Authors: He Qianming, Li Zinan
Another book added to the genius biography sales combination
71-year-old Walter Isaacson is known as the “genius biography writer”. Not only because he has writing talent, but also because he has written biographies of many geniuses such as Franklin, da Vinci, Einstein, and Jobs. These works are bundled and sold as “genius biographies” on Amazon, and now this sales combination has added another book.
In the second half of 2021, Isaacson determined Elon Musk as his next writing subject. Prior to this, the two only talked on the phone for over an hour and agreed on this matter. Isaacson requested to “shadow Musk” and participate in every business meeting, family gathering, and enter the production lines of Tesla and SpaceX, and interview his family, etc.
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Because it is Walter Isaacson, Musk agreed and gave him the “power to enter his life”. The author also emphasized to Musk, “You cannot control what I write, this is a biography.” Musk also promised.
How Isaacson selects his writing subjects is shown in his published works series. In 2004, after finishing Franklin and planning to write about Einstein, he received a call from Jobs who wanted to take a walk and chat. After meeting, Jobs wanted Isaacson to write a biography for him. However, Isaacson believed that Jobs was in a career fluctuation period and did not agree, but instead asked him if he thought he was “suitable as the next candidate in that series?” It wasn’t until five years later when Jobs became seriously ill that Isaacson started writing his biography and published it shortly after his death, breaking sales records.
Prior to this, Jobs had suggested Isaacson to write about da Vinci next: “Because you write about people who connect art, science, and technology.” Isaacson wrote about da Vinci.
Isaacson spends about a week each month following Musk into Tesla, SpaceX, and later Twitter’s office, attending meetings and family gatherings. Now, he has finished a chronicle of the 52-year-old Musk, with the Chinese version being 600,000 words long and 600 pages thick, divided into 95 chapters.
Isaacson’s “Genius Biographies” packaged for sale on Amazon’s website.
As a biographer, Isaacson’s curiosity lies not in “money” or the fact that the other person is a new “richest person”, but in the side that drives technological innovation. He sees many similarities to innovative pioneers in Musk. He listed a long list of names: from Thomas Edison to Nikola Tesla, Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci.
As far as the living people with these names are concerned, he thinks that Musk is much more interesting and important than Jeff Bezos and others.
“The most interesting person of our time,” Isaacson described him. At more exaggerated times, he would say, “The most interesting person in the solar system.”
“He has taken us into the era of sustainable energy with electric cars, solar power, and energy storage, and has sent humanity into space, ushering in a new era of space exploration.” In November 2021, Isaacson published an article in Time magazine explaining why this person will be recorded in history. He used parallel paragraphs to introduce how Musk’s companies at the time, such as Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Boring Company, etc., have changed different fields.
There is no doubt that Musk is a good subject for writing because he can provide the most exciting conflicts. But many times, he does not provide exclusive news, he just “explodes.” This is a big trouble for writers. Does he have any secrets left? It’s not even the first biography.
Many people are familiar with Musk’s life story, more than 20 years of continuous entrepreneurship, experiencing multiple near-collapse situations, but creating at least 3 successful companies, spanning the fields of automobiles, aerospace, and finance. Therefore, he has become the richest man in the world and has fathered 10 children with three women. His face appeared on the cover of Time magazine and in gossip tabloids, and his tweets can ignite public opinion at any time.
20 minutes after the call with Musk ended, Isaacson’s phone was blown up. Because Musk tweeted again: If you are curious about Tesla, SpaceX, and my recent situation, @WalterIsaacson is writing a biography.
The new writing subject quickly showed him the uncontrollable impulsive side of his personality. This is just one example of Musk’s recklessness that he saw.
He quickly witnessed Musk’s “unconventionality”: someone who cannot control his impulses and is addicted to risks.
Musk is one of the few innovators, but on the other hand, he is cruel and has harmed many people, and some of the cruelty is unnecessary.
Isaacson. Image from the Aspen Institute. Photographer: Patrice Gilbert.
Using the materials collected over the past two years, Isaacson wants to understand one question the most—whether the demon that drives Musk in his heart is also necessary for driving innovation and progress.
Isaacson believes that when we talk about Musk, we should be clear about the most important question. He himself puts “innovation” in the most important position, while critics often put this person’s “cruelty” in the forefront. Evaluating a person can sometimes be a quite difficult philosophical question. The author reminds us to look at the relationship between these two things. Behind the question is a fair proposal: try to understand people, understand their complexity.
“We can appreciate a person’s strengths while criticizing their flaws, but we also need to understand how these factors are intertwined and difficult to separate. To understand a person’s character as a whole, we must accept the inseparable dark side.” He wrote.
Isaacson believes that his responsibility is to present rather than judge. “For those of us who have the opportunity to walk alongside the people who are changing the world, we should at least try to write the first draft of this story.” He said.
The intertwining of darkness and light in a person
Isaacson challenges himself not to become even a small character in Musk’s personal story. “When I interview him, I will avoid asking him questions and just observe.” Even when Musk is silent, he hopes to observe and understand his silence, rather than break it with questions.
This is the awareness of a biographer. “In life, we can appreciate only the good side of a person and dislike the dark side, but a biographer needs to try to figure out how they are intertwined and cannot just pick parts of them.”
In his book and when participating in podcast programs, Isaacson quotes Shakespeare to illustrate his understanding of the complexity of people. “All heroes have character flaws, some heroes are trapped by their flaws, some heroes end in tragedy, and those characters we perceive as villains may be more complex than heroes.” Isaacson said, even the kindest person’s character is “shaped by flaws.”
People always ask Isaacson to compare this new protagonist with his previous subjects, especially Steve Jobs. Isaacson mentioned a past event when writing “Steve Jobs: A Biography”, he asked Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak: Does Jobs need to be so harsh, so rough, so indulged in dramatic conflicts? The answer was, if not, they might not have created the Macintosh computer and Apple might not have been so great.
Isaacson applies Wozniak’s understanding of Jobs to Musk: If Musk were more relaxed and approachable, would he still be the person who wants to send us to Mars and to the future world of electric vehicles? But this is not new, Musk himself defended himself on the entertainment program Saturday Night Live: “I reinvented the electric car, I want to send humans to Mars with a rocket. But if I were a calm and easygoing ordinary person, do you think I could still achieve these things?”
Isaacson hopes that readers will find their own answers from the carefully crafted story. In “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future”, Tesla and SpaceX’s breakthroughs are often associated with Musk’s cold, ruthless, and brutal behavior. For example, in 2017 when solving the production problems of the Model 3, Musk fired a young man who had been working at Tesla for nearly a year, working 7 days a week, because of a calibration error in a mechanical arm.
Even if there are no difficult problems to overcome, Musk will suddenly explode. In July 2021, SLianGuaiceX has gone through multiple hardships and become a stable and reliable partner of NASA. It is the world’s leading aerospace company, and the next big goal is to launch a starship (Starship) that is expected to fly to Mars 20 months later. But on a late Friday night, Musk suddenly went to the SLianGuaiceX office and found that no one was working, so he immediately erupted. He roared at the on-duty employees, “I want to see everyone start moving!” At 1 am, Musk sent an email to all employees, requiring those who are not engaged in key projects to immediately return to work overtime.
The final result was that it took only 10 days for SLianGuaiceX employees to put the rocket on the launch pad, but due to government approval, it could not be launched for a long time. Musk was satisfied and said that this incident “restored his confidence in the future of humanity.”
Isaacson wrote in his book, “This crisis action created out of thin air kept the team’s hardcore combat capability and satisfied Musk’s desire for drama to some extent.”
Isaacson tried to find out where Musk’s drive came from and why this person showed such traits: “For me or any biographer, this can usually be traced back to childhood.” The detailed description of Musk’s growth process is an increment of this biography.
In the exploration of Musk’s childhood family life, Isaacson delved deeper than any previous writer, at least gaining a lot of clues to understand the protagonist. He interviewed the closest people to Musk, especially his father, Errol Musk, whom no one had been able to break through before, and obtained his direct quotes. In another biography of Musk published in 2015, author Ashlee Vance tried to contact Errol but received a warning from Musk.
The frequent communication with Errol Musk helped Isaacson reconstruct Musk’s childhood experiences and clarify the influence his father had on him.
He described Errol Musk as “an engineer, a scoundrel, a charismatic dreamer,” depicting the trauma and impact this father caused to his son, comparing him to “Darth Vader” (a character in Star Wars with tragic and conflicting characteristics, falling into darkness due to physical and mental destruction). These influences shaped Musk and became a part of him. Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk said that their father seemed to have a split personality, being charming and charismatic in one moment and cold and ruthless in the next. The constant lies from their father also affected their sense of reality. Friends and relatives say that they can see their father’s shadow in Musk. But Errol seems proud that his son inherited his harsh dictatorial style and applied it to Musk and others’ relationships.
Childhood Musk and his father. Picture from Isaacson’s social media.
Musk’s first wife, Wilson Justin, felt that because he had such a childhood, “he had to close his heart to others to some extent.” It made him cold and ruthless, but it also made him dare to take risks. “He learned to eliminate fear. If you shield the psychology of fear, then maybe you have to shield other emotions, such as happiness and empathy.” It is well known that Musk does not really have the latter two abilities.
The mother of Musk’s other three children, Glemes, feels that the most profound constraint that childhood brings to him is: life is pain. Musk agrees, saying that this has made his pain threshold very high.
Musk realized and tried to get rid of his father’s influence. Justin would use “You are becoming more and more like your father” as a secret language, “warning him that he is falling into darkness.”
In a book review in The New Yorker, writer Jill Lepore said that Isaacson focused too much on the influence of Musk’s father during his childhood and ignored the social background at the time: “From the biography of Elon Musk, we will not know that when Musk was 4 years old, about 20,000 black students held protests, and heavily armed police killed as many as 700 of them.”
In the Musk biography published in 2015, author Ashley Vance believes that similar racial conflict events were one of the sources that shaped and strengthened Musk’s belief in “the need to save humanity.”
Isaacson did not establish this direct causal connection. In his presentation, Musk’s character is not influenced by a single factor – it is not a mind map, but more like a multi-perspective, multi-clue, sometimes obscure picture.
He was influenced by the dark side of his father, but also benefited from the unconstrained time his mother was always busy making a living. His precise adventurous genes may come more from his grandfather. He was an unrestrained adventurer who traveled around in private planes in that era. “The flying Holdman family,” people said. Grandfather led his family to search for lost cities in the desert, obsessed with flying, and ultimately died in a plane crash.
Musk loves physics, and he was confused by the stories in the Bible at school (“What do you mean when you say the water parted?” he asked, “That is impossible”). Isaacson searched through his childhood materials and found evidence of his early obsession with rockets, and also found that when Musk was in his teens, he repeatedly read a book in his father’s office that described great inventions of the future. And that book inspired him to start thinking about landing on other planets.
Musk is determined and resolute. Isaacson discovered that Musk had astonishing achievements when he was 5 years old, which shows that once he makes a decision, he cannot be shaken. This made Musk’s younger brother feel “really scary” and “incredible”. As a child, Musk, as people later noticed, whenever he started to think about difficult problems, he couldn’t see or hear anything, “all sensory systems would shut down.”
Musk has been deeply shaped by spending time in science fiction novels and games. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” is mentioned 11 times in the book. Isaacson called it Musk’s “childhood enlightenment ‘bible'” that saved him from his existential depression in adolescence, inspired him to focus on the ultimate questions of the universe, shaped his value system, and added a sense of humor to his serious and clumsy nature.
“Musk is impressed by the passion of superheroes.” Isaacson presents how Musk is obsessed with heroism. He told the author, “They always want to save the world, but they wear their underwear on the outside or wear tight iron clothes. If you think about it carefully, you will feel something strange about them, but they are indeed trying to save the world.”
A picture of Musk during his college years taken by his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Gwen. Source: Musk’s social media.
Musk’s Loop: Pulling a rabbit out of a hat, blocking the sword above his head, starting a fire drill, and pulling out the next rabbit
Isaacson presents Musk’s multiple entrepreneurial experiences from 1995 to the present, which all have similar narrative logic, like loops.
Musk’s dissatisfaction with the current state of an industry and his desire for disruption are usually the starting point of one of his entrepreneurial stories. Disruption also requires Musk to be dissatisfied with the status quo and to adopt unusual methods. Musk often sets extremely difficult time points and expectations for his team, which sometimes puts the company in crisis, but Musk and the team eventually overcome difficulties through hard work and wisdom.
When Musk founded the Internet company X.com in March 1999, he aimed to disrupt the traditional banking industry. From this point on, Musk’s management strategy was to set almost impossible goals for a task and then drive others to achieve them. Steve Jobs did the same, and he would also tell his colleagues, “Don’t be afraid, you can do it.” But Musk doesn’t say such things.
Isaacson gives an example in the book to illustrate Musk’s desire for risk. In 2000, Musk wanted to show his co-founder of LianGuaiyLianGuail, Peter Thiel, how fast his McLaren sports car was. He stepped on the accelerator on the fast lane and crashed into the embankment, shattering the car body. Musk was not only scared, but also laughed and said, “At least McLaren showed my adventurous spirit.” Isaacson quotes a partner at Sequoia Capital, Roelof Botha, to explain this: the car accident is like a metaphor, he likes to enlarge risks, burn bridges, and leave no way out for everyone.
In 2002, SLianGuaiceX co-founder Thomas Muller gave Elon Musk a shortened schedule for the development of the Merlin engine, which Musk then requested to be shortened again.
Due to Musk’s radical approach, Tesla faced crises in both 2007 and 2017. A year before the release of Tesla’s first car, the Roadster, Musk made a last-minute change to the chassis design, preventing the team from using a pre-purchased chassis from Lotus. This required a complete redesign and change in the supply chain within a year. Prior to the delivery of the Model 3 in 2017, Musk demanded the use of robots to replace human workers and increase the factory’s automation rate. This plan ultimately failed, leading Tesla into a production capacity hell. Musk slept at the factory, assembling screws and dismantling robotic arms, helping Tesla overcome the challenges.
Isaacson sees Musk’s adoption of radical goals and strategies as an inevitable part of Tesla and SpaceX’s success. This has put Musk’s companies in crisis but also paved the way for extraordinary achievements. Musk has never stopped driving this cycle, and both Tesla and SpaceX have grown and learned from repeated failures and crises. Musk is not only radical and visionary but also has exceptional execution capability.
Isaacson points out one difference between Musk and Jobs, which is that Musk sleeps at the factory while Jobs never even went to the iPhone assembly line. Musk is not like Jobs, a “fingertip genius” who combines technology and art. He is an engineer who believes in physics.
During the early days of SpaceX, Musk developed his own work philosophy called the “Five-Step Work Method.” It involves questioning every requirement, deleting unnecessary parts and processes, optimizing the remaining processes, speeding up the turnover time, and automating the processes.
Musk has promoted this work method many times and considers it to be the truth. Isaacson explains in the book how this work method guides the employees of Tesla and SpaceX. Musk demands that employees maintain a sense of crazy urgency, which is the principle of company operations. The only rule employees have to follow is the laws of physics; all other rules are just “suggestions.”
According to Isaacson, employees who say “impossible” to Musk are almost always fired by him. Musk’s standard for determining the feasibility of something is based on physics. If the reason for saying “impossible” is not related to physics, Musk will consider the employee to be lying or lazy.
Isaacson believes that this stems from Musk’s philosophical view formed during his youth. He believes that physics is the best theory for understanding the world – “He has seen people who break the law, but he has never seen anyone who violates the laws of physics.”
In 2021, when Isaacson decided to write “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future,” it didn’t seem like a good time. The cycle that had persisted for over a decade in Musk’s life came to a halt this year.
In this year, Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, completed 63% of rocket launches in the United States. Tesla sold nearly one million cars and its market value surpassed that of automotive giants such as Toyota, Ford, and General Motors, propelling Musk to the position of the world’s richest person.
In the fall of 2021, Isaacson observed that Musk was in a “restless calm” state. Once, Musk flew to Mexico to attend his brother Kimbal’s party, but he wasn’t relaxed. He locked himself in his room and spent most of his time playing games.
Due to emotional fluctuations and depression, Musk had stomachaches and would vomit from time to time. Musk asked Isaacson to recommend a doctor for him. He didn’t really need Isaacson to introduce a doctor, but he wanted to confide in Isaacson—the anxiety brought about by idleness.
From 2007 to 2020, Musk’s suffering never stopped. Like a sword hanging over his head, he had to find ways to conjure up “rabbits” from his hat to block the sword above his head. “Perform a magic trick, perform another magic trick, make a series of little rabbits fly in the air. If the next rabbit doesn’t appear, you’re doomed.”
At the end of 2021, Musk talked to Isaacson about his inner anxiety after becoming the world’s richest person.
By then, Tesla and SpaceX were far from crisis. Musk began to miss the days when he slept on the factory floor. “If he didn’t have to fight for survival, he wouldn’t feel at ease,” Isaacson said.
Isaacson wrote that in the months before Jobs’ death, he was still conveying his ideas about products to Apple’s management. Restlessness is a characteristic of innovators, but Isaacson discovered that Musk was more than that.
Isaacson described Musk as someone addicted to games and extremely eager for drama. Even though he had already cleared the game, he was restless and anxious, eager to move on to the next level or start a new game.
In reality, there weren’t enough challenges to keep him engaged, so Musk deliberately created dramatic events to immerse the company in his defined “crisis.” Autopilot Day, solar roof installations, Tesla production hell—these things could have been completed smoothly, but Musk liked to sound the alarm, forcing everyone to participate in his “fire drills.”
In early 2022, Isaacson witnessed another firefighting exercise initiated by Musk – the acquisition of Twitter. Isaacson did not see a serious sense of mission in this matter. He believed that Musk bought Twitter because he saw it as a playground.
“At first, I tried to fit my grand mission into it, but I found that Twitter couldn’t accommodate it. However, I gradually began to believe that Twitter could be a part of the mission to protect human civilization and buy more time for human society before humans become an interplanetary species,” Musk defended himself.
A new cycle following the five-step work method began. Within six months of acquiring Twitter, Musk laid off nearly 90% of the employees, which was the second step in the five-step process, simplification and elimination of processes.
At the end of the year, Musk started urging Tesla engineers to design a car without a steering wheel, accelerator, and rearview mirror. “If we mess up, it’s my fault, but we have to go all out.”
Is the grand and heroic sense of mission a product of narcissism?
Initially, Isaacson thought that the missions expressed by Musk, such as going to Mars and accelerating the energy transition, were just ways to inspire employees or spontaneous words. However, Isaacson gradually became convinced that Musk’s beliefs were genuine, which surprised him, “It’s not ordinary.”
“I don’t think his sense of mission comes from so-called narcissism or money-driven motives,” Isaacson argued with a podcast interviewer.
Isaacson’s narrative illustrates how Musk operates Tesla and SLianGuaiceX at any cost, without considering personal interests. His first wife, Justine, said, “Musk never talks about money. He sees himself as either extremely rich or completely broke, with no third possibility. What truly attracts him are the problems he wants to solve.”
Isaacson described Musk on the eve of founding SLianGuaiceX in 2001 as a 30-year-old young man who had started two businesses and earned 250 million dollars. He decided to build a rocket that could fly to Mars. He had a childlike love for space science fiction and took the plots in science fiction novels as his own career. Most of his knowledge about rockets came from NASA’s official website and textbooks he had just bought. Reid Hoffman, a former executive at LianGuaiyLianGuail who later became a venture capitalist, could not understand Musk’s actions at all. He advised Musk that this matter was meaningless, and he would be the next fool who bankrupted himself due to arrogance. But Musk believed that he had to give it a try, otherwise, humanity would be forever trapped on Earth.
In 2008, Musk had to rely on personal credit to borrow money to get Tesla and SLianGuaiceX through the crisis. People around him urged him to choose between SLianGuaiceX and Tesla and concentrate the funds on one of them. Tesla and SLianGuaiceX represented his two missions, and he refused to give up either one.
In 2008, Musk was on SLianGuaiceX. Source: Visual China.
Musk repeatedly explained to his friends the source of his sense of mission: technological progress is not inevitable, it requires many people to strive tirelessly for it. Musk wants to personally promote space technology; colonizing Mars can protect human consciousness from nuclear war and climate change; colonizing Mars can reignite people’s desire for adventure, give them a goal worth pursuing, and make them truly look forward to a new day.
Initially, Musk just wanted to contribute to sending humans to Mars and donate to NASA. But when he searched the NASA website, he received a frustrating message that NASA did not have a plan to go to Mars. Musk believed that there was no hope unless he did it himself, revolutionarily making rockets.
Isaacson believes that what makes Musk truly special is his grand sense of mission, and his belief, so heroic and stubborn, that if he doesn’t do it, it won’t be realized. Without anyone’s consent, Musk decided to shoulder the fate of humanity.
After equating his own career with the destiny of humanity, Musk became hostile towards anyone or anything that hindered the advancement of his mission, revealing a ruthless side to those who became his obstacles. Accelerating the transition of human energy is one of the grand missions. For this reason, Musk violated regulations and had workers work overtime during the pandemic, risking infection.
Isaacson deepened his understanding when he learned about the conflict between Musk and Bill Gates. Bill Gates had shorted Tesla, which made Musk resentful towards him. Musk complained to Isaacson, “He is so hypocritical, on one hand, he claims to care about climate change, on the other hand, he expects to profit from shorting a new energy company.” Later, Gates sent Musk a personally written charity project proposal to express his apology. But Musk didn’t buy it and asked, “Aren’t you still holding a $500 million short position on Tesla?”
When Musk makes rash decisions that can put the company in crisis or hurt those around him, Isaacson would say that Musk has entered the “demon mode”.
However, Isaacson doesn’t fully criticize Musk’s “demon mode”. He quoted Musk’s then-girlfriend Grimes, who said, “‘Demon mode’ causes a lot of chaos, but it does help him solve problems.” Isaacson also cited Musk’s mother’s explanation for his lack of empathy, saying that Musk has Asperger’s syndrome. But Isaacson also presented this explanation without verification.
The grand mission opened the switch of “demon mode”. Isaacson pointed out that sometimes it also becomes an excuse for some confusing behaviors of Musk. When Musk bought Twitter, he tried to give this behavior a grand sense of mission, but he found that it was not valid. However, Musk gradually convinced himself that the mission of Twitter is to try to eliminate misunderstandings between people and slow down the occurrence of wars, and continue human civilization.
Musk opened a bottle of wine in Twitter’s conference room. Source: Isaacson’s social media.
Isaacson, who sincerely believes in Musk’s sense of mission, did not “defend” Musk on this point. When Isaacson wrote about Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, he made a heavy and contradictory judgment to Musk’s narrative of grand mission: Musk’s starting point for buying Twitter is not a grand narrative of saving human civilization, but because he likes it, “It is well known that Twitter is the world’s largest playground,” Isaacson said.
Musk, as described by Isaacson, seldom has regrets. He is annoyed uncontrollably – those who are not excellent and inefficient employees are hindering his career and the progress of human civilization. Musk did not hesitate to fire them, “extremely stupid” is a phrase he often uses, in fact, he has been using this phrase frequently since he was five years old.
There are already too many missionaries in the world, so it’s better to be a storyteller
“Sometimes, great innovators are children who dance with risks and refuse to be trained. They may be hasty, awkward in dealing with things, and sometimes even cause crises, but perhaps they are also crazy – crazy enough to believe that they can really change the world.”
Isaacson ended the book like this, but obviously the critics are not satisfied with this chronicle. They believe that his narrative style of presenting a large number of details in chronological order is somewhat flat.
“It may look ordinary,” Isaacson retorted, “Open the Bible, and there is the best opening sentence in history, ‘In the beginning’.”
Critics also believe that the writer is too kind to Musk. They believe that Isaacson did not see him as a powerful person – having such great power but acting impulsive, domineering, and ruthless, wouldn’t this cause greater danger?
“Isaacson often overlooks the moments when Musk’s character flaws have a greater impact.” Vox book reviewer Constance Grady listed a series of casualties and data caused directly or indirectly by Musk’s disregard for rules that Isaacson did not mention in the book, “Because of his power, wealth, platform, and influence, Musk has repeatedly done some unconventional and counterintuitive things that have harmed many people.”
For example, in the production capacity hell of 2018, Musk made assembly workers work without protection to save the bankrupt Tesla. At that time, Tesla’s injury rate was 30% higher than other car companies. Isaacson mentioned this detail in his 600,000-word book only once.
The Financial Times used an example to criticize Musk’s hypocrisy – Musk portrayed himself as a savior of the climate, but at the same time, he sent a private jet across the United States to pick up a pet dog. Isaacson also did not mention this incident in his book.
These make people question Isaacson and his narrative, did he deliberately or unintentionally ignore these materials? Is Isaacson being fair to his biography subject? Isaacson has not responded to these specific opinions.
Isaacson’s biography ends in April of this year. But Musk’s story continues. SLianGuaiceX is trying to launch the Starship rocket that can send people to Mars again; Tesla is developing a cheaper, self-driving next-generation car; Neuralink is recruiting volunteers for human experiments with brain-machine interface devices; the newly established artificial intelligence company xAI is secretly developing models to challenge OpenAI and Google’s research.
What will happen next is unpredictable. After all, in 2021, not only Isaacson, but most people cannot predict that Musk would acquire Twitter. In just a few months, Musk has once again refreshed people’s understanding of him. He provoked billionaire Mark Zuckerberg on social media, even set a location for a duel, but eventually nothing happened, turning it into a farce.
This may be a trouble for writing a biography of Musk. Maybe Isaacson needs to add not only a chapter and a conclusion, but also a second half.
Musk now is no longer just a genius engineer or innovator who produces best-selling electric cars and reusable rockets. Today, his emotions can affect hundreds of millions of people who use social media, and even influence a war. Musk’s radical attitude towards autonomous driving cars raises doubts about whether he values the safety of ordinary people’s lives enough. Will the demon in Musk’s mind depicted by Isaacson become uncontrollable?
For someone who already has tremendous power, besides appreciating his inventions and adventurous spirit, does the biographer have more responsibilities? Is it appropriate to compare such a person to a “child who refuses toilet training”?
After graduating from university, Isaacson worked at Time magazine for over 20 years, starting as a journalist and eventually becoming the editor-in-chief, adhering to the principles of objectivity, neutrality, and storytelling. Since the publication of this biography, Isaacson always has to quote a remark from his teacher many years ago to explain why he is “just presenting.”
His teacher was the novelist Walker Percy, who once told the young Isaacson, “There are two types of people in Louisiana (Isaacson’s hometown): missionaries and storytellers. It’s best to be a storyteller, as there are already too many missionaries in the world.”
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