Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson

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On November 10, 2023, it was announced that A24 had purchased the film rights for an adaptation to be directed by Darren Aronofsky. When Musk tweets, “Take the red pill,” in 2020, Isaacson notes that it’s a reference to The Matrix but does not add that The Matrix is a movie made by two people who later came out as trans. Isaacson boils Musk down to two men… the result is a beat-by-beat book that follows him insider important rooms and explores obscure regions of his mind. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure.

For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. One of the things that anyone covering Elon Musk for long enough has to reckon with is that he loves to tell hilarious lies. You definitely realize you’re a tool being used to achieve this larger objective and that’s great,” says Lucas Hughes, who worked as a financial analyst at SpaceX and was one of the junior people Musk lashed out at.A New York Times article confirms Musk doesn’t want Starlink running drones but says nothing about drone subs. I could find no support for it in any of the news articles that Isaacson listed as sources for this chapter. We don’t hear Justine’s side of the story, except via a magazine article she published during her divorce, “ I Was a Starter Wife. In this chapter, Isaacson cites stories where rank-and-file workers complained about being pressured to take shortcuts and work 10-hour days.

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. Similarly, Isaacson falls flat on racial issues — the existence of apartheid in Musk’s youth is barely mentioned. Jill Lepore of The New Yorker wrote that "Isaacson's new biography depicts a man who wields more power than almost any other person on the planet but seems estranged from humanity itself".There is a very obvious question that Isaacson had the access to explore: how did Musk’s meddling with the safety sensors, the seat-of-the-pants fixes changes to the manufacturing process, and general “production hell” affect that injury rate? The Washington Post followed it up, publishing the excerpt where Isaacson claimed Musk had essentially shut down a military offensive on a personal whim.

It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. But I remember the days of the “ alien dreadnought,” the promises for swappable batteries that never materialized, and the countless other things Musk said that turned out to be, at best, exaggeration. Within the first three paragraphs of the book, Isaacson describes a wilderness survival camp Musk attended, where “every few years, one of the kids would die.There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean?

With Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson offers both an engaging chronicle of his subject’s busy life so far and some compelling answers. When Elon gets upset, he lashes out, often at junior people,” Jon McNeill, the former president of Tesla, says. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said. Crucially, though, this article says nothing about Ukrainian submarines — instead, it’s primarily about aerial vehicles.