Impulsive and self-destructive: Elon Musk as depicted in a new book
Elon Musk. By Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster; 688 pages; $35 and £28 Judging by the umpteen biographies written about Elon Musk, the world’s richest man is also among its most intriguing.
The latest, by Walter Isaacson—the author of a bestselling biography of Steve Jobs, a co-founder of Apple—was published on September 12th. It is undoubtedly the most intimate of the lot. Mr Musk let Mr Isaacson shadow him for two years and granted him access to his family and closest confidants.
The result is an even-handed account of a flawed visionary. It is hard to think of anyone who has wrought such astounding change in so many different fields of endeavour. Mr Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, has made it much cheaper to put things into space.
His carmaker, Tesla, has accelerated the transition to electric vehicles. His Starlink communications satellites have made the internet accessible in remote places. Yet Mr Musk is as widely loathed as he is admired, thanks to his pronouncements on politics, his crusade against the “woke mind virus" and his rocky stewardship of Twitter (which for some reason he has renamed “X").
Mr Isaacson describes a man with a lofty vision for humankind, but also one who is impulsive, pugnacious and self-destructive. Born in 1971, Mr Musk had a tumultuous childhood in South Africa. He was brought up partly by a struggling single mother and partly by an abusive father (who would later father two children with a stepdaughter from his second marriage).
Mr Musk was violently bullied at school. As a teenager, he saw a man stabbed through the head. He escaped into daydreams and science-fiction novels.
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