Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
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This is the astonishingly intimate story of our era’s most fascinating and controversial innovator—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence—from the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies. Oh, and he also took over Twitter.
Bullies often abused Elon Musk as a child in South Africa. One day, a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face swelled to the size of a bulging ball of flesh. He was hospitalized for a week. The physical scars, however, paled in comparison to the emotional scars left by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.
His father’s influence on his psyche would last a lifetime. He grew into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to sudden Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an abnormally high risk tolerance, a taste for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was harsh and at times destructive.
At the start of 2022, after a year that saw SpaceX fly thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla sell a million automobiles, and Musk become the richest man on the planet, Musk spoke ruefully about his desire to create drama. “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 stated.
It was a sentimental remark, not a New Year’s resolution. Even as he said it, he was covertly purchasing Twitter stock, the world’s ultimate playground. Whenever he was in a bad mood, his thoughts would wander back to being bullied on the playground. He now had the opportunity to own the playground.
For two years, Isaacson followed Musk around, attending his meetings, walking through his factories with him, and interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and rivals. The result is a revealing inside story replete with incredible tales of victory and adversity that asks the question: do the demons that drive Musk also fuel creativity and progress?
