Book review: Elon Musk’s reputation brings the hype to this grim biography

Tesla CEO and billionaire Elon Musk’s impetuous decisions are laid bare in this new biography

Fri, 22 Sep, 2023 - 22:00

Review: Michael Moynihan

Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk comes with plenty of hype, as you might expect.

The book’s subject, the South African billionaire behind Tesla, Neuralink, Starlink, X (formerly known as Twitter) and other businesses is the kind of global figure who tends to flicker on the edges of many people’s consciousness, with the occasional eruption garnering our full attention. His purchase of Twitter was one such moment, and that social media platform’s various travails, including financial losses and downsizing, have kept Musk in the limelight long after he arrived into Twitter’s main office, triumphant with ownership and carrying a sink.

That kind of dramatic gesture is of a piece with the man described in this book — making impetuous decisions which might have sounded like a good idea near midnight after a long day’s work, but which another five minutes’ rational thought might have ruled out.

For those seeking a rosebud at the core of the Musk tale, his childhood is an obvious port of call, and Isaacson’s account of Musk’s schooldays is particularly grim. Bullied severely, at one point he had to be hospitalised after an assault by schoolmates which damaged his nose and left him almost unrecognisable, according to his brother Kimbal.

Elon found little consolation at home as a child. His father Errol comes across in the book as particularly repellent: After divorcing Elon’s mother, Errol married Heidi Jana Bezuidenhout.

Years later, after divorcing Heidi, Errol had two children with Jana Bezuidenhout, Heidi’s daughter. He informed Elon of one of the new arrivals in an email.

Elon himself has ten children, including twins with one Shivon Zilis, who works for his company Neuralink. “He really wants smart people to have kids,” Zilis told Isaacson, “so he encouraged me to do this.”

As reported in the book, declining birth rates are a genuine concern for Musk (“Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” he has posted), so much so that Zilis had her twins at or around the same time Musk and ex-partner Grimes (real name Claire Boucher) were expecting their second child.

Musk’s identification of the challenges facing civilisation isn’t confined to birth rates.

Take his long-running obsession with moving to Mars, which leads to a rare funny interlude in the book when a third party tries to explain the Musk view of the red planet: “He’s overboard on Mars. I let him explain his Mars thinking to me, which is kind of bizarre thinking. It’s this crazy thing where maybe there’s a nuclear war on Earth and so the people on Mars are there and they’ll come back down and, you know, be alive after we all kill each other.”

That third party was Bill Gates who explains his own position with :“I’m not a Mars person”.

Isaacson’s book is a serviceable compendium of Musk’s peccadilloes and eccentricities — one reviewer described it as an “insight-free doorstop”: Harsh but accurate.

Not error-free, though. Isaacson writes that Musk told Starlink engineers to shut down coverage which would aid a Ukraine attack on Russian targets.

Musk has corrected Isaacson, pointing out that there was no coverage in that area, and Isaacson has since walked back his claim, while publisher Simon and Schuster has since promised to update future editions.

A surprising oversight, and a significant one. In interviews Isaacson has made much of his access to Musk. Perhaps he should have made more of his access to proofs and revisions.