At 52 years old, Elon Musk has a definitive biography. Walter Isaacson, famous biographer of geniuses such as Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci, published this Tuesday his new book entitled Elon Musk (available on the 14th in Spain, published by Debate). The tycoon is now the richest person in the world, simultaneously running six headline-grabbing companies and having ten children from three women. He also has enormous social influence: his fight for freedom of expression.
Musk says he hasn’t read the book yet. Isaacson’s style is not very combative: he lets Musk explain himself, despite showing dozens of his character’s dramas and struggles. When Musk asked Isaacson if he wanted to write it, the journalist in return asked him for hours of direct access to meetings and private moments, and they conducted “dozens of interviews and late-night conversations.” In addition, conversations with more than 100 people around him, including family members, ex-wives and executives of his companies. The book reveals countless new details and wrinkles about a character already well-known and whose legacy has yet to be defined. His first biography was published in 2015, but more than half of the 700 pages of Isaacson’s book cover the last eight years.
These are some of the most revealing fragments of the new biography of this “man-child,” as Isaacson defines him.
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1. Fistfight training
Elon Musk was born and raised in South Africa to British and Canadian parents. Isaacson tells of a childhood and adolescence in which every anecdote represents a different variant of violence. When he was little, he was bitten in the back by a German Shepherd and Musk demanded not to kill the dog, but he later learns that he was shot. On another occasion, he went to a concert with his brother Kimbal, they saw a dead man with a knife in the brain and stepped in a pool of his blood that was on their sneakers. There are reports of summer camps where fighting was encouraged; a beating at school that still resents him decades later, or trips to Britain or Hong Kong, where the teenage Musk brothers were left to wander the streets alone.
“I had difficulty understanding social norms,” Isaacson writes. “Empathy was not natural and I had neither the desire nor the instinct to be forgiving. As a result, bullies regularly taunted him, approached him, and beat him. “If you’ve never been punched in the nose, you don’t know how it’s going to affect the rest of your life,” he says. [Musk]“.
All of these real scars are “minor,” Isaacson adds, compared to those inflicted by his father, Errol. When he left the hospital after being beaten by a classmate, his father scolded him for an hour. Kimbal, Elon’s brother, says it is “the worst memory” of his life.
Isaacson manages to speak to Errol several times, who tries unsuccessfully to justify himself: as he admits, he applied an “extremely strict street dictatorship towards his children”. Musk’s parents divorced when he was 8 years old, but Elon spent his teenage years with his father. One of the most persistent rumors from this time is that Errol was interested in an illegal emerald mine. Errol confesses to Isaacson that he secretly traded gemstones for a while, but never owned part of a mine.
2. Aversion to satisfaction
Musk was successful. Not only does he have more money than anyone else, but he has also managed to revolutionize industries such as electric cars and space exploration. But unlike others in a similar situation such as Bill Gates, Larry Page or Jeff Bezos who have resigned, Musk is taking on new challenges.
“His childhood post-traumatic stress disorder also gave him an aversion to gratification,” Isaacson writes. “‘I don’t think I know how to taste success and smell the flowers,’ says Claire Boucher, an artist named Grimes and mother of three [diez] Children. “I think he was conditioned in his childhood that life is pain.” Musk agrees. “Adversity shaped me,” he says. “My pain threshold has become very high.”
Musk didn’t have a financially difficult childhood, but he didn’t have a peaceful one either. “He developed a siege mentality that included an attraction, sometimes a craving, for drama, both at work and in romantic relationships,” Isaacson writes. “When faced with excruciating challenges, the tension often kept him awake at night and caused him to vomit. But it also gave him energy. “He’s a magnet for drama,” he says [su hermano] Kimbal.”
In 2022, Musk experienced one of the best moments of his life. Tesla and SpaceX grew non-stop. Also his benefits and assets. But he couldn’t be satisfied: “I have to change my mindset and stop falling into the crisis mode that I’ve been in for 14 years, or possibly most of my life,” admits Musk Isaacson.
“My mental health is skyrocketing,” Musk admitted to Isaacson in September 2022. “It’s bad when there is extreme pressure. But when a lot of things are going well, that’s not good for my mental health either.” Just a month after these words, Musk made his offer to buy Twitter. It was a huge new mess.
According to Isaacson’s calculations, Musk now runs six companies: “Tesla, SpaceX with his unit.” [de satélites] Starlink, Twitter [ahora X]the Boring Company, Neuralink and xAI [la nueva competencia de OpenAI y DeepMind]“.
3. Twitter, the “woke virus” and the trans daughter
Musk traveled to Hawaii for a few days in April 2022, to an island owned by Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle. Musk was with a friend he often hangs out with, Australian actress Natasha Bassett. Instead of disconnecting, he spent four days debating whether he should buy Twitter.
From Hawaii he flew to Vancouver (Canada), where his then-wife Grimes wanted to take him to her grandparents. But Musk was in “stress mode” and left him at the hotel. From there, he sent the offer that ultimately led to the purchase of Twitter in October.
The interface between family or private life and big decisions will be repeated another time. Musk has ten children from three women: twins Griffin and Xavier, triplets Kai, Saxon, Damian and his first wife Justine. Then Grimes’ friend. Although it all seems incomprehensible, reading the book makes all this confusion of names and pairs seem like small leaps in an incredibly busy life, with no consecutive vacations since 2001, when he also contracted malaria, which almost killed him.
His son Kai announced at age 8 that he was a vegetarian: “To reduce my carbon footprint.” Musk’s most estranged child is Jenna, whose original name comes from her favorite X-Men character. “Xavier was strong-willed and developed a deep dislike of capitalism and wealth,” Isaacson writes. “They had long, bitter conversations, in person and via text message, in which Xavier repeatedly told her, ‘I hate you and I hate everything you represent.’ “It was one of the factors that led Musk to sell his homes and live in less luxury, but it had little impact on their relationship.”
But Jenna elicited a different reaction from her father. At 16, she decided to transform herself into a woman and change her first and last names. Musk found out from a member of his security detail. This alienation, Isaacson writes, has caused him more pain than “anything else in his life since his first child, Nevada, died suddenly as a baby.” Musk blamed Jenna’s changes on the “woke virus.” “She blamed it in part on the ideology Jenna internalized at Crossroads, the progressive private school she attended in Los Angeles. “In their view, Twitter was infected with a similar mentality that suppressed right-wing and anti-establishment voices,” says Isaacson. Buying Twitter was a way to stop the “woke infection.”
4. The “Demon Mode”
“Musk is crazy sometimes,” Isaacson says. Musk can be charming and fun. Also hateful and terrible. His cases of shouting and insulting employees are well known. The book is full of examples of Musk treating the people around him like objects. “The feedback I give people is hardcore [una de sus palabras favoritas] and mostly accurate, and I try not to be ad hominem about it. We all make mistakes. Physics doesn’t care about feelings. “He cares if you built the rocket right.”
Grimes is the one who goes into more detail about the different sides of Musk: “He has many minds and many very different personalities. And it moves very quickly between them. “From one moment to the next you feel that the air in the room changes and suddenly the whole situation changes into a different state,” he says. “My favorite version of E [Elon] “She’s the one who signs up for Burning Man and is able to sleep on a couch and eat soup out of a bag so peacefully.” The opposite mode is the “Demon”: “It’s when everything goes dark and you find yourself in the middle of your mental storm.” His Asperger’s syndrome and his father’s terrible influence are two of the reasons given for these changes.
5. The “new” worst time of your life
In 2008, after three failures, SpaceX staked its future on a fourth rocket launch. Tesla lacked money to pay salaries due to the global crisis and internal cost problems. This year has been described as the worst year of Musk’s life.
Musk tells Isaacson that 2018 was even worse. “It was the time of greatest concentration of pain I have ever experienced. 18 months of non-stop madness [empezó en verano 2017]. “An overwhelming suffering.”
In these months, the problems of producing enough cars in his factories, his false tweets about a pedophile diver during a rescue operation in Thailand, investors’ doubts about his reliability as the head of his companies and his photo of him smoking marijuana in the podcast by Joe Rogan. Isaacson says he made spontaneous decisions. “At least 20 percent of them will be wrong and then we have to change them. But if I don’t make decisions, we die,” the tycoon admits.
6. He didn’t want to get into wars
When the Ukraine War broke out, Russia cut off Ukraine’s telecommunications. Musk offered to help with Starlink, his satellite company. He sent thousands of recipients to Ukraine. Their intention was humanitarian aid. Isaacson’s book reveals for the first time how Musk refused to expand the coverage of his satellites so that Ukraine could carry out a drone strike against the Russian fleet in Crimea.
This fragment appeared before the book was published and accusations of collaboration with Putin rained down on Musk. This is his response in the book: “How did I get into this war? Starlink wasn’t intended to get involved in wars. “So people could watch Netflix and relax and go online to do homework and do good, peaceful things, not drone strikes.” Starlink eventually created a military unit that could sign contracts with the Pentagon.
7 What if we cut this cable?
Another repeated phrase from Musk is “Zafarrancho.” It consists of creating a sense of extraordinary urgency by setting impossible deadlines and goals. There are several passages in the book where he is irritated by the fact that in some of his companies almost no one works at night.
Isaacson describes one like this: “I had seen Musk get into this demonic mood before, so I could sense what it meant. As he often did – at least two or three times a year – the urge to give the order for an uprising grew within him, a burst of sustained activity 24 hours a day. The goal was to shake things up and “clean the shit out of the system,” as he puts it.”
In a twist on those moments on Twitter, Musk wanted to move servers between two data centers to save millions of dollars. His engineers warned him that it was neither easy nor fast. Besides, it was Christmas. Musk called his trusted people and started doing that stubborn boss thing: This is easier than it seems. Often things went reasonably well. His way of playing with risk without a safety net is another theme in his life.
“Musk turned to his security guard and asked if he could borrow his pocket knife. This allowed him to lift one of the ventilation slots in the floor and force the panels open. He crawled under the floor of the server himself, pried open a switch panel with the knife, unplugged the server and waited to see what would happen. Nothing exploded. The server was ready to transmit. Musk was now really excited. “That was,” he exclaimed with a loud laugh, “like a remake of Mission: Impossible.”
This “operation” led to Twitter stability problems months later, such as the disastrous presentation of Governor Ron DeSantis’ candidacy. Musk admitted to Isaacson that he was wrong: “There’s still shit that doesn’t work because of this,” he told him. However, Isaacson adds, “The adventure showed Twitter employees that Musk was serious when he talked about the need for a manic sense of urgency.”
8. The last big worry
Musk has built many other things: Neuralink and the humanoid robot Optimus. However, his legacy has yet to be decided. When Isaacson complains about Musk’s rude, rude or ridiculous tweets, he says variations of this sentence: “You may not like certain aspects of what he tweets, but this year.” [2023] has so far sent more mass into orbit than all countries and companies combined. “He created a car company that is worth as much as the next nine car companies combined.” Isaacson also admits that these are futuristic tunnels or autonomous driving systems that will seemingly never arrive.
It also seems incredible that the same person was later described as follows: “His jokes were often full of smug references to 69 and various sexual acts, bodily fluids, pooping, farting, smoking joints, and other topics that would excite you.” . “Laughter for a group of stoned university students.”
These successes and ambiguities can be dwarfed by what you achieve with artificial intelligence (AI). At Musk’s pace, he could have changed the focus of his businesses and ideas over the next 20 years. “I can’t just sit there and do nothing,” he told Isaacson in one of their final conversations in Austin, Texas, with one of his twins on his lap. “AI is just around the corner, I wonder if it’s worth spending so much time thinking about Twitter. You could probably make it the largest financial institution in the world. But I have a limited number of brain cycles and hours in a day.”
Isaacson then asked him about his priorities: getting to Mars, he said, and “focusing on making AI safe.” Musk believes humanity is in his brilliant hands. He loves the superhero epic. At the moment he already has his book.
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