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As Tesla struggled, Musk wondered: what will we wear on Mars? Life in Elon’s orbit
What happened after Walter Isaacson, one of the world’s most celebrated biographers, took on oddball tech trailblazer and space nut Elon Musk as a subject? Sales took off, but critics of the eagerly awaited tome brought it down to Earth.
By Nick Bryant
Elon Musk’s ultimate goal is to make life “multi-planetary”, he told his biographer.
Is there a living creature on the planet as multi-tentacled as Elon Musk, the South Africa-born tech trailblazer whose elastic reach seems to extend not only to most realms of earthly life but into the galactic sphere as well? Musk is the CEO of Tesla, which has done more than any other auto company to bring about the mass adoption of electric cars in Western countries. He is the founder of SpaceX, the spacecraft company that has constructed the world’s most reliable reusable rocket. He is the brains behind Starlink – a constellation of communications satellites designed to beam down the internet into remote corners – which has given him operational sway in how the war is conducted in Ukraine and forced US generals to kiss his arse. More recently, of course, he has become the proprietor and ringmaster of what he calls X (but is still almost universally referred to as Twitter), the social-media platform he acquired in October 2022 at the vastly inflated price of $US44 billion.
Such is Musk’s ubiquitousness that he has become a mainstay of popular culture. A host on Saturday Night Live. A regular at the Burning Man festival. A character, inexorably, on The Simpsons in the episode The Musk Who Fell to Earth. In the Marvel movies he was the inspiration for Tony Stark, the billionaire industrialist played by Robert Downey jnr, whose ingenuity transformed him into the superhero Iron Man.
More consequential is the billionaire’s omnipresence in world affairs, where he seems impossible to geo-block. It is no exaggeration to say that Vladimir Putin could have achieved a lightning victory in Ukraine after a massive malware attack in the opening hours of the war crippled Kyiv’s military command system, had Musk not moved at warp speed to deliver 2000 Starlink terminals to restore battlefield comms. In perhaps the clearest manifestation of his power, the US is now totally reliant on Musk’s rockets to launch spy satellites into space.
To describe the 52-year-old as a Master of the Universe, then, not only feels clichéd but somehow inadequate. That said, given his mission is to colonise Mars and “to make mankind a multi-planetary civilisation”, it also feels apt. Ever since he emerged at the turn of the century as a Silicon Valley tech wizard, the surly bonds of Earth have never been able to contain his ambition. But the devotion to that vision combined with the quirks of his personality raise a vexing question. Is he a super-heroic Iron Man or simply a super-tiresome man-boy? Is he going to save civilisation or destroy democracy?
Few authors are better credentialled to answer those questions than Walter Isaacson, a one-time editor of Time magazine and former CEO of CNN who has carved a niche as the biographer of history’s most transformational figures. His canon includes Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and, most famously, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Being the subject of a biography by Isaacson is the airport bookshop equivalent of being awarded the Nobel of Nobels.
Such is his standing that when, in 2021, Isaacson first talked with Musk about writing his story, he made the kind of demands that the billionaire routinely issues to others. “I said to him, ‘I want to do this not based on a few interviews. If I do the book, I want to be by your side at every meeting and every conversation and every meal’ and he said, ‘Okay’.”
Elon Musk and his biographer Walter Isaacson at a 2014 conference.Credit: Getty Images
This loose verbal agreement in place, Isaacson went back to enjoying a meal with friends. Twenty minutes later, one of his dining companions, who happened to glance at Twitter, exclaimed: “Oh my god, you’re writing about Elon Musk.” The billionaire had announced the book deal to his then 60 million followers. “I didn’t really care that it was public,” recalls Isaacson, “but I hadn’t yet told my editor, I hadn’t yet told my agent.”
Isaacson had been initiated into Muskworld, the reality distortion field that he inhabited for the next two years. “I would spend about one week a month
with him,” the 71-year-old tells me via Zoom, in an interview which coincided with the global publication of his book last month. “I’d pack a few T-shirts, but not much because you had to keep your bag with you at all times because he would go to three or four cities a day sometimes.”
His first expedition introduced him to the otherworldliness of his subject. “He did a weekly meeting called Mars Coloniser, where they would talk for two hours about what people would wear once we have communities on Mars and how they would vote and govern themselves. And I’m going, ‘Wait a minute, these people are nuts.’ He’s got all these crises going on with Tesla and SpaceX, and yet he’s spending two hours wondering what the robots will be doing on Mars.”
Isaacson’s book reads like how a biographical version of reverse engineering might seem if an author was tasked with reconstructing the life of an oddball billionaire inventor. Over 95 chapters, we learn of Musk’s childhood fixation with science fiction, in particular the Douglas Adams classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There’s his move, aged 17, from South Africa to Canada, his mother’s homeland, and then on to the US, where he studied physics at university and became obsessed with electric vehicles, rockets and colonising Mars. There’s his impatience with academia, a tech-billionaire trope, when he decides against pursuing a PhD at Stanford.
His early successes are already Silicon Valley lore. His first company, Zip2, which he founded with his brother Kimbal, combined business listings with map locations on the internet, a groundbreaking concept back then. His online banking venture X.com was folded into a fledging outfit called PayPal that Musk wanted to rename “X”. His vision was to combine a payment platform with a social-media network, which is essentially his business plan for Twitter, his new “X”.
Failure is a recurring theme. Forced out at PayPal in a boardroom coup that unfolded while he was flying to Sydney for his honeymoon in 2000, Musk set up SpaceX, which almost brought about his financial ruin. Its first three unmanned launches all ended in fireworks. “Move fast, blow things up, repeat,” is how Isaacson describes this near-ruinous phase.
Tesla, after its launch in 2003, was also bleeding money, because Musk had not yet worked out how to manufacture electric vehicles at scale. “The threat of the hangman’s noose concentrated his mind,” says Isaacson. Musk, we are told, operates best when he is in survive-or-die mode, when his “dark intensity” and his “demon-mode temperament” drive his problem-solving.
In a book that is both exhaustive and exhausting, Isaacson chronicles a work ethic fuelled by “a “maniacal sense of urgency”, with widespread allegations of employees being set impossible deadlines, and staff unwilling to work around-the-clock getting fired. Family holidays get interrupted. Kids’ birthdays are missed. Musk sleeps in the office, pulls all-nighters with his design teams, drinks gallons of Red Bull and Diet Coke and thinks nothing of picking up a hammer to fix engineering problems.
There’s his politics. Trump he regards as a con man – he was joking when he said that he bought Twitter to help the disgraced former president regain the White House in 2024 – and Biden as a boring windbag. The COVID lockdowns made him more virulently libertarian, and he sees himself as a field marshal in the war on woke.
Musk tweeted his bid for Twitter in April 2022, a decision that has cost him dearly.Credit: Getty Images
Then there’s the personal stuff, a punk version of Modern Family. Alarmed by the declining birth rate and its civilisational implications, Musk has fathered 11 children with three different women, one of whom, Shivon Zilis, is an executive at one of his companies. Three of his kids are called X, Y (for short) and Techno Mechanicus.
Although now in his early 50s, his jokes tend “to be filled with smirking references to 69, other sex acts, body fluids, pooping, farts”. His mother, Maye, a former beauty queen who more recently has modelled swimwear for Sports Illustrated, still scolds him for spending too much time playing video games. His obsession with gaming may be a symptom of his Asperger’s syndrome, a condition that makes it harder for him to relate to other people, read social cues or feel empathy.
The through-line of the book is Musk’s messianic fervour, the belief that his work is epochal. “There are only a handful of really big milestones,” Musk explains to Isaacson: “single-celled life, multi-cellular life, differentiation of plants and animals, life extending from the oceans to land, mammals and consciousness. On that scale, the next important step is obvious: making life multi-planetary.“
Evidently, South Africa is where to find the key to unlocking Musk’s personality. In the playgrounds where he was bullied. In the brutal wilderness survival camp – “a paramilitary Lord of the Flies”, recalls Musk – where he was picked upon for being small and socially awkward. In the home he shared with his domineering father, Errol, “an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist who to this day bedevils Elon”. Once, according to Musk, when he was beaten up so badly that he ended up in hospital, Errol sided with his son’s tormentors and berated him for being a worthless idiot. This is where he “knew pain and learned how to survive it”.
Musk with mother Maye and brother Kimbal celebrating the 1999 sale of Zip2, his first company.Credit: Courtesy of Maye Musk
His childhood PTSD shut him down emotionally and “instilled in him an aversion to contentment”. It goes a long way to explaining his “demon mode” at times of maximum stress. “His heritage and breeding, along with the hardwiring of his brain, made him at times callous and impulsive,” says Isaacson. “It also led to an exceedingly high tolerance for risk.”
“My job wasn’t to like or dislike him. My job was to tell you the story.”
Walter Isaacson
All this builds neatly, and inexorably, to the acquisition of Twitter, which Musk bought partly, notes Isaacson, because “it was like an amusement park” and partly because it met a “psychological, personal yearning”. Twitter, you see, “was the ultimate playground. But now he could own the playground.” Buying Twitter was maybe the worst business decision he has ever made. Isaacson says it is one of the few times he saw Musk doubt himself. But, in an expensive form of therapy that could end in Twitter, if not Musk, declaring bankruptcy, he is apparently vanquishing his demons.
After his two-year embed came to an end, did Isaacson like the guy? “It’s such an anodyne word, ‘like’,” he replies. “There were times when I thought he was appalling. There were times when I thought he was pretty inspiring or a really good engineer. He has many different personalities. But my job wasn’t to like or dislike him. My job was to tell you the story.”
Given Musk’s ongoing travails with Twitter, or X as we are now supposed to call it, the release of that story could not have been better timed. The launch of the book, Elon Musk, in early September was treated as one of the publishing events of the year, the Barbie of biography. Instantly, it became Amazon’s No. 1 bestseller. Newspapers of record, such as The New York Times, breathlessly reported on its main takeaways. In a column in The Washington Post, Isaacson trumpeted the book’s arrival by revealing its most explosive scoop. Just as Ukraine was about to mount a surprise attack on Russian warships off the coast of Crimea using a fleet of submarine drones packed with explosives, Musk had ordered his technicians to shut down the Starlink system over the Black Sea, which thwarted the mission. However, as that bombshell made front-page news around the world, Isaacson was forced to issue an embarrassing “clarification”. Starlink, in that region of the war zone, had not been activated in the first place. Musk’s decision was not to extend the network coverage to allow the attack. The Post ran a correction on the column and also a news story on the mistake.
No reporter likes to publish a correction, especially a self-styled “old-fashioned journalist” with the pedigree and fastidiousness of Isaacson. But when I broach the subject he is surprisingly phlegmatic. “I made a mistake,” he confesses. “When I realised it was a decision he had made earlier, but he was just reasserting that decision, I corrected it. The general story is still the same.” Besides, it generated more publicity for the book. “I think it’s a good thing because it brought more discussion of it,” he says, showing a Musk-like appreciation of the attention economy. “It didn’t pain me in the least.”
Next, after the Starlink flap, came a rash of unflattering reviews. Writing in The Guardian, the novelist Gary Shteyngart called the biography a “dull, insight-free doorstop of a book” with prose “bordering on AI”. Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times called it “ceaselessly unenlightening”. Gideon Haigh bemoaned “670 pages of insight-free stenography” in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. “Let’s put a stake in the ‘great man’ biography, starting with Isaacson’s Elon Musk,” blasted a headline in the Los Angeles Times. Its reviewer, Brian Merchant, complained that the book ignored allegations of racial discrimination at Tesla’s flagship plant at Fremont, California, where black workers had been taunted with the N-word. Merchant reckoned his books are based on “a tacit pact” between author and subject: “The author will unearth unflattering personal anecdotes and share stories about the subject’s capacity to be cruel. In exchange, the subject’s greatness will be treated as an assumption.” He suggested this “devil’s bargain” be labelled “the Isaacson Accord”.
Isaacson’s book has sold well but received harsh reviews.Credit: Simon & Schuster via AP
The criticism of the writing is warranted. In describing such a colourful central character, Isaacson deploys monochromatic prose which gives the book the feel, in parts, of an operating manual. Pen portraits of those in Musk’s orbit read like abbreviated Wikipedia entries. There is not the same wordsmithery of some of his earlier biographies or magazine writing for Time, when I recall him being more florid. Even the title, Elon Musk, is banal. Isaacson is also infuriatingly non-judgmental. Though he has written a warts-and-all biography, there are times when he also feels a little too much like a cosmetic surgeon. His study seems predicated on the view that Musk is such a visionary that there will inevitably be collateral damage: the staff he humiliates; the engineers he keeps on dragging away from birthday dinners and family celebrations.
Access journalism has downsides. After embarking on embeds, journalists can develop a reportorial form of Stockholm syndrome. “Whatever I did, whatever I wrote, every sentence, it was not because of any relationship I had with Elon Musk,” Isaacson says in his defence. “It was because I was supposed to be getting the story. I also had to remember that my client is the reader.” Isaacson claims he was merely a fly on the wall, that he didn’t become a “pal”. “Ninety per cent of the time, it was almost as if he didn’t know I was there,” he says. Yet in the passages of the book dealing with Ukraine, there are hints that Musk came to regard this establishment insider as a counsellor, the grown-up in the room. “How am I in this war?” Musk asked heavy-heartedly when he called Isaacson one night in September 2022. “Starlink was not meant to be involved in wars. It was so people can watch Netflix and chill.”
So did Isaacson become Musk’s brain trust? “I don’t know whether he regarded me as a sounding board or not, but that night I simply asked questions. He seemed to be worked up about whether or not a sneak attack on the Russian fleet could lead to the use of tactical nuclear weapons. I don’t have an opinion on that, all I did was ask questions. ‘Have you spoken to General Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff? Have you spoken to Jake Sullivan [Joe Biden’s national security adviser].’ And he did speak to those people … I tried very hard to be just a neutral observer.”
In the 1960s, it was not uncommon for journalists to serve as diplomatic back-channels, so did Isaacson occasionally act as a conduit between Musk and the Pentagon? “I did not back-channel,” he says. “I kept on saying to myself and to him, ‘I’m not a player here’ … So I stayed very much in a monotone. Neutral, especially during crises.”
Neutral. If you really wanted to lay the boot in, then, you could accuse Isaacson of lazy both-side-erism as he chronicles the good, the bad and the really ugly. But, then, Musk is building a profoundly ambiguous legacy. He can be tedious in the extreme, a nasty bully with a sophomoric sense of humour (how ironic that his parents almost named him Nice, after the city in France where he was conceived). But, unquestionably, there are saving graces. Without Musk, the electric vehicle revolution still might not have happened. Moreover, he invested in AI because he regards it as such an existential threat and thought he should police it.
Musk, who has been a force for electric vehicle adoption, at a Tesla launch event.Credit: Getty Images
In the book, Isaacson describes an argument between Musk and his buddy Larry Page, co-founder of Google, who apparently argued that if robots take over from humans it will simply be the next evolutionary step. “I am pro-human,” Musk told Page in front of a party full of people. “I f---ing like humanity, dude.” Fearing that Google would dominate AI, Musk set up a non-profit research lab, OpenAI, which went on to develop ChatGPT. But he parted from the start-up in 2018, and claimed it was training AI to be “too woke”. Recently, he set up a rival, xAI, to develop what he has called “TruthGPT”.
One of my personal concerns is that the valorisation of tech giants such as Musk, Bezos, Gates and Jobs has fed corporate cults of personality and a form of hi-tech demagoguery. Silicon Valley product launches often have a quasi-religious feel. “Tech bros” are prone to Messiah complexes. This idolatry of disruptors created a zeitgeist that assisted the rise of a demagogic political disruptor, Donald Trump. I put this thesis to Isaacson, who surprisingly hasn’t given it much thought. “One of the criticisms of my book is that biography of the tech billionaires feeds into a veneration of strong-personality tech types, whether it’s Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Elon Musk or Larry Page,” he says. But these are people “who will have the most impact on what the first half of the 21st century will look like”.
Prior to interviewing Isaacson, I had developed a pet theory on why he might have ended up being overly generous to Musk. He hails from New Orleans in Louisiana, America’s most exotic city, which has always been heavily populated by Gothic figures. Maybe it gives him a higher tolerance for Muskian craziness. Isaacson chuckles, but the mention of his home town reminds him of his mentor, the Louisiana-based novelist Walker Percy, and the advice he once imparted: “There are two kinds of people who come out of Louisiana, preachers and storytellers. For heaven’s sake, be a storyteller”.
“The world has too many preachers. And whether it was at Time magazine when I was writer or in all of my books, I have a little sign above my desk which says, ‘Let me tell you a story’. … I let the reader make the judgments; I just try to tell the story.“
Isaacson believes his book describes a man in full: “He’s cruel at times. He’s callous and cavalier. He doesn’t have empathy. And I think that’s really bad. I don’t cut him slack when he’s really unnecessarily rough or being an asshole. I do try to show how both his dark strands and his light strands are part of the same fabric.” For the most part, then, Isaacson remains untroubled by his critical acid shower. Though it is sometimes said that bad reviews should spoil breakfast but never lunch, they don’t appear to have even soured his early morning coffee. “We’re in a day and age when everything is binary … You’re a hero or you’re a villain. Me, I’m a narrator of a story.” (The biography is still riding high in the Amazon bestsellers list.)
Unlike Musk, Isaacson is a man of steady-state emotion. Ever the courteous Southern gentleman, few things seem to trouble or arouse him. But as our conversation draws to an end, I’m struck by how animated he becomes when I ask about America’s decline, and whether Musk acted as an accelerant or a break. “We used to be a nation of risk-takers,” Isaacson says. “Everyone who came to the United States took risks, whether they were on the Mayflower or crossing the Rio Grande River. People like my father, who fought in World War II, and my grandfather, they took risks and started businesses or tried to make things. Nowadays, we don’t make as much in the US. Until Tesla came along, most car companies outsourced all manufacturing because we don’t make things, and we don’t know how to build a factory.
“What Musk would say is that we ended up with a society that has more referees than risk-takers, more regulators than people trying to innovate, and that has made us sclerotic. It’s hardened our arteries … Now, Musk is maybe too much of a risk-taker. He’s wild, he’s impulsive, but if you ask me about America’s decline, I do think we need to know how to make things in America again.“
Isaacson’s father, it turns out, was an engineer, so perhaps that offers an explanation as to why he pulled his punches. Musk is trying to make American manufacturing great again. So maybe this old-fashioned journalist was attracted to a futurist who he believes can revive the past.
Or perhaps we all subconsciously share the same sense of ambivalence because it doubles as a hedge. What if this guy does end up being the brain-box who ultimately saves us from the climate emergency and the march of the machines? In that doomsday scenario, when we all start boarding Musk rocket ships to Mars, who cares if he’s a reckless man-boy?
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