Rick Wilson's Reviews > Elon Musk

It’s pretty good. I really like Isaacson as a writer, he does a good job of keeping this reasonable. I think the limits of this book are due to the nature of the subject, and the sort of shifting sand on which it was written.

If you cringe at the thought of musk and his hype factory of drama, give it a miss. Seriously don’t put yourself through that. You can get the most salacious bits in one of the many rehashed think pieces that have been emerging.

Speaking to the biography and less to the biographized, overall I found it a mostly well done book. It’s subject is a moving target as musk’s story is not over and as such it’s a challenge to get a whole picture of a complex person. It seems likely, should Musk survive another 20 years, there will be some really surreal moments that will be glaringly missed. But Isaacson does the best with what we have, and the book is not blindly worshiping at the altar of some engineering brainiac, and it’s not a purely critical takedown the worlds richest person. The book ends up somewhere inbetween, which seems reasonable.

What emerges is a portrait of a somewhat broken and flawed man, who works excessively hard, demands a lot of others around him, and has created some really impressive things. Someone who engags in hyperbolic rhetoric at times out of a sort of misplaced immaturity. Someone who struggles with interpersonal relationships and family. Who cares about that same family but is also willing to neglect them to work, sleep, eat and breathe the projects that he wholeheartedly throws himself into.

I wish the book had spent more time on Musks early years, family background, and childhood even. That’s the part that you get from this book I don’t think you get from salacious news articles or other sources. At one point I was 1/2 of the way in and realized were up till like 2019, and so the second half of the book is just the last five years or so. Isaacson chooses to spend a lot of time on sort of the 2019 to 2023 period of time. Disproportionately describing every event that occurred around the acquisition of Twitter, in my thought to the detriment of the book. It’s probably because that’s when Issacson had access to Musk and was able to follow him around. Doesn’t mean I have to love it.

The book also misses a chance to contextualize the fact that many of the decisions musk has made about what he views as “the most important things” have actually imposed a lot of externalities on the world. It’s taken at face value that things like electric vehicles and trying to get to Mars are reasonable. but one of the common threads is that musk is pushing so hard and sacrificing for what he views as the betterment of humanity, it seemed a little absent to not ask the question; is his perception correct? EVs need lithium, lithium mines are atrocious for the environment. What’s up with launching so many rockets when satellites already litter the upper atmosphere. Should we be focused on those domains?

I also think, as with many biographies of living people, it’s challenging to have a portrait of a person without giving time the chance to settle their legacy. And as such, this probably is not the definitive biography. But my takeaways as of September 2023 is that it’s a really good portrait and draws together a lot of very strange and odd threads into a cohesive narrative about what I found to be an interesting person.