Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson

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In the following paragraph, Isaacson quotes text messages from Fedorov, who had “secretly shared with him [Musk] the details of how the drone subs were crucial” to the Ukrainians. Is achieving the specific vision Musk has for the world worth the injuries he’s inflicted on his workforce? Of course, there’s the time in April 2022 when he sold Tesla shares and said he had no further sales planned, followed by him selling more Tesla shares in August 2022, when he said he was done selling Tesla shares. When Elon gets upset, he lashes out, often at junior people,” Jon McNeill, the former president of Tesla, says.

But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue and charismatic fantasist. Musk has often donated in ways that will benefit him in Texas, where he has a substantial operation. While Isaacson manages to detail what makes Musk awful, he seems unaware of what made Musk an inspiring figure for so long. Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training," Isaacson concludes in the last lines of his life of Musk.

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.

The fantasy of the conservative movement is small and sad, a limited world with nothing new to explore. From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. On November 10, 2023, it was announced that A24 had purchased the film rights for an adaptation to be directed by Darren Aronofsky. Musk found out from a member of his security detail — and it’s revealing to me that none of the people around Musk who knew, including Grimes, wanted to break the news. The thing you learn after a while on the Musk beat is that his most self-aggrandizing statements usually bear the least resemblance to reality.He pushes employees at his companies — he now runs six, including X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — to slash costs and meet brutal deadlines because he needs to pour resources into the moonshot of colonizing space “before civilization crumbles. In the demo video, which features the title card “The car is driving by itself,” the car was not driving by itself, Tesla’s director of Autopilot software said in a deposition.

Presumably one or more of the Musks — Elon is quoted directly as saying the counselors told him not to die like another kid in a previous year. 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. Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother and sometimes business partner, is quoted as saying, “This is the wrong person for you.

So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. 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. I could find no support for it in any of the news articles that Isaacson listed as sources for this chapter. One of the things that anyone covering Elon Musk for long enough has to reckon with is that he loves to tell hilarious lies.

As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly. Isaacson’s book is like a decoder ring, tying the mercurial Musk’s various obsessions into a coherent worldview with a startlingly concrete goal at its center. 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.

There was a way to find out what’s true here, and it would have been to interview more sources, both Ukrainian and US military ones. We also know that five women at SpaceX have said that harassment was regular at the company and that women workers at Tesla say they have been subjected to “nightmarish” sexual harassment. Musk’s dependence on taxpayer largess plays a role here; skipping how dependent Musk is on Texas is a howler. However, Musk denied the allegation, saying satellites in the region were not turned on, and that he chose not to activate them. Then there’s this description of Neuralink, Musk’s brain implant company: “The idea for Neuralink was inspired by science fiction, most notably the Culture space-travel novels by Iain Banks.