CNN –
“You will never be successful,” Errol Musk said in 1989 to his 17-year-old son Elon, who was preparing to fly from South Africa to Canada to find relatives and a higher education.
This is one of the scenes that Walter Isaacson paints in his 670-page biography of Elon Musk, who is now the richest person who has ever lived. The biography gives readers new insight into the private life of the entrepreneur who made electric vehicles popular and sent rocket boosters back to Earth so they could be reused.
But Musk’s public statements and actions became increasingly shaky, filing lawsuits and threatening lawsuits against nonprofits that combat hate speech and allowing some of the internet’s worst actors to reclaim their platforms.
Isaacson portrays Musk as a restless genius with a turbulent childhood who is on the verge of starting a new AI company with his five other companies.
Musk allowed Isaacson to shadow him for two years but exercised no control over the content of the biography, the author said.
Here are four key takeaways.
Musk’s upbringing and his father haunt him
Isaacson’s book attributes much of Musk’s drive to his upbringing. He recounts the emotional scars inflicted on Musk by his father, which, as Isaacson writes, resulted in Musk becoming “a tough but vulnerable man-child with an extraordinarily high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of… mission and a madman” became intensity that was callous and sometimes destructive.”
Musk chose to live with his father from ages 10 to 17 and endured what Musk and others describe as occasional but regular verbal taunts and abuse. Musk’s sister Tosca said Errol sometimes lectured his children for hours, “calling them worthless and pathetic, leaving scars and making nasty comments and not allowing them to leave.”
Elon Musk became estranged from his father, although he occasionally supported him financially. In a 2022 email sent to Elon Musk on Father’s Day, Errol Musk said he was cold and out of power and asked his son for money.
In the letter, Errol made racist comments about black leaders in South Africa. “If there are no white people here, the black people will return to the trees,” he wrote.
Elon Musk has said he rejects racism and discrimination, but hate speech has flourished on X, formerly known as Twitter, since he bought it 11 months ago, according to the Anti-Defamation League. Musk last week threatened to sue the ADL for defamation, arguing that the nonprofit’s statements had caused his company to miss out on significant advertising revenue.
Isaacson reported that in other emails, Errol called Covid “a lie” and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top US infectious disease expert who played a prominent role in the government’s fight against the pandemic.
Elon Musk has also criticized Fauci and raised many questions about public health policy during the pandemic. But he has said he supports vaccinations, even if he doesn’t believe vaccinations should be mandatory.
Musk’s fluid family and his obsession with population
Musk has a fluid mix of girlfriends, ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, and significant others, and he has many children with multiple women. Isaacson’s book revealed that Musk was having a third child (Techno Mechanicus) with musician Grimes in 2022, and Musk confirmed the revelation on Sunday.
Musk has frequently stated that humans must be a multiplanetary species and warned that space exploration will secure humanity’s future. He has also spoken several times about the need for people to have more children.
“Population collapse due to low birth rates poses a much greater risk to civilization than global warming,” Musk said last year.
Musk has cited his desire to increase the world’s population as an explanation for his unique family situation.
The book reports that Musk encouraged employees like Shivon Zilis, a top operations executive at his company Neuralink, to have lots of children. “He feared that declining birth rates would pose a threat to the long-term survival of human consciousness,” Isaacson writes.
Although the book portrays their relationship as a platonic work friendship, Musk volunteered to donate Zili’s sperm. She agreed and had twins through in vitro fertilization in 2021; She didn’t tell people who the biological father was.
Zilis and Grimes were friendly, but Musk didn’t tell Grimes about the twins, according to the book.
Musk asked Zilis if her twins would like to take his last name. Isaacson reports that in 2022, Grimes was upset when she learned the news that Musk had fathered children with Zilis.
“I’m doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis,” Musk tweeted at the time, trying to defuse the tension. “A declining birth rate is by far the greatest threat to civilization.”
One of Musk’s children, Jenna, frequently criticized her father’s wealth in particular and capitalism in general. In 2022, she disowned her father, which, according to Isaacson, saddened Musk.
Isaacson reports that Musk’s broken relationship with Jenna, who is transgender, has partly led to Musk turning rightward toward libertarianism and questioning what he sees as a “woke-mind virus” that is essentially anti-scientific, anti-time and is anti-human.
Musk has questioned the use of alternative gender pronouns and made numerous statements that some critics consider anti-trans pronouns.
“I absolutely support trans people, but all these pronouns are an aesthetic nightmare,” Musk said Posted in 2020.
But in December 2020, he also posted a now-deleted tweet that read, “If you put him/her in your bio,” next to a drawing of an 18th-century soldier rubbing blood on his face in front of a pile of corpses and wearing a cap with the caption “I love to oppress.”
At the end of last year he tweeted: “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.”
Buying his favorite social media platform, laying off staff and tinkering with policies and branding have cost Musk’s other companies and projects time and resources, Isaacson reports.
“I have a bad habit of biting off more than I can chew,” Musk once told Isaacson.
After a protracted legal battle over his decision to buy Twitter, Musk said he regained his enthusiasm for taking over the company when he realized he wanted to avoid a world in which people retreat into their own echo chambers would prefer a world of civil discourse.
But Isaacson notes, “He would end up undermining this important mission with statements and tweets that ultimately ended up pushing progressives and mainstream media outlets to other social networks.”
According to the book, members of the Musk team, such as his chief executive Jared Birchall, his lawyer Alex Spiro and his brother Kimbal, sometimes try to stop Musk from sending text messages or tweets that could pose legal or economic danger. Some friends once persuaded him to put his phone in a hotel safe overnight before Musk called hotel security to open the safe for him.
During Christmas 2022, Kimbal warned his brother Elon about how quickly he makes enemies. “It’s like high school when you were always getting beat up,” he said. Kimbal stopped following Elon on Twitter after his brother posted tweets about Fauci and other conspiracies. “Stop falling in love with weird shit.”
Are robocars, an AI company and a robot called Optimus in the pipeline?
Musk continues to push forward new technical projects. As of 2021, Musk has been working on a “humanoid” robot called Optimus that walks on two legs, rather than four-legged robots from other labs. He introduced an early version of the Optimus robot in September 2022. Musk told engineers that humanoid robots will “take the economy to a virtually infinite level,” according to Isaacson, by completing tasks that humans find dangerous or monotonous.
Some of Musk’s top engineers are also working on a “robotaxi,” a driverless vehicle that looks like an Uber. Last summer, he spent hours each week preparing new factory designs in Texas to produce the next-generation Tesla cars, which would be similar to Tesla’s Cybertruck.
Musk is also starting his own AI company called Musk had co-founded OpenAi with Sam Altman in 2015 and donated $100 million to the non-profit organization. He became angry when Altman turned the project into a for-profit venture. Musk also ended a friendship with Larry Page when the two disagreed over AI. According to the book, Musk believes he has a better vision for AI and humanity and believes the data he has from Tesla and Twitter will be an asset to his next AI plans.
“Could you put the rockets into orbit or make the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of it, hinged and non-hinged?” Isaacson asks in the final chapter.