Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk book review: The difficulty of pinning down Elon Musk and his many contradictions

What Walter Isaacson captures brilliantly is the “maniacal sense of urgency” which is at the root of Elon Musk’s achievements. (Image source: X)

“Forgive me, Majesty. I am a vulgar man! But I assure you, my music is not,” says Wolfgang Mozart in the movie Amadeus. That one line sums up the genius of one of the greatest composers of all time.

Walter Isaacson could have borrowed the idea to capture the genius of Elon Musk. Instead, he chose to write a 600-page tome on the man who is easily the biggest inventor of our times, a contemporary Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla. But Musk is also a man with a temperamental flaw and that’s what the author is after.

Simon & Schuster; 688 pages; Rs 1,499.

Musk didn’t need Issacson, among the best-known biographers in the business after his books on Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger, to uncover the sheer brilliance of his mind. For years now he has been regularly reminding us of the fact, while disparaging almost anyone else who comes close to claiming that title. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, two of America’s business heroes, have both been lampooned and dissed by the rule-demolishing visionary, for whom controversy is an adrenaline rush. The eagerness to please, writes the author, isn’t part of his repertoire. Larry Page, for instance, whose accomplishments merely include co-founding Google, didn’t get artificial intelligence, Musk tells the author. The context is his leap into the world of AI and robots at a time when he had his hands already full with electric vehicles, space travel and autonomous cars. “Because I am worried about Larry Page”, he says. “I had long conversations with him about AI dangers, but he didn’t get it. Now we barely speak.”

That last line is another Musk special and the part where the author truly excels. Digging deep into his memory bank and getting him to revisit every excruciating detail of his difficult childhood with a father who is borderline perverse and a school system that nurtured bullies, is to Isaacson’s credit. Stretching it to a point where every future action is attributed to the trauma of a difficult childhood, is his big failing. Firing people indiscriminately and unfairly, berating every companion and partner he’s ever had, displaying a complete lack of empathy for even the most well-meaning friends and family, are as much a part of the Musk story as his great successes. Surely, not all of them are because his father isn’t a very nice man.

What Isaacson captures brilliantly is the “maniacal sense of urgency” which is at the root of the man’s achievements. Time is his enemy, so it must be conquered. There is no tomorrow and everything needs to be done now. He only knows one mode - constantly fighting to survive. “When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated every day,” he tells the author after another bout of depression. This was just after being crowned the world’s richest man confirming his claim that money isn’t his driver. On a visit to the Twitter headquarters just before he bought the company, he spied five types of water, including bottles from Norway and cans of Liquid Death. “I drink tap water”, he said when offered one.

His work ethic supports such an ascetic lifestyle and is summed up in one word, hardcore. Thus, on April 6, 2022, he prepared for the opening of Giga Texas, inspected the model Y assembly line, had a conference call with White House officials on trade, China and battery subsidies. In between, he also gave some thought to a company whose shares he had been buying up. All in a day’s work.

Geniuses become what they are by stretching the boundaries of what is deemed possible. Musk goes a step beyond. Outsized risk is his starting point. So his rewards are outsized too. In February 2018, he reached an unusual agreement with the board of Tesla at a time when the company was going through major production problems. Instead of a guaranteed salary, he would receive compensation only if Tesla achieved super-aggressive targets in terms of revenue, profits, and market cap. An example of how ambitious these targets were was the $650 billion market cap that was set at a time when it was barely $55 billion. By October 2021 Tesla's market cap had crossed a trillion dollars. Musk eventually made $56 billion as a result of what had seemed like an outrageously ambitious plan.

For long passages, the book reads like an exercise in stringing together colourful anecdotes from Musk’s rollercoaster life. Sure, many of these are revealed for the first time thanks to the author’s meticulous stalking of the man. But screaming at people, firing them indiscriminately, going off on rants, are established early enough, so little purpose seems to be served by recounting more of these every few pages.

Walter Isaacson. (Image source: X/@WalterIsaacson)

What is far more rewarding is the author’s keen insight into the nature of Musk. Take, for example, his explanation for why Twitter was an ideal playground for the man: “It rewards players who are impulsive, irreverent, and unfiltered, like a flamethrower for the thumbs.” The book could have used some more of such candid analyses.

To be fair, no one in the pantheon of geniuses that Isaacson has written about, is quite as complex and self-contradictory a person as Musk. Which is why even for an expert biographer like him, it is difficult to keep the pieces together. Take Twitter (now X), the least relevant but the most discussed of Musk’s various investments. According to the man who put down nearly $44 billion to buy it, it would take him at least five years to turn around the company by which time its revenue would quintuple to $26 billion. With half its revenue gone since he bought the company in October 2022, you have to wonder if hubris has finally caught up with the world’s richest man. No wonder, the word unsure with respect to anything Musk does appears only when it comes to the part on Twitter.