Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson

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Isaacson followed Musk for the next two years, visiting his SpaceX and Tesla factories and attending board meetings. 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? But it’s undeniable that he’s spent decades palling around with libertarian-to-far-right types (most famously Peter Thiel and David Sacks, who is inexplicably described as “not rigidly partisan” despite coauthoring a noxious book with Thiel that, among other things, suggested date rape wasn’t real). However, Musk denied the allegation, saying satellites in the region were not turned on, and that he chose not to activate them.

Brian Merchant of the Los Angeles Times criticized Isaacson's "great man" biography format as extremely dated and took issue with his persistent framing of Musk as a "moody but brilliant world-mover", writing, "The author will unearth unflattering personal anecdotes and share stories about the subject's capacity to be cruel. It’s not unusual for queer people to hide from parents they suspect will reject them; there is a reason many gay and trans people have “ found families. 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. During the production surge, Musk began walking the floor, barking questions at workers, and “making decisions on the fly. Having made a pattern of writing biographies of important men — and one important woman, Jennifer Doudna of CRISPR fame — Isaacson is now in the position of a kind of kingmaker.It debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending September 16, 2023.

One of the things that anyone covering Elon Musk for long enough has to reckon with is that he loves to tell hilarious lies.

So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast.

Isaacson does have time for a lot of Steve Jobs comparisons, which, after a while, begin to feel like product placement for his other book. 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. CNN had a story summarizing an excerpt of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk that claimed Musk had shut down SpaceX’s satellite network, Starlink, to prevent a “Ukrainian sneak attack” on the Russian navy. Is achieving the specific vision Musk has for the world worth the injuries he’s inflicted on his workforce? One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh.The fantasy of the conservative movement is small and sad, a limited world with nothing new to explore. The Washington Post followed it up, publishing the excerpt where Isaacson claimed Musk had essentially shut down a military offensive on a personal whim. The problem is the man is Elon Musk, a guy who in 2011 promised to get us to space in just three years.