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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 ‏ : ‎ 1.78 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
• #1 in Computer & Technology Biographies
• #3 in Scientist Biographies
• #4 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals

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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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Walter Isaacson on Musk’s Legacy and Criticism of His Biography

Isaacson, a former editor of TIME and an acclaimed biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, among others, is the author of the new book Elon Musk

In an excerpt from a new podcast, On Musk with Walter Isaacson , biographer Isaacson, the bestselling author of Elon Musk (and a former TIME editor), talks with host Evan Ratliff about criticism of his book, Musk's geopolitical influence, and why he took over Twitter .

Evan Ratliff: I want to talk about some of the criticism that comes up around the book and giving you a chance to respond. There's Musk being a difficult and demanding person, even an asshole, whether that matters for how creative he is, how innovative he is. And then there's these sort of larger societal accusations. Let's say like, allowing misinformation or encouraging misinformation, or the self-driving and people getting killed or the sort of lawsuit against Tesla when it comes to racial discrimination. Those seem to be two separate ideas, and I'm wondering, we've talked a lot about the first one and how you feel about that second basket, that question of whether, aside from whether he is or isn't a bad person to his employees, there are things that he's doing in the world that have negative implications.

Walter Isaacson: Yeah, I think when you barrel ahead impulsively, you do things that have negative implications. You know, bad workplace environments. Well, it starts at the top because he's all in, hardcore driven. He's not there to what he thinks are touchy feely HR, guidelines. And that's bad. Likewise, he pushes a little fast on full self driving. I mean, he feels that humans will kill 10 or 100 times more people than a self-driving car will. So he doesn't get the fact that a self driving just, you know, one time as it did this once hit a side of a big white truck, you know, and that's been in the news after three, four years. It's still in the news. He says, you know, people focus on that, not the million of people got killed by humans. It's because he doesn't have a real feel for human feelings and emotions. He doesn't realize that a self-driving car smashing somebody into a truck is gonna really shake people up more than the fact that a bad driver, you know, here on Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans got into an accident. So these are the things that his engineering mindset doesn't feel as well.

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And I feel like when people bring those things up, they're often saying, they want you to engage with those things more. And we've talked about, you know, explaining what's going on versus moralizing. But how do you feel about how you engaged with sort of that aspect of Musk?

I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk. And a couple people have pointed that out. Certainly if you're looking at the bad workplace environments that he may engender either at Tesla or at Twitter–that's in the book, you know, in no uncertain terms. Likewise, the accidents on the self-driving cars are definitely in the book starting with Autonomy Day in 2019 all the way to the present. There's a lot of evidence that his obsession with this might be moving things too fast.

So, I'm perfectly happy when people say I should have been tougher on Musk, but also say, man, read the book. If you want ammunition, both of how amazing he can be at times and getting things done, but also the rubble he leaves in his wake.

When it came to the Ukraine Starlink situation, you've talked about that…the thing that got corrected in the post and Musk tweeting, but maybe you've talked about this, but I haven't heard it yet, but I'm interested in what it felt like for you. Like you strike me as someone who's like relatively unbothered by some of the noise that's around these things.

I think you have to be unbothered by the noise and you have to keep the essence of the story. And the essence of that story was fine, it was correct, which was that night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled or not be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. And there was a fix that had to be made because it had already been geofenced, so his decision was not to permit the movement of the geofencing.

I hadn't gone into it enough, I just said he turned it off, so that was oversimplifying. But I didn't want to get distracted from the main thing, which is this private citizen is suddenly deciding that night whether or not Ukraine gets to do a sneak attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea. The essence is a private citizen has that power to decide and neither he nor anybody else corrected that.

Read More: Inside Elon Musk's Struggle for the Future of AI

And then I talked to him, I said, have you talked to the U. S. government? And he turns over power to these satellites to the U. S. government.

At a later point.

Yeah, at a later point, after that night where we talk about it. So you see... All of these things happen, and I try to have it shown in real time. And the essence of the story being, how does somebody acquire this much power? Why is it that the rest of government and other contractors have become so paralyzed and sclerotic that they can't do some of these things? And then how does he, with his megalomania, finally back down and say, maybe I should give up some of this power.

There's something chilling about Musk's power and influence growing beyond his companies, beyond the rocket launch pad and the Tesla factory floor. And in the case of Starlink satellite's use in Ukraine, even Musk himself finds this a little unsettling. From failing to understand how people might respond to self driving car deaths, to his outwardly blasé approach to controlling global geopolitics with a thumbs up or thumbs down, like a Roman emperor in the Colosseum. People are not Elon Musk's forte, by his own admission. But we are increasingly in his hands.

And depending on where you stand on Musk, some of his ideas can seem either sinister, logical, or simply baffling. Take, for example, his stated concern about underpopulation and declaration that people need to be having more children. More specifically, smart people need to be having more children. It's a creed he's lived with all 10 of his surviving children born by IVF. He's put his money behind it too, funding a University of Texas at Austin research group called the Population Well Being Initiative, to the tune of $10 million. What I wanted to know from Isaacson… was given his front row seat to Musk's unusual family dramas, what are we supposed to make of this particular Musk obsession?

Like a lot of things with Elon Musk, he goes back to the father a bit. It also goes to Musk's theory that consciousness in the human species is a fragile thing. And one of the threats is a low birth rate. Most of us probably don't think that way. We think we're overpopulated. But there is a decline in birth rate in many, many countries. And Musk deeply feels that that's a problem. And you know, people can totally disagree with that and say, hey, overpopulation is a big problem. They can also think he's weird to fund IVF for other people or fund clinics.

That's it. It feels like such a classic Musk thing that I've learned from reading this book, which is it's the kind of thing where people can look at it and they can say, he has this vision for humanity and it involves like people having more children. And then there are people who dislike him who kind of see it through a lens of, is this some kind of eugenics situation…I feel like people bring these lenses to it and I'm wondering if that has happened in your past work, or if this is a unique situation.

I think it's somewhat unique that people have such extraordinarily strong feelings for and against Musk. When I started working on this book, he was one of the most popular people on earth. There's some people who didn't like him, but his politics was generally a supporter of Obama. He had done really bad, dumb tweets in the past, like saying he was going to take Tesla private or calling some cave diver a pedophile. But generally, he wasn't that controversial. And then his politics shift, and it's reflected in his tweets, and he buys Twitter.

And so I end up with a book in which people either think he's an absolute hero or an absolute villain. And if you come at it from a frame of Musk is inherently an evil person, even having a lot of kids seems like something evil. And, pushing for self driving cars or robots seems evil. Likewise, if you're one of these starry eyed fans, even the weird, dark things he does on Twitter, people will be slamming me for telling the stories of his behavior, both at Twitter and at factories. So, yeah, it's a difficulty that people frame his every action, often based on their own love or hatred for him.

There's a tension it feels like between the way that Musk talks about that epic idea, getting to Mars, helping save humanity with interplanetary species, et cetera, and the way he treats individual people, like he doesn't like people, sometimes he can be very cruel. And I'm wondering does he really care or is he just trying to make himself an epic figure or is he actually trying to solve the energy problem and send us to Mars for humanity reasons?

When Musk first started talking about his three great missions: space travel, artificial intelligence, and sustainable energy, I thought it was a type of pontifications that you'd do for a biographer or do for a podcaster, do for a pep talk. And then I'd see him over and over again, just chanting to himself, like walking around the factory for building Starship and things are getting delayed.

And he would keep saying to himself and others around him, we have to have an urgency of getting humanity to Mars. And I came to believe that I don't know if he always fully believed it, but I know he believed he believed it. I know that they sound strange, but sometimes, as Shakespeare teaches us, we become the mask we wear. And he had internalized and externalized this so much that he was driven by a fierce urgency that we've got to get rockets that can get us to Mars within the next few decades, or that we have to sustain solar and battery and electric vehicle energy on this planet. And I am totally convinced that he is driven by his belief in those missions, and then he backfills and figures out, well, how can I make money on the way.

But if you're driven mainly by financial or selfish reasons, you're not going to start a rocket company. That's not a good idea for making money. You're not going to start an EV company when every other car company is getting out of the business. You're not going to worry about robots, and you're not going to buy Twitter, so I don't think he was motivated by money. He was motivated by this almost man child epic sense of him as a hero in a comic book or a video game.

Twitter one is interesting because I felt like the way you wrote that almost reversed the poles there in which he decides to buy Twitter, impulsively decides, gets stuck with it, and then he almost seems to be back filling the mission where he says, like, actually...

I ask him at one point, how does this fit into your mission? Makes no sense. I mean, I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks, and he admits, he said, yes, maybe it's a lark, maybe it doesn't really fit in. And then later he says, well, maybe it will help democracy so that civilization will survive long enough that we'll be able to become multi-planetary.

And that's where I just didn't believe him, and I'm not even sure he believed himself. That's just a bull crap explanation. But he had to try to justify it to himself. But my own opinion is he kind of stumbled into that impulsively and had mixed feelings about it, and if he had to do it all over again, I'm not sure he would.

The other reason Musk gives for buying Twitter—one he seems to get a lot of play for in some corners of the world—is that he is fighting against wokeness, or more specifically, what Musk calls anti-woke-mind virus. When he talks about, anti-woke mind virus, he uses that phrase. And that really touches on things that have become, you know, third rails in society in terms of how they're discussed. I'm curious how you kind of engaged with that idea with him. I mean, he's someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa. So obviously like his views on race and other societal issues are going to be colored by that. Like, what does he mean when he says something like that?

The way I engage with it, and you see it in the book, is I question it. I say, why do you, why are you following this particular conspiracy?

And I'll even talk about Occam's razor, which is the simplest explanation, maybe the best one, instead of thinking there's a vast conspiracy of drug makers and. COVID vaccines, or people trying to lockdown so they control government, or any of these things that he goes to. I'm not that way. I'm not conspiratorial.

Uh,  and I find that anti-political correctness and wokeness sentiment… it's a little hard for me to explain because my head's not there. You know, I think sometimes what we call being woke is being polite and sensitive to other people's feelings.  And I'll ask him about that. I say, Hey, did you understand, you've got a daughter who transitioned.

And he'll say things when he's in a more rational mood of, well, I don't mind people using pronouns, but you know, it gouges my eyes out when I see it too much. I'm going, why? What's the problem?

But it's when he's in his dark moods, this eats away at him. And the book, I describe his political evolution from being an Obama supporter to being  supporting Bobby Kennedy, then Ron DeSantis, you know, people who are worried about wokeness or worried about conspiracy theories. And I never try to excuse it in the book. I don't excuse what I call the rabbit hole, going down these rabbit holes of conspiracy. Uh,  I do try to explain it, from his childhood, from his father, whatever. And until you read the book. I think critics can have a difficulty saying, is he explaining it or is he excusing it?  And the simple mantra I always use is–let me tell you a story.

So, I'll explain something. And then I'll tell a story about  a particularly horrible tweet he did, like: “Prosecute Fauci are my pronouns.” I mean, just in a few words, he’s able to attack transgender pronouns and Anthony Fauci. And...  I talk about his father having said all these sort of things and him being in a hotbox room in Twitter, and he's going dark and giddy and one of the people in the room starts joking about Fauci and pronouns.

But if you read that anecdote or that story, you're not going to say, Walter excused it.  You're not going to say he tried to sugarcoat it. You're going to see the rawness that's there sometimes in Elon Musk

You've talked about how you think Twitter will just be a blip of his legacy, but he certainly can and is getting mired in it. And there's this quote in the book. It's him saying, I probably spent too much time on Twitter. It's a good place to dig your own grave. You get your shoulder into it and you keep on digging.

Do you feel that he could be undoing some of that magic– that vision that you captured when it comes to space or electric cars?

Yeah, I personally feel that the time he spends on Twitter and the mindshare he devotes to it is not as important, it's not as high value as him doing something else. And I don't think he's particularly good at the social interactions and human emotions that come in Twitter. And he admits he's just addicted to it.

I don't think it's going to be an important part of his legacy. It's not going to be a great part of his legacy. I think it makes the book more interesting for this guy to go down this rabbit hole. But also, near the end of the book, to say, you know, this isn't the best use of my time, even talking about Twitter, he said, we probably could be talking about more important things.

It's also…it's made him disliked in a way that I feel like he wasn't disliked before. I mean, if you look at the category of things that people dislike him for– Twitter and things he's said on Twitter and done with Twitter–occupy a large percentage of those things.

Absolutely. When you look at the controversy he's caused, and for that matter, the enmity and hatred that he's engendered, about 95 percent of that comes either from what he says on Twitter, or what he does on Twitter, or what he does to Twitter.

Musk is polarizing, arguably, one of the two most polarizing figures of our time. I'll let you guess the other. His fans can be slavishly adoring. His critics can be blind with rage. But if there was one common thread among the more critical takes on Isaacson's biography, it was a demand for more judgment or at least analysis from Isaacson. What was the ultimate meaning in all these stories he'd gathered, these hours at Musk's side? Were we supposed to believe that he was some kind of tortured genius?

I'm here to be as straightforward as I can, with the reader in mind, to tell you stories that I think are very revealing, somewhat exciting, somewhat appalling, but always informative. And in face of the criticism that, well, maybe I didn't render too much judgment, I tried pretty hard to pull back a bit. You can kind of tell what I think by the way I'm telling this story, but I'm not going to hammer that into you. You should wrestle with each of these things and figure out how it fits with your own vision of life.

From the new podcast On Musk with Walter Isaacson , a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeart , available wherever podcasts are .

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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

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The biggest ideas and pettiest rages in Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography

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On the Shelf

By Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster: 688 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

Walter Isaacson’s newest book, “ Elon Musk ,” about the temperamental corporate executive who runs Tesla, SpaceX and the company formerly known as Twitter, goes on sale this week.

Musk is already one of the most well-known and extensively covered leaders in American corporate life (and one of its most unavoidable figures on the service he has renamed X). Isaacson’s biography is a Musk agonistes : a portrait of a (largely) self-made, emotionally volatile entrepreneur from South Africa who has a tortured relationship with his father and an addiction to crises of the self-inflicted variety.

Musk is tormented, erratic and rude, over and over again

Musk’s moods are variously described as cycling through “light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what people around him call ‘demon mode’”; he’s “childlike, almost stunted,” “a drama magnet,” “not bred for domestic tranquility”; he has “a craving for storm and drama” and “erratic emotional oscillations.” Multiple people describe him as having undiagnosed Asperger’s . At one point, Musk calls himself bipolar. His volatile emotional states are the biggest constant in a book that zigzags from cars to rockets, tunneling to AI, solar energy to neural implants.

Let’s put a stake in the ‘great man’ biography — starting with Isaacson’s ‘Elon Musk’

Call it the ‘Isaacson Accord’: the agreement behind Walter Isaacson biographies, including ‘Elon Musk,’ to leave the assumption of difficult genius untouched.

Sept. 11, 2023

Isaacson repeatedly likens Musk to his estranged father, Errol Musk, also reportedly prone to volatile moods, abrasive behavior, credit-grubbing, flimflammery and conspiracy theories. Elon’s mother, Maye, said Errol “hit her” before the pair divorced, something that Errol denied. Musk cut off his father after Errol had a child with a woman Elon considered his half-sister — Jana — whom Errol had raised as his stepdaughter since she was 4. In an email Errol wrote to Elon for Father’s Day in 2022, he called Joe Biden a “freak, criminal, pedophile president” and that in South Africa, “with no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees.”

Nothing Elon Musk says in the book is as jarring as his own father’s sometimes bizarre and racist comments. But elsewhere, Elon’s own frequent lack of empathy is bolstered by ample evidence. During the first dance at his wedding with his first wife, Justine, he whispered to her, “I am the alpha in this relationship.” In 2016, he accused journalists of “killing people” (by discrediting self-driving technology) after they asked questions about the first drivers to die in Tesla Autopilot accidents . He was briefly estranged from his brother, Kimbal, after the latter — who once helped rescue Tesla financially — asked for help with his own restaurants. Elon replied that they were doomed, and “I think they should die.”

It’s natural for a reader to wonder whether trying to decarbonize the auto industry or avoid humanity’s extinction justifies the chaos, the bullying, the poor labor standards — the trouble. Isaacson weighs in on the subject only at the end of his book: “Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness? The times he’s an a—? The answer is no, of course not.”

Then, a few paragraphs later, the needle on Isaacson’s moral compass wobbles: “But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? ... Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.”

Elon Musk confirms he and Grimes privately welcomed a third child, Techno Mechanicus

Elon Musk and Grimes have a third child named Techno Mechanicus, the tech mogul confirmed ahead of the release of Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography.

Sept. 10, 2023

The two Elon Musks, before and after 2018’s Tesla ‘production hell’ (or Amber Heard, or his daughter’s transition)

The year 2018 was an inflection point in the perception of Musk as a public figure, one that foreshadowed his pandemic evolution in 2020 from moderate Democrat to trolling conservative . When a group of children were trapped in a cave in Thailand, Musk tweeted that one rescue diver who dismissed his offer to build a submersible was a “ pedo guy .” (Musk later apologized, but not easily.) On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he smoked marijuana , risking his status as a U.S. government contractor. He shot a Tesla Roadster into space .

Behind the scenes, the summer of 2017 through the fall of 2018 encompassed the most “hellacious” period of Musk’s life, Isaacson writes: “Musk went through periods when he oscillated between depression, stupor, giddiness, and manic energy.” Isaacson traces Musk’s tailspin to the news of his father’s relationship with his stepdaughter — as well as his own stormy relationship with the actor Amber Heard , who had recently gone through a tumultuous divorce with the actor Johnny Depp.

Heard “drew [Musk] into a dark vortex” around 2017, Isaacson writes, “that lasted more than a year and produced a deep-seated pain that lingers to this day. ... His brother and friends hated her with a passion.”

There were plenty of other stressors that didn’t involve a public figure who’s already taken enough public bludgeoning after the Depp-Heard defamation trial . One of the biggest was the “production hell” at Tesla in 2018, when the survival of the company (and Musk’s reputation) hinged on meeting a seemingly impossible production target for the Tesla Model 3 . Musk prowled the factory in a “frenzy of insanity,” he recalled later, “getting four or five hours’ sleep, often on the floor. I remember thinking, I’m like on the ragged edge of sanity.”

What drove Elon Musk — onetime Democratic ‘fanboy’ — to troll progressive politics

In his ‘Elon Musk’ biography, Walter Isaacson examines the billionaire’s political evolution, from fundraising for Democrats to trolling progressive politicians.

Sept. 8, 2023

What gave his turmoil a political bent was his daughter Jenna’s gender transition around 2020, followed by her decision to cut ties with him. Musk blamed this on her becoming “a full communist” as a result of her progressive education at a Los Angeles private school, Crossroads . This is around the time “woke mind virus” worked its way into his vocabulary.

Musk’s team got part of the 405 freeway repainted to improve his Tesla commute

In 2015, Isaacson reports that Musk would drive from his home in Bel Air to SpaceX headquarters near LAX and wanted his Tesla to be able to complete the trip using the company’s not-quite-functional Autopilot system. One lane on the 405 Freeway caused Musk’s Tesla trouble because the lane markers were too faded. Musk’s staff hatched a plan to sneak out onto the freeway at 3 a.m. to repaint the lanes themselves until they found a Musk fan in a governmental “transportation department” (it’s not specified which one) who helped arrange for the lanes to be repainted in exchange for a tour of SpaceX.

Musk’s first principles and Bill Gates’ belly

In the book, Musk is repeatedly depicted as being obsessed with “first principles,” namely, the importance of getting to Mars , making humanity a multiplanetary species, avoiding dictatorship by artificial intelligence . Isaacson rarely contexualizes or scrutinizes Musk’s positions on these issues himself, leaving the reader to get competing views from Musk’s own peers in the tycoon space.

Column: Elon Musk comes around to blaming the Jews

Following fellow right-winger RFK Jr., Elon Musk blames the Jews, in the form of the Anti-Defamation League, for his self-inflicted disaster at X (formerly Twitter).

Sept. 5, 2023

At a party in 2013, Isaacson reports, Musk argued with Google’s Larry Page about the danger of artificial intelligence on the grounds that human consciousness was something special in the universe. Page called Musk’s position sentimental nonsense and “specist.” Well, yes, I am pro-human,” Musk told Page. Determined that “the future of AI should not be controlled by Larry,” he cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman (but left the project before ChatGPT was released ).

First-principles thinking tends to close off alternatives. (Is getting to Mars really the best way to save humanity?) The book strikes a rare note of skepticism when describing a visit from Bill Gates to advocate different priorities (such as eradicating mosquitoes). Musk thinks his wealth is better spent on his human-saving companies. “He’s overboard on Mars,” Gates tells Isaacson. “... It’s this crazy thing where maybe there’s a nuclear war on Earth and so the people on Mars” will return and restore humanity.

Later, Musk realized Gates still had a short position on Tesla stock. “It’s pure hypocrisy,” Musk complained to Isaacson. “Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?” He retaliated by tweeting a picture of Gates with a bulging belly.

Musk thought attacking Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband was one of his worst mistakes

After the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) was seriously injured by a man who invaded their home in 2022, Musk tweeted a link suggesting Paul Pelosi had gotten into a fight with a male prostitute, saying: “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.” He deleted the tweet and, Isaacson reported, “said privately that it was one of his dumbest mistakes.” His brother agreed.

“You’re an idiot,” Kimbal, who “stopped following Elon on Twitter because it was too nerve-wracking,” told his brother of the Pelosi tweet. “Stop falling for weird s—.” Kimbal Musk was down on his brother’s Twitter acquisition altogether. “It’s a pimple on the a— of what should be your impact on the world.”

The dubious history of the Santa Monica Observer, the outlet behind that false Paul Pelosi story

Elon Musk’s now-deleted tweet of an unfounded story about Paul Pelosi sparked controversy over how false information propagates on Twitter.

Oct. 31, 2022

The emerald mine affair

Over the years, Musk critics have accused him of getting a leg up in life because of money his father made from emerald mines. Isaacson, who interviewed Errol Musk, reports that Errol struck a black-market deal to receive emeralds from three mines in Zambia to cut in Johannesburg, but that Errol did not have an ownership stake in the mines. He reportedly earned $210,000 from those mines before the business collapsed in the 1980s.

But Isaacson calls it a “myth” that Elon emigrated in 1989 with wealth from his father’s emerald business. Isaacson writes that Errol’s emerald business had become “worthless” years earlier, and that he only gave his son $2,000 in traveler’s checks when Elon Musk moved to Canada that year.

Isaacson and the muddied waters of the Musk-Ukraine controversy

In the days before its release, Isaacson’s book has picked up headlines for a chapter, excerpted in the Washington Post , detailing Musk’s intervention in the Russian-Ukrainian war. In March 2022, after Russia launched a wide-scale invasion of Ukraine, Musk quickly offered to donate Starlink satellite internet services to the Ukrainian government to aid in the country’s military defense.

But that September, Isaacson wrote, Musk effectively thwarted a Ukrainian submarine drone attack against the Russian fleet based in Russian-occupied Crimea. “The Russian ambassador had warned him, in a conversation a few weeks earlier, that attacking Crimea would be a red line and could lead to a nuclear response,” Isaacson wrote.

It was the ensuing detail from Isaacson that caught headlines: Musk “secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast,” which neutralized the drones. It sounded as if Musk had acted at the behest of the Russian government.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX wins Pentagon deal for Starlink in Ukraine

SpaceX’s Starlink satellite communications terminals are seen as vital for keeping civilians connected and providing crucial military communications.

June 1, 2023

On Friday, Isaacson posted a correction on Musk’s social media service, X (formerly Twitter): “The Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it...”

The rest of Isaacson’s chapter on the incident gives a little more context. Musk was surprised at the blowback, given that he had directly donated support to the Ukrainian military defense in a way that no other company could. But he also seemed to have bitten, hard, on the Russian government’s bluffs of potential nuclear retaliation; Ukraine has since launched many attacks both on Crimea and Russian soil without major escalation.

“How am I in this war?” Musk asked Isaacson in a call. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars.” Following the furor, Starlink contracts with government agencies , which then decide where its tech is used for military purposes. A government rather than a private individual getting to decide matters of war: You might call it a first principle.

Book Club: Walter Isaacson

What: Author Walter Isaacson joins the L.A. Times Book Club to discuss “Elon Musk” with Times columnist Anita Chabria . When: 2 p.m. Pacific Oct. 1 Where: The El Segundo Performing Arts Center. Get tickets . Join: Sign up for the Book Club newsletter for the latest books, news and live events.

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Matt Pearce was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times from 2012 to 2024. He previously covered the covering internet culture and podcasting, the 2020 presidential election and spent six years on The Times’ national desk, where he wrote stories about violence, disasters, social movements and civil liberties. Pearce was one of the first national reporters to arrive in Ferguson, Mo., during the uprising in 2014, and he chased Hurricane Harvey across Texas as the storm ravaged the Lone Star State in 2017. A University of Missouri graduate, he hails from a small town outside Kansas City, Mo.

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

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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The Journalist and the Billionaire

What did an old establishment guy like walter isaacson learn writing elon musk’s biography.

It’s a Saturday night in August, and Walter Isaacson is sitting in the back of Lilette, a restaurant on Magazine Street in his hometown of New Orleans, swizzling a Sazerac. “The question for a biographer,” he tells me, holding forth a little, “is to show how the demons of a person are totally connected to the drive that gets their rockets to orbit. People who are driven by demons get shit done.”

Isaacson was the editor of Time magazine in the 1990s, a decade or so before the internet wrecked the print party. He was running CNN when 9/11 happened and then landed in 2003 at the Aspen Institute, where, for 14 years, he was the impresario of its thought-leader confabs. But he’s long had a side hustle writing biographies of Great Men: Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs — as well as one Great Woman, biochemist Jennifer Doudna.

On September 12, Isaacson’s latest will be published, about Elon Musk , a man many take to be something of a demon himself — erratic, vindictive, and exhibiting little impulse control. His moods can have far-reaching implications for, say, the Ukrainian army, which depends on his Starlink satellites to fight Russia. Many others hail him as a hero trying to get humanity to Mars while battling evil AI and dating many hot babes in the process. But if you’re somewhere in between, trying to figure out if he is becoming a Bond villain or still that Tony Stark–like figure many people assume him to be, Isaacson’s book is not designed to help you sort it out.

It is written in Time -magazine style — restrained, middlebrow, and without an obvious agenda. Its author is just there to give you, the reader, the facts of Musk’s life as he was able to observe and report them. Isaacson spent more than two years hanging around with the guy in his factories and at his rocket-launch sites, interviewing 128 people in his orbit and fielding many surreal late-night phone calls and text messages. But unlike his previous subjects, Musk was tweeting the entire time Isaacson was reporting, making news constantly with his megalomaniacal maneuvering. Sometimes this was alarming, as when the richest man in the world tweeted, as he did in April, “Between Tesla , Starlink & Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in one head than anyone ever.”

Isaacson, who at 71 still retains a touch of his genteel Louisiana drawl, is the ultimate Old Establishment man — Harvard, Rhodes scholar, approached to join the CIA (but declined) — so much so that his first book, The Wise Men , co-written with Evan Thomas in 1986, was literally about the old Establishment Isaacson had been groomed to join. He has a golden Rolodex and is utterly at ease at a cocktail party. Richard Stengel, who is Isaacson’s friend and was one of his successors running Time, says that when Isaacson was at Aspen, he was “the most intellectual maître d’ in the history of the world.”

And Musk? He has total contempt for the stodgy elites and their status anxiety — he wouldn’t even let the media keep their little blue check marks after he took over Twitter . And while he loves a party and hanging out with celebrities and his fellow billionaires, he can be a goofy social presence, like a too-smart kid not quite grown up. As Isaacson writes in the book, sounding a little stodgy himself, Musk’s humor tends “to be filled with smirking references to 69, other sex acts, body fluids, pooping, farts, dope smoking, and topics that would crack up a dorm room of stoned freshmen.”

They may be the unlikeliest writer-subject pairing since Bob Woodward and John Belushi. Except that for Isaacson, Musk is irresistible. Both as a journalist and “intellectual maître d’,” Isaacson has always made it his business to get to know, and win over, everyone worth knowing. If that compulsion counts as a demon driving him , well, perhaps that is how he has gotten so much shit done.

His courtship of Musk began in August 2021. Isaacson was in Sag Harbor, staying at the home of his high-powered lawyer friends Joel Klein and Nicole Seligman , when Musk called. Antonio Gracias , who sat on the boards of both Aspen and Tesla, had set it up.

At the time, Musk was more an engineer with a halo than the controversialist he has since become. Thanks to the success of Tesla and SpaceX, he was the richest person in the world, and Time magazine — now something of a hobby project owned by a software billionaire — picked him as its 2021 Person of the Year . (“This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit.”)

Musk thought it might be a good moment to do a book and wondered if Isaacson would want to write it. Notably, on Amazon, four of Isaacson’s works — Franklin, Einstein, Jobs and da Vinci — are packaged and sold as a set: “ The Genius Biographies .” Why wouldn’t Musk want to join the others on that shelf?

Isaacson and Musk discussed the possibility for over an hour. The journalist laid out his ground rules: He’d want to shadow Musk in meetings and on assembly lines and interview ex-wives, lovers, children, enemies, and employees. No topic could be off limits. Musk said he was game, and they hung up. Twenty minutes later, Isaacson’s phone started blowing up. He picked it up to discover that Musk had tweeted , “If you’re curious about Tesla, SpaceX & my general goings on, @WalterIsaacson is writing a biography.”

Look,” Isaacson tells me in New Orleans. “He and I are very different. I came from a charmed childhood and became very much a part of the media Establishment. He came from a brutal childhood and resents the established elites. It means I have to work to understand his mindset. And he has to get his head around that somebody like me is writing the book.”

At the restaurant, he drops a couple of ice cubes into his drink and says, “I put ice in it ’cause I’ve been across the lake and it’s 99 degrees.” People keep coming up to the table to shake his hand. First, a boisterous bald man whom Isaacson introduces as his haberdasher, “the other David Rubenstein” (not to be confused with the billionaire David Rubenstein of the Carlyle Group, who will be giving Isaacson’s book party in Washington, D.C., on September 17; the New York book party is being thrown by Michael Bloomberg at his place on East 78th Street). The chef comes out of the kitchen to say “hello,” followed by a local politician named Helena Moreno, who could very well be the city’s next mayor, Isaacson assures me.

Also at our table is a prim, polite, and politically connected uptown New Orleans woman in a floral dress whose name is Anne Milling. “A real steel magnolia,” Isaacson calls her. She tells him she’s not so sure about his latest subject. “I just don’t like his values,” she says with exquisite disdain.

“You may not like certain aspects of what he tweets,” Isaacson tells her, “but he has sent up this year so far more mass to orbit than all countries and all companies combined. He has created a car company that’s worth as much as all nine other car companies combined.”

“That’s great,” she shoots back. “I admire that, Walter, but now I’ll teyyeh what! His values are not my values, so theyyeh go!”

“But have you gotten a rocket to Mars?” he asks.

“I don’t give a hoot about a rocket tah’ Mahhs!”

Isaacson smiles and sips his rye. Ever since he started this book, he has heard the same sorts of complaints from many in his circle: that Musk’s jokes and conspiracy mongering are in fact malignant. That he might actually be a homophobe or an antisemite . But Isaacson is guessing there are more people who haven’t made up their minds about Musk, and are simply fascinated by him and want to understand more. There is, of course, also a built-in fanboy audience for the book, assuming Musk himself doesn’t disavow it.

The next morning, Isaacson scoops me up in his gray Volvo — he keeps his Tesla in New York, where he still has a place on Central Park West — to show me his New Orleans. He grew up “well enough off,” the son of an electrical engineer and a real-estate agent. We stop by his childhood home, a rambling white pile encircled by lush palms on a corner of Napoleon Avenue in Broadmoor. His only sibling, a brother named Lee who owns an IT business, lives here now.

It was clear from the beginning that Walter was a little different. “He just sort of came out as Walter,” says The New Yorker ’s Nicholas Lemann , who grew up in New Orleans and has known Isaacson since they were children. “His parents were a little mystified by the whole thing, but he just always was recognizably the person he is now.” Isaacson attended the elite Isidore Newman School, where his classmates voted him Most Likely to Succeed.

The writer Michael Lewis was a few grades behind him. “This is my first impression of Walter Isaacson,” he says. “I was in like fifth or sixth grade. They hauled us into the auditorium, where we were supposed to just watch Walter onstage so we would be like him one day. It was like the headmaster thought Walter was the example of what a Newman student should be. He was like a senior, maybe. We all found it rather nauseating.” A few years after that, Lewis says, “we’re all ushered back into the auditorium, where Walter is once again onstage. At this point, I think, he had just gotten the Rhodes scholarship.” Incredibly, Lewis says, it then happened again. “This time, he is, like, the youngest person ever to whatever at Time magazine or something. By now, there’s, like, vomit running down the aisles.”

I recount this to Isaacson as we pass the school. “I love Michael,” he says carefully, “but I think that he makes all narratives more beautiful. I’ve heard his story about them parading me out at some assembly.” (This conversation is occurring the same weekend Lewis is embroiled in a controversy over whether he made some aspects of the narrative of his best-selling book The Blind Side a little too … beautiful.)

There is a story that Isaacson likes to tell about how he became the kind of journalist — and ultimately, biographer — that he has become. His childhood friend was the nephew of the novelist Walker Percy, who told Isaacson that there are “two types of people who come out of Louisiana: preachers and storytellers. It was better to be a storyteller.”

Isaacson’s parents subscribed to Time and Saturday Review and were members of the Book of the Month Club. In high school, he got a summer job at the States-Item, where, as he wrote in the introduction to his 2009 book of short profiles, American Sketches, he realized that “the key to journalism is that people like to talk.”

“In the world we grew up in, to leave New Orleans was considered a sort of mystery and tragedy,” explains Lemann. “So the idea that Walter would go off and become a super-achiever on a global scale, that was just not something that people thought about as a possibility.” He adds, “I’ve never completely gotten over my inner Quentin Compson,” referring to the William Faulkner character who leaves Mississippi for Harvard but can never let go of the South and kills himself by jumping off a bridge into the Charles River. “But I think Walter has completely triumphed over his.”

Isaacson practically gags at this. “What the fuck,” he says. “Nick ran the Columbia School of Journalism in New York City! Give me a break. He’s not only a success but a Yankee. At least I’ve moved back home. He hasn’t yet!”

He does cop to having had a bit of a Compson phase when he first arrived at Harvard in 1970, though. There’s a memorial plaque on a bridge there dedicated to the character, and Isaacson would visit it with a fellow Southerner classmate . There, they would recite passages from Faulkner novels. “I think I snapped out of that by sophomore or junior year,” he says, “but freshman year, when you’re trying to figure out your identity at college …” And yet he still can and does recite his favorite Faulkner passage from memory when I ask about it. (It’s an exchange from Absalom, Absalom! between Compson and his roommate about the fall of the South.)

He once wrote a review of a Faulkner biography in what he thought was the style of Faulkner for the Harvard Crimson, which never invited him to be on its staff. Instead, Isaacson joined the Lampoon, despite the fact that he doesn’t seem like a born satirist, really. He’s funnier in person than on the page.

One year, Sunday Times of London editor Harold Evans came to speak. Afterward, Isaacson mailed his States-Item clips to Evans, who was impressed. It was the summer of 1973, the era of Watergate, and Isaacson thinks perhaps Evans figured he might be the next Woodward or Bernstein, so he put him on the investigative team. But Isaacson soon realized that wasn’t for him. “I tended to like people too much to relish investigating them,” he wrote in American Sketches. He did learn something else from watching Evans work, which came in handy later at Time and in writing his biographies: “It was possible to be crusading and investigative while also retaining access to the people you cover.”

After his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, he returned, at 24, to New Orleans and the States-Item (which later merged with the Times-Picayune ). There, he befriended a 19-year-old reporter named Dean Baquet. “Walter stood out,” remembers Baquet. “He was so clearly an ambitious guy in a city that, frankly, sees really ambitious people as a little bit awkward.” (Baquet could probably relate, as he did become the executive editor of the New York Times. ) The two cub reporters teamed up for a story about a corrupt businessman who then threatened to sue them. Isaacson panicked, but, he recalls, “Dean said, ‘Don’t worry, we got it nailed.’ His source was the U.S. Attorney, who was leaking to him. He said, ‘He’s going to be indicted for this in a few weeks.’ Indeed, he was.”

Isaacson began getting noticed as a reporter and one week received two fateful phone calls. “Somebody calls and says, ‘I’m a friend of Cord Meyer. Can we meet you?’” Back at Oxford, Isaacson had encountered the tony and mysterious Meyer, who would visit campus to speak to promising students, claiming to be the cultural attaché to the U.S. Embassy. It turned out he was CIA. “They asked, ‘Would you ever think of joining the CIA?’” says Isaacson. “I said, ‘Yes, I guess so.’ Then they said something that totally screwed it up. They said, ‘But we never want you to be undercover or a secret agent. We want you to be an analyst because you’ve studied economics. Come be an analyst at Langley.’ I did want to say, ‘Hey, how come I can’t be cloak and dagger?’ But that was the offer they gave me. That very same week, an editor at Time called.” And so he picked New York over Langley. (But would he have made a good spy? “No,” he says. “I would’ve fucked it up totally.”)

The Time magazine to which Isaacson arrived in 1978 was an organ of the Wasp Establishment, peddling a sensible and optimistic Middle American worldview. It was the flagship title of a fleet of other money-printing magazines — People, Sports Illustrated, Fortune — which gave Time Inc. a glossy sheen of prosperity and power. This was another era entirely, when a magazine that came out on Monday (there were editions in other parts of the world, too) could set the agenda for the week. The office culture at Time was also, among other things, more than a bit sexist. The writers and editors were still mostly white Ivy League boys in crisp white shirts.

Isaacson was a confident, clever Ivy League boy, and he did well there. “He was a fine writer and editor,” remembers one of his former bosses, Stephen G. Smith. “But what struck me about him was that he was a prototype of a Rhodes scholar. Big brain. Great emotional intelligence, even in his 20s. He just had that gift of appreciating — it sounds like ‘sucking up’ — but it was a gift of connecting with people.”

“He had no problem finding mentors,” remembers one old work friend from back then. There were lots of determined young journalists at Time then. Isaacson worked there with Graydon Carter (who co-founded Spy, then ran Vanity Fair ), Kurt Andersen (another Spy co-founder; he later ran this magazine), and Jim Kelly (managing editor of Time after Isaacson). There was also Maureen Dowd, Alessandra Stanley, Michiko Kakutani, and Frank Rich, all of whom would become columnists or critics at the Times. (Rich now writes for New York . ) “Even among that group, you sort of knew that Walter and Frank were in a slightly different category,” recalls Carter. “They got along better with older people, knew more what they were doing and were going to do.”

“Walter was uncommonly ambitious in a place that was relatively kind of relaxed and not cutthroat,” remembers Kelly. “Not that he made it cutthroat.” Isaacson covered Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign and chronicled the fall of Communism as a foreign correspondent and then worked his way up, eventually becoming managing editor of the magazine.

“You had to kind of respect his absolute grit,” says Stanley. “And I would say, of all of us, I would vote him most improved, not only because he’s gotten smarter, but he’s a much nicer person now than he was then. Success doesn’t always do that.”

Isaacson’s Well-Connected Life

He’s known everyone.

Reporting for the Times-Picayune in 1972.

With Time editor Henry Grunwald at the 1980 Democratic Convention.

With Kurt Andersen, Jim Kelly, and Richard Stengel at Time.

With The Wise Men co-author Evan Thomas in 1982.

With Walker Percy in 1984.

With Václav Havel during the Prague Spring.

In Moscow for Time in 1991.

 Interviewing Mikhail Gorbachev in 1997.

With George W. Bush in 2005.

With then-Senator Barack Obama in 2005.

With Musk in 2023.

Isaacson takes me back to his condo, where he lives with his wife, Cathy, a lawyer from Washington whom he met in his early 20s. It’s airy and spacious, in a newish building that was designed to fit in with the look of the Garden District with its columns and porches. A balcony overlooks St. Charles Avenue, lined with big Southern Gothic oaks, emerald Mardi Gras beads still festooning their branches. Isaacson acts a bit sheepish about all that talk of youthful ambition. “There was always part of me like, Okay, what am I really doing? When am I going to go back home to New Orleans? I do not remember a burning desire to run Time ,” he says while standing by his stove cooking red beans and rice. I almost believe him. He holds up a knife and asks, “Do you like garlic, by the way?”

When he was appointed editor of Time in 1996, the internet was not yet a threat. He knew something of what was coming, though: He had spearheaded Time Inc.’s boondoggle of an early web portal called Pathfinder (which he tells me was a childhood nickname) before pivoting back to the weekly. He created a new section in the mag covering technology and science and made early relationships in Silicon Valley.

At the end of the decade, Time Warner merged with America Online, and corporate synergy was the name of the game. Isaacson was tapped to run CNN. He had never worked in TV and hardly even watched it. But it was a promotion, the next stage of his media career. “I get to CNN,” he says, “it’s like, ‘We need a donut with an uplink and a wraparound.’ I’m like, What the fuck are you talking about? ” It was a culture clash in other ways, too. “All they care about is having their mug on TV,” says Isaacson. Suddenly, he was spending inordinate amounts of time dealing with people like Lou Dobbs and Greta Van Susteren. “I’m thinking, How do I get out of this movie? ” he says. “I visit Ken Auletta. I remember being in the guest room in a fetal position. I hate this job, I hate this job, I hate this job. Then 9/11 happens. Then for a year or so, at least I knew what we were doing.”

He lasted until 2003, when he left to be CEO of the Aspen Institute. There was, at the time, a little bit of Schadenfreude: Michael Wolff wrote a column for this magazine expressing shock that one of the “greatest careerists of our time” could have had what seemed like this comeuppance.

Isaacson, Cathy, and their daughter, Betsy (then a teenager), moved to Georgetown, where they lived down the street from Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee and next door to George Stephanopoulos. He set about transforming the sleepy think tank, starting the Ideas Festival and using his contacts to make it something like Davos in the Rockies mixed with TED Talks. “His capacity for that was beyond belief,” remembers the historian and journalist Evan Thomas, who has known Isaacson since they worked together at Time. “Walter started at breakfast and would still be going at 11 p.m., just as happy as a clam. He’s chatting up the Dalai Lama, Larry Summers, Gloria Steinem, whoever happened to be famous and hot, from any walk of life — they were either at Walter’s house, on Walter’s stage, in Walter’s tent.”

Isaacson says he loved Aspen, but his pals tell me they had a suspicion their friend wasn’t feeling totally fulfilled by it. “I think the job that he’s had that he loves the most is being editor of Time, ” says Stengel. “I think he feels the most nostalgia about that. I think if he could, in a fantasy way, go back and do anything, that’s what he would do.”

But that world — the world that Isaacson was formed by and helped form — was fast collapsing. “Thirty years ago,” says Kelly, “there was a powerful room of magazine editors and network anchors, and that’s Walter. He is one of the emperors in that room. That room is destroyed. A new room was built, and it has the Steve Jobses and Elon Musks of the world. Walter knows he is not one of them, but he wants to be in the room. So now he’s the scribe to the new emperors, and that makes him very happy.”

One Friday night last September, Isaacson was back at his high school in New Orleans, watching a football game when he received a text from Musk: “This could be a giant disaster.”

Months earlier, the Ukraine War had broken out; the Russians’ opening salvo had been a malware attack that cut off the Ukrainians’ communications and internet access. Musk jumped to help them get back online, sending 500 Starlink terminals to Ukraine just two days later and thousands more after that. Suddenly, the war effort was heavily dependent on Musk, who was giving away his technology largely for free. That September, the Ukrainians planned a sneak attack on the Russian fleet at Sevastopol in Crimea using explosive-packed drones that relied on Starlink to guide them. But it wasn’t until their drone subs lost connectivity that they learned that Musk had disabled coverage within 100 kilometers of the Crimean coast, fearing such an attack could lead to World War III. As this was unfolding, Musk called Isaacson.

“I finally went under the bleachers, and he told me about stopping Starlink service in Crimea because they were doing the sneak attack,” says Isaacson. What, in such a scenario, is the responsibility of the biographer? “I didn’t tell him what to do,” he says. “I said, ‘What’s happening?’ He didn’t ask advice, and so my questions were simply things like, ‘Have you talked to Jake Sullivan or General Milley?’ He said ‘yes,’ and I said, ‘Oh, okay. What did they say?’ He told me.” It seems as though Isaacson came to be a kind of Dr. Melfi to Musk’s Tony Soprano at a time when Musk was exercising a terrifying amount of power. “At one point,” says Isaacson, “I almost said to him, ‘Why are you telling me all this?’ But I didn’t. He was talking and telling me. I don’t think it was like a therapist. I think he wanted it to be in the book.” (Musk did not respond to requests for comment for this article.)

On Sept. 7, the Washington Post published an excerpt from the book about Starlink. It read like Musk had switched off the coverage as the attack was underway — the suddenly unguided drones washing dramatically up on the shore — which apparently was not the case, exactly. An uproar ensued and Musk posted to X : “The Starlink regions in question were not activated. SpaceX did not deactivate anything.” He also texted Isaacson about the excerpt. Isaacson then posted to X that he wished to “clarify” that “the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.” When I followed up on this, Isaacson texted me, “I realized that I misinterpreted him that night when he told me he was not allowing Starlink to be used during the attack. I thought he had just made that decision. In fact, he was simply adhering to a policy he had previously implemented. So I posted a correction.” (Musk reposted it and wrote, “Much appreciated, Walter.”)

As all of this came out, a Ukrainian official posted to X Sept. 7 that Musk’s decision meant that the unsunk Russian ships continued to “fire Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities. As a result, civilians, and children are being killed. This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego.”

The book recounts Musk calling Isaacson late at night on another occasion, racked with anxiety, asking, “How am I in this war? Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill and get online for school and do good peaceful things, not drone strikes.” It includes eye-popping text-message exchanges between Musk and Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s then-vice-prime minister, who begs Musk to turn Starlink on in the country’s eastern territories. (Musk: “Russia will stop at nothing, nothing, to hold Crimea. This poses catastrophic risk to the world … seek peace while you have the upper hand.”)

“He has an epic superhero-savior complex,” says Isaacson. “He told me that he loved reading comics as a kid. He said, ‘Heroes were weird because they were trying to save the world while wearing their underpants on the outside, but at least they were trying to save the world.’”

There are moments in the book when Musk is caught with his pants down, mostly around his various baby mamas. He donated his sperm to Shivon Zilis, an executive at one of his other companies, Neuralink (which is developing implantable “brain-computer interfaces”), so that she could have two of his children without telling Grimes, with whom he had also had children. Isaacson reports that while Zilis was in an Austin hospital with pregnancy complications, so too, in a nearby room, was a woman who happened to be a surrogate mother carrying another of Musk’s babies with Grimes. Despite the fact that Zilis and Grimes were acquainted, Grimes had no clue that Zilis was carrying Musk’s kid or that she was down the hall. Isaacson writes that Grimes was furious when she found out later and wasn’t at all sure whether she would ever allow her Musk babies (a boy named X and a girl named Y and a new baby boy named Techno Mechanicus) to hang out with Zilis’s Musk babies (a boy named Strider Sekhar Sirius and a girl named Azure Astra Alice).

Isaacson also wades into Musk’s fiery relationship with Amber Heard. “She was just so toxic,” Musk’s brother, Kimbal, tells Isaacson, “a nightmare.” In the book, Musk’s chief of staff, Sam Teller, compares her to the Joker and says “she didn’t have a goal or aim other than chaos. She thrives on destabilizing everything.” Grimes says, “My Dungeon and Dragons alignment would be chaotic good, whereas Amber’s is probably chaotic evil.” As for Heard herself? She tells Isaacson that “Elon loves fire and sometimes it burns him.”

Musk is a volatile, moving target. Isaacson would spend a week or so at a time with him each month, traveling to L.A. to meet him at the SpaceX factory, then up to Fremont to the Tesla factory, then to Boca Chica, Texas, for the Starship launch. “The way I did it was to avoid trying to pepper him with questions and just observe,” says Isaacson. “Secondly, don’t fill the silences. There’d be times when it would just be him and me sitting in a conference room between meetings, sometimes 45 minutes. Occasionally, he’d start talking and reminisce. Then he’d go quiet or he’d read his mail or just stare into space. My way of operating was, Don’t fill the silences. If I’m quiet, they’ll eventually start talking again.”

Isaacson tells me he didn’t party with the playboy mogul. “I saw people cross the line sometimes,” he says, “people who worked for him or with him or who suddenly thought that they were party friends.” So he never saw him doing ketamine in a hot tub or anything? “I have never had him and a hot tub in the same field of vision,” he says. After having spent so much time with the man, I wondered, quite simply and perhaps naïvely — did Isaacson end up liking Musk, like, as a person? “Well, first of all, there’s seven or eight Elons,” says Isaacson. “There’s Elon firing off memes, there’s Elon being an asshole, there’s Elon in engineering mode. I was totally fascinated by him. Really repelled at times, when he was being brutal to people around him, but also astonished when he would change a design of a valve on the fly and they would test it and it worked. It’s not like there was one simple emotion. This is a guy who has multiple personalities and, as Grimes said, ‘It’s really great and fun to be around Elon when you’ve got the right Elon.’” Isaacson says Musk’s neurodivergence plays “a very large part” in his makeup and concedes that “I think his lack of empathy is a deeply unattractive trait. I also think that he would not be who he was in terms of the enterprises if he hadn’t had the deficit of the empathy gene.”

Isaacson is a particular type of biographer. His book is driven by listen-to-everyone-he-can access. It is not the Robert Caro approach with granular, yearslong reportage on the nature and implications of Musk’s power. Washington Post’ s Will Oremus wrote in his September 10 review that “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.” The book is scrupulously unsnarky — don’t expect the tone of the book Joe Hagan wrote on Jann Wenner. “It is pure narrative storytelling; there’s not preaching in there,” says Isaacson. “People will come away from this book, if they admire Musk, with more evidence that they would like. If they hate Musk, they’ll come away with more evidence to reinforce their dislike of him. Hopefully, there will be a large group of readers who’ll say, ‘Wow, I get it, it’s more complex, and there’s not simply one way to look at it.’”

What is the inherent value of reporting the words that come out of Musk’s mouth for two years straight when he just tweets with abandon anyhow, often contradicting himself? Musk is a contemporary celebrity, which means he keeps the stunts coming so that his audience doesn’t look away. He’s performing. At some point, you just want to look away to preserve room in your consciousness for less crazy-making things.

When The Wall Street Journal excerpted the part of Isaacson’s book about the purchase of Twitter, the reaction, at least among those who followed the Musk-Twitter saga very closely, was some measure of Elon fatigue . Is that all he got? But the Musk fanboys ate it up. When the second excerpt came out, in Time, Musk himself tweeted: “Not quite how I would tell the story, but very accurate for an observer who only saw part of the puzzle.”

But can the puzzle pieces of Musk ever really be fit together by a biographer?

When Isaacson wrote about Steve Jobs, he was a largely beloved figure at the end of his life. He wasn’t influencing wars and foreign policy, pimping for Tucker Carlson, fulminating against something called the “woke mind virus,” or beefing with the Anti-Defamation League. He was making really cool consumer technology. There is risk for Isaacson in applying his Time Man of the Year approach to Musk, to cover him as he did Jobs — He can be a real prick, but check out all these neat toys he’s made! — since Musk is probably going to be around for decades more. Who knows what his ultimate legacy will be?

On St. Charles Avenue, just outside Isaacson’s apartment, is what’s said to be the oldest continually operating streetcar in the world. He rides it for just 40 cents (senior-citizen discount) to and from Tulane University, where he is a professor and something of a celebrity on campus. (His classes are very difficult to get into.)

The boy who used to recite Faulkner on a bridge at Harvard was happy to return to his hometown. “When you’ve been at Time magazine,” he says, “half the publicists who act like they’re your friends are just doing it because you’re at Time or CNN, whereas when I came back home, everybody had known me when I had really big ears in kindergarten.”

His office is stuffed with bric-a-brac from his big life among the muckety-mucks; a photograph of him sitting with George W. Bush during the time Isaacson was vice-chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority after Hurricane Katrina; a picture of Isaacson flying on Air Force One with President Obama; a few of Isaacson’s favorite Time covers. There is also a 1984 Apple Macintosh.

Jobs approached Isaacson in 2009 after realizing he might not have much time left. The book was a balanced and unvarnished look at Jobs’s legacy and the darker sides of his personality; reviewing it for the Times, Janet Maslin observed that the book “greatly admires its subject.” Still, Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, and some members of Jobs’s inner circle, such as Apple’s chief designer, Jony Ive, loathed the book and, by extension, its author. Ever the deadline reporter, Isaacson rushed out the book the month of Jobs’s death, which upset them. But mostly they felt the book painted Jobs as too much of an asshole and deadbeat dad.

It’s hardly unusual for the family of a subject to hate a biography. What is more unusual is the line Isaacson included in his acknowledgments in later versions of the book: “I am grateful to those who have been forgiving of my lapses and misperceptions and who have helped me make corrections or clear a few things up.”

Certain things in the original version of the book were excised. Andy Hertzfeld, an original Apple employee, had speculated that Powell Jobs had been “scheming” to meet Jobs. Gone is this quote from Hertzfeld: “Laurene is nice, but she can be calculating and I think she targeted him from the beginning … Her college roommate told me that Laurene had magazine covers of Steve and vowed she was going to meet him. If it’s true that Steve was manipulated, there is a fair amount of irony there.” (Isaacson included her denial in all versions of the book.) Elsewhere, a nine-sentence paragraph about Jobs being a neglectful father to some of his children simply disappeared.

It goes to an interesting tension between biographer and subject. Jobs wasn’t alive to react negatively to Isaacson’s book, assuming he would have. Musk, who can be wrathful, childishly mocking, and unrelenting, will be. “I’m brutally honest about everything about Musk,” says Isaacson. “It’s just that sometimes people who are — especially children who didn’t ask to be part of the story — you have to balance how hurtful it will be to a person who’s not central to the story and is young versus how necessary it is for the reader. Maybe that was the case back with the parts I revised out of Jobs. ”

As for Musk, Isaacson says it was necessary to include his falling out with his oldest child. “Some of the politics are driven by his own personal things in his own life,” says Isaacson. “Like Xavier, the eldest, named after his favorite X-Man person, becoming Jenna, transitioning, and becoming a Marxist and rejecting him. It helps inflame his fears that wokeness has infected everything from Los Angeles high schools to Twitter. He’s become in the past four years obsessed by the need to fight what he has decided is the ‘woke mind virus.’”

To many observers, it seems as though Musk is falling down a rabbit hole, growing more conspiratorial and mean-spirited — an alarming trend line when crossed with his growing power. But Isaacson doesn’t think so. “He hasn’t changed,” he says, “because in 2017, 2018, he was doing dark human shit as much as he is doing now. Pedophile tweets and things like that. He’s not that different. One difference, especially among the formerly blue-checked elite, is that his politics has shifted to the populist anti-woke side.” But that is definitely a difference now that he actually owns Twitter and has renamed it X.

The book begins with Musk’s hard-core childhood in South Africa, where he was beaten up at school, attended a “paramilitary Lord of the Flies ” summer camp, and was terrorized and belittled by his father. Bringing it back to X, Isaacson says, “He got brutalized on the playground. Now he gets to be king of the playground.”

I ask what Musk will hate most about the book, and Isaacson pauses for a moment. “I think some of the complexities of his father and childhood influence on him,” he says.

On Saturday, Sept. 9, after the excerpts had been published, Musk posted about the book: “I have a copy, but Walter recommended that I not read it,” adding a laughter emoji. So far, the billionaire seems pleased with the journalist. The two men had dinner in Austin, Texas, last week — the moment was, as with everything with Musk, publicized on X — and Musk promoted an interview Isaacson did with podcaster Lex Fridman, writing that “Any conversation with Walter & Lex will be great.”

And what if Musk changes his mind and goes on the offensive, starts tweeting that Isaacson is a “pedo guy” or sics his rabid fanboys on him? “I will depend on you and many others to say, ‘We’ve never noticed him to practice pedophilia,’” says Isaacson with a laugh. “While I’m here in New Orleans, I’m not too worried what people say about me.”

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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.

• Main content

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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‘He is driven by demons’: biographer Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk

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Gillian Tett

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It is late morning on a Friday in Galatoire’s Restaurant on Bourbon Street, New Orleans — a road famous for multicoloured buildings and wild bars — and I seem to be almost the only sober customer in the joint. 

On one side of me a group of women dressed in Barbie pink are shrieking and waving lurid cocktails; on the other, rowdy men are hosting a pre-wedding party. Purple, green and gold balloons hang across the restaurant, which has the ambience of an old-fashioned French saloon.

“It’s a scene!” yells the American writer Walter Isaacson, straining to be heard above the cacophony. 

I reflect to myself that it seems like an odd place to meet someone who is famous for tackling high-minded questions such as how to unleash innovation in America or navigate artificial intelligence. Or maybe not. The trigger for our lunch is that Isaacson, 71, has just explored these issues by writing a biography of a man who is as zany, loud-mouthed, unpredictable and wild as any New Orleans bar: Elon Musk . The book’s contents were being kept closely guarded ahead of publication day on Tuesday.

Chasing a controversial innovator was not a novel task for Isaacson: he has already penned hefty, bestselling biographies of Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna , Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. I ordered these books before our lunch and the resulting stack of paper was almost a foot high.

However, exploring the mind of Musk was “not quite like anything I have ever done before”, he says, as we sit down. “I told him at the beginning [of the project] that if I am going to do this I have to be at your side for two years and I want to talk to you almost every day — I want to be like Boswell doing Doctor Johnson.” 

That delivered “a wild ride”, says Isaacson. But it also left him (and everyone else) grappling with big questions: do you have to be half-crazy to be truly innovative, or a genius? And how do you stop a brilliant mind from spinning out of control?

“He told me he thinks he is bipolar — but has never been diagnosed,” Isaacson shouts a few minutes later, as I push the microphone into a wine glass beneath his mouth to contend with the hubbub. “But I think it is more complicated.” Indeed.

I thought it was insane — Musk doesn’t have empathy and so Twitter was not a good fit for him

We have met in this unlikely venue because Isaacson is a local luminary: his family have lived in the city for several generations and he grew up close to Bourbon Street, a historic district known for its tourist crowds and Creole culture. “I had a magical childhood,” he confides, with a slight southern twang. “Very different from Musk.” 

As a young adult, Isaacson studied at Harvard and Oxford, fell in love with journalism and, after working for Britain’s The Sunday Times and a New Orleans paper, moved to New York, where he had a storied career: he became editor of Time magazine and chief executive of CNN before running the Aspen Institute, a think-tank, and transforming its fortunes. 

But when Hurricane Katrina hit his hometown in 2005, it left him aching to reconnect with his roots. So he moved back a few years ago and now teaches history at Tulane University, while tirelessly championing the city and its icons. 

Galatoire’s is an upmarket French Creole-inspired restaurant founded in 1905. “It’s a piece of history,” declares Isaacson as we arrive and the restaurant manager and waiters rush up, greeting him as a regular. The Democrat strategist James Carville — another New Orleans local — appears at our table, eager to swap gossip about US president Joe Biden. Then other guests swarm in, escaping the August street heat: 35C with 90 per cent humidity. 

“What’s good to eat?” I shout, yearning for a light salad.

A waiter called Billy dumps big white bread rolls on the table and recommends starters of a local crab dish and shrimp remoulade, followed by fish. Lemon fish, red fish or pompano? Isaacson chooses pompano; I settle on red fish. Vegetables? Isaacson shakes his head, so I furtively order spinach. Cocktails? I mentally prepare to embrace the Creole spirit. But Isaacson orders a modest glass of white wine — “it’s a house blend, very good” — and I follow suit. 

Galatoire’s Restaurant 209 Bourbon St, New Orleans, LA 70130, US Crab with anchovies and mushrooms $20 Shrimp remoulade $15 Pompano $43 Red fish $44 Side of spinach $6 Glass of white wine x 2 $30 Total (incl tax) $174.52

As the wine arrives — mercifully crisp and cold — I ask Isaacson how he persuaded Musk to back his project. When he wrote his biography of Jobs, a decade ago, the Apple co-founder was willing to chat because he was battling cancer and mindful of his legacy. But Musk is young and still in a feverish expansion mode; why talk now?

“In 2021, I was kicking around looking for my next book, and a lot of friends, including Mike Bloomberg, said I should do Elon,” Isaacson explains. “So someone set up a phone call with him and we talked for an hour and a half, and I told him that if I do this I need total access, and you have absolutely no control over the book. None.”

Did he accept that? Musk is (in)famously obsessive about controlling even the small details of his life.

Isaacson nods. “He just said “OK!” Then he asked me if I minded if he told other people [about the book] and, of course, I said no.” Then, a few minutes later, Isaacson met up with friends who told him that Musk had dispatched a tweet — even during the phone call — announcing that Isaacson would be his biographer. Isaacson was shocked. “It was the first example [I saw] of him being totally impetuous.”

Why did Musk agree? “He loves history and he has a big enough ego that he thinks of himself as a historical figure — and he has a desire to surprise people with his openness and brutal honesty,” Isaacson says. Had Musk done his research before agreeing, by reading Isaacson’s searing biography of Jobs (which Jobs’ family disliked)? “No.”

A creamy dish of crab festooned with anchovies , mushrooms and green onions appears, next to orange-coloured shrimp remoulade. Both are delicious, but also very rich. 

Isaacson duly started shadowing Musk, expecting “this to be easy”, since his new subject was riding high. A decade earlier two of Musk’s companies — Tesla and SpaceX — had almost drowned in debt. But by 2021, Tesla had sold almost 1mn cars and SpaceX made 31 successful launches. That rebound had made Musk the richest man in the world ; and Time magazine and the Financial Times named him “ Person of the Year ” for his vision in transforming green transport and space travel.

But then “everything was going so well that [Musk] became uncomfortable”, Isaacson says. “He doesn’t like things when they are going well. He is addicted to drama.” So, perhaps out of boredom, Musk hatched a plan to take over Twitter, the social media giant now known as X. “When I heard that, I knew I would have a rough ride [as his biographer],” Isaacson notes. “I thought it was insane — Musk doesn’t have empathy and so Twitter was not a good fit for him.”

Quite so. In the spring of 2022, Musk offered $44bn for Twitter and plunged into a damaging war with its staff, the media, users and liberal politicians. But Musk did not kick his biographer out; instead, Isaacson says, “I sat week after week on the sidelines taking notes. I was in the conference room at all the corporate meetings, attended his Zoom calls. I was at family dinners with his kids.”

I have these messages [between Musk and the Ukrainians] in real time

But didn’t that breach commercial secrets? My mind boggles at what Tesla shareholders, say, might think. “I worried about that [privacy issue] more than he did,” Isaacson notes tartly, explaining that he was there during the intense internal debates when Musk decided to change Tesla’s approach towards self-driving cars away from one that used pre-designed rules for the artificial intelligence (say, to not run red lights) into one that studied Tesla video feed from onboard cameras to see how humans actually drive, and mimic them (even if, say, this means sometimes crossing a red light).

Even more explosively, Isaacson watched Musk embark recently on a hitherto-secretive drive to create an AI company , where he apparently hopes to use the vast stores of data from Twitter and Tesla to leapfrog other AI companies such as OpenAI. This could have huge commercial significance for the AI sector.  

More controversial still, Isaacson observed Musk’s negotiations with the Ukrainian government in late 2022, when its army was using SpaceX’s Starlink communications system to support its military. Musk prevented the system from being used in areas claimed by Russia. “I have these [messages] in real time as he is turning off Starlink around Crimea because there was a secret drone attack,” Isaacson tells me, noting that Musk gave him all the encrypted messages with [Mykhailo] Fedorov, the Ukrainian digital minister, seemingly without asking the Ukrainians, and some of these are in the book.

I am shocked. Might that not put lives at risk in Ukraine? Or hurt the country’s western backers? “These text messages are a few months old. If there would have been operational [issues] I would not have published them,” Isaacson insists, noting that SpaceX subsequently cut a deal with the Pentagon that puts control into the hands of the US military. (Musk and Isaacson have been revising the details of the story in recent days, suggesting that the service was already deactivated in Crimea at the time of the attack.)

Musk fell into the habit of calling or texting him late at night to reflect on whatever dramas he was engaged in that day. “Elon is very mercurial, but he never told me not to put anything in the book.”

Did you ever feel like you were becoming his therapist, rather than his biographer? At the Aspen Institute, Isaacson was famously skilled at stroking powerful egos, even while challenging them intellectually. Isaacson bristles. “I never wanted to be either his therapist or adviser.” Fair enough. But their relationship does highlight the challenge of writing about a living person: how do you get close enough to capture their essence without being captured yourself?

“I learnt not to fill his silences,” Isaacson explains. “Sometimes it would be Elon and me alone after a [company] meeting and I would ask him a question and he didn’t answer, and there would be four or five minutes of silence where he was processing. That is hard — we journalists sometimes don’t have the ability to stay silent for four minutes!” 

At first Isaacson was baffled by this. But then “Shivon Zilis [an executive at Musk’s Neuralink company who has had twins with him] told him that “Musk engages in batch processing — he sequentially processes information and at times he zones out”.

This makes him sound like a computer, I reflect. But this robotic analysis was interspersed with wild mood swings. “In front of me he would go into multiple Elon Musk personalities. There are times he gets really dark and he goes into what Grimes [the Canadian singer who is Musk’s on-off girlfriend] calls ‘demon mode’.” He will become angry. “But then when he snaps out he will hardly remember what he did in demon mode and turns from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde.” Yikes.

Why? In a recent New Yorker profile of Musk, the writer Ronan Farrow suggested that excessive ketamine use might explain his volatility. But Isaacson disagrees: “I don’t think it’s a medication issue — he has been this way for a long, long time.” Instead, he cites the “pain of his childhood”: Musk grew up amid violence in apartheid-era South Africa, and had a difficult relationship with his father; he was left “feeling like an outsider” and haunted by a need to prove himself. 

“He is driven by demons,” Isaacson calmly notes — and then points out that this is not so unusual since many of the brilliant innovators he has previously studied were also haunted by feeling marginalised, whether it was the Jewish Einstein in early 20th-century Germany or the female Doudna operating in a male scientific world, or the illegitimate Leonardo.

Billy the waiter collects our dishes , and I realise that I have eaten most of the crab; it was deliciously succulent. Then two plates of fish, smothered in more crab, appear; I gingerly poke at mine, already feeling bloated in the summer heat from the heavy food. 

Do innovators have to be a psychological mess to have the drive to succeed? Isaacson pulls a face. “I was born in a magical place with truly wonderful parents,” he says, gesturing around him. “And I am never going to send a rocket to Mars.” He pauses.

“Musk goes through manic mood swings and deep depressions and risk-seeking highs, and if he didn’t have that risk-seeking maniacal personality he would not be the person who launched EVs and got rockets into orbit.

“So my key point and conclusion is that all people have light and dark strands, whether that is Da Vinci or anyone else. We celebrate the light ones while decrying the dark ones. But those strands are entwined and you can’t disentangle them.”

To put it bluntly: Isaacson thinks that Elon’s demons are also his inspirational angels.

Of course, Isaacson adds, this is not the only key to genius: the other trait that many of the people he has studied also share is a passion for interdisciplinary study. Leonardo, say, explored the arts, humanities and science in combination, while Jobs used the principles of calligraphy to design computers. Isaacson argues that building interdisciplinary curriculums is one secret of unleashing more innovation. 

“At Tulane we try to make sure that everyone has a double major in science and humanities — we need kids who are creative, not just those who can code.” Indeed, he believes that the crazy, artistic whirl of New Orleans, where boundaries are made to be broken, is the perfect cauldron for these collisions.

But could Musk’s “demons” overwhelm him? Isaacson hedges his bets. “I always think he is going to go off the edge with that maniacal intensity — he is spread far too thin,” he admits, noting that Musk is now in charge of six companies: the social media platform X, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, the Boring Company — and his secretive AI group, xAI. “I thought he would blow Twitter up. But every morning I wake up and see it’s turning into X.com, which is what he always wanted,” Isaacson adds.

So, too, in Musk’s private life; he has had 11 children by three mothers. “He has this maniacal belief in having lots of children.” But some of his children are by IVF. “It’s not like he is having all these romantic affairs.” Many, like him, are based in Austin, since “he likes having his children around. But it’s not a Norman Rockwell painting.” Do the mothers get on? “Not with each other,” Isaacson jokes. And sometimes not with Musk: Grimes recently revealed tensions over their kids in a subsequently deleted message on social media, and it emerged that she has more children by him than previously realised. Cue (yet) more drama for Musk — and Isaacson.

The decibels around us keep rising as more drinks are consumed. My redfish is half untouched. Isaacson takes a mouthful. “It’s good — more crab!” A waiter notices that our wine glasses are empty and offers more. We demur — and I explain that I will need to leave soon for the airport, because I am grappling with the summer travel hell of cancelled flights. 

Did you end up liking Elon, I ask. Isaacson pauses for a long time; the writer is not someone who sees life in black and white, but — like his hometown — he admires complex shades. “‘Like’ is such an anodyne word — it doesn’t describe the intensity of reactions that Elon can provoke in a person,” Isaacson replies. “There are times he is fun to be around and times he is an asshole. I try to show all of these Elons in the book and then let people judge.”

So did he surprise you? “Yes.” He ticks off the shocks: the intensity of his moods; his obsessive addiction to, and focus on, engineering; the fact that “he became more intensely political, [since] he had not been when I started writing about him”.

Contrary to popular perception, Isaacson insists that Musk “doesn’t like [Donald] Trump — he thinks he is a conman”. However, Isaacson concedes that Musk has now developed “an anti-establishment populism that you can see in Robert F Kennedy Jr and Vivek Ramaswamy — a conspiratorial mindset about the establishment”. That seems alarming to me with the 2024 election looming and Musk running X.

The bill arrives, and as we walk out into the scorching heat, I ask Isaacson who he could possibly write about next that would be as interesting. Over lunch, the names Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos were tossed out. “But I haven’t decided,” he quickly retorts. “All my headspace is Elon right now.” The same could be said of much of corporate America today; maybe we are all addicted to drama.

Gillian Tett is chair of the editorial board and editor-at-large, US of the Financial Times

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International Edition

South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.

Who Is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur and businessman who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003. Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company, Zip2, to a division of Compaq Computers.

In January 2021, Musk reportedly surpassed Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest man in the world.

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. As a child, Musk was so lost in his daydreams about inventions that his parents and doctors ordered a test to check his hearing.

At about the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 10, Musk developed an interest in computers. He taught himself how to program, and when he was 12 he sold his first software: a game he created called Blastar.

In grade school, Musk was short, introverted and bookish. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling.

Musk’s mother, Maye Musk , is a Canadian model and the oldest woman to star in a Covergirl campaign. When Musk was growing up, she worked five jobs at one point to support her family.

Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is a wealthy South African engineer.

Musk spent his early childhood with his brother Kimbal and sister Tosca in South Africa. His parents divorced when he was 10.

At age 17, in 1989, Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk obtained his Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship via that path.

In 1992, Musk left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.

After leaving Penn, Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, his move was timed perfectly with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Zip2 Corporation

Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995 with his brother, Kimbal Musk. An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune . In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.

In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used the money from their sale of Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com acquisition the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today.

In October 2002, Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Before the sale, Musk owned 11 percent of PayPal stock.

Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station—with plans for astronaut transport in the future—in a move to replace NASA’s own space shuttle missions.

Falcon 9 Rockets

On May 22, 2012, Musk and SpaceX made history when the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule. The vehicle was sent to the International Space Station with 1,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts stationed there, marking the first time a private company had sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Of the launch, Musk was quoted as saying, "I feel very lucky. ... For us, it's like winning the Super Bowl."

In December 2013, a Falcon 9 successfully carried a satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit, a distance at which the satellite would lock into an orbital path that matched the Earth's rotation. In February 2015, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 fitted with the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, aiming to observe the extreme emissions from the sun that affect power grids and communications systems on Earth.

In March 2017, SpaceX saw the successful test flight and landing of a Falcon 9 rocket made from reusable parts, a development that opened the door for more affordable space travel.

A setback came in November 2017, when an explosion occurred during a test of the company's new Block 5 Merlin engine. SpaceX reported that no one was hurt, and that the issue would not hamper its planned rollout of a future generation of Falcon 9 rockets.

The company enjoyed another milestone moment in February 2018 with the successful test launch of the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. Armed with additional Falcon 9 boosters, the Falcon Heavy was designed to carry immense payloads into orbit and potentially serve as a vessel for deep space missions. For the test launch, the Falcon Heavy was given a payload of Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster, equipped with cameras to "provide some epic views" for the vehicle's planned orbit around the sun.

In July 2018, Space X enjoyed the successful landing of a new Block 5 Falcon rocket, which touched down on a drone ship less than 9 minutes after liftoff.

BFR Mission to Mars

In September 2017, Musk presented an updated design plan for his BFR (an acronym for either "Big F---ing Rocket" or "Big Falcon Rocket"), a 31-engine behemoth topped by a spaceship capable of carrying at least 100 people. He revealed that SpaceX was aiming to launch the first cargo missions to Mars with the vehicle in 2022, as part of his overarching goal of colonizing the Red Planet.

In March 2018, the entrepreneur told an audience at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that he hoped to have the BFR ready for short flights early the following year, while delivering a knowing nod at his previous problems with meeting deadlines.

The following month, it was announced that SpaceX would construct a facility at the Port of Los Angeles to build and house the BFR. The port property presented an ideal location for SpaceX, as its mammoth rocket will only be movable by barge or ship when completed.

Starlink Internet Satellites

In late March 2018, SpaceX received permission from the U.S. government to launch a fleet of satellites into low orbit for the purpose of providing Internet service. The satellite network, named Starlink, would ideally make broadband service more accessible in rural areas, while also boosting competition in heavily populated markets that are typically dominated by one or two providers.

SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 satellites in May 2019, and followed with another payload of 60 satellites that November. While this represented significant progress for the Starlink venture, the appearance of these bright orbiters in the night sky, with the potential of thousands more to come, worried astronomers who felt that a proliferation of satellites would increase the difficulty of studying distant objects in space.

Tesla Motors

Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company formed in 2003 that is dedicated to producing affordable, mass-market electric cars as well as battery products and solar roofs. Musk oversees all product development, engineering and design of the company's products.

Five years after its formation, in March 2008, Tesla unveiled the Roadster, a sports car capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, as well as traveling nearly 250 miles between charges of its lithium ion battery.

With a stake in the company taken by Daimler and a strategic partnership with Toyota, Tesla Motors launched its initial public offering in June 2010, raising $226 million.

In August 2008, Tesla announced plans for its Model S, the company's first electric sedan that was reportedly meant to take on the BMW 5 series. In 2012, the Model S finally entered production at a starting price of $58,570. Capable of covering 265 miles between charges, it was honored as the 2013 Car of the Year by Motor Trend magazine .

In April 2017, Tesla announced that it surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker. The news was an obvious boon to Tesla, which was looking to ramp up production and release its Model 3 sedan later that year.

In September 2019, using what Musk described as a "Plaid powertrain," a Model S set a speed record for four-door sedan at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey County, California.

The Model 3 was officially launched in early 2019 following extensive production delays. The car was initially priced at $35,000, a much more accessible price point than the $69,500 and up for its Model S and X electric sedans.

After initially aiming to produce 5,000 new Model 3 cars per week by December 2017, Musk pushed that goal back to March 2018, and then to June with the start of the new year. The announced delay didn't surprise industry experts, who were well aware of the company's production problems, though some questioned how long investors would remain patient with the process. It also didn't prevent Musk from garnering a radical new compensation package as CEO, in which he would be paid after reaching milestones of growing valuation based on $50 billion increments.

By April 2018, with Tesla expected to fall short of first-quarter production forecasts, news surfaced that Musk had pushed aside the head of engineering to personally oversee efforts in that division. In a Twitter exchange with a reporter, Musk said it was important to "divide and conquer" to meet production goals and was "back to sleeping at factory."

After signaling that the company would reorganize its management structure, Musk in June announced that Tesla was laying off 9 percent of its workforce, though its production department would remain intact. In an email to employees, Musk explained his decision to eliminate some "duplication of roles" to cut costs, admitting it was time to take serious steps toward turning a profit.

The restructuring appeared to pay dividends, as it was announced that Tesla had met its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 cars per week by the end of June 2018, while churning out another 2,000 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. "We did it!" Musk wrote in a celebratory email to the company. "What an incredible job by an amazing team."

The following February, Musk announced that the company was finally rolling out its standard Model 3. Musk also said that Tesla was shifting to all-online sales, and offering customers the chance to return their cars within seven days or 1,000 miles for a full refund.

In November 2017, Musk made another splash with the unveiling of the new Tesla Semi and Roadster at the company's design studio. The semi-truck, which was expected to enter into production in 2019 before being delayed, boasts 500 miles of range as well as a battery and motors built to last 1 million miles.

Model Y and Roadster

In March 2019, Musk unveiled Tesla’s long-awaited Model Y. The compact crossover, which began arriving for customers in March 2020, has a driving range of 300 miles and a 0 to 60 mph time of 3.5 seconds.

The Roadster, also set to be released in 2020, will become the fastest production car ever made, with a 0 to 60 time of 1.9 seconds.

In August 2016, in Musk’s continuing effort to promote and advance sustainable energy and products for a wider consumer base, a $2.6 billion dollar deal was solidified to combine his electric car and solar energy companies. His Tesla Motors Inc. announced an all-stock deal purchase of SolarCity Corp., a company Musk had helped his cousins start in 2006. He is a majority shareholder in each entity.

“Solar and storage are at their best when they're combined. As one company, Tesla (storage) and SolarCity (solar) can create fully integrated residential, commercial and grid-scale products that improve the way that energy is generated, stored and consumed,” read a statement on Tesla’s website about the deal.

The Boring Company

In January 2017, Musk launched The Boring Company, a company devoted to boring and building tunnels in order to reduce street traffic. He began with a test dig on the SpaceX property in Los Angeles.

In late October of that year, Musk posted the first photo of his company's progress to his Instagram page. He said the 500-foot tunnel, which would generally run parallel to Interstate 405, would reach a length of two miles in approximately four months.

In May 2019 the company, now known as TBC, landed a $48.7 million contract from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to build an underground Loop system to shuttle people around the Las Vegas Convention Center.

In October 2022, Musk officially bought Twitter and became the social media company's CEO after months of back and forth.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S ELON MUSK FACT CARD

Musk’s Tweet and SEC Investigation

On August 7, 2018, Musk dropped a bombshell via a tweet: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." The announcement opened the door for legal action against the company and its founder, as the SEC began inquiring about whether Musk had indeed secured the funding as claimed. Several investors filed lawsuits on the grounds that Musk was looking to manipulate stock prices and ambush short sellers with his tweet.

Musk’s tweet initially sent Tesla stock spiking, before it closed the day up 11 percent. The CEO followed up with a letter on the company blog, calling the move to go private "the best path forward." He promised to retain his stake in the company, and added that he would create a special fund to help all current investors remain on board.

Six days later, Musk sought to clarify his position with a statement in which he pointed to discussions with the managing director of the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund as the source of his "funding secured" declaration. He later tweeted that he was working on a proposal to take Tesla private with Goldman Sachs and Silver Lake as financial advisers.

The saga took a bizarre turn that day when rapper Azealia Banks wrote on Instagram that, as a guest at Musk's home at the time, she learned that he was under the influence of LSD when he fired off his headline-grabbing tweet. Banks said she overheard Musk making phone calls to drum up the funding he promised was already in place.

The news quickly turned serious again when it was reported that Tesla's outside directors had retained two law firms to deal with the SEC inquiry and the CEO's plans to take the company private.

On August 24, one day after meeting with the board, Musk announced that he had reversed course and would not be taking the company private. Among his reasons, he cited the preference of most directors to keep Tesla public, as well as the difficulty of retaining some of the large shareholders who were prohibited from investing in a private company. Others suggested that Musk was also influenced by the poor optics of an electric car company being funded by Saudi Arabia, a country heavily involved in the oil industry.

On September 29, 2018, it was announced that Musk would pay a $20 million fine and step down as chairman of Tesla's board for three years as part of an agreement with the SEC.

Inventions and Innovations

In August 2013, Musk released a concept for a new form of transportation called the "Hyperloop," an invention that would foster commuting between major cities while severely cutting travel time. Ideally resistant to weather and powered by renewable energy, the Hyperloop would propel riders in pods through a network of low-pressure tubes at speeds reaching more than 700 mph. Musk noted that the Hyperloop could take from seven to 10 years to be built and ready for use.

Although he introduced the Hyperloop with claims that it would be safer than a plane or train, with an estimated cost of $6 billion — approximately one-tenth of the cost for the rail system planned by the state of California — Musk's concept has drawn skepticism. Nevertheless, the entrepreneur has sought to encourage the development of this idea.

After he announced a competition for teams to submit their designs for a Hyperloop pod prototype, the first Hyperloop Pod Competition was held at the SpaceX facility in January 2017. A speed record of 284 mph was set by a German student engineering team at competition No. 3 in 2018, with the same team pushing the record to 287 mph the next year.

AI and Neuralink

Musk has pursued an interest in artificial intelligence, becoming co-chair of the nonprofit OpenAI. The research company launched in late 2015 with the stated mission of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity.

In 2017, it was also reported that Musk was backing a venture called Neuralink, which intends to create devices to be implanted in the human brain and help people merge with software. He expanded on the company's progress during a July 2019 discussion, revealing that its devices will consist of a microscopic chip that connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone.

High-Speed Train

In late November 2017, after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked for proposals to build and operate a high-speed rail line that would transport passengers from O'Hare Airport to downtown Chicago in 20 minutes or less, Musk tweeted that he was all-in on the competition with The Boring Company. He said that the concept of the Chicago loop would be different from his Hyperloop, its relatively short route not requiring the need for drawing a vacuum to eliminate air friction.

In summer 2018 Musk announced he would cover the estimated $1 billion needed to dig the 17-mile tunnel from the airport to downtown Chicago. However, in late 2019 he tweeted that TBC would focus on completing the commercial tunnel in Las Vegas before turning to other projects, suggesting that plans for Chicago would remain in limbo for the immediate future.

Flamethrower

Musk also reportedly found a market for The Boring Company's flamethrowers. After announcing they were going on sale for $500 apiece in late January 2018, he claimed to have sold 10,000 of them within a day.

Relationship with Donald Trump

In December 2016, Musk was named to President Trump’s Strategy and Policy Forum; the following January, he joined Trump's Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. Following Trump’s election, Musk found himself on common ground with the new president and his advisers as the president announced plans to pursue massive infrastructure developments.

While sometimes at odds with the president's controversial measures, such as a proposed ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, Musk defended his involvement with the new administration. "My goals," he tweeted in early 2017, "are to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and to help make humanity a multi-planet civilization, a consequence of which will be the creating of hundreds of thousands of jobs and a more inspiring future for all."

On June 1, following Trump's announcement that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, Musk stepped down from his advisory roles.

Personal Life

Wives and children.

Musk has been married twice. He wed Justine Wilson in 2000, and the couple had six children together. In 2002, their first son died at 10 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Musk and Wilson had five additional sons together: twins Griffin and Xavier (born in 2004) and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian (born in 2006).

After a contentious divorce from Wilson, Musk met actress Talulah Riley. The couple married in 2010. They split in 2012 but married each other again in 2013. Their relationship ultimately ended in divorce in 2016.

Girlfriends

Musk reportedly began dating actress Amber Heard in 2016 after finalizing his divorce with Riley and Heard finalized her divorce from Johnny Depp . Their busy schedules caused the couple to break up in August 2017; they got back together in January 2018 and split again one month later.

In May 2018, Musk began dating musician Grimes (born Claire Boucher). That month, Grimes announced that she had changed her name to “ c ,” the symbol for the speed of light, reportedly on the encouragement of Musk. Fans criticized the feminist performer for dating a billionaire whose company has been described as a “predator zone” among accusations of sexual harassment.

The couple discussed their love for one another in a March 2019 feature in the Wall Street Journal Magazine , with Grimes saying “Look, I love him, he’s great...I mean, he’s a super-interesting goddamn person.” Musk, for his part, told the Journal, “I love c’s wild fae artistic creativity and hyper-intense work ethic.”

Grimes gave birth to their son on May 4, 2020, with Musk announcing that they had named the boy "X Æ A-12." Later in the month, after it was reported that the State of California wouldn't accept a name with a number, the couple said they were changing their son's name to "X Æ A-Xii."

Musk and Grimes welcomed their second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, in December 2021. The child was delivered via a surrogate.

Nonprofit Work

The boundless potential of space exploration and the preservation of the future of the human race have become the cornerstones of Musk's abiding interests, and toward these, he has founded the Musk Foundation, which is dedicated to space exploration and the discovery of renewable and clean energy sources.

In October 2019 Musk pledged to donate $1 million to the #TeamTrees campaign, which aims to plant 20 million trees around the world by 2020. He even changed his Twitter name to Treelon for the occasion.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Elon Musk
• Birth Year: 1971
• Birth date: June 28, 1971
• Birth City: Pretoria
• Birth Country: South Africa
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.
• Space Exploration
• Internet/Computing
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• University of Pennsylania
• Queen's University, Ontario
• Stanford University
• Nacionalities
• South African
• Interesting Facts
• Elon Musk left Stanford after two days to take advantage of the Internet boom.
• In April 2017, Musk's Tesla Motors surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker.

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Elon Musk Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/elon-musk
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 31, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I'm very pro-environment, but let's figure out how to do it better and not jump through a dozen hoops to achieve what is obvious in the first place.
• Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

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How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson

One way to keep musk’s myth intact is simply not to check things out..

By Elizabeth Lopatto , a reporter who writes about tech, money, and human behavior. She joined The Verge in 2014 as science editor. Previously, she was a reporter at Bloomberg.

Share this story

The trouble began days before the biography was even published.

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. The Washington Post followed it up, publishing the excerpt where Isaacson claimed Musk had essentially shut down a military offensive on a personal whim.

This reporting did not pass the smell test to me, and I said so at the time ; I wondered about the sourcing. One of the things that anyone covering Elon Musk for long enough has to reckon with is that he loves to tell hilarious lies. For instance:

• “Funding secured.” Remember when Elon Musk pretended he was going to take Tesla private and had everything in order, and then whoopsie, that was not at all true ?
• Tesla share sales. Of course, there’s the time in April 2022 when he sold Tesla shares and said he had no further sales planned , followed by him selling more Tesla shares in August 2022, when he said he was done selling Tesla shares . He sold more shares in November 2022 .
• Tesla and Bitcoin. Remember when Musk said, “ I might pump but I don’t dump ,” and then Tesla sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin ?
• The staged 2016 Autopilot demo video. In the demo video, which features the title card “The car is driving by itself,” the car was not driving by itself , Tesla’s director of Autopilot software said in a deposition. Musk himself asked for that copy.
• The batteries in Teslas will be exchangeable. Refueling your EV will just be a battery swap that will happen faster than pumping gas.
• The time he said Teslas might fly. I am not making this up . He really said he’d replace the rear seats with thrusters, and journalists spent time trying to figure out what the fuck that meant .

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. Musk says a lot of stuff! Some of it is exaggeration, and some isn’t true at all.

Isaacson’s sweeping 670-page biography has an intense amount of access to the man at its center. The problem is the man is Elon Musk, a guy who in 2011 promised to get us to space in just three years . In reality, the first SpaceX crew launched into orbit almost a decade later. Sure, access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk lots of chances to sell his own mythology.

I wanted to know if Isaacson had done his homework

So when I opened the Musk biography, I wanted to know if Isaacson had done his homework. The first thing I did was flip to the back, where the author lists his sources for the Ukraine thing. They are: interviews with Musk, Gwynne Shotwell, and Jared Birchall (Musk’s body man); emails from Lauren Dreyer; and text messages from Mykhailo Fedorov, “provided by Elon Musk.” Other sources are news articles, one of which was about SpaceX curbing Ukraine’s use of drones . Crucially, though, this article says nothing about Ukrainian submarines — instead, it’s primarily about aerial vehicles.

 In his book, Isaacson writes:

Throughout the evening and into the night, he [Musk] personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.

That final sentence is arresting, isn’t it? I could find no support for it in any of the news articles that Isaacson listed as sources for this chapter. There is a Financial Times story that confirms some Starlink outages during a Ukrainian push against the Russians, but it says nothing about drone subs or washing ashore harmlessly. A New York Times article confirms Musk doesn’t want Starlink running drones but says nothing about drone subs.

What could the possible source for this sentence be? 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. Not very secret now, I suppose.

Musk disputed Isaacson’s account on Twitter: “SpaceX did not deactivate anything,” he said. “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” he went on, though he did not specify which government’s authorities . “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”

Isaacson caved immediately :

To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.

Tremendous statement. “To clarify” obfuscates what’s going on: is Isaacson saying his book is wrong? Surely that is what this means since “future editions will be updated” to correct it . The Post corrected its excerpt , anyway. “The Ukrainians thought” — which Ukrainians, and how did Isaacson know their thinking? In his listed sources, we have only the text messages of one Ukrainian, who, for diplomatic purposes, may be obscuring what he knows. “They asked Musk to enable it for their drone attack” is an entirely different account than the one given in the book, which says Musk shut off existing coverage rather than approving extended coverage; what could possibly be the source here? And of course, the last sentence — “Musk did not enable it because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war” — is simple boot-licking.

We are dealing with not one but two unreliable narrators: Musk and Isaacson himself

Isaacson “clarified” further in another tweet. ”Based on my conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack that night,” he wrote on Twitter . “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 chose not to. Musk’s word was good enough for him — and so, when Musk contested the characterization, Isaacson rolled over.

I am lingering here because it highlights a major problem with Isaacson’s biography. We are dealing with not one but two unreliable narrators: Musk and Isaacson himself. After all, just before issuing his clarification, Isaacson had been touting a walk through the SpaceX factory with CBS’s David Pogue to promote his book. 

Isaacson writes a specific kind of biography. There is even a “genius” boxed set of his biographies that includes Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and — somewhat incongruously — Steve Jobs. 

One way to keep Musk’s myth intact is simply not to check things out

Having made a pattern of writing biographies of important men — and one important woman, Jennifer Doudna of CRISPR fame — Isaacson is now in the position of a kind of kingmaker. To keep up his pattern, everyone he writes about implicitly is branded a genius. 

One way to keep Musk’s myth intact is simply not to check things out. 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.” This is a striking claim! I flipped to the “notes” section to see if Isaacson had interviewed any of Musk’s schoolmates. He hadn’t. There are no news articles backing it up, either. So what is the source? Presumably one or more of the Musks — Elon is quoted directly as saying the counselors told him not to die like another kid in a previous year. 

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. There are some weird choices as a result.

Isaacson writes that Musk’s “blood boiled if anyone falsely implied he had succeeded because of inherited wealth or claimed he didn’t deserve to be called a founder of one of the companies he helped start.” The bolding on “falsely” is mine because Isaacson had earlier detailed Errol Musk, Elon’s father, giving Elon and Kimbal Musk “$28,000 plus a beat-up car he bought for $500” to help them start Zip2. Maye, Elon’s mother, contributed another $10,000 and “let them use her credit card because they had not been approved for one.” Certainly Musk got started with family money. Is the problem about the meaning of “inherited wealth”?

Skipping how dependent Musk is on Texas is a howler

Here’s another strange choice. “Over the years, one criticism of Tesla has been that the company was ‘bailed out’ or ‘subsidized’ by the government in 2009.” This is not quite right. 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. By one estimate, Tesla alone has gotten more than $3 billion in loans and subsidies from state and local governments . While Isaacson gives a detailed accounting of Tesla’s $465 million in loans from a DOE program, he skips all the rest of the assists Musk has gotten over the years — goodies that have inspired jealousy from the likes of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos .

Then there’s this description of Neuralink, Musk’s brain implant company: “The idea for Neuralink was inspired by science fiction, most notably the Culture space-travel novels by Iain Banks.” Maybe so, but there’s actual science fact : brain-machine interfaces had been implanted in humans as early as 2006 , something Isaacson doesn’t mention. Musk certainly didn’t come up with the idea; brain-machine interfaces already existed. Nor does Isaacson mention the gruesome allegations about Neuralink’s test subjects .

But I want to get to the real big one: Musk’s politics. This is a recurring theme for Isaacson, and his perspective is bewildering.

Musk’s dependence on taxpayer largess plays a role here; skipping how dependent Musk is on Texas is a howler. Musk has often donated in ways that will benefit him in Texas , where he has a substantial operation. So writing a sentence like “Musk has never been very political” when Musk has donated more than $1 million to politicians in the last 20 years is odd.

Now, I personally view Musk as a political nihilist, willing to say whatever he needs to say to get taxpayer money. But it’s undeniable that he’s spent decades palling around with libertarian-to-far-right types (most famously Peter Thiel and David Sacks, who is inexplicably described as “not rigidly partisan” despite coauthoring a noxious book with Thiel that, among other things, suggested date rape wasn’t real ). 

If you know these details, Musk looks like a dolt

These long-standing right-wing ties belie the notion advanced by Isaacson that the real cause of Musk’s right-wing pivot is his daughter, Jenna; I found these sections of the book difficult to read, as they essentially amount to victim blaming. In Isaacson’s telling, “Jenna’s anger made Musk sensitive to the backlash against billionaires.” She stopped speaking to her father in 2020 and transitioned without telling him. 

I wonder, though Isaacson doesn’t, if she didn’t tell him because she was afraid to. Musk found out from a member of his security detail — and it’s revealing to me that none of the people around Musk who knew, including Grimes, wanted to break the news. It’s not unusual for queer people to hide from parents they suspect will reject them; there is a reason many gay and trans people have “ found families .” 

When Musk tweets, “Take the red pill,” in 2020, Isaacson notes that it’s a reference to The Matrix but does not add that The Matrix is a movie made by two people who later came out as trans. In fact, The Matrix itself is a trans story — in the ’90s, prescription estrogen was literally a red pill . Isaacson includes Ivanka Trump’s reply (“Taken!”) but not that of Matrix creator Lilly Wachowski: “ Fuck both of you .” If you know these details, Musk looks like a dolt — sort of a problem for a biographer trying to write a Great Man book.

Similarly, Isaacson falls flat on racial issues — the existence of apartheid in Musk’s youth is barely mentioned. It’s a strange omission; Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman . was the chair of the national council of the Social Credit Party, which was openly antisemitic. 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. 

Justine Musk and Amber Heard are both disparaged

One of the other things Isaacson doesn’t mention is the alleged racist working conditions at Tesla’s Fremont factory . Recently, a former Tesla worker was awarded millions for racist abuse at work . This does seem relevant to Musk’s politics.

Also relevant: how Isaacson treats Musk’s exes. Justine Musk and Amber Heard are both disparaged. Of Justine Musk, Elon’s mother said, “She has no redeeming feature.” Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother and sometimes business partner, is quoted as saying, “This is the wrong person for you.” We don’t hear Justine’s side of the story, except via a magazine article she published during her divorce, “ I Was a Starter Wife .” It makes me wonder: is Justine under a non-disclosure agreement? Did she sign something with a non-disparagement clause, like Tesla founder Martin Eberhard ? Isaacson spoke to her — so why did she have nothing to say?

Similarly, Amber Heard is described by Kimbal as “so toxic,” by Grimes as “chaotic evil,” and by Musk’s chief of staff as “the Joker in Batman… She thrives on destabilizing everything.” Heard is even blamed for Musk’s misbehavior — including “funding secured” in 2018. Even so, Heard’s response is muted enough (“I love him very much,” she says. “Elon loves fire and sometimes it burns him.”) that I wonder if she, too, is NDA’d. By not even bringing up this possibility, Isaacson’s story is inherently skewed.

There is one person we do know is under an NDA: a flight attendant who says Musk propositioned her in 2016 . We also know that five women at SpaceX have said that harassment was regular at the company and that women workers at Tesla say they have been subjected to “nightmarish” sexual harassment . This does not especially interest Isaacson.

Isaacson does have time for a lot of Steve Jobs comparisons, which, after a while, begin to feel like product placement

The workers at Musk’s companies, generally, don’t interest his biographer much. Isaacson begins describing the 2018 Fremont production push from Musk’s perspective: “Musk had come to realize that designing a good factory was like designing a good microchip.” During the production surge, Musk began walking the floor, barking questions at workers, and “making decisions on the fly.” He decided that safety sensors were “too sensitive, tripping when there was no real problem.” 

In this chapter, Isaacson cites stories where rank-and-file workers complained about being pressured to take shortcuts and work 10-hour days. “There was some truth to the complaints,” Isaacson writes. “Tesla’s injury rate was 30 percent higher than the rest of the industry.” Leave aside the risible “some truth.” There is a very obvious question that Isaacson had the access to explore: how did Musk’s meddling with the safety sensors, the seat-of-the-pants fixes changes to the manufacturing process, and general “production hell” affect that injury rate? He chose not to. The injuries among Tesla’s workers aren’t mentioned further.

Isaacson does have time for a lot of Steve Jobs comparisons, which, after a while, begin to feel like product placement for his other book. In the index, Jobs is listed as showing up on 20 pages. You’d be forgiven for thinking Jobs was an important part of Musk’s rise, based on the index alone.

It’s impossible to escape the conclusion that Musk views everyone around him as disposable. The biography teems with mentions of Musk firing people on the spot, demanding to have things his own way even when it is stupid and expensive, and being unable to tolerate even the slightest dissent. “When Elon gets upset, he lashes out, often at junior people,” Jon McNeill, the former president of Tesla, says. 

The later chapters aren’t very revealing

“You definitely realize you’re a tool being used to achieve this larger objective and that’s great,” says Lucas Hughes, who worked as a financial analyst at SpaceX and was one of the junior people Musk lashed out at. “But sometimes tools get worn down and he feels he can just replace that tool.” Musk believes that “when people want to prioritize their comfort and leisure they should leave,” Isaacson writes.

The later chapters aren’t very revealing. Isaacson is bought in on Musk’s vision of AI and his hinky Tesla Bot . The biographer has swallowed Musk’s hype here wholesale. But I remember the days of the “ alien dreadnought, ” the promises for swappable batteries that never materialized, and the countless other things Musk said that turned out to be, at best, exaggeration. In 10 years, the big revelation that Musk switched off the Ukrainian internet access during a battle may not be the most embarrassing thing Isaacson has committed to the page.

Isaacson wraps up the book by ponderously wondering if Musk’s achievements are possible without his bad behavior: 

Would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training.

This seems to me to be the wrong set of questions. Here are some other ones: If Musk were more receptive to criticism, would his companies be in better shape? If Musk cared more about the team around him, what else could he have accomplished by now? Is achieving the specific vision Musk has for the world worth the injuries he’s inflicted on his workforce? Do we — the readers of Isaacson’s book — want this particular man’s vision of the future at all?

While Isaacson manages to detail what makes Musk awful, he seems unaware of what made Musk an inspiring figure for so long. Musk is a fantasist, the kind of person who conceives of civilizations on Mars. That’s what people liked all this time : dreaming big, thinking about new possible worlds. It’s also why Musk’s shifting political stance undercuts him. The fantasy of the conservative movement is small and sad, a limited world with nothing new to explore. Musk has gone from dreaming very, very big to seeming very, very small . In the hands of a talented biographer, this kind of tragic story would provide rich material.

Correction 11:00AM ET: The original version of this mischaracterized Musk’s donations — he has donated more than $1 million, not more than $1 billion. We regret the error.

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11 WTF Moments From the New Biography ‘Elon Musk’

By Miles Klee

Tuesday saw the release of Elon Musk , author Walter Isaacson’s mammoth new biography of the controversial tech mogul , and hardly a chapter of the nearly 700-page book goes by without a weird anecdote about the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s eccentric, sometimes self-destructive behavior. We are treated to insights about volatile relationships with family and partners, his caustic managerial style, and the toll that burnout takes as Musk struggles to deliver on promises of a fantastical future. Isaacson had total access to Musk himself, and, throughout the narrative, features perspectives from dozens of people in Musk’s inner circle (or formerly close with him) on exactly what makes the man tick.

The Emotional Wreckage of Musk’s First Marriage

Musk split with his first wife, Justine Musk, in 2008, after the relationship devolved into constant and bitter verbal fights, with Musk saying things like, “If you were my employee, I would fire you” or calling her an “idiot,” Justine told Isaacson. She also recalled once trying to explain the concept of empathy to Musk, but he said his lack of such a quality gave him an advantage when it came to running major companies. He also grew irritated by her suggestions that he try therapy, and blamed her own anger on Adderall, which a psychiatrist had prescribed to her for attention deficit disorder. Justine Musk said that although the drug was “an amazing help” for her, Elon “would go around the house throwing away the pills” that he believed were contributing to their marital strife.

Musk Has Suffered From Years of Neck and Back Pain Because of a Birthday Party Stunt

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Tesla’s Autopilot has been involved in hundreds of car crashes and at least 17 fatalities , with such accidents surging along with increased use of the system. Surely, Musk’s habit of exaggerating what it can do hasn’t helped. Though when it comes to Autopilot-involved deaths, he doesn’t seem to think they matter much in the grand scheme, believing the tech “should be judged not on whether it prevented accidents but instead on whether it led to fewer accidents.” After the first two reported Autopilot-involved fatalities in 2016, Musk did not immediately issue a statement, and Isaacson notes that he “could not understand why one or two deaths caused by Tesla Autopilot created an outcry when there were more than 1.3 million traffic deaths annually.” He then got angry during a press conference where reporters opened with questions about those accidents, firing back that they were the ones “killing” people if they turned public sentiment or government regulators against autonomous driving systems.

What Was Secretly on Musk’s Mind During a Rolling Stone Interview

In 2017, Musk gave an interview to Neil Strauss for a Rolling Stone cover story . He seemed distracted from the beginning and walked out on Strauss, coming back several minutes later to explain that he had recently broken up with his girlfriend, actress Amber Heard . Later in the conversation, Musk spoke unforgivingly of his estranged father, Errol Musk. “He was such a terrible human being,” Musk said. “Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” He didn’t offer specifics at the time, but Isaacson reveals that shortly before this, Musk had learned that in 2016, Errol had impregnated Jana Bezuidenhout, a woman more than four decades younger, whom Errol had raised as his stepdaughter. Elon and his siblings were profoundly disturbed by the news, which seemed to weigh on him during his talk with Strauss, who wrote, “There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can’t bring himself to utter the words.”

The Personal Turmoil Behind the Infamous ‘Pedo Guy’ Tweet

An unexpected consequence of smoking weed on joe rogan’s show.

Musk’s 2018 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience was intended to be a bit of damage control at a precarious time for the CEO, who was seen as increasingly erratic. So, naturally, when Rogan offered him a toke on a tobacco-and-cannabis blunt, he confirmed that it was legal before gamely taking a puff. Even so, Tesla investors were rattled as the image of Musk wreathed in pot smoke went viral, and the company’s share price tumbled to almost its lowest point that year. There was one other, hidden ramification, too: “SpaceX was a NASA contractor, and they are big believers in the law,” Musk is quoted as saying in the biography. That meant, for the next couple of years, he was subject to random drug tests. “Fortunately,” he said, “I really don’t like doing illegal drugs.”

Why Musk and Grimes Got into Couples’ Spats

Throughout their courtship and co-parenting journey, Musk and occasional girlfriend Grimes have had their share of blowups, some of them sparked by truly unusual behavior. In 2021, for example, he was obsessed with the civilization strategy game The Battle of Polytopia , which in time began to distract him from work meetings and social events. Grimes started playing as well, noting that video games are one of Musk’s only outlets for relaxation, but, she said, “he takes those so seriously that it gets very intense.” In one game they played together, having agreed to an alliance, she betrayed him with a surprise attack, triggering “one of our biggest fights ever.” When she tried to argue it was only a game and not a big deal, he said, “It’s a huge fucking deal,” and didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day. On the flip side, Grimes was angry with Musk when he sent a photo of her having a C-section during childbirth to friends and family, without her consent. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset,” she told Isaacson.

When Musk’s Reproductive Habits Made for a Curious Coincidence

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At the end of 2022, as Musk tried to get Twitter under control in the wake of a contentious acquisition, he expressed an alarming opinion of a humanitarian crisis in China. Talking to reporter Bari Weiss, Isaacson writes, he said that “Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China, because Tesla’s business could be threatened.” He also told her that the country’s repression of the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim minority group, had two sides. The Chinese government is placing this population in concentration camps and has been widely accused of crimes against humanity with the U.S. even going so far as to call it “ genocide .”

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Who are Elon Musk's 11 children?

Elon Musk is a tech entrepreneur, space pioneer, one-time “Saturday Night Live” host and controversial figure .

Musk wears many different hats, and in addition to the above, he’s also a father of 11 children that he's had with three different women.

The X owner shares three kids with the musician Grimes, twins with tech executive Shivon Zilis and five children, a set of twins and triplets, with his ex-wife, Justine Wilson.

“He believes that people should have many more children,” author Walter Isaacson, who published both a biography and Time magazine cover story about Musk in September 2023, said while appearing on TODAY Sept. 11, 2023. Isaacson added that Musk "wants to have a lot of children.”

Here’s a look at all of Musk’s children.

Strider and Azure

Musk shares twins Strider and Azure with Zilis, 38, an AI specialist and executive at Neuralink, a company that Musk co-founded. Isaacson describes Zilis in his Time cover story as Musk's "intellectual companion on artificial intelligence since the founding of OpenAI eight years earlier."

Isaacson also revealed in the Time cover story the names of the twins, who were born in November 2021, and shared a photo of them.

On Sept. 8, 2023, Zilis shared an adorable video on X of her twins running around, with one of them yelling, “I love you.”

X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl and Techno

Grimes and Musk had a son in May 2020. Originally named X Æ A-12 , the child, whom they call X, had to have his name officially changed to X Æ A-Xii in order to be in line with California laws about birth certificates.

The child’s name is pronounced “X Ash A Twelve,” Musk said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast shortly after his birth.

“First of all, my partner’s the one that mostly came up with the name,” he said . “It’s just X, the letter X, and then the ‘Æ’ is pronounced, ‘Ash,’ and then, ‘A-12’ is my contribution.”

He and Grimes split in September 2021 , only to get back together.

Elon Musk and singer Grimes welcomed a baby girl named Exa Dark Sideræl with the help of a surrogate in December 2021. Grimes, whose birth name is Claire Elise Boucher, told Vanity Fair in a March 2022 feature that the baby’s name is pronounced “sigh-deer-ee-el,” but nicknamed Y.

“There’s no real word for it,” she shared with the outlet when asked about her relationship status with Musk at the time. “I would probably refer to him as my boyfriend, but we’re very fluid. We live in separate houses. We’re best friends. We see each other all the time. ... We just have our own thing going on, and I don’t expect other people to understand it.”

She also said she and Musk hoped to have more kids.

“We’ve always wanted at least three or four,” she told Vanity Fair.

On March 10, 2022, after the article was released, Grimes tweeted that she and Musk had broken up, again.

In September 2023, a New York Times review of Isaacson’s Musk biography revealed that Musk and Grimes had welcomed a third child, Techno. Grimes also mentioned Techno in a lengthy X post , writing, in part, “I wish I could show u how cute little Techno is but my priority rn is keeping my babies out of the public eye.”

Adding, “Plz respect that at this time.”

In September 2023, Grimes filed a court petition to establish parental rights after they broke up.

Griffin, Vivian and Nevada

The business mogul and his first wife, Wilson, share twins Griffin and Vivian, born in 2004. The birth of their twins came after the couple had a son named Nevada in 2002 who died from sudden infant death syndrome.

“My firstborn son died in my arms,” Musk wrote in  an email exchange reported by Business Inside r India  in February 2022. “I felt his heartbeat.”

Kai, Saxon and Damian

After having twins, Musk and Wilson had triplets — all boys — in 2006. Musk and Wilson divorced in 2008.

Following his divorce from Wilson, he married actor Talulah Riley in 2010. They divorced in 2012, married again in 2013, then divorced a second time in 2016.

CORRECTIONS (April 27, 2024, 4:13 p.m.):  A previous version of this story misspelled Talulah Riley's first name. It has been corrected. Also, a previous version of this story stated that Musk and Grimes’ son,  X Æ A-Xii , was born in May 2021, and their daughter, Exa Dark Sideræl , was born in December 2020. X was born in May 2020, and Exa was born in December 2021. Additionally, a previous version of this story stated that Grimes filed a court petition to establish parental rights in October 2023. She filed the court petition in September 2023. 

Drew Weisholtz is a reporter for TODAY Digital, focusing on pop culture, nostalgia and trending stories. He has seen every episode of “Saved by the Bell” at least 50 times, longs to perfect the crane kick from “The Karate Kid” and performs stand-up comedy, while also cheering on the New York Yankees and New York Giants. A graduate of Rutgers University, he is the married father of two kids who believe he is ridiculous.

I Read Everything Elon Musk Posted for a Week. Send Help.

If your media diet looked like his, you’d be red-pilled too..

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Mother Jones illustration; Michel Euler/AP

Last January, not long after agreeing with an actual Nazi that western Jews have brought antisemitism upon themselves by welcoming “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Elon Musk took a quick trip to Poland. The billionaire chief of SpaceX, Tesla, and X laid a wreath at Auschwitz and then preceded on to a symposium in Krakow, where he told the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro that social media could have averted the Holocaust and bragged that he considered himself “aspirationally Jewish.” The tweet, he explained in a different interview, at a different symposium “might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done.” But he did not take it down, nor has he moderated his views. If anything his descent into the online fever swamp has only accelerated.

It is hard to appreciate just how thoroughly one of the world’s richest men has been red-pilled until you actually follow along with his media diet. So that’s what I decided to do. Last month, I read everything Musk had to say on X for a week and tracked everyone he interacted with. He tweeted 389 times in five days. He posted the laughing/crying emoji 45 times. But there was a clear signal piercing through the noise. Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that’s radicalizing him even more.

Over the course of the week, Musk dabbled in a range of small-scale freakouts and smoldering obsessions. He sent 13 tweets about Brazil’s supreme court, as part of a weeks-long battle with the government over efforts to censor disinformation and hate speech. He twice promoted a statistic about the murder rate among Black Americans. He spent one afternoon earnestly amplifying a follower who claimed that “Over 1,000 African migrants have taken over NYC’s City Hall.” (It was an overflow crowd for a hearing on racial disparities in the shelter system.) But one subject came to drown out all the rest. During the week Tesla recalled its CyberTruck for a faulty accelerator pedal, Musk’s most urgent public concern was Katherine Maher.

Musk tweeted about Maher, the CEO of National Public Radio who formerly served as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, nearly 60 times. It began relatively simply, with Musk lamenting the resignation of Uri Berliner, a former NPR staffer who wrote a critical essay about what he considered the media outlet’s leftward drift. Then Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo—the conservative strategist who helped orchestarate the backlash to Critical Race Theory—began dredging up old comments from Maher, in which she talked about correcting for white historical biases at Wikipedia and pushing back against disinformation at NPR. “Katherine Maher is blatantly racist and sexist – one of the worst human beings in America,” Musk tweeted at Rufo. “She’s evil,” he tweeted again, one minute later.

Rufo and the Canadian behavioral marketing guru Gad Saad are two of Musk’s favorite sounding boards when it comes to wokeness. From Rufo, Musk learns what he should be mad about—clips of Maher speaking to the Atlantic Council, clips of Maher delivering a Ted Talk, screenshots of Maher’s old tweets. From Saad, he gets a more holistic intellectual framework for being mad. Musk is obsessed with the idea that a “woke mind virus” is infecting society. Saad happens to be the author of a book called The Parasitic Mind , which Musk has said gave him “ nightmares .” In March, a few months after Saad tweeted at Musk to ask him to promote the book, they held a glitchy 38-minute public discussion on X Spaces. The billionaire has continued to plug the book—including three different times in the week I tuned in.

If you only pay glancing attention to Musk, it’s tough to fully grasp both the intensity and shallowness of his conservative convictions. I knew that he previously said that the rise of Artificial Intelligence could bring about “ civilizational destruction ,” but I had, in my ignorance, assumed that this fear stemmed from a simple Matrix -style kind of doomism: Machines will grow sentient and enslave us. The reality, which became clear as Musk’s fixation with Maher progressed, was a bit darker: He believes AI will destroy the world with wokeness.

It was a “severe civilization-level risk,” Musk wrote in a late-night exchange with the billionaire venture-capitalist Marc Andreesen. (Andreesen’s own spiraling antipathy toward progressive buzzwords like “sustainability” and “social responsibility” has made him a leading proponent of Effective Accelerationism—sort of the anti-woke mind virus.)

“Now imagine if this is programmed, explicitly or implicitly, into super powerful AI – it could end civilization,” he said in response to a Rufo tweet about Maher’s TED Talk, in which she discusses how Wikipedia moderators think about truth when it comes to thorny subjects like religion. “Now, no need to imagine. It is already programmed into Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT.”

Musk returned to the theme of civilization-destroying woke AI throughout the week. “Imagine if instead of merely rendering forced ‘diverse’ images,” he said in reply to a follower with the handle DogeDesigner , “it decided to make that true in reality, potentially killing millions of people to achieve diversity goals.”

Imagine! With those stakes, everything fits in this heroic or apocalyptic dichotomy.

“[T]he West…wishes to be eaten alive and to have its children sacrificed because then death could be the ultimate expression of its progressive purity,” Saad wrote toward the beginning of the week.

“Suicidal empathy for the L,” Musk agreed.

All of this might sound familiar. That’s because it’s a facet of the same complaint that led to his remedial education at Auschwitz last year, stripped of the most obvious antisemitic signifiers: Woke progressives are opening the doors to the forces that will destroy us all: Falling birth rates, gender ideology, flag-burning immigrants, socially-conscious AI. There was a basic fallacy in expecting a tour about the horrors of genocide to soften the views of someone currently worried about “ white genocide ” and civil war , and who believes the ideology of his critics could lead to millions of deaths.

Musk described the current state of his red-pilling, and how all-encompassing it is, most succinctly in a response to Rufo about a five-year-old tweet from Maher about feeling “deep discomfort” about having children.

“Once you see that the true battle is expansionists vs extinctionists,” he wrote , “you can’t unsee it.”

And once you see that Musk truly can’t see anything else, you can’t unsee that. Still, there are some things Musk does want AI to kill off. The emerging tech is a boon to Musk not just because of what it promises for his companies, but because of what he hopes it can replace. “Legacy media simply can’t compete with hundreds of millions of humans providing real-time, AI-assisted, interactive information,” he boasted , responding to a chart from DogeDesigner showing declining traffic at major news sites. Musk is doing his part. His feed looks like a newsroom after private equity came to town—one of the only articles from a legacy media outlet he shared all week was a New York Post story about X’s advertising situation, and the only reporter from a legacy news outlet he interacted with was Bill Melugin, Fox News’ man on the border.  

Musk touts his platform as the future of news even as he uses it to spread misinformation. Not long after taking over the platform, he shared— and later deleted —a report from a notorious fake-news site that falsely asserted that Nancy’s Pelosi’s husband, Paul, had not been brutally attacked by a home invader and instead had gotten in a fight with a male prostitute. Communicating in emojis and exclamation marks makes it harder to commit factual errors, but he still made some. Musk twice expressed his alarm at a too-good-to-check story about a non-profit that works with migrants in Mexico handing out flyers asking them to vote for Joe Biden when they get to the United States. The non-profit said it had nothing to do with the flyers, and the text appeared to have been crudely translated using an online app. The allegation, which originated with a right-wing site called Muckraker.com, was amplified by the Heritage Foundation and found its way to Musk by way of both the Heritage Foundation and Nate Hochman, a Republican writer and activist who was fired from Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after featuring a Nazi symbol in a campaign video. It may seem like a small thing, but there’s no such thing when it comes to truth—I’m told the future of civilization hangs in the balance.

A lot of his time is just spent saying the same grim things, to the same grim people, over and over. He has the mannerism not of a master of the universe, but of the reply guys clamoring for their attention. Musk tweeted “DefundNPR” at Rufo three times in two days, like a man at a ballpark by himself, trying to start the wave. He will sometimes respond to the same post multiple times, hours apart with a slightly different reaction. One of the big stories last week in Musk’s circle was a report from the popular account End Wokeness that the actress Naomi Watts has a daughter who is trans.

“Funny how so many progressive actors have children who are transgender,” Gad Saad wrote.

“Terrible,” Musk said.

“‘A ‘trans’ child is the ultimate Hollywood virtue signal, meaning EXTRA approval. Two is even better. 3 is god mode,” said a finance influencer and self-described Tesla shareholder, a few hours later.

“Yup,” said Musk.

It is hard to overstate that this is just what one of the most powerful men in the world does all day. It is the media diet of one of those influencers who only eats organ meat . At least Howard Hughes kept out of sight. But even amidst this right-wing emoji-storm, there were still occasional glimpses of the Musk who, until fairly recently, enjoyed a less polarizing reputation as a billionaire who built cool stuff. He does talk a lot about SpaceX, although those interstellar ambitions take on a different light when you realize his quest is now part of a civilization struggle against pronouns. If you catch him at the right moment, you can still find Musk sharing math jokes, politely engaging with people with product complaints, and offering unsolicited medical advice. “If you’re experiencing severe neck/back pain, I recommend looking into a disc replacement,” he suggested. I don’t know if that’s good advice or not, but I do at least get where he’s coming from. 

Once, in the course of 389 tweets, the father of 11 even talked about what it’s like to be a parent.

“Whoa, I just realized that raising a kid is basically 18 years of prompt engineering 🤯,” he wrote.

“Our first child will be born next month – what’s your biggest piece of advice?” a former Tesla employee asked in response.

It was right there for him on a platter—a chance to be normal. What would it be: Treasure every moment? Stock up on wipes?

“Be super careful about what schools teach your kids,” Musk replied.

Never mind.

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Guest Essay

That Strange Piece of Metal Origami Embodies All of Elon Musk’s Flaws

By Elizabeth Spiers

Ms. Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

Some of the problems Tesla is facing — including first-quarter profits that are down 9 percent from last year, stressful months for shareholders and layoffs of about a tenth of its work force — are the result of factors affecting the electric vehicle industry as a whole. But many of Tesla’s troubles are unique to Tesla and the fact that its chief executive and co-founder, Elon Musk, is unique to the auto industry. He’s a Silicon Valley creature in a Detroit ecosystem who values innovation for its own sake, even at times when he could be more focused on safety and quality. His ethos and approach to running Tesla are embodied by his pet project, the Cybertruck.

Though it fits the technical definition of a truck (it has a bed), the vehicle looks more like an origami version of an El Camino. Mr. Musk suggested its stainless steel exterior might be bulletproof; some owners say it rusts.

It’s not unusual for new car and truck models to have some flaws, but the Cybertruck, which has sold only about 4,000 units, was recalled recently because the accelerator had a sticking problem, which is sort of like a parachute having a gaping-hole-in-the-canopy problem. Some owners have reportedly gotten an alert that the “vehicle may suddenly lose electrical power, steering and propulsion.” And you may want to watch your fingers with the frunk (front trunk) and doors; they don’t have industry standard sensors that can keep doors from snipping off someone’s digits. (The Cybertruck’s lead engineer said the steel doesn’t rust, and the company is working on the frunk issue .)

Tesla delayed the Cybertruck’s release a few times in order, the company said, to fix design and manufacturing flaws, but Mr. Musk’s primary focus often appears to be the aesthetics of science fiction and the desire to be seen as edgy (perhaps literally so in the case of the Cybertruck, which is surprisingly devoid of curves for a machine that needs to be aerodynamic). This is a man who named his child X Æ A-12, who rebranded Twitter as X and who endlessly engages in the performative subversion of posting antagonistic memes. Conventional automakers produce daring-looking concept cars, too, but they’re not made for mass production, and unlike the retro-futuristic Cybertruck, they are crafted with an eye toward what transport will look like in the future, not what the future looked like in the past.

Musk’s approach to innovation is in keeping with much of Silicon Valley’s. The tech industry puts a cultural premium on shipping products to market quickly and worrying about the consequences of any unfinished work, harmful features or deficiencies after consumers complain or the company gets sued. “Move fast and break things” is intended as a battle cry against sclerotic institutions and norms, but sometimes things get broken that should have been protected, like consumer privacy and safety. Democracy, even.

The consequences may be negligible if the product is an entertainment app, but with cars and rockets, the stakes are terrifyingly high. Tesla gives the impression that it accepts certain risks as the price of innovation.

The people who venerate Mr. Musk think of him as someone who takes big risks, someone with a vision that no one else has. I think his risk taking is better explained by an anecdote in Walter Isaacson’s biography . Once when Mr. Musk played Texas hold ’em, his former colleague Max Levchin said, Mr. Musk kept betting everything and losing, putting in more money and losing more rounds until he finally won one.

There are people who hear this story and think, “Wow, what an exciting high-stakes risk taker!” There are other people (me) who think risking it all is relative and it’s easy to go all in when you can always buy more chips. When Mr. Musk put a big chunk of his PayPal exit money into SpaceX and Tesla, it might have been because he saw specific opportunities. It might also have been that his desire to be viewed as cool and edgy made him interested in fast cars and shiny rocket ships. Or it might have been an impulsive decision based on emotion and in-the-moment appeal. It wouldn’t be the first or last time he made major decisions that way.

Mr. Musk came into the auto business as an investor, with no expertise in the industry. Like many of his tech counterparts, he operates as though his knowledge and skills are essentially transitive to any business. He’s repeatedly told that he’s a genius, and the venture capitalists who fund his industry routinely insist that a talented founder can run any company. Tesla’s early success lent credence to this view. But recent events — and the heightened scrutiny that all public companies receive — have revealed the extent to which his ego drives the company. He has embellished his engineering credentials, dismissed or fired experts who disagree with him and spent a great deal of energy on X trying to manage his public persona and cheerleading right-wing trolls. (Ross Gerber, a shareholder, says that has damaged the Tesla brand; he may be right, considering that sales are down among Democrats, according to one poll. )

The Cybertruck is a manifestation of Musk’s immaturity, both as a person and as a chief executive. It is futuristic in a way that is adolescent and unprincipled. It is reflective of a mentality that says rejecting expertise is appealingly subversive instead of plainly dangerous. It is not yet ready to exist in the adult world.

On an earnings call last week, Mr. Musk promised to deliver a more affordable E.V. by 2025. He has blown through many deadlines, but a cheaper electric vehicle is a sensible goal. He also promised something else: a sentient humanoid robot, something experts have said is not possible. He introduced an early prototype of the robot, called Optimus, in 2022. Videos showed it staggering around a stage and pantomiming a dance. It was retro-futuristic looking, with a silver-toned exterior. It looked, in short, like an ambulatory recycled Cybertruck.

Elizabeth Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.

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