Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson

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I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said.

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. is] a head-spinning tale about a vain, brilliant, sometimes cruel figure whose ambitions are actively shaping the future of human life.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. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from. Similarly, Isaacson falls flat on racial issues — the existence of apartheid in Musk’s youth is barely mentioned. There is one person we do know is under an NDA: a flight attendant who says Musk propositioned her in 2016. This reporting did not pass the smell test to me, and I said so at the time; I wondered about the sourcing.

Brian Merchant of the Los Angeles Times criticized Isaacson's "great man" biography format as extremely dated and took issue with his persistent framing of Musk as a "moody but brilliant world-mover", writing, "The author will unearth unflattering personal anecdotes and share stories about the subject's capacity to be cruel. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. 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.Here are some other ones: If Musk were more receptive to criticism, would his companies be in better shape? 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. 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). But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

Isaacson, whose previous biographical subjects include Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, is a patient chronicler of obsession; in the case of Musk, he can occasionally seem too patient — a hazard for any biographer who is given extraordinary access. On November 10, 2023, it was announced that A24 had purchased the film rights for an adaptation to be directed by Darren Aronofsky.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era – a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence. The first thing I did was flip to the back, where the author lists his sources for the Ukraine thing. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.