When celebrated biographer Walter Isaacson took on oddball tech billionaire Elon Musk, strange revelations came quickly.
Is there a living creature on the planet as multi-tentacled as Elon Musk, the South Africa-born tech trailblazer whose elastic reach seems to extend not only to most realms of earthly life but into the galactic sphere as well? Musk is the CEO of Tesla, which has done more than any other auto company to bring about the mass adoption of electric cars in Western countries. He is the founder of SpaceX, the spacecraft company that has constructed the world’s most reliable reusable rocket.
Isaacson had been initiated into Muskworld, the reality distortion field that he inhabited for the next two years. “I would spend about one week a month In a book that is both exhaustive and exhausting, Isaacson chronicles a work ethic fuelled by “a “maniacal sense of urgency”, with widespread allegations of employees being set impossible deadlines, and staff unwilling to work around-the-clock getting fired. Family holidays get interrupted. Kids’ birthdays are missed.
After his two-year embed came to an end, did Isaacson like the guy? “It’s such an anodyne word, ‘like’,” he replies. “There were times when I thought he was appalling. There were times when I thought he was pretty inspiring or a really good engineer. He has many different personalities. But my job wasn’t to like or dislike him. My job was to tell you the story.”with Twitter, or X as we are now supposed to call it, the release of that story could not have been better timed.
Prior to interviewing Isaacson, I had developed a pet theory on why he might have ended up being overly generous to Musk. He hails from New Orleans in Louisiana, America’s most exotic city, which has always been heavily populated by Gothic figures. Maybe it gives him a higher tolerance for Muskian craziness.