Marquise's Reviews > Elon Musk

For a biography, this read like a series of vignettes written for Popular Mechanics and Vanity Fair at the same time, and submitted whilst the editor was taking a nap.

Isaacson’s reputation as a biographer preceded him, I had seen an interview he gave where he talked about this book extolling how much he worked to present a fair and balanced narrative about the life of controversial entrepreneur Elon Musk, saying he’d followed him for two years and set up a hard condition that he’d have access to everything so he could tell all the good, the bad, and the ugly without Musk having a say in the final published product. It seemed refreshingly honest, conveying an image of a spunky writer looking for the truth and willing to get down and dirty to show the life of a world-changing billionaire as is, no sugarcoating and no punches pulled. We’d finally see the true Musk without the mask of public performance on, as he truly is in private. Who could resist that promise of unvarnished honesty?

And instead, we got an author with a severe case of uncritical worshipping at the altar of Tech Bros, one of those techno-evangelicals that think technological advance will save humanity from ourselves and that don’t waste a chance to let us know it’s folks like Our Lord and Saviour Elon Musk, blessed be his cringey self, who take scientific progress by the throat and make it go forward kicking and screaming. They’re the saints of the Church of Innovation, who may be crazy, unethical, narcissistic, toxic arseholes, arrogant, selfish, abusive, mercurial, untrustworthy partners, horrible parents, and inveterate man-children with irreparably messed up personal lives, yes, but don’t you see The Innovations they bring about? So please forget the uncomfortable truths about them and please also forget the hard questions about ethics and morality in favour of focusing on The Innovations.

Because it’s The Innovations that matter. Walter Isaacson circumvents asking the hard questions and doesn’t dare challenge Elon in the least when he does or says something questionable. He asks one question, Elon answers with something vague, grandiose, often bullshitty, or downright laughable, and Isaacson merely relays it, often very repetitively, and never goes beyond the occasional comment in passing that timorously will offer a possible different reality than what Elon has said. And he also uses euphemisms and softened synonyms to describe Elon’s erratic moods and behaviour, like when he repeatedly uses “reality-bending” or “reality-defying” to describe Elon’s claims and demands instead of the harsher but also more truthful “lies” and “unreasonable.” He never questions it when Elon cheaps out on materials or blatantly says regulations are for stupid people and only suggestions until proven otherwise, preferring instead to breathlessly talk about how much Elon saves on costs and how innovative his “thinking outside the box” in defying regulations and norms is.

He never asks the questions he should about safety or the ethics of his ideas and experiments, let alone his companies’ practices. If you were hoping to see discussion of the realities of Tesla’s failures and Neuralink’s questionable ethics or Twitter’s changes since the disastrous takeover, you won’t find it here. Failures here are merely presented as obstacles that The Innovations’ favourite child-priest Elon will solve with his uncanny ability to see what nobody else does. When something goes wrong, like in the failed first launch of the Falcon 1 rocket, it’s going to be a poor hapless engineer’s fault for not doing this cog just like Elon said it should be, and never Elon’s fault. All credit to the boss, all the blame to the underlings, who, in the end, are the ones who do the hard work. Isaacson admits that Elon isn’t good at sharing power, but you won’t catch him admitting Elon isn’t good at sharing credit or giving others their due either. Long live the king, and if the kingdom goes to hell, the peasants are to blame, and please let’s not think too much of the aristocracy’s propensity to revolt against this particular king, shall we?

Granted, it is one thing to be cautious toward the hand that is feeding you, and no matter what Isaacson wants to believe about his own supposed neutrality, Elon’s was the hand feeding him these two years. His objectivity was compromised, to say nothing of his neutrality. The billionaire is, by Isaacson’s own account, very persuasive and charismatic in his erratic way, and he lived with this man for two years. How can you even pretend to be objective in this scenario?

But it’s another thing altogether to make excuses for Elon, and Isaacson does it here not just by omission. Whether deliberately or for lack of proper editing, the excuses made for Elon’s eyebrow-raising behaviour revolve around his claimed Asperger’s Syndrome. Is Elon emotionally abusive? Oh, ya see, he is autistic and can’t read the room. Is Elon an unreasonable arsehole that drives people sick with his gruelling work schedules and demands? Oh, ya see, he has Asperger’s and is “laser-focused” on the task. Is he a toxic drama llama that hurts his family and relationships? Oh, ya see, he has Asperger’s and his brain isn’t wired for empathy. Has Elon got himself ousted by his own partners and is hated by employees? Oh, ya see, he has Asperger’s and has no social and teamwork skills. Does Elon have a ridiculous talent for sticking his dick in crazy? Oh, ya see, he is “a fool for love” and also has Asperger’s. Has Elon stubbed his toe on a Tesla’s tire that day and now can't walk with a big sore toe? Oh, ya see, he has Asperger’s . . .

And the thing is, we don’t know he has Asperger’s or not, and neither does Elon. He was never diagnosed by a professional. It’s a self-diagnosis. And you know what’s worse? That everyone, Isaacson included, just took that self-diagnosis as gospel and repeats it to explain and justify everything insane, toxic, borderline illegal, and unreasonable Elon does. The amount of Elon acolytes that mindlessly say he has Asperger’s as if he’s been diagnosed by the best professional in the world and can’t be doubted is disturbing. Only Maye Musk, Elon’s mother, is the one that says here it is merely a self-diagnosis, and Isaacson dutifully notes it down and relays it in her words, to quickly forget it and repeat the Elonite crowd’s collective excusatory bleat that Elon is an Aspie and that explains his Elon-ness. Is this an attempt to deflect criticism by claiming a disability? If Elon is truly autistic (one of his sons is, so it’s not that improbable that he might be as well), then criticism of him carries the taint of ableism. And to be honest, I don’t get the impression that they use his supposed Asperger’s for anything but excusing him. Asperger’s for Elon has become a mantle of self-justification that his employees and friends have picked up without a second thought.

But, there’s another problem with this: Elon hasn’t stopped the self-diagnosis at autism. He has also self-diagnosed as Bipolar. He claimed he was Bipolar to explain what he describes as his most hellish year, 2018, when his love life was a poisonous brew of mutual abuse with Amber Heard and Tesla and SpaceX were having serious problems. This pattern says he’s prone to self-diagnosing without a basis, just grabs what looks plausible and claims it for himself.

I’ve seen some charitable souls trying to defend him saying maybe Elon did go to therapy incognito and never told. Ha! I’m sorry, but no. Elon very explicitly rejected going to psychotherapy when his concerned friend told him to, and when his first wife wanted him to go to couples therapy, he bailed out immediately. He has been asked to go to therapy when he was in hell in 2018 again, and he didn’t want to go. This isn’t a man who admits to having mental health issues to take care of them but one that is happy to claim mental health issues when it suits him. He’s like that kind of idle old lady that reads a book or magazine article about mental health issues and suddenly decides this is what she has and tells all and sundry about her poor, poor mental health self-diagnosis to get pity and validation and excuse her own shittiness. We all have known this type of self-diagnosed hypochondriacs at some point, so why is Elon given a pass with his made up self-diagnoses? Why does Isaacson not challenge him on this? These fake sufferers are a bad reflection on legitimate mental health sufferers, and Isaacson acts as an enabler here.

I don’t think Isaacson even wanted to write a biography as much as to write about the tech advances Elon’s companies pioneered. He’s not a good biographer at all, when you look closer. He doesn’t know how to handle the personal life of his subject, and it’s all the more noticeable when Elon’s early life is dealt with quickly and perfunctorily by 22% of the book, meaning that over two thirds of this book are about Elon’s companies, which is what Isaacson truly admires and wants to write about. For all that Elon’s supposed hard childhood in South Africa and the environment of violence he grew up in are used as explanations for why he’s a relentless fighter that doesn’t know the meaning of “no” and “risky,” this period of his life is hardly given a few chapters and the instances that supposedly were character-shaping for Elon aren’t analysed or even described at large. It’s terribly superficial, and I didn’t get the impression that Elon’s childhood was particularly hard at all. Oh, sure, he and his siblings keep saying it was and can’t shut up about what a bad man, very bad their father is, but when you want to know precise examples of why it was so hard, you are given examples like the bullying at school (that Elon seems to have provoked by calling the other boy names) and the “veldskool” camp that sounds like a rougher-sounding Boy Scouts with more violence than would be acceptable in the US. Is that the “hard childhood” he claims to have had? It seems more like bad and violent incidents than regular occurrences.

To me, it sounds like he had a regular childhood with bad times here and there mostly as a result of toxic masculinity than deprivation or abusiveness like you usually think of when you’re told someone has had a hard childhood. His father, however, was truly a piece of work, and Elon is more alike to him than anyone in his circle wants to admit.

The bits of adult Elon's life are also so very superficial and barely mentioned in passing in short paragraphs. The author doesn't seem to even want to discuss the comical evolution by Elon from bro! to bruh . . . much, because he doesn't delve into his progression from liberal techie that got his behind kissed by Obama to conservative hat-wearing cows-less faux Texas cowboy that's racked in a fanbase of Republicans that'd make Donald weep with envy. Just as he avoids the hard questions about his early life and his companies, Isaacson also doesn't like to give Elon's politics and ideological swings more onpage time than he can help.

Perhaps Isaacson should’ve stuck to writing about the tech companies and their innovations and not attempted a biography for which he’s clearly not prepared. Or willing. But even the overwhelming number of tech chapters (this book has 95 chapters and most of them about Musk’s tech dealings) isn’t done well. I already mentioned the issues with acting as a mere relayer of information that circumvents questioning, ethics, morality of tech practices, and so on, but an additional problem is the deficient editing. Seriously, where was the editor? This book is repetitive, isaacson uses the same phrases over and over, and sometimes even goes about the same thing in different chapters. That’s why I said it’s written like vignettes, all put together on the run, a collection of notes put together more or less coherently, and submitted for publication with . . . uh, I hesitate to say there was editing, because it doesn’t seem to me like there was any. And if there was, it is so poor it’s no wonder this book turned out to be a 700-page bloat.

There’s not much we can find new in those chapters either. At least, not if you don’t live under a rock and do read the news. There’s some new information here and there, mostly not quite relevant in the grand scheme of things as it pertains mostly to Elon’s private life, which is ultimately his to live as he pleases. But there is one bomb dropped here that is relevant: the revelation that Elon meddled in Ukraine’s defence strategy by turning off Starlink at a key point when they were going to attack the Russian fleet at Sevastopol in Crimea. Elon dropped this bomb on Isaacson by text, and Isaacson duly relayed it with zero criticism, not even a word of concern on the worrying fact that Elon had taken this decision after he was talked by the Russian ambassador into believing that this would escalate the war so much nukes would become a reality, and that after turning Starlink off on the Ukrainians, Elon again made sure to tell the Russian ambassador that he’d done this and that Starlink would not be used for military purposes. Isaacson knew this for a year, sat on it, and then relayed it in his book with no comment, no criticism, no nothing.

That alone would make me question his integrity, if there was nothing else. Sadly, the only time I can tell that Isaacson does question Musk’s official line is when he asked Elon about his motives for buying Twitter. True to his grandiose sense of messianic mission in life, Elon babbled a speech about truth, freedom, justice, reasonably-priced blue checks and a hard-boiled twittering bird’s egg, but this time at least Isaacson didn’t just let him talk, he managed to insert his own suspicion that the true motivations might also be as much fun as the desire to own the playground because as an awkward nerd with zero social skills and a shitty personality, he yearns to have the playground where the awkward nerds with zero social skills and shitty personalities can and do shine.

Is Elon a free speech champion as he claims? Mmm, let me copy Isaacson’s method for a bit and relay to you an incident between him and Bezos (bold is mine):

They met in 2004 when Bezos accepted Musk’s invitation to take a tour of SpaceX. Afterward, he was surprised to get a somewhat curt email from Musk expressing annoyance that Bezos had not reciprocated by inviting him to Seattle to see Blue Origin’s factory, so Bezos promptly did. Musk flew up with Justine, toured Blue Origin, then they had dinner with Bezos and his wife MacKenzie. Musk was filled with advice, expressed with his usual intensity. He warned Bezos that he was heading down the wrong path with one idea: “Dude, we tried that and that turned out to be really dumb, so I’m telling you don’t do the dumb thing we did.” Bezos recalls feeling that Musk was a bit too sure of himself, given that he had not yet successfully launched a rocket. The following year, Musk asked Bezos to have Amazon do a review of Justine’s new book, an urban horror thriller about demon-human hybrids. Bezos explained that he did not tell Amazon what to review, but said that he would personally post a customer review. Musk sent back a brusque reply, but Bezos posted a nice personal review anyway.

There it is. Goodreads users and other frequent readers and reviewers, how do you feel now knowing free speech champion Elon Musk stoops to gaming the system to promote content he wants popularised for his personal or his dependents' gain? He asked Bezos to order Amazon do reviews of his wifey’s book, so what’s to stop him now that he owns Twitter from doing this very thing with content there he wants promoted and made popular? People who want to game ratings through reviews to favour the book of the woman they’re sleeping with will also promote only content they agree with or that their circle/family/paying customers want seen.

I, personally, feel disgusted. If I loathe the ‘likes’-harvesters and book influencers that will do anything, even unethical stuff, for visibility for their reviews, why would I think differently of a man with the power to decide what is and isn’t relevant online?

By now, you’ll probably be wondering if this is a hagiography or merely a poorly edited and poorly laid out bonafide biography, and I’d say it’s both. You’d have, to use Isaacson’s much-favoured expression, to use reality-defying logic to do an obvious and open hagiography of someone like Elon given what he is like and the life he leads and the companies he runs, but it can be done low-key by omission and by justification, which is how it was done for this book. A better editor would’ve done much for the book’s presentation and layout as well, so it at least would’ve been a readable and entertaining biography. You don’t have to like the subject of a biography to like the biography itself, I didn’t come to this book as an Elon hater, I was very willing to read it out of curiosity and desire to learn more, so I expected something worth this author’s reputation. Yet I came out of reading this with a poor image of both subject and author. That the last paragraph is a risibly fanboyish “Sure, he’s crazy and toxic and cringey and a man-child, but . . . lookie there! Innovations!” just cinched it for me.