. 

The 52-year-old was photographed carrying his son and, at one point, putting him on his shoulders as he addressed a group of employees at the Gigafactory. According to NBC Right Now , Elon visited Gigafactory staff after production had halted for over a week due to a suspected arson attack. 

Based on the photos, Elon appeared to be in good spirits and enjoyed the rare public father-son bonding time. After all, the SpaceX founder is amid a custody battle with his ex girlfriend, whose real name is Claire Boucher . The couple—who dated for four years before splitting in 2022—have been at odds over the care of their children X, daughter Exa Dark Sideræl , 23 months, and son Techno Mechanicus .

Late last year, Grimes filed a petition for parental rights in California, NBC reported in October, but it appears Elon has yet to formally respond to his ex-girlfriend's filing. E! News previously reached out to both Elon and Grimes' reps for comment and has not heard back.

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And while the ongoing battle has yet to be fully resolved, Elon—who shares 11 children from three different mothers including Grimes, Justine Wilson and Shivon Zillis —is experienced in coparenting. 

Read on to untangle the businessman's entire family tree.

Maye was born in Saskatchewan, Canada and emigrated with her parents to Pretoria, South Africa in 1950, when she was 7. She and Elon's father,  Errol , split in 1979. After Elon moved to Canada at age 17, Maye obtained Canadian citizenship by birthright and moved there too, as did his siblings.  There, she established a dietician practice and became President of the Consulting Dieticians of Canada, per Forbes . She also worked as a model. In 2019, after Elon sold his company Zip2 to Compaq for more than $300 million, he bought his mom an apartment in New York City, where she lived for 13 years and continued her modeling career. She is signed to the IMG Models agency.  "I brought my children up like my parents brought us up when we were young: to be independent, kind, honest, considerate and polite," Maye wrote in an essay  for CNBC. "I taught them the importance of working hard and doing good things."

Elon's father is an engineer and like Elon, was born in South Africa. In the 2015 biography Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future , author Ashlee Vance wrote that Elon and his dad had a difficult relationship. In an emotional 2017 Rolling Stone interview, Elon criticized his father and talked about his upbringing, saying that after his parents split, he moved in with his dad, which, he said, "was not a good idea." However, Errol told  Rolling Stone , "I love my children and would readily do whatever for them." In a 2015 Forbes  interview, Elon's dad said he used to take his kids on trips overseas. "Their mother and I split up when they were quite young and the kids stayed with me," he said. "I took them all over the world." After divorcing Elon's mother Maye , Errol married Heide , whose daughter  Jana Bezuidenhout  was 4 years old at the time. Errol and Heide went on to have two daughters together before they, too, broke up.  Years later, Jana reached out to Errol following a breakup. "We were lonely, lost people," Errol explained  in a 2018 interview with The Sunday Times . "One thing led to another—you can call it God's plan or nature's plan." Either way, the duo welcomed son Elliott in 2017 and then a baby girl in 2019. As Errol put it to The Sun , "The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce. If I could have another child I would. I can't see any reason not to."

Kimbal, born in 1972, is a restauranteur. He is the founder of The Kitchen, a collective of five restaurants that source directly from local farmers, Forbes reported in 2018. He also runs a non-profit, Big-Green, that has built 200 learning gardens in schools across the U.S., the outlet said. Tosca, born in 1974, is a filmmaker. In 2017, she founded Passionflix, a female-focused streaming service that targets the billion-dollar romance novel industry, according to Forbes . 

Elon and Canadian-born Justine, his college sweetheart from Queen's University in Ontario , married in 2000.  In a 2010 article she penned for  Marie Claire , titled I Was a Starter Wife: Inside America's Messiest Divorce , Justine said that while dancing at their wedding reception, Elon told her, "I am the alpha in this marriage." "I shrugged it off," Wilson wrote, "just as I would later shrug off signing the postnuptial agreement, but as time went on, I learned that he was serious." The two welcomed their first child, son Nevada Alexander , in 2002. The baby died at age 10 weeks from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). "Nevada went down for a nap, placed on his back as always, and stopped breathing," Justine wrote in her article. The couple pursued IVF to conceive again and went on to welcome five more kids: 19-year-old twins Vivian  and Griffin and 17-year-old triplets Kai , Saxon and Damian .  In 2008, Elon filed for divorce. They share custody of their children. 

In a July 2022 snap shared on social media, Elon revealed he took his oldest sons to meet  Pope Francis . While he was "honored" to meet the head of the Catholic church, Elon added of his 'fit, "My suit is tragic."  That same year, Elon's daughter Vivian filed a petition to change her full name in accordance with her new gender identity, writing, "I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form."

Elon and Tallulah—who played host greeter Angela on HBO's Westworld— married in 2010.  "It all happened very fast," she told CBS News . "We were engaged after, I think, two weeks of knowing each other."  The two divorced in 2012, then remarried a year later before divorcing again in 2016.

Elon and Amber went public with their romance in early 2017, a year after she filed for divorce from Johnny Depp and Elon ended his second marriage to his second wife  Tallulah Riley . Months later, Elon and Amber called it quits .  "I just broke up with my girlfriend," Elon told Rolling Stone   at the time. " I was really in love , and it hurt bad...Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think."

Elon and the singer dated on and off for about four years, starting in 2018. In September 2021, Elon told Page Six that he and Grimes "are, I'd say, probably semi-separated," adding, "It's mostly that my work at SpaceX and Tesla requires me to be primarily in Texas or traveling overseas and her work is primarily in LA. She's staying with me now and Baby X is in the adjacent room." In a March 2022 interview with Vanity Fair , the singer said she and Elon "live in separate houses" and are "best friends." She later tweeted, "Me and E have broken up *again* since the writing of this article haha, but he's my best friend and the love of my life, and my life and art are forever dedicated to The Mission now."  When news broke in September 2023 that the couple share three children together, the "Crystal Ball" singer confirmed that, yes, their most recent addition Techno Mechanicus had joined son  X Æ A-12 , 3, and daughter  Exa Dark Sideræl , 20 months.

In 2020, Elon and then-girlfriend Grimes welcomed their first child together, a son. They soon modified the spelling of his name in order to meet California's legal guidelines, which only permit letters from the English alphabet. Switching over to roman numerals, the parents agreed to spell his name, X Æ A-Xii. "X, the unknown variable," Grimes explained on Twitter . "Æ, my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence) A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent."  Grimes continued, "A=Archangel, my favorite song" adding a rat and sword emoji. "Metal rat."

In her 2022  Vanity Fair interview, Grimes revealed she and Elon privately welcomed a baby girl via surrogacy. "Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second)," she said. "Dark, meanwhile, is the unknown. People fear it but truly it's the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe.'" Sideræl—pronounced "sigh-deer-ee-el," is "the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time," and a nod to her favorite Lord of the Rings character, Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the ring." A year later, the  New York Times ' Sept. 9 review of Walter Isaacson's biography  Elon Musk  stated that Elon and Grimes share three children, not two as previously believed. The on-again, off-again couple at one point welcomed a child named  Techno Mechanicus , nicknamed  Tau , a report Grimes  confirmed soon after . "I wish I could show u how cute little Techno is," she  wrote on X , "but my priority rn is keeping my babies out of the public eye, Plz respect that at this time."

In 2022,  Business Insider  published court documents that stated Elon welcomed twins with Neuralink executive  Shivon Zilis in November 2021. The babies were reportedly born in Austin, Texas, where the businessman lives. He also seemingly weighed in on the report on Twitter, writing , "Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far." "Mark my words," he added, "they are sadly true." In September 2023, a  Time magazine cover story, adapted from biographer Walter Issacson 's book about Elon, revealed that their twins were named  Strider and Azure .

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