I have known Elon Musk for more than a decade.
We exchanged ideas, drank whiskey together, met each other’s children, and discussed everything from the war in Ukraine to the future of American education.
I have long said that he is the Napoleon Bonaparte of our time. Walter Isaacson’s new biography, which is based on two years of observing Musk, comes to a similar conclusion.
And at a time when the world’s richest man is transitioning from hero to villain in some circles, this historical analogy should not be ignored.
In 2017, Musk and I went out for drinks in Menlo Park, California, with one of my sons, who was 18 at the time and about to study abroad in Africa.
Musk was busy. In the middle of our conversation, he took a video call from one of his Tesla factories, which appeared to be on fire. ‘Is it important?’ he asked. The guy in the burning factory seemed unsure. “Then don’t bother me,” he snapped and hung up.
“Don’t go to South Africa,” he said to my son with sudden urgency. ‘You will die.’ My son disregarded this advice. A few months later he narrowly escaped being shot during a carjacking in Johannesburg.
I have known Elon Musk for more than a decade. We exchanged ideas, drank whiskey together, met each other’s children, and discussed everything from the war in Ukraine to the future of American education.
I have long said that he is the Napoleon Bonaparte of our time. Walter Isaacson’s new biography, which is based on two years of observing Musk, comes to a similar conclusion. And at a time when the world’s richest man is transitioning from hero to villain in some circles, this historical analogy should not be ignored.
I tell this story to illustrate an important trait that sets Musk apart from ordinary people: he has superhuman intuition. I’ve never met anyone like him – I doubt I ever will – and I’ve met almost all of his colleagues and rivals in Silicon Valley.
Musk makes Isaacson aware more than once that he identifies with France’s most famous ruler.
“If they see their general on the battlefield, they will be more motivated,” Musk tells his biographer, explaining why he likes to show up on the Tesla and SpaceX factory floors without warning.
“Wherever Napoleon was, that’s where his armies would do best,” Isaacson explains.
The similarity doesn’t end there.
Hegel – the 19th century German philosopher – famously said that Napoleon was the world spirit on horseback. Elon is the world spirit in a cyber truck.
Friend and confidante: Niall Ferguson.
With his OCD, his self-diagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, his superhuman ability to multitask, and his seemingly willful lack of empathy, Musk embodies many characteristics of our distracted, spectrum-based age. His life without the PC, the Internet, the smartphone and the private jet is hard to imagine.
However, had such a man been born in 1771 rather than 1971, he certainly would not have lived in obscurity. (Napoleon was born in 1769).
The Musk family was not wealthy. His maternal grandfather was a Canadian chiropractor and amateur aviator whose ultra-conservative views led him to emigrate to South Africa, apparently because of rather than despite the apartheid system.
Musk’s paternal grandfather was a burned-out World War II cryptographer.
His parents, Errol and Maye, separated when he was eight years old.
Isaacson portrays his father as a sadistic, lying, unfaithful and occasionally violent monster from whom Musk either inherited or learned a dark “demon mode” – the destructive side of his nature that manifests itself at irregular intervals. (Errol disputes this description and says he loves his children).
When 18-year-old Musk left for Canada to study, his parents gave him $2,000 each. “You’ll be back in a few months,” his father is said to have told him. “You’ll never succeed.”
This has to rank as one of the worst predictions in human history.
Musk’s success was breathtaking. The fact that he’s worth around $268 billion isn’t really the point. Even more compelling is the scale of his ultimate goal: to make humanity a “space civilization” capable of colonizing other planets.
Musk, now 52, tells Isaacson that he “could have made a lot of money” if he hadn’t built SpaceX’s biggest rocket, the Starship. ‘But I could not [then] have made life multiplanetary.’
The German philosopher Hegel famously said that Napoleon was the world spirit on horseback. Elon is the world spirit in a cybertruck. With his OCD, his self-diagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, his superhuman ability to multitask, and his seemingly willful lack of empathy, Musk embodies many characteristics of our distracted, spectrum-based age.
Like the French emperor, Musk demonstrated a warlike spirit throughout his life.
He grew up in a violent society (late apartheid South Africa) and has long enjoyed playing combat-simulating computer games. By the time he was 13, he was already good enough at programming to create his own program called Blastar. “I’m prepared for war,” he said to a student friend.
Unlike many billionaires, Musk can be confident at times.
“I care about winning, not in the slightest,” he wrote in a 1999 email. “God knows why… it’s probably due to a very disturbing psychoanalytic black hole or neural short circuit.”
This hunger for victory is inextricably linked to an insatiable willingness to take risks.
With the exception of his first company, Zip2 – an online yellow pages that sold to Compaq for $307 million at the height of the dot-com boom in 1999 – each of Musk’s companies is more or less a wild moonshot, or better said a Mars shot.
Tesla and SpaceX were both, as PayPal founder Peter Thiel admits to Isaacson, “incredibly crazy bets.”
Venture capitalist Michael Moritz declined to invest in Tesla in 2006, telling Musk, “We’re not going to compete with Toyota. It’s a mission impossible.”
“How is this a business?” American internet entrepreneur Reid Hoffman asked when Musk suggested SpaceX to him.
“What I didn’t like,” Hoffman said later, “is that Elon starts with a mission and later finds a way to pad it out to make it work financially.”
The naysayers appear to be providing Musk with rocket fuel. “The fight for survival keeps you going,” he says. “When you’re no longer in survive-or-die mode, it’s not as easy to motivate yourself every day.”
Like Napoleon, Musk knows how to lead. “He’s amazingly successful at getting people to walk across a desert.” “He has a level of certainty that makes him put all his chips on the table,” Hoffman tells Isaacson.
Like the French emperor, Musk demonstrated a warlike spirit throughout his life. He grew up in a violent society (late apartheid South Africa) and has long enjoyed playing combat-simulating computer games. His parents, Errol and Maye, separated when he was eight years old. (Pictured: Young Musk with brother Kimbal, left, and recently a couple with Maye, right).
When 18-year-old Musk left for Canada to study, his parents gave him $2,000 each. “You’ll be back in a few months,” his father is said to have told him. “You will never succeed.” This has to rank as one of the worst predictions in human history.
Isaacson portrays his father Errol (pictured, right, with young Elon) as a sadistic, lying, lustful and occasionally violent monster from whom Musk (left, on his 18th birthday) either inherited or learned a dark “demon mode” – the destructive side of his nature, which manifests itself at irregular intervals. (Errol disputes this description and says he loves his children).
And like Napoleon, Musk is never satisfied with being anything other than number 1.
He’s currently CEO of five major companies: Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Company, Neuralink and X, formerly Twitter – not to mention a planned artificial intelligence venture that he says will challenge OpenAI.
Musk is also a micromanager, another Napoleonic trait. Perhaps the best example is the way he personally determined the price of every single component of a SpaceX rocket in his tireless quest to reduce costs.
He is merciless when he senses someone is not “hardcore” and only respects those who are “ultra hardcore.”
“Revolutionizing industries is not for the faint of heart,” he once told Tesla employees in an email. A young engineer was unceremoniously fired when Musk blamed him for misaligning a robot arm. “Did you fucking do that?” he growled. ‘You’re an idiot. Get the hell out of here and don’t come back.’
And Musk never says “die.” Many other entrepreneurs would have given up after SpaceX’s third failed launch. Not Musk.
“There should be absolutely no doubt that SpaceX will reach orbit,” he said after another rocket exploded in 2008. “I will never give up, and I mean never.”
Like Napoleon—who cheated on his first wife (who also cheated on him), then divorced, remarried, and had more children by his mistresses than by his wives—Musk has an unorthodox family life.
He married his first wife, Justine, despite warnings from his brother and mother that they were unsuitable. Their first child, Nevada – conceived at the state’s annual Burning Man festival – died suddenly at just 10 weeks old.
His second wife, actress Talulah Riley – to whom he proposed, then divorced, then remarried, just weeks after meeting them – called him a “child man” and said her job was to keep him from becoming “king-crazy.” “ (“People become kings, and then they go crazy”). She failed.
Musk’s former girlfriend and mother of several of his children, singer Grimes, wrote a song about Musk called “Player of Games”:
“I’m in love with the greatest player / But he’ll always love the game / More than he loves me.” That’s probably true.
Musk now has ten children by three different women, most recently twins with Shivon Zilis, the 37-year-old operations manager of Neuralink (his company that develops computer chips that can be implanted into the human brain).
Like Napoleon—who cheated on his first wife (who also cheated on him), then divorced, remarried, and had more children by his mistresses than by his wives—Musk has an unorthodox family life. (Pictured: With her former girlfriend, actress Amber Heard, in 2017).
He married his first wife Justine (pictured), despite warnings from his brother and mother that they were unsuitable. Their first child, Nevada – conceived at the state’s annual Burning Man festival – died suddenly at just 10 weeks old.
Musk’s former girlfriend and mother of several of his children, singer Grimes (pictured), wrote a song about Musk called “Player of Games”: “I’m in love with the greatest gamer / But he’ll always love the game / More than him.” .” love me.’ That’s probably true. Musk now has ten children from three different women.
Like Napoleon, Musk has a weakness for imperial overreach. “Open loop warning” is a code phrase he and his brother Kimbal use when Musk starts acting like he “doesn’t care about the results” – for example, when he recklessly and baselessly accused a British diver of who took part in the Thai cave rescue, being a “pedo guy”.
Like Napoleon, Musk has moved politically from left to right. In 2010, he defined Tesla’s mission as “f*** oil.”
He has since crossed the partisan aisle. “Unless the virus of the waking mind, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and anti-man in general, is stopped,” he told Isaacson in 2021, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.”
And he remains outraged by his transgender child Jenna’s rejection of him, which he attributes to her “woke” education in Los Angeles.
Like Napoleon, Elon has accumulated enemies over the years: not just rivals in Silicon Valley, but also newer adversaries on Wall Street, in the media and within the US Democratic Party.
The number of enemies has increased particularly sharply in the last 18 months. After initially supporting Ukraine in its fight to repel the Russian invasion and providing President Zelensky’s forces with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet services for free, Musk “geofenced” access when the Ukrainians attempted a naval drone attack on the Crimea annexed by Moscow to start in 2014.
“Without Starlink we would have lost the war,” a Ukrainian platoon commander told the Wall Street Journal. “Without Starlink we can’t fly, we can’t communicate,” an official told the New York Times.
Musk’s critics now claim that he is – perhaps unintentionally – helping the Kremlin.
He replies that he is trying to prevent the war in Ukraine from escalating into World War III.
Anyway, Isaacson seems more concerned about Musk’s recent Twitter takeover in his bio.
Paying too much for the social media site – and then being blocked by the courts from completing the deal – has now been described by Musk as “part of the mission to preserve civilization and give our society more time to become multi-planetary.” “to become” rationalized by defying “groupthink” in the media, toeing the line.’
But could the Twitter takeover prove to be a Pyrrhic victory, like Napoleon’s botched capture of Moscow in 1812 – if not his Waterloo?
Like Napoleon, Elon has amassed enemies over the years – and especially in the last 18 months. Musk’s critics now claim that he is – perhaps unintentionally – helping the Kremlin. He replies that he is trying to prevent the war in Ukraine from escalating into World War III. Anyway, Isaacson seems more concerned about Musk’s recent Twitter takeover in his bio.
Not only did Musk buy Twitter at an inflated price ($44 billion). By relaxing the rules on so-called “hate speech” on the platform, he also caused advertising revenue to plummet by 60 percent.
Certainly one cannot admire—and imitate—Napoleon without risking ultimate defeat and exile. But I still wouldn’t bet against Musk.
Of course he’s not always right. “It’s okay to be wrong,” he tells his employees. “Just don’t be confident and be wrong.”
Like his French role model, Napo-Elon does not strive for universal love. Nor does he pretend to be infallible.
But will any other person in our time change the world more? I for one highly doubt it.
Niall Ferguson is a Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His latest book is Doom: The Politics Of Catastrophe.