‘I’m Not Trump’s Fan’ and Other Takeaways From a New Book on Elon Musk

A brand new biography of Elon Musk portrays the billionaire entrepreneur as a fancy, tortured determine whose brilliance is usually overshadowed by his lack of ability to narrate on a human stage to the individuals round him — his wives, his kids and people on whom he relied to assist construct the house exploration and electrical automobile companies that made him the wealthiest man on Earth.

Mr. Musk’s life to date — his troublesome childhood in South Africa, his stormy romantic relationships, his success as a visionary who created SpaceX and Tesla, and his impetuous determination to purchase Twitter — is detailed by scores of interviews along with his household, buddies, enterprise associates and Mr. Musk himself.

The e-book, which shall be launched on Tuesday, is by Walter Isaacson, the journalist whose earlier works have chronicled the lives of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin.

It opens with a quote from Mr. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, who as soon as stated, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

The New York Times purchased copies of the e-book at a retail retailer that was promoting it upfront of its licensed launch.

Twitter, Now Known as X

Mr. Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, after a shock bid for the corporate after which a seeming reluctance to comply with by with the deal.

• Days after Twitter’s board permitted the deal, Mr. Musk informed his 4 teenage sons that he had bought the social community to sway the subsequent U.S. presidential election. “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?” he stated. (It was a joke, Mr. Isaacson writes, however Mr. Musk’s sons nonetheless didn’t perceive his rationale for getting Twitter, an app they not often used.)

• After buying Twitter, Mr. Musk and his lieutenants combed by its staff’ inside communications and social media posts, in search of indicators of disloyalty, Mr. Isaacson writes. The “musketeers,” as Musk loyalists have been recognized inside Twitter, searched Twitter’s Slack archives for key phrases together with “Elon,” and fired dozens of staff who had made snarky feedback about Mr. Musk.

• Mr. Musk staged a shock raid on a Twitter information facility in Sacramento, Calif., final winter, shortly after buying the corporate. Mr. Musk had determined to maneuver servers housed within the facility to a different Twitter information middle to chop prices, however Twitter’s infrastructure leaders warned him that shifting the costly gear safely might take months. In a match of anger, Mr. Musk determined to maneuver the servers himself, enlisting a small workforce and a flock of shifting vans to haul them away on Christmas Eve. (He later stated he regretted the choice, which led to service outages.)

Personal Life

Mr. Musk’s sprawling household has been a supply of consolation amid the frequent turmoil of his industry-spanning enterprise pursuits, Mr. Isaacson writes. But his relationship along with his father, Errol, is a supply of trauma that is still with him.

• Mr. Musk’s father is described as emotionally and bodily abusive and is quoted talking disparagingly of Black individuals. When Mr. Musk agreed in 2016 to satisfy his father, from whom he has been largely estranged, a pal recollects to Mr. Isaacson, “It was the only time I had ever seen Elon’s hands shaking.” Mr. Isaacson writes, “There are certain people who occupy a demon’s corner of Musk’s head space. They trigger him, turn him dark, and rouse a cold anger. His father is number one.”

• While the musician Grimes, also referred to as Claire Boucher, was giving start to his son X in May 2020, Mr. Musk took an image of the supply and shared it along with his family and friends, together with her father and brothers. “Grimes was understandably horrified and scrambled to get it deleted. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset,” she informed Mr. Isaacson.

Politics and Trump

Mr. Musk’s politics defy easy categorization. Despite his assaults on liberal critics, his rants towards “woke” Democrats and his occasional promotion of far-right conspiracy theories, he’s portrayed as extra disillusioned with the leftward drift of the Democratic Party than he’s a fan of Republicans.

• Mr. Musk repeatedly professes to not be an admirer of former President Donald J. Trump, telling his biographer, “I’m not Trump’s fan. He’s disruptive.” Mr. Isaacson writes that Mr. Musk harbors a “deep disdain” for the previous president “whom he considered a con man” and appeared, Mr. Musk says, “kind of nuts.”

• But neither is he a Biden supporter, although he tells Mr. Isaacson that he would have voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 had he solid a poll. (He determined to not vote as a result of he was registered in California and thought of it a waste as a result of the state was not aggressive within the presidential election.) Mr. Musk describes an encounter with Mr. Biden a number of years in the past wherein he got here away unimpressed. “When he was vice president, I went to a lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over.”

Artificial Intelligence

Mr. Musk has lengthy been apprehensive about synthetic intelligence, which he considers a possible existential menace. He was a co-founder of OpenAI earlier than breaking ties with the group in 2018, and not too long ago introduced he was forming a rival A.I. firm, X.AI.

• Mr. Musk “summoned” Sam Altman, the chief government of OpenAI, to a gathering at Twitter’s headquarters in February 2023, shortly after the discharge of ChatGPT. Mr. Musk angrily requested Mr. Altman to “justify how he could legally transform a nonprofit funded by donations into a for-profit that could make millions.” The encounter, Mr. Isaacson writes, left Mr. Altman “pained.”

• Mr. Musk’s determination to begin X.AI got here partly out of considerations about underpopulation. (He is the daddy of 10 kids.) “The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was leveling off because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially,” Mr. Isaacson writes. Mr. Musk believed that “at some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.”

• Mr. Musk’s gave X.AI’s early staff three targets: Create an A.I. chatbot able to writing code, an A.I. chatbot educated to be politically impartial and a man-made intelligence that might cause and pursue fact. “You should be able to give it big tasks, such as ‘Build a better rocket engine,’” Mr. Musk informed Mr. Isaacson.

Elon and the Media

Mr. Musk’s relationship with the media, which was already strained earlier than he purchased Twitter, reached new ranges of pressure after the deal was introduced.

• The “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David confronted Elon Musk on the marriage ceremony in 2022 of Ari Emanuel, the chief government of the Hollywood expertise company Endeavor, who had seated them on the similar desk. “Do you just want to murder kids in schools?” Mr. David requested Mr. Musk, grilling him on his assist of Republican candidates within the wake of the varsity taking pictures in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 college students useless. “No, no,” Mr. Musk replied, in accordance with Mr. Isaacson. “I’m anti-kid murder.” Mr. Emanuel additionally seated the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, one other Musk critic, on the similar desk. “It ended up being a microcosm of Twitter,” Mr. Isaacson wrote.

• As Mr. Musk’s erratic tweets broken Twitter’s relationship with advertisers, he sought counsel from boldfaced names within the media {industry} on methods to restore the rift. One was David Zaslav, the chief government of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, the Warner Bros. film studio and AE Daily News. They spoke for greater than an hour. “Zaslav told him that he was doing self-destructive things that made it harder to attract brands that were aspirational. He should focus on improving the product by adding longer video offerings and making ads more effective.”

Tesla

For years, Tesla has been the highest-profile enterprise in Mr. Musk’s portfolio of firms, serving as a continuing supply of pleasure and stress.

• The firm’s early struggles contributed to an extended, troublesome interval for Mr. Musk, one which took a bodily and psychological toll, he informed Mr. Isaacson in a 2021 interview. “You can’t be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you,” Mr. Musk stated. But he additionally acknowledged that he had discovered goal beneath strain: “When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated every day.”

• Even as the corporate discovered success, it attracted critics within the type of short-sellers who guess towards Tesla’s inventory. That apply reached a fever pitch in 2018 as Tesla struggled to satisfy manufacturing targets, infuriating Mr. Musk, who known as short-sellers “leeches on the neck of business.” But he acknowledged that a few of these merchants had additionally collected an impressively correct image of the corporate from insiders and even drones flying over Tesla’s manufacturing facility. “The degree of inside information they had was insane,” he stated.

• Production sprints and struggles at Tesla and the house exploration firm SpaceX additionally sharpened Mr. Musk’s philosophy, which he distilled right into a five-step method that he known as “the algorithm” and which he repeatedly invoked to staff. It concerned, so as: questioning necessities, deleting elements or processes, simplifying and optimizing, accelerating processes, and, lastly, automating. “I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Mr. Musk informed Mr. Isaacson.

SpaceX

Mr. Musk created SpaceX to assist humanity turn into a multi-planetary species. The firm’s success to date is a credit score to his willingness to just accept dangers, generally efficiently and generally not.

• During the countdown to a pivotal launch in 2015, an unidentified liquid started dripping from a Falcon 9 rocket, scary Mark Juncosa, a prime SpaceX official. Mr. Musk deliberated briefly earlier than deciding to proceed, leading to a profitable launch. At the time, Mr. Juncosa assumed that Mr. Musk had based mostly that call on an advanced danger evaluation, however realized he was flawed after reviewing footage years later. “I thought he had done some complex quick calculations to decide what to do, but in fact he just shrugged his shoulders and gave the order,” Mr. Juncosa stated of Mr. Musk. “He had an intuition of what the physics were.”

• To obtain interplanetary flight sooner or later, SpaceX wanted to discover a technique to earn cash within the current. So in 2015, Mr. Musk introduced Starlink, in search of to faucet into the profitable market of offering web service, on this case by a constellation of low-orbit satellites. The service has turn into a significant lifeline to individuals in battle zones and helped the Ukrainian army defend towards Russian invasion. But Mr. Musk has additionally been criticized for not permitting Ukraine to make use of the service to launch a drone assault on a Russian naval base final 12 months, fearing that it might have provoked a significant escalation within the battle. “We did not want to be a part of that,” Mr. Musk stated.

• In 2021, SpaceX for the primary time efficiently despatched a crew into orbit with out a skilled astronaut aboard. Afterward, Mr. Musk mirrored on the position that he and his firm had performed in advancing house exploration. “Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable,” he stated. “It would have happened without me. But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.” He added, “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”