Elon Musk Is Very Interesting

My wife checked out two books for me recently that she selected, and this is about the second of them, Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. I shared a review of the other one by and about Matthew Perry, which I liked, last week.

What a book this was! It was a lot larger than what I normally read (more than 600 pages in 95 chapters). I enjoyed this one despite not being a fan of Musk.

For several years, I have been feeling negative about Elon Musk. I never knew much about him, but it was his transition following the pandemic that turned me off. This is discussed in the book, but what I had noticed was that Musk had gotten very negative about the way we were dealing with the pandemic. He also became loudly anti-woke. The book details these well.

What I knew about Musk's humor used to really bother me. He thinks that "69" and "420" are funny. Sure, they can be, but over and over and over again? I tried to give him some slack because I had heard that he has Asperger's syndrome, a form of Autism Spectrum Disorder. He had revealed on Saturday Night Live in 2021 that he had Asperger's. What I know about the disease makes it seem like he has properly described himself.

I learned so much about Musk in this book. I had known a little about his mother, Maye Musk, but I didn't know about his father or the rest of his family. His mother, who I knew was a model, was born in Canada in 1948. She married Errol Musk in 1970 in South Africa and divorced him in 1979. Musk, born in 1971, doesn't talk to his father any longer, and the book does a great job of detailing Errol's issues. What a mean person he was! The Musks had Elon first and then added his brother Kimbal and his sister Tosca. The book details his relationship with his brother very well, and Musk picked up new step-siblings when his father remarried. Musk has been close to his cousins, the nephews of his father, too.

There is so much more to Elon than his family or his origin in South Africa. I was very familiar with his involvement with Tesla and his acquisition of Twitter, but I didn't know much about SpaceX or his involvement with PayPal (through the original X.com). He also was a co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI. Isaacson does a fantastic job of detailing the many businesses that Musk has created and financed. He also explains very well how Musk likes to take massive risks.

Musk has been married. Several times! Sometimes secretly, too. He apparently thrives on drama in his relationships, like he does in life in general. He has 11 kids! They are from several mothers, not all of which have been one of his wives. Many of the children were born through in vitro fertilization. The woman he married, divorced and remarried isn't a mother of any of his kids. His first child died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome in 2002, but I don't think this is what has driven him. Interestingly, one child was born a boy but became a girl before adulthood, changing her name legally to Vivian Jenna Wilson in 2022 at age 18. She no longer talks to Musk or has anything to do with him at all.

Sometimes Musk sounds crazy. He has been guided, though, by strong big-picture goals of protecting humans (allowing them to move eventually to Mars) and reducing pollution through electric vehicles. He has had some other strong interests too, like using artificial intelligence in a good way. He helped Ukraine get back on the internet after the Russians wiped out their network when the war started, but he wouldn't let them use it to take Crimea from Russia. The book does a good job of helping the reader to see his passions and to understand them while also pointing to some big mistakes that he has made. Isaacson also details Musk's good and bad interactions with some pretty famous business people, like Larry Ellison, Larry Page and Jeff Bezos.

So, I read about a person that has rubbed me wrong and understand him better now. My title was that Musk is interesting, which is true, but the author is very interesting as well. I had never heard of Walter Isaacson before reading this, but he has written a few other biographies as well, including books about Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Henry Kissinger and Steven Jobs. I have heard of each of these people, but I had not heard of Jennifer Doudna, a Nobel Prize winner who was a pioneer at CRISPR and co-invented a technology for editing genes. He wrote about her in 2021.

Isaacson, who turns 72 tomorrow, grew up in New Orleans where he lives now and is a professor at Tulane. He was formerly Chairman of CNN. He wrote some other books that were not single-person biographies too, including The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution and, as co-author, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986).

I really liked this book. I am still not an Elon Musk fan, but I understand him better and find him interesting. The challenge of writing a biography of someone still alive is that the story is not over, which makes a conclusion difficult for the author. This book didn't have much of a conclusion. The 95th chapter that ended the book was about the SpaceX launch of Starship in April 2023, which exploded. Isaacson did say some things about Musk in the last chapter that were kind of conclusionary. There was a one-page "Acknowledgements" after that last chapter, where he indicated that Musk had allowed him to shadow Musk for two years. I had wrongly assumed that Musk had to approve this book. Isaacson said, though, that Musk did not read it or ask to read it before publication. Good job, Musk! Good job, Isaacson!