Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson book review: It’s hard to feel for him when he lacks empathy towards others
Walter Isaacson’s biography reveals an emotionally arrested man-child whose brooding lifts only through video games and goofy humour.
On his YouTube channel, called Dad of a Genius, Errol Musk, the father of Elon Musk, posts videos laying claim to his role in shaping the world’s richest person. It’s worth noting that Elon severed ties after Errol impregnated his own stepdaughter, whom Errol raised from age four, with the first of their two children, but Dad of a Genius could almost be the title for Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk because of the shadow Errol casts over its 600-plus pages.
He is present in traumatic memories as Elon cries recollecting the psychological abuse he endured as a child. At age 5, he would hit Errol’s legs in vain to stop him from beating mother Maye, yet after his parents divorced, the 10-year-old Elon Musk curiously opted to live with Errol rather than his loving but vulnerable mother. Two decades later, grieving the loss of his firstborn from SIDS, Elon stuns his two siblings by urging his father to move to the US to be nearby, purchasing Errol’s new family a home. When Errol’s wife starts deferring to Elon as the family provider, tensions mount and the patriarch is shipped back to South Africa.
Elon’s childhood home was a reality distortion field, with Errol constantly bending the truth to portray himself as hero or victim – “mental torture”, recalls his brother and closest friend, Kimbal. Musk revealed his own gaslighting tendencies during the merger of his digital banking company X.com with Peter Thiel’s Confinity, which created an early version of PayPal, repeatedly inflating his platform’s users by a factor of two.
“He didn’t just exaggerate, he made it up,” recalls a Confinity co-founder, who subsequently exploited Musk’s honeymoon in Australia with his first wife Justine to help depose him as chief executive of the new entity, which explains why the PayPal name prevailed rather than Musk’s less salubrious-sounding X.com.
Isaacson suggests that when slighted, Musk’s history of persecution by his father, as well as memories of the school bullies who taunted and beat him when he was a small awkward child, triggers a siege mentality. Bill Gates, visiting SpaceX’s new Austin, Texas, factory, faces Musk’s wrath for shorting Tesla stock. Despite Gates apologising and incurring a $US1.5bn loss, Musk tweets an unflattering image of Gates’s belly with the caption: “In case u need to lose a boner fast.”
Likewise, when a British cave diver, who helped rescue the 12 Thai boys and their assistant coach trapped in the Tham Luang cave system, ridicules Musk’s effort to assist through delivering a purpose-built submarine, he slanders him as “pedo guy”. Cue Elon’s Covid-denying father, who calls Joe Biden a “pedophile president” in a conspiracy-filled Father’s Day email berating his son for cutting off financial support.
Musk’s willingness to entertain right-wing conspiracy theorists (he once shared a tweet from Robert F. Kennedy Jr, alleging the CIA’s involvement in John F. Kennedy’s murder) is the underside to the expansive imagination that allows him to pursue space travel in service of humankind’s survival or frame purchasing Twitter as a democracy-defining struggle.
Fearing the risks of AI to civilisation, he tells Isaacson: “Getting to Mars is now far more pressing.”
Isaacson, a traditional detached biographer, typically trusts our scepticism without authorial intervention. But the demonisation of actor Amber Heard, who dated Musk after divorcing Johnny Depp and who Kimbal describes as “so toxic, a nightmare”, feels like a pile-on without the colour to back this up.
A former chief of staff to Musk likens Heard to Batman’s Joker, offering: “She didn’t have a goal or aim other than chaos. She thrives on destabilising everything.” But it’s Elon who oscillates between cackling and rage in dark moods and seems addicted to crises, commenting: “when you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated.” In Isaacson’s view, Elon diverges from Errol in his devotion to his nine surviving children. He certainly adores his two-year-old son and sometimes work companion, X, who shares the name of Musk’s bafflingly rebranded Twitter. But Elon is drawn to turmoil, like the father whose birthday he shares, cultivating drama when tranquillity threatens to reign. Kimbal laments his attraction to women with “a very dark side … who are really mean to him”. But Elon hardly models uxoriousness. Justine recalls flaming public arguments in which he hurled terms like “moron”, once telling her: “If you were my employee, I’d fire you.” And family bonds don’t make him reconsider holding multiple chief executive titles simultaneously or sleeping on a couch in Twitter’s library, rather than at home. With women from three relationships on hand, it’s easy to evangelise about declining birthrates and the “social duty” to procreate. Isaacson says transgender daughter Vivian’s rejection of her father causes Musk bottomless pain. Yet it doesn’t deter him from continued transphobic tweets (or is that Xes now?).
Musk’s dysfunctional personal life sometimes veers into dark comedy; when he and his girlfriend, techno artist Grimes, source a surrogate to carry X’s sister Y, Grimes stays with the woman in hospital, unaware that in a nearby room Musk exec Shivon Zilis is pregnant with twins secretly conceived with her boss through IVF. Even Elon’s relationship with Kimbal is a maelstrom. At Elon’s first company Zip2, a city-guide software provider co-founded with his brother, Elon is rushed to ER after Kimbal bites a hunk of flesh from his hand. Rolling-on-the-floor fights between the siblings were a regular office sight.
While happiness eludes Musk, describing his life as “nonstop pain”, it’s hard to feel for him when he lacks empathy towards others. If Musk’s businesses are his playgrounds to keep him energised and entertained, they also resemble his dog-eat-dog childhood schoolyards but with him now in charge, berating junior employees.
Isaacson’s interviews often revisit how much the world’s greatest entrepreneur owes to this dark side, sometimes uncomfortably excusing bad behaviour. However, disregarding sensitivities certainly allows him to push teams to move at warp speed in pursuit of terrifyingly high goals. Only someone with maniacal self-surety would embark on a spaceflight venture at 30, having been ousted as chief executive from his two previous companies. Without an emotional shut-off valve, the risks he embraces would be intolerable. At his 42nd birthday, curated by Grimes with a Japanese steampunk theme, he directed a blindfolded knife-thrower to target a balloon held beneath his groin. His loins survived, but taking on a sumo wrestler that same night resulted in a decade of neck surgeries.
Despite acknowledging his tendency to shovel his own grave, Musk shows no self-awareness. Otherwise, he would note parallels between suspending journalists’ Twitter accounts for challenging him with the woke biases he correctly identified in Twitter 1.0. Some of the book’s most amusing scenes show Musk blowtorching Twitter’s culture of entitlement, more focused on “psychological safety” than productivity, with yoga studios and artisanal free lunches. His relentless efficiency drive enables him to cull 75 per cent of personnel while keeping operations afloat (just). But his hubris in trashing its content moderation processes mean advertisers follow the sacked employees out.
The enduring picture that emerges from Isaacson’s biography is of an emotionally arrested man-child whose brooding lifts only through video games or goofy humour. But his unshakeable wilfulness and refusal to play nice by listening to others is reinforced because he does, at times, achieve the near-impossible.
Ben Naparstek is a growth adviser for technology companies
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