A painstakingly excavation of the tortured unquiet mind of the world’s richest man… Isaacson’s book is not a soaring portrait of a captain of industry, but rather an exhausting ride through the life of a man who seems incapable of happiness.

If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation. So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. 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 said. But I remember the days of the “ alien dreadnought,” the promises for swappable batteries that never materialized, and the countless other things Musk said that turned out to be, at best, exaggeration.There is a Financial Times story that confirms some Starlink outages during a Ukrainian push against the Russians, but it says nothing about drone subs or washing ashore harmlessly. Similarly, Isaacson falls flat on racial issues — the existence of apartheid in Musk’s youth is barely mentioned. Sure, access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk lots of chances to sell his own mythology. 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. The portrait that emerges is one that resembles a hard-charging, frequently alienating Gilded Age-style captain of industry, with a particular fixation on AI that ties everything together.

There is even a “genius” boxed set of his biographies that includes Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and — somewhat incongruously — Steve Jobs.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. There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” he went on, though he did not specify which government’s authorities.

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. There is a very obvious question that Isaacson had the access to explore: how did Musk’s meddling with the safety sensors, the seat-of-the-pants fixes changes to the manufacturing process, and general “production hell” affect that injury rate? I could find no support for it in any of the news articles that Isaacson listed as sources for this chapter. While writing that it is "strictly a book of reportage" and that "[Isaacson's] reporting is rigorous and dogged", the reviewer noted that the book "asks all the wrong questions". These long-standing right-wing ties belie the notion advanced by Isaacson that the real cause of Musk’s right-wing pivot is his daughter, Jenna; I found these sections of the book difficult to read, as they essentially amount to victim blaming.

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. Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training," Isaacson concludes in the last lines of his life of Musk. Over the years, the criticism has been that Tesla has gotten a great deal of assistance from state, federal, and local governments, sometimes screwing them in the process, as demonstrated by the Buffalo Gigafactory. Isaacson begins describing the 2018 Fremont production push from Musk’s perspective: “Musk had come to realize that designing a good factory was like designing a good microchip. Arguably the entire Musk family has an interest in presenting Elon Musk as preternaturally tough and also as using his tough childhood as an excuse for his continuing bad behavior.

You definitely realize you’re a tool being used to achieve this larger objective and that’s great,” says Lucas Hughes, who worked as a financial analyst at SpaceX and was one of the junior people Musk lashed out at. And of course, the last sentence — “Musk did not enable it because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war” — is simple boot-licking.However, Musk denied the allegation, saying satellites in the region were not turned on, and that he chose not to activate them. Now, I personally view Musk as a political nihilist, willing to say whatever he needs to say to get taxpayer money. He now says that the policy had been implemented earlier, but the Ukrainians did not know it, and that night he simply reaffirmed the policy.