Whether or not you’re keen on Elon Musk or despise him, you need to admit he is fascinating. As he himself acknowledged whereas internet hosting “Saturday Evening Dwell” in 2021, “I reinvented electrical automobiles and I am sending folks to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you suppose I used to be additionally going to be a chill, regular dude?”
Walter Isaacson has written biographies of Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs, and this coming week CBS’ sister firm, Simon & Schuster, will publish his biography of Elon Musk. “You simply need to say, ‘I wish to discuss to you about Elon Musk,’ and increase! Individuals love speaking,” Isaacson mentioned.
Simon & Schuster
When requested what sort of entry he needed to Musk, he replied, “I mentioned, ‘I wish to be by your aspect for 2 or three years. I wish to be in each assembly.’ And he mentioned, ‘High-quality.'”
So far as what Musk is like, Isaacson mentioned, “There isn’t any single Elon Musk. He has many personalities. Nearly a number of personalities. And you’ll watch him go from being very giddy and humorous, to being deeply in engineering mode. After which, abruptly the darkish cloud occurs. It is nearly like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”
Isaacson writes that Musk’s volatility stems from a brutal childhood in South Africa, together with his abusive father, Errol. “Every thing is said to the traumas and the drives of childhood,” he mentioned. “It made him adventurous. It made him in order that he felt extra comfy with drama.”
Musk himself mentioned, in a 2022 TED Discuss, “I didn’t have a contented childhood, to be frank. It was fairly tough.”
“It has left deep scars on him, the way in which his father handled him,” mentioned Isaacson. “When he was bullied on the schoolyard, when his face was pounded into the concrete steps, and his father took the aspect of the one that beat him up as a substitute of Elon. Errol Musk mentioned, ‘I raised him to be robust.’ So, Errol Musk does not make a complete lot of apologies.”
By age 31, Musk had based and bought two software program corporations, making him a multimillionaire. One among them was PayPal. With that cash, he based SpaceX.
Isaacson says the SpaceX manufacturing facility ground just isn’t like, say, Boeing’s: “All people right here is keen to take dangers, they usually know tips on how to transfer quick. When Musk and I’d stroll alongside this hall and he would see folks being a bit torpid, or not sufficient folks, he’d say, ‘The place’s everyone? Get this transferring! This must be carried out by tonight!’ That will by no means occur in Boeing.”
And why the urgency? “He feels there’s an urgency for people to turn into multi-planetary, to get to Mars,” Isaacson mentioned. “He feels there may very well be a disaster on Earth, or one thing may occur, and we must be a multi-planetary species.”
Pogue mentioned, “When you’re the worker, your blood has gotta run chilly when he comes by your station.”
“You realize, there are individuals who actually attempt to keep away from eye contact, as a result of he will be brutal,” Isaacson mentioned. “He can get actually mad. He can unload on folks.”
CBS Information
Musk is open about his Asperger’s syndrome, however he believes that expressing empathy together with his workers will solely gradual issues down. As Isaacson defined, “He’d say to me, ‘Yeah, I haven’t got as a lot empathy. I am not such as you, I do not need the individual in entrance of me simply to like me. I gotta get this mission carried out.'”
If anybody’s discovered tips on how to get together with Musk, it is design chief Franz von Holzhausen. He is been at Tesla for 15 years, shaping each Tesla mannequin, together with the radically designed, chrome steel Cybertruck. “Typically it is not simple. It’s a must to put some private issues apart, however in the end the reward’s value it,” he mentioned.
Pogue requested, “As an instance I am Elon, and I am saying, ‘We’ve got to do it this fashion.’ And also you, primarily based in your whole profession and knowledge, disagree?”
“These moments, you comply with disagree,” von Holzhausen mentioned. “However in the end it is Elon’s firm. He is the boss.”
Today, SpaceX and Tesla aren’t Musk’s solely initiatives. There’s his brain-implant firm, Neuralink; a tunnelling operation, The Boring Company; Tesla’s solar-roof division; and a brand new artificial-intelligence firm, xAI. Tesla can also be growing Tesla Bot, a humanoid robotic designed to do our soiled work for us.
After which there’s Starlink, a constellation of 5,000 satellites that may deliver an web sign to the complete planet, together with to distant areas and catastrophe areas.
Final yr, Musk shipped thousands of Starlink terminals to help the Ukrainian military at no cost. However when he believed that Ukraine was happening the offensive, attacking Russian ships in Crimea final September, Isaacson says that Musk shut off their service there. “Musk felt that may result in World Warfare III,” Isaacson mentioned, “and so, on his personal, he decommissioned Starlink alongside the Crimean coast.”
In truth, as Isaacson has now acknowledged, that is not fairly what occurred. Starlink wasn’t operating in that area within the first place, however when Ukraine requested for service there, Musk did decline to activate it.
Pogue requested, “How does Elon really feel about having this a lot international energy?”
“You realize, he says to me, ‘How am I in the course of this?'” Isaacson replied. “However frankly, he loves it. He loves drama. He loves being the epic hero. I feel it’s a little bit harmful, as a result of he loves it an excessive amount of.”
However with regards to controversy, it might be exhausting to high Musk’s purchase of Twitter last year for $44 billion. He instantly fired over 80% of the employees; reinstated Donald Trump’s account; and loosened the principles in opposition to hate speech and misinformation.
In July, he modified Twitter’s identify to X.
Huh? “He loves the letter X,” Isaacson mentioned. “It is mysterious to him. There’s SpaceX. There was X.com, his first funds firm, that turns into PayPal. His son has a reputation that appears like a Druid auto-generated password [X Æ A-12 Musk], however they name him X.”
Musk has had 11 youngsters with three girls. Isaacson’s guide reveals that Musk’s ex-girlfriend, musician Claire Boucher, whose stage identify is Grimes, had a brand new child boy final yr. His full identify is Techno Mechanicus Musk.
In fact, Musk has by no means been a typical CEO. He is smoked marijuana on camera during an interview; he is challenged Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match; and he is continuously in bother with the federal government, whose laws he despises.
Isaacson mentioned, “When you ask him what the largest downside dealing with America nowadays is, [he’ll say] that we’re too risk-averse, we have now too many referees and never sufficient doers, and that is why we do not construct high-speed trains or rockets that may get to orbit.”
Already, the U.S. authorities hires SpaceX to carry our astronauts into orbit; contracts with Starlink to attach our navy; and plans to pay Tesla to open its community of electric-car charging stations to all drivers.
However in a recent New Yorker article, journalist Ronan Farrow writes that the U.S. is changing into depending on Musk whilst he is changing into extra erratic. Farrow notes in his article that members of the Tesla board had expressed concern about Musk’s use of the prescription sleep support Ambien, and in addition that Musk has not disputed he makes use of ketamine.
However no matter his eccentricities, Elon Musk actually has modified the world. Tesla’s success triggered a worldwide shift to electrical automobiles, and SpaceX has now performed 261 profitable launches in a row for a fraction of the standard value to taxpayers, largely, as a result of the corporate discovered tips on how to land its boosters after every launch and reuse them.
SpaceX
When requested if he admires Musk, Isaacson replied, “A biographer has to point out the sunshine and the darkish strands. And you have to be vital of the darkish strands, you have to be admiring of the sunshine strands. However then the hardest factor is to point out how they intertwine.”
“And the way about his legacy?” requested Pogue. “Do you suppose we’ll be speaking about Elon Musk 100 years after he is gone?”
“He introduced us into the period of electrical automobiles when GM and Ford had given up,” Isaacson mentioned. “He mentioned, ‘Sure, we are able to shoot astronauts into orbit,’ when NASA had decommissioned the area shuttle. So, 100 years from now, we’ll nonetheless be baffled in some methods about how darkish he may very well be, however we’ll say, ‘Yeah, yeah. He put his finger on the floor of historical past, and the ripples got here out.'”
READ AN EXCERPT: “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson
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Story produced by David Rothman. Editor: Joseph Frandino.
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