elon musk best biography

South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.

Who Is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur and businessman who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003. Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company, Zip2, to a division of Compaq Computers.

In January 2021, Musk reportedly surpassed Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest man in the world.

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. As a child, Musk was so lost in his daydreams about inventions that his parents and doctors ordered a test to check his hearing.

At about the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 10, Musk developed an interest in computers. He taught himself how to program, and when he was 12 he sold his first software: a game he created called Blastar.

In grade school, Musk was short, introverted and bookish. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling.

Musk’s mother, Maye Musk , is a Canadian model and the oldest woman to star in a Covergirl campaign. When Musk was growing up, she worked five jobs at one point to support her family.

Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is a wealthy South African engineer.

Musk spent his early childhood with his brother Kimbal and sister Tosca in South Africa. His parents divorced when he was 10.

At age 17, in 1989, Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk obtained his Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship via that path.

In 1992, Musk left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.

After leaving Penn, Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, his move was timed perfectly with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Zip2 Corporation

Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995 with his brother, Kimbal Musk. An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune . In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.

In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used the money from their sale of Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com acquisition the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today.

In October 2002, Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Before the sale, Musk owned 11 percent of PayPal stock.

Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station—with plans for astronaut transport in the future—in a move to replace NASA’s own space shuttle missions.

Falcon 9 Rockets

On May 22, 2012, Musk and SpaceX made history when the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule. The vehicle was sent to the International Space Station with 1,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts stationed there, marking the first time a private company had sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Of the launch, Musk was quoted as saying, "I feel very lucky. ... For us, it's like winning the Super Bowl."

In December 2013, a Falcon 9 successfully carried a satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit, a distance at which the satellite would lock into an orbital path that matched the Earth's rotation. In February 2015, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 fitted with the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, aiming to observe the extreme emissions from the sun that affect power grids and communications systems on Earth.

In March 2017, SpaceX saw the successful test flight and landing of a Falcon 9 rocket made from reusable parts, a development that opened the door for more affordable space travel.

A setback came in November 2017, when an explosion occurred during a test of the company's new Block 5 Merlin engine. SpaceX reported that no one was hurt, and that the issue would not hamper its planned rollout of a future generation of Falcon 9 rockets.

The company enjoyed another milestone moment in February 2018 with the successful test launch of the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. Armed with additional Falcon 9 boosters, the Falcon Heavy was designed to carry immense payloads into orbit and potentially serve as a vessel for deep space missions. For the test launch, the Falcon Heavy was given a payload of Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster, equipped with cameras to "provide some epic views" for the vehicle's planned orbit around the sun.

In July 2018, Space X enjoyed the successful landing of a new Block 5 Falcon rocket, which touched down on a drone ship less than 9 minutes after liftoff.

BFR Mission to Mars

In September 2017, Musk presented an updated design plan for his BFR (an acronym for either "Big F---ing Rocket" or "Big Falcon Rocket"), a 31-engine behemoth topped by a spaceship capable of carrying at least 100 people. He revealed that SpaceX was aiming to launch the first cargo missions to Mars with the vehicle in 2022, as part of his overarching goal of colonizing the Red Planet.

In March 2018, the entrepreneur told an audience at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that he hoped to have the BFR ready for short flights early the following year, while delivering a knowing nod at his previous problems with meeting deadlines.

The following month, it was announced that SpaceX would construct a facility at the Port of Los Angeles to build and house the BFR. The port property presented an ideal location for SpaceX, as its mammoth rocket will only be movable by barge or ship when completed.

Starlink Internet Satellites

In late March 2018, SpaceX received permission from the U.S. government to launch a fleet of satellites into low orbit for the purpose of providing Internet service. The satellite network, named Starlink, would ideally make broadband service more accessible in rural areas, while also boosting competition in heavily populated markets that are typically dominated by one or two providers.

SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 satellites in May 2019, and followed with another payload of 60 satellites that November. While this represented significant progress for the Starlink venture, the appearance of these bright orbiters in the night sky, with the potential of thousands more to come, worried astronomers who felt that a proliferation of satellites would increase the difficulty of studying distant objects in space.

Tesla Motors

Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company formed in 2003 that is dedicated to producing affordable, mass-market electric cars as well as battery products and solar roofs. Musk oversees all product development, engineering and design of the company's products.

Five years after its formation, in March 2008, Tesla unveiled the Roadster, a sports car capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, as well as traveling nearly 250 miles between charges of its lithium ion battery.

With a stake in the company taken by Daimler and a strategic partnership with Toyota, Tesla Motors launched its initial public offering in June 2010, raising $226 million.

In August 2008, Tesla announced plans for its Model S, the company's first electric sedan that was reportedly meant to take on the BMW 5 series. In 2012, the Model S finally entered production at a starting price of $58,570. Capable of covering 265 miles between charges, it was honored as the 2013 Car of the Year by Motor Trend magazine .

In April 2017, Tesla announced that it surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker. The news was an obvious boon to Tesla, which was looking to ramp up production and release its Model 3 sedan later that year.

In September 2019, using what Musk described as a "Plaid powertrain," a Model S set a speed record for four-door sedan at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey County, California.

The Model 3 was officially launched in early 2019 following extensive production delays. The car was initially priced at $35,000, a much more accessible price point than the $69,500 and up for its Model S and X electric sedans.

After initially aiming to produce 5,000 new Model 3 cars per week by December 2017, Musk pushed that goal back to March 2018, and then to June with the start of the new year. The announced delay didn't surprise industry experts, who were well aware of the company's production problems, though some questioned how long investors would remain patient with the process. It also didn't prevent Musk from garnering a radical new compensation package as CEO, in which he would be paid after reaching milestones of growing valuation based on $50 billion increments.

By April 2018, with Tesla expected to fall short of first-quarter production forecasts, news surfaced that Musk had pushed aside the head of engineering to personally oversee efforts in that division. In a Twitter exchange with a reporter, Musk said it was important to "divide and conquer" to meet production goals and was "back to sleeping at factory."

After signaling that the company would reorganize its management structure, Musk in June announced that Tesla was laying off 9 percent of its workforce, though its production department would remain intact. In an email to employees, Musk explained his decision to eliminate some "duplication of roles" to cut costs, admitting it was time to take serious steps toward turning a profit.

The restructuring appeared to pay dividends, as it was announced that Tesla had met its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 cars per week by the end of June 2018, while churning out another 2,000 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. "We did it!" Musk wrote in a celebratory email to the company. "What an incredible job by an amazing team."

The following February, Musk announced that the company was finally rolling out its standard Model 3. Musk also said that Tesla was shifting to all-online sales, and offering customers the chance to return their cars within seven days or 1,000 miles for a full refund.

In November 2017, Musk made another splash with the unveiling of the new Tesla Semi and Roadster at the company's design studio. The semi-truck, which was expected to enter into production in 2019 before being delayed, boasts 500 miles of range as well as a battery and motors built to last 1 million miles.

Model Y and Roadster

In March 2019, Musk unveiled Tesla’s long-awaited Model Y. The compact crossover, which began arriving for customers in March 2020, has a driving range of 300 miles and a 0 to 60 mph time of 3.5 seconds.

The Roadster, also set to be released in 2020, will become the fastest production car ever made, with a 0 to 60 time of 1.9 seconds.

In August 2016, in Musk’s continuing effort to promote and advance sustainable energy and products for a wider consumer base, a $2.6 billion dollar deal was solidified to combine his electric car and solar energy companies. His Tesla Motors Inc. announced an all-stock deal purchase of SolarCity Corp., a company Musk had helped his cousins start in 2006. He is a majority shareholder in each entity.

“Solar and storage are at their best when they're combined. As one company, Tesla (storage) and SolarCity (solar) can create fully integrated residential, commercial and grid-scale products that improve the way that energy is generated, stored and consumed,” read a statement on Tesla’s website about the deal.

The Boring Company

In January 2017, Musk launched The Boring Company, a company devoted to boring and building tunnels in order to reduce street traffic. He began with a test dig on the SpaceX property in Los Angeles.

In late October of that year, Musk posted the first photo of his company's progress to his Instagram page. He said the 500-foot tunnel, which would generally run parallel to Interstate 405, would reach a length of two miles in approximately four months.

In May 2019 the company, now known as TBC, landed a $48.7 million contract from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to build an underground Loop system to shuttle people around the Las Vegas Convention Center.

In October 2022, Musk officially bought Twitter and became the social media company's CEO after months of back and forth.

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Musk’s Tweet and SEC Investigation

On August 7, 2018, Musk dropped a bombshell via a tweet: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." The announcement opened the door for legal action against the company and its founder, as the SEC began inquiring about whether Musk had indeed secured the funding as claimed. Several investors filed lawsuits on the grounds that Musk was looking to manipulate stock prices and ambush short sellers with his tweet.

Musk’s tweet initially sent Tesla stock spiking, before it closed the day up 11 percent. The CEO followed up with a letter on the company blog, calling the move to go private "the best path forward." He promised to retain his stake in the company, and added that he would create a special fund to help all current investors remain on board.

Six days later, Musk sought to clarify his position with a statement in which he pointed to discussions with the managing director of the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund as the source of his "funding secured" declaration. He later tweeted that he was working on a proposal to take Tesla private with Goldman Sachs and Silver Lake as financial advisers.

The saga took a bizarre turn that day when rapper Azealia Banks wrote on Instagram that, as a guest at Musk's home at the time, she learned that he was under the influence of LSD when he fired off his headline-grabbing tweet. Banks said she overheard Musk making phone calls to drum up the funding he promised was already in place.

The news quickly turned serious again when it was reported that Tesla's outside directors had retained two law firms to deal with the SEC inquiry and the CEO's plans to take the company private.

On August 24, one day after meeting with the board, Musk announced that he had reversed course and would not be taking the company private. Among his reasons, he cited the preference of most directors to keep Tesla public, as well as the difficulty of retaining some of the large shareholders who were prohibited from investing in a private company. Others suggested that Musk was also influenced by the poor optics of an electric car company being funded by Saudi Arabia, a country heavily involved in the oil industry.

On September 29, 2018, it was announced that Musk would pay a $20 million fine and step down as chairman of Tesla's board for three years as part of an agreement with the SEC.

Inventions and Innovations

In August 2013, Musk released a concept for a new form of transportation called the "Hyperloop," an invention that would foster commuting between major cities while severely cutting travel time. Ideally resistant to weather and powered by renewable energy, the Hyperloop would propel riders in pods through a network of low-pressure tubes at speeds reaching more than 700 mph. Musk noted that the Hyperloop could take from seven to 10 years to be built and ready for use.

Although he introduced the Hyperloop with claims that it would be safer than a plane or train, with an estimated cost of $6 billion — approximately one-tenth of the cost for the rail system planned by the state of California — Musk's concept has drawn skepticism. Nevertheless, the entrepreneur has sought to encourage the development of this idea.

After he announced a competition for teams to submit their designs for a Hyperloop pod prototype, the first Hyperloop Pod Competition was held at the SpaceX facility in January 2017. A speed record of 284 mph was set by a German student engineering team at competition No. 3 in 2018, with the same team pushing the record to 287 mph the next year.

AI and Neuralink

Musk has pursued an interest in artificial intelligence, becoming co-chair of the nonprofit OpenAI. The research company launched in late 2015 with the stated mission of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity.

In 2017, it was also reported that Musk was backing a venture called Neuralink, which intends to create devices to be implanted in the human brain and help people merge with software. He expanded on the company's progress during a July 2019 discussion, revealing that its devices will consist of a microscopic chip that connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone.

High-Speed Train

In late November 2017, after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked for proposals to build and operate a high-speed rail line that would transport passengers from O'Hare Airport to downtown Chicago in 20 minutes or less, Musk tweeted that he was all-in on the competition with The Boring Company. He said that the concept of the Chicago loop would be different from his Hyperloop, its relatively short route not requiring the need for drawing a vacuum to eliminate air friction.

In summer 2018 Musk announced he would cover the estimated $1 billion needed to dig the 17-mile tunnel from the airport to downtown Chicago. However, in late 2019 he tweeted that TBC would focus on completing the commercial tunnel in Las Vegas before turning to other projects, suggesting that plans for Chicago would remain in limbo for the immediate future.

Flamethrower

Musk also reportedly found a market for The Boring Company's flamethrowers. After announcing they were going on sale for $500 apiece in late January 2018, he claimed to have sold 10,000 of them within a day.

Relationship with Donald Trump

In December 2016, Musk was named to President Trump’s Strategy and Policy Forum; the following January, he joined Trump's Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. Following Trump’s election, Musk found himself on common ground with the new president and his advisers as the president announced plans to pursue massive infrastructure developments.

While sometimes at odds with the president's controversial measures, such as a proposed ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, Musk defended his involvement with the new administration. "My goals," he tweeted in early 2017, "are to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and to help make humanity a multi-planet civilization, a consequence of which will be the creating of hundreds of thousands of jobs and a more inspiring future for all."

On June 1, following Trump's announcement that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, Musk stepped down from his advisory roles.

Personal Life

Wives and children.

Musk has been married twice. He wed Justine Wilson in 2000, and the couple had six children together. In 2002, their first son died at 10 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Musk and Wilson had five additional sons together: twins Griffin and Xavier (born in 2004) and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian (born in 2006).

After a contentious divorce from Wilson, Musk met actress Talulah Riley. The couple married in 2010. They split in 2012 but married each other again in 2013. Their relationship ultimately ended in divorce in 2016.

Girlfriends

Musk reportedly began dating actress Amber Heard in 2016 after finalizing his divorce with Riley and Heard finalized her divorce from Johnny Depp . Their busy schedules caused the couple to break up in August 2017; they got back together in January 2018 and split again one month later.

In May 2018, Musk began dating musician Grimes (born Claire Boucher). That month, Grimes announced that she had changed her name to “ c ,” the symbol for the speed of light, reportedly on the encouragement of Musk. Fans criticized the feminist performer for dating a billionaire whose company has been described as a “predator zone” among accusations of sexual harassment.

The couple discussed their love for one another in a March 2019 feature in the Wall Street Journal Magazine , with Grimes saying “Look, I love him, he’s great...I mean, he’s a super-interesting goddamn person.” Musk, for his part, told the Journal, “I love c’s wild fae artistic creativity and hyper-intense work ethic.”

Grimes gave birth to their son on May 4, 2020, with Musk announcing that they had named the boy "X Æ A-12." Later in the month, after it was reported that the State of California wouldn't accept a name with a number, the couple said they were changing their son's name to "X Æ A-Xii."

Musk and Grimes welcomed their second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, in December 2021. The child was delivered via a surrogate.

Nonprofit Work

The boundless potential of space exploration and the preservation of the future of the human race have become the cornerstones of Musk's abiding interests, and toward these, he has founded the Musk Foundation, which is dedicated to space exploration and the discovery of renewable and clean energy sources.

In October 2019 Musk pledged to donate $1 million to the #TeamTrees campaign, which aims to plant 20 million trees around the world by 2020. He even changed his Twitter name to Treelon for the occasion.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Elon Musk
• Birth Year: 1971
• Birth date: June 28, 1971
• Birth City: Pretoria
• Birth Country: South Africa
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.
• Space Exploration
• Internet/Computing
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• University of Pennsylania
• Queen's University, Ontario
• Stanford University
• Nacionalities
• South African
• Interesting Facts
• Elon Musk left Stanford after two days to take advantage of the Internet boom.
• In April 2017, Musk's Tesla Motors surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker.

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Elon Musk Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/elon-musk
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 31, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I'm very pro-environment, but let's figure out how to do it better and not jump through a dozen hoops to achieve what is obvious in the first place.
• Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

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Elon Musk: The Complete Biography of an Extraordinary Innovator

• by history tools
• March 26, 2024

Elon Musk is one of the most famous entrepreneurs and business leaders of the 21st century. As the co-founder of PayPal, CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX, and driving force behind many other companies, Musk has had an outsized influence on technology, space exploration, and solving some of humanity‘s biggest challenges.

Let‘s take a closer look at Musk’s remarkable life story, complex persona, monumental successes and occasional setbacks, and what makes him such a polarizing character.

Childhood and Early Life in South Africa

Musk was born on June 28, 1971 in Pretoria, one of South Africa’s wealthiest and most segregated cities during apartheid. His mother Maye was a famous dietitian and model who grew up in Canada, while his father Errol was a wealthy white South African electromechanical engineer.

As a child, Musk was an avid reader and self-taught computer programmer. At age 12 he created and sold a video game called Blastar to a computer magazine for $500. But his relationship with his father was difficult – his parents divorced when he was 9 years old. Musk chose to live mostly with his father, which he would later regret considering they became estranged.

Discovering His Calling

After spending two years in the South African military, Musk moved to Canada at age 19. He studied at Queen‘s University in Ontario for two years, avoiding mandatory service in the South African military, before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania.

At Penn, Musk pursued a Bachelor’s degree in Physics as well as a Bachelor’s degree in Economics. Most notably, he rekindled an early passion by taking extra classes at the Stanford School of Engineering. It was a harbinger of innovations to come.

Founding Zip2 and PayPal

In 1995 Musk dropped out of Stanford’s PhD program to found his first startup Zip2 Corporation with his brother Kimbal. Zip2 provided online city guides to newspapers like the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.

Compaq bought Zip2 in 1999 for $307 million, earning Musk $22 million. He soon co-founded X.com, one of the first online banks providing services like checking accounts and money transfers.

X.com merged with its rival Confinity in 2000 to become PayPal, with Musk serving as the new CEO. Despite internal struggles at the new company, PayPal went on to revolutionize online payments. In 2002 eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk received $175 million.

“If something‘s important enough you should try, even if the probable outcome is failure.”

Making History with SpaceX

Flush with cash from the PayPal sale, Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 with an audacious long-term goal: make humanity multi-planetary by establishing a human colony on Mars.

SpaceX develops rockets, spacecraft and satellites aimed at revolutionizing space transportation to eventually make it affordable for private citizens to travel into orbit and to other planets. It almost went bankrupt in 2008, but Musk kept it afloat with personal funds.

In 2012 SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft became the first commercial spaceship to deliver cargo to the International Space Station. And in 2020 SpaceX sent astronauts to the ISS for the first time, effectively resurrecting American manned spaceflight.

Tesla Accelerates Ahead with Musk at the Helm

Also in 2004 Musk made the series A investment round in Tesla Motors and joined Tesla’s board of directors as chairman. Founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning in 2003, Tesla aimed to prove electric cars could be better than gasoline-powered cars.

The original Roadster sports car impressed critics, but by 2007 Tesla was also on the verge of bankruptcy. Musk invested heavily in Tesla and took over leadership of the company, serving as CEO and product architect.

Under his guidance, Tesla went public in 2010 to raise funds and the Model S sedan was named Motor Trend‘s 2013 Car of the Year. By 2023 Tesla had become the world‘s most valuable automaker, dominating the rapidly growing EV market.

Expanding His Entrepreneurial Portfolio

In addition to SpaceX and Tesla, Musk has founded or co-founded a number of new companies over the last two decades. These include:

• The Boring Company (2016) – Develops tunnels aimed at eliminating street traffic to reduce transportation time
• Neuralink (2016) – Develops implantable brain-machine interfaces to connect human brains with computers
• OpenAI (2015) – Non-profit AI research company working to ensure artificial general intelligence benefits humanity
• Starlink (2019) – SpaceX project to provide global satellite Internet access coverage

Not all of these companies have proven successful so far. But Musk continues to think big while attracting top talent to bring innovative new technologies to reality.

Taking Over Twitter for $44 Billion

In January 2022, Musk started acquiring shares of social media company Twitter. By March he had accumulated a 9.2% stake to become Twitter‘s largest shareholder. This set in motion a tumultuous year that eventually led to his purchase of Twitter for $44 billion on October 27, 2022.

Shortly after acquiring Twitter, Musk laid off roughly half the company‘s 7,500 employees and radically changed the platform‘s operations. Many users have quit the platform over concerns about misinformation as Musk grants "amnesty" to suspended accounts. The long-term implications of his takeover remain uncertain.

“Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.”

Marriages, Relationships and Family

In 2000, Musk married Canadian author Justine Wilson. Their first son died unexpectedly from SIDS at 10 weeks old. They share custody of 5 sons – a set of twins and a set of triplets – born through IVF. Musk and Wilson separated in 2008.

From 2010 to 2012, Musk was married to English actress Talulah Riley. After divorcing, they remarried in 2013 before finalizing their divorce again in 2016. Musk also had an on-and-off relationship with musician Grimes which began in 2018. They had 2 children – a son born in 2020 and daughter born in 2021 via surrogate.

In 2022 it was revealed that Musk secretly had twins in 2021 with Shivon Zilis, a top executive at his company Neuralink. He now has 10 children from 3 relationships. But his 18-year-old transgender daughter has disowned him, changing her name in opposition to Musk‘s "public transphobia."

Losing and Regaining Title of World‘s Richest Person

Thanks mostly to his shares in Tesla Motors, Musk experienced an astronomical rise in his personal net worth. He became the richest person in the world for the first time in January 2021 when he surpassed Jeff Bezos.

But his net worth dropped in 2022 and early 2023 as Tesla‘s share price declined. On January 6, 2023 Musk lost the title of world‘s richest person to Bernard Arnault, CEO of LVMH.

What‘s more, with an estimated $183 billion loss between November 2021 and January 2023, Musk holds the record for the largest loss of personal fortune in history according to Guinness World Records. Despite these setbacks, Musk’s supporters are betting he’ll reclaim the top spot someday.

What Makes Musk Such a Polarizing Figure

Musk has earned both ardent fans and vocal critics. So what makes him such a polarizing public figure?

Reasons supporters are drawn to Musk include:

• Daring vision for future innovations
• Willingness to take risks
• Commitment to tackling climate change with sustainable energy
• Power to make things happen that others consider impossible
• Relatable sense of humor on social media

However some people are strongly critical of Musk for:

• Poor treatment of employees by demanding unrealistic hours and goals
• Controversial public stances on issues like pandemic lockdowns
• Spreading misinformation and making questionable promises on Twitter
• Brash communication style and vindictiveness towards naysayers
• Concerns about concentration of power held by billionaires

But there‘s no questioning the outsized impact Musk already made on multiple industries. Even his detractors admit they‘re curious to see what he’ll achieve next.

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Elon Musk Hardcover – September 12, 2023

• Print length 688 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster
• Publication date September 12, 2023
• Dimensions 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1982181281
• ISBN-13 978-1982181284
• See all details

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982181281
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982181284
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.25 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
• #1 in Computer & Technology Biographies
• #2 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals
• #3 in Scientist Biographies

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Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Elon Musk. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race; Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He is a Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine.

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Customers say

Customers find the book amazing, with an exquisite balance of awe-inspiring moments and grounded critique. They also describe the intellectual quality as refreshingly objective, moody, genius, flawed, and spontaneous. Readers describe the characters as complex, brilliant, and ruthless. They praise the writing quality as well-written and creative, simplifying the details. They describe the biography as exciting, compelling, and amazing. Opinions are mixed on the content, with some finding it candid and fair, while others say it's hypocritical and grossly inept. Reader opinions are also mixed on storyline, with Some finding it outstanding, while other say it’s disjointed and time jumping at times.

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Customers find the book captivating, showing the good, bad, and ugly of Elon Musk. They also say it provides insight into both Musk's incredible genius and ruthless. Readers also say the book provides a detailed account of his personal life and business.

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"... it's a good read imo . a page turner. overall i'd say it's a study of character rather than a cut and dry accounting of what elon has done...." Read more

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Customers find the writing quality of the book well written, concise, and well structured. They also appreciate the key insights and creative approach.

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Customers find the book refreshingly objective, presenting the facts without sugarcoating. They also say the character is very intelligent, interesting, and erratic. Readers say the motivations are complex and unique, and appreciate the past and present. They mention that the due diligence screams off the page.

"...For aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators, the book provides a treasure trove of lessons on perseverance, problem-solving, and thinking beyond..." Read more

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"...And about Elon Musk - an amazing guy - temperamental, moody , genius, flawed, spontaneous. He has accomplished so much in such a short time...." Read more

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Customers find the biography compelling, extraordinary, and candid. They also appreciate the author's believable and commendable portrayal of the main characters.

"...In conclusion, "Elon Musk" by Walter Isaacson is an exceptional biography that offers a profound and intimate look at the life and mind of a modern..." Read more

"...This biography is a masterclass in storytelling , offering a captivating and nuanced exploration of Musk's life, from his childhood to his..." Read more

"...enjoyed the book, appreciated the subject's quirks & the author's honesty . Would highly recommend this book...." Read more

"...Beautifully written, honest and unbiased. Couldn’t put it down!" Read more

Customers find the characters fascinating, awesome, and flawed. They also say the author does a fantastic job portraying an unbiased depiction of Musk's work, family life, and moral. Readers also mention that the portrait is both nuanced and comprehensive.

"...automotive industry, Musk's visionary ideas are portrayed with enthusiasm and intellectual depth ...." Read more

"...And about Elon Musk - an amazing guy - temperamental, moody, genius, flawed , spontaneous. He has accomplished so much in such a short time...." Read more

" Interesting character . Well written" Read more

"...Isaacson tackles it all, painting a portrait that's both nuanced and comprehensive...." Read more

Customers find the visual presentation of the book insightful, unique, and thoughtful. They also say the book provides a comprehensive look at Elon Musk's life.

"..." by Walter Isaacson is an exceptional biography that offers a profound and intimate look at the life and mind of a modern visionary...." Read more

"...over the last few years, it really shows the good, the bad, and the ugly . Mostly good, crazy, and mind boggling things...." Read more

"Another great biography by Walter Isaacson. A very thorough look at a modern day Einstein and the hard work he puts in and a look at some of his..." Read more

"...Still, an important and unbiased look at the Nicola Tesla of our age." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the storyline. Some find the narrative outstanding and a page turner, while others say it's disjointed, time jumping at times, and confusing. They also say the book is long and the ending is disappointing.

"... Compelling Narrative Style :Walter Isaacson's storytelling skills are evident throughout the book...." Read more

"...But this was different. Its short chapters and sub chapters made it very readable...." Read more

"...is accurate, though as a genuine believer in that mission, seemed awfully short ...." Read more

"...It is full of amazing events and details about what happens in parts of the world, including the world of AI, of which ordinary people know close to..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the content. Some find the author extraordinarily candid and fair in his commentaries about the main characters. They also appreciate Elon Musk's audacity, visions, drive, and result. However, some customers say the book is grossly inept, boring, and disjointed. They say it's not purposefully dishonest and not good journalism.

"...he asked a few days after Gates’s visit. “It’s pure hypocrisy . Why make money on the failure of a sustainable energy car company?”"..." Read more

"...Isaacson's work is a testament to the power of biography to inspire, educate , and entertain." Read more

"...in a good light in some ways while it also shows his crazy, dysfunctional bad side . It seems it's a fair appraisal...." Read more

"...also it was hilarious ...." Read more

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Biography of Elon Musk

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Elon Musk is best known for being the co-founder of PayPal, a money-transfer service for Web consumers, for founding Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX, the first private company to launch a rocket into space and for founding Tesla Motors, which builds electric cars.

Famous Quotes from Musk

• "Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough."
• "It is where great things are possible" [Musk on moving to the USA]

Background and Education

Elon Musk was born in South Africa, in 1971. His father was an engineer and his mother is a nutritionist. An avid fan of computers, by the age of twelve, Musk had written the code for his own video game, a space game called Blastar, which the preteen sold for a profit.

Elon Musk attended Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned two bachelor's degrees in economics and physics. He was admitted to Stanford University in California with the intention of earning a PhD in energy physics. However, Musk's life was about to change dramatically.

Zip2 Corporation

In 1995, at the age of twenty-four, Elon Musk dropped out of Stanford University after just two days of classes to start his first company called Zip2 Corporation. Zip2 Corporation was an online city guide that provided content for the new online versions of the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune newspapers. Musk struggled to keep his new business afloat, eventually selling majority control of Zip2 to venture capitalists in exchange for a $3.6 million investment.

In 1999, the Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million. Out of that amount, Elon Musk's share was $22 million. Musk had become a millionaire at the age of twenty-eight. That same year Musk started his next company.

Online Banking

In 1999, Elon Musk started X.com with $10 million dollars from the sale of Zip2. X.com was an online bank, and Elon Musk is credited with inventing a method of securely transferring money using a recipient's e-mail address.

In 2000, X.com bought a company called Confinity, which had started an Internet money-transfer process called PayPal. Elon Musk renamed X.com/Confinity Paypal and dropped the company's online banking focus to concentrate on becoming a global payment transfer provider.

In 2002, eBay bought Paypal for $1.5 billion and Elon Musk made $165 million in eBay stock from the deal.

Space Exploration Technologies

In 2002, Elon Musk started SpaceX aka the Space Exploration Technologies. Elon Musk is a long-standing member of the Mars Society , a nonprofit organization that supports the exploration of Mars, and Musk is interested in establishing a greenhouse on Mars. SpaceX has been developing rocket technology to enable Musk's project.

Tesla Motors

In 2004, Elon Musk cofounded Tesla Motors, of which he is the sole product architect. Tesla Motors builds electric vehicles . The company has built an electric sports car, the Tesla Roadster, the Model S, an economy model four door electric sedan and plans to build more affordable compact cars in the future.

In 2006, Elon Musk co-founded SolarCity, a photovoltaics products and services company with his cousin Lyndon Rive.

In December 2015, Elon Musk announced the creation of OpenAI, a research company to develop artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity.

In 2016, Musk created Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup company with a mission to integrate the human brain with artificial intelligence. The aim is to create devices that can be implanted in the human brain and merge human beings with software.

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time . He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
• Length: 688 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982181284

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Raves and Reviews

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year "Whatever you think of Mr. Musk, he is a man worth understanding— which makes this a book worth reading." — The Economist "With Elon Musk , Walter Isaacson offers both an engaging chronicle of his subject’s busy life so far and some compelling answers..." — Wall Street Journal "Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk , published Monday, delivers as promised — a comprehensive, deeply reported chronicle of the world-shaping tech mogul’s life, a twin to the author’s similarly thick 2011 biography of Steve Jobs . Details ranging from the personally salacious to the geopolitically volatile have already made the rounds — the rare example of a major book publication causing a news cycle in its own right...What Isaacson’s biography reveals through its personalized lens on Musk’s work with Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, and more is not only what Musk wants, but how and why he plans to do it. 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....Isaacson’s book is like a decoder ring, tying the mercurial Musk’s various obsessions into a coherent worldview with a startlingly concrete goal at its center." — Politico "[The book] has everything you'd expect from a book on Musk—stories of tragedy, triumph, and turmoil.... While the stories are fascinating and guaranteed to spark a mountain of coverage, founders and entrepreneurs will also unearth valuable lessons." — Inc. "Isaacson has gathered information from the man’s admirers and critics. He lays all of it out.... The book is bursting with stories....A deeply engrossing tale of a spectacular American innovator. " — New York Journal of Books "One of the greatest biographers in America has written a massive book about the richest man in the world. This fast-paced biography, based on more than a hundred interviews...[is] a head-spinning tale about a vain, brilliant, sometimes cruel figure whose ambitions are actively shaping the future of human life." —Ron Charles on CBS Sunday Morning "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." — The Sunday Times "An experienced biographer’s comprehensive study." —The Observer "Walter Isaacson’s all-access biography… Its portrait of the tech maverick is fascinating." —The Telegraph "Isaacson boils Musk down to two men… the result is a beat-by-beat book that follows him insider important rooms and explores obscure regions of his mind." —The Times

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Walter Isaacson on Musk’s Legacy and Criticism of His Biography

Isaacson, a former editor of TIME and an acclaimed biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, among others, is the author of the new book Elon Musk

In an excerpt from a new podcast, On Musk with Walter Isaacson , biographer Isaacson, the bestselling author of Elon Musk (and a former TIME editor), talks with host Evan Ratliff about criticism of his book, Musk's geopolitical influence, and why he took over Twitter .

Evan Ratliff: I want to talk about some of the criticism that comes up around the book and giving you a chance to respond. There's Musk being a difficult and demanding person, even an asshole, whether that matters for how creative he is, how innovative he is. And then there's these sort of larger societal accusations. Let's say like, allowing misinformation or encouraging misinformation, or the self-driving and people getting killed or the sort of lawsuit against Tesla when it comes to racial discrimination. Those seem to be two separate ideas, and I'm wondering, we've talked a lot about the first one and how you feel about that second basket, that question of whether, aside from whether he is or isn't a bad person to his employees, there are things that he's doing in the world that have negative implications.

Walter Isaacson: Yeah, I think when you barrel ahead impulsively, you do things that have negative implications. You know, bad workplace environments. Well, it starts at the top because he's all in, hardcore driven. He's not there to what he thinks are touchy feely HR, guidelines. And that's bad. Likewise, he pushes a little fast on full self driving. I mean, he feels that humans will kill 10 or 100 times more people than a self-driving car will. So he doesn't get the fact that a self driving just, you know, one time as it did this once hit a side of a big white truck, you know, and that's been in the news after three, four years. It's still in the news. He says, you know, people focus on that, not the million of people got killed by humans. It's because he doesn't have a real feel for human feelings and emotions. He doesn't realize that a self-driving car smashing somebody into a truck is gonna really shake people up more than the fact that a bad driver, you know, here on Claiborne Avenue in New Orleans got into an accident. So these are the things that his engineering mindset doesn't feel as well.

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And I feel like when people bring those things up, they're often saying, they want you to engage with those things more. And we've talked about, you know, explaining what's going on versus moralizing. But how do you feel about how you engaged with sort of that aspect of Musk?

I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk. And a couple people have pointed that out. Certainly if you're looking at the bad workplace environments that he may engender either at Tesla or at Twitter–that's in the book, you know, in no uncertain terms. Likewise, the accidents on the self-driving cars are definitely in the book starting with Autonomy Day in 2019 all the way to the present. There's a lot of evidence that his obsession with this might be moving things too fast.

So, I'm perfectly happy when people say I should have been tougher on Musk, but also say, man, read the book. If you want ammunition, both of how amazing he can be at times and getting things done, but also the rubble he leaves in his wake.

When it came to the Ukraine Starlink situation, you've talked about that…the thing that got corrected in the post and Musk tweeting, but maybe you've talked about this, but I haven't heard it yet, but I'm interested in what it felt like for you. Like you strike me as someone who's like relatively unbothered by some of the noise that's around these things.

I think you have to be unbothered by the noise and you have to keep the essence of the story. And the essence of that story was fine, it was correct, which was that night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled or not be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. And there was a fix that had to be made because it had already been geofenced, so his decision was not to permit the movement of the geofencing.

I hadn't gone into it enough, I just said he turned it off, so that was oversimplifying. But I didn't want to get distracted from the main thing, which is this private citizen is suddenly deciding that night whether or not Ukraine gets to do a sneak attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea. The essence is a private citizen has that power to decide and neither he nor anybody else corrected that.

Read More: Inside Elon Musk's Struggle for the Future of AI

And then I talked to him, I said, have you talked to the U. S. government? And he turns over power to these satellites to the U. S. government.

At a later point.

Yeah, at a later point, after that night where we talk about it. So you see... All of these things happen, and I try to have it shown in real time. And the essence of the story being, how does somebody acquire this much power? Why is it that the rest of government and other contractors have become so paralyzed and sclerotic that they can't do some of these things? And then how does he, with his megalomania, finally back down and say, maybe I should give up some of this power.

There's something chilling about Musk's power and influence growing beyond his companies, beyond the rocket launch pad and the Tesla factory floor. And in the case of Starlink satellite's use in Ukraine, even Musk himself finds this a little unsettling. From failing to understand how people might respond to self driving car deaths, to his outwardly blasé approach to controlling global geopolitics with a thumbs up or thumbs down, like a Roman emperor in the Colosseum. People are not Elon Musk's forte, by his own admission. But we are increasingly in his hands.

And depending on where you stand on Musk, some of his ideas can seem either sinister, logical, or simply baffling. Take, for example, his stated concern about underpopulation and declaration that people need to be having more children. More specifically, smart people need to be having more children. It's a creed he's lived with all 10 of his surviving children born by IVF. He's put his money behind it too, funding a University of Texas at Austin research group called the Population Well Being Initiative, to the tune of $10 million. What I wanted to know from Isaacson… was given his front row seat to Musk's unusual family dramas, what are we supposed to make of this particular Musk obsession?

Like a lot of things with Elon Musk, he goes back to the father a bit. It also goes to Musk's theory that consciousness in the human species is a fragile thing. And one of the threats is a low birth rate. Most of us probably don't think that way. We think we're overpopulated. But there is a decline in birth rate in many, many countries. And Musk deeply feels that that's a problem. And you know, people can totally disagree with that and say, hey, overpopulation is a big problem. They can also think he's weird to fund IVF for other people or fund clinics.

That's it. It feels like such a classic Musk thing that I've learned from reading this book, which is it's the kind of thing where people can look at it and they can say, he has this vision for humanity and it involves like people having more children. And then there are people who dislike him who kind of see it through a lens of, is this some kind of eugenics situation…I feel like people bring these lenses to it and I'm wondering if that has happened in your past work, or if this is a unique situation.

I think it's somewhat unique that people have such extraordinarily strong feelings for and against Musk. When I started working on this book, he was one of the most popular people on earth. There's some people who didn't like him, but his politics was generally a supporter of Obama. He had done really bad, dumb tweets in the past, like saying he was going to take Tesla private or calling some cave diver a pedophile. But generally, he wasn't that controversial. And then his politics shift, and it's reflected in his tweets, and he buys Twitter.

And so I end up with a book in which people either think he's an absolute hero or an absolute villain. And if you come at it from a frame of Musk is inherently an evil person, even having a lot of kids seems like something evil. And, pushing for self driving cars or robots seems evil. Likewise, if you're one of these starry eyed fans, even the weird, dark things he does on Twitter, people will be slamming me for telling the stories of his behavior, both at Twitter and at factories. So, yeah, it's a difficulty that people frame his every action, often based on their own love or hatred for him.

There's a tension it feels like between the way that Musk talks about that epic idea, getting to Mars, helping save humanity with interplanetary species, et cetera, and the way he treats individual people, like he doesn't like people, sometimes he can be very cruel. And I'm wondering does he really care or is he just trying to make himself an epic figure or is he actually trying to solve the energy problem and send us to Mars for humanity reasons?

When Musk first started talking about his three great missions: space travel, artificial intelligence, and sustainable energy, I thought it was a type of pontifications that you'd do for a biographer or do for a podcaster, do for a pep talk. And then I'd see him over and over again, just chanting to himself, like walking around the factory for building Starship and things are getting delayed.

And he would keep saying to himself and others around him, we have to have an urgency of getting humanity to Mars. And I came to believe that I don't know if he always fully believed it, but I know he believed he believed it. I know that they sound strange, but sometimes, as Shakespeare teaches us, we become the mask we wear. And he had internalized and externalized this so much that he was driven by a fierce urgency that we've got to get rockets that can get us to Mars within the next few decades, or that we have to sustain solar and battery and electric vehicle energy on this planet. And I am totally convinced that he is driven by his belief in those missions, and then he backfills and figures out, well, how can I make money on the way.

But if you're driven mainly by financial or selfish reasons, you're not going to start a rocket company. That's not a good idea for making money. You're not going to start an EV company when every other car company is getting out of the business. You're not going to worry about robots, and you're not going to buy Twitter, so I don't think he was motivated by money. He was motivated by this almost man child epic sense of him as a hero in a comic book or a video game.

Twitter one is interesting because I felt like the way you wrote that almost reversed the poles there in which he decides to buy Twitter, impulsively decides, gets stuck with it, and then he almost seems to be back filling the mission where he says, like, actually...

I ask him at one point, how does this fit into your mission? Makes no sense. I mean, I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks, and he admits, he said, yes, maybe it's a lark, maybe it doesn't really fit in. And then later he says, well, maybe it will help democracy so that civilization will survive long enough that we'll be able to become multi-planetary.

And that's where I just didn't believe him, and I'm not even sure he believed himself. That's just a bull crap explanation. But he had to try to justify it to himself. But my own opinion is he kind of stumbled into that impulsively and had mixed feelings about it, and if he had to do it all over again, I'm not sure he would.

The other reason Musk gives for buying Twitter—one he seems to get a lot of play for in some corners of the world—is that he is fighting against wokeness, or more specifically, what Musk calls anti-woke-mind virus. When he talks about, anti-woke mind virus, he uses that phrase. And that really touches on things that have become, you know, third rails in society in terms of how they're discussed. I'm curious how you kind of engaged with that idea with him. I mean, he's someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa. So obviously like his views on race and other societal issues are going to be colored by that. Like, what does he mean when he says something like that?

The way I engage with it, and you see it in the book, is I question it. I say, why do you, why are you following this particular conspiracy?

And I'll even talk about Occam's razor, which is the simplest explanation, maybe the best one, instead of thinking there's a vast conspiracy of drug makers and. COVID vaccines, or people trying to lockdown so they control government, or any of these things that he goes to. I'm not that way. I'm not conspiratorial.

Uh,  and I find that anti-political correctness and wokeness sentiment… it's a little hard for me to explain because my head's not there. You know, I think sometimes what we call being woke is being polite and sensitive to other people's feelings.  And I'll ask him about that. I say, Hey, did you understand, you've got a daughter who transitioned.

And he'll say things when he's in a more rational mood of, well, I don't mind people using pronouns, but you know, it gouges my eyes out when I see it too much. I'm going, why? What's the problem?

But it's when he's in his dark moods, this eats away at him. And the book, I describe his political evolution from being an Obama supporter to being  supporting Bobby Kennedy, then Ron DeSantis, you know, people who are worried about wokeness or worried about conspiracy theories. And I never try to excuse it in the book. I don't excuse what I call the rabbit hole, going down these rabbit holes of conspiracy. Uh,  I do try to explain it, from his childhood, from his father, whatever. And until you read the book. I think critics can have a difficulty saying, is he explaining it or is he excusing it?  And the simple mantra I always use is–let me tell you a story.

So, I'll explain something. And then I'll tell a story about  a particularly horrible tweet he did, like: “Prosecute Fauci are my pronouns.” I mean, just in a few words, he’s able to attack transgender pronouns and Anthony Fauci. And...  I talk about his father having said all these sort of things and him being in a hotbox room in Twitter, and he's going dark and giddy and one of the people in the room starts joking about Fauci and pronouns.

But if you read that anecdote or that story, you're not going to say, Walter excused it.  You're not going to say he tried to sugarcoat it. You're going to see the rawness that's there sometimes in Elon Musk

You've talked about how you think Twitter will just be a blip of his legacy, but he certainly can and is getting mired in it. And there's this quote in the book. It's him saying, I probably spent too much time on Twitter. It's a good place to dig your own grave. You get your shoulder into it and you keep on digging.

Do you feel that he could be undoing some of that magic– that vision that you captured when it comes to space or electric cars?

Yeah, I personally feel that the time he spends on Twitter and the mindshare he devotes to it is not as important, it's not as high value as him doing something else. And I don't think he's particularly good at the social interactions and human emotions that come in Twitter. And he admits he's just addicted to it.

I don't think it's going to be an important part of his legacy. It's not going to be a great part of his legacy. I think it makes the book more interesting for this guy to go down this rabbit hole. But also, near the end of the book, to say, you know, this isn't the best use of my time, even talking about Twitter, he said, we probably could be talking about more important things.

It's also…it's made him disliked in a way that I feel like he wasn't disliked before. I mean, if you look at the category of things that people dislike him for– Twitter and things he's said on Twitter and done with Twitter–occupy a large percentage of those things.

Absolutely. When you look at the controversy he's caused, and for that matter, the enmity and hatred that he's engendered, about 95 percent of that comes either from what he says on Twitter, or what he does on Twitter, or what he does to Twitter.

Musk is polarizing, arguably, one of the two most polarizing figures of our time. I'll let you guess the other. His fans can be slavishly adoring. His critics can be blind with rage. But if there was one common thread among the more critical takes on Isaacson's biography, it was a demand for more judgment or at least analysis from Isaacson. What was the ultimate meaning in all these stories he'd gathered, these hours at Musk's side? Were we supposed to believe that he was some kind of tortured genius?

I'm here to be as straightforward as I can, with the reader in mind, to tell you stories that I think are very revealing, somewhat exciting, somewhat appalling, but always informative. And in face of the criticism that, well, maybe I didn't render too much judgment, I tried pretty hard to pull back a bit. You can kind of tell what I think by the way I'm telling this story, but I'm not going to hammer that into you. You should wrestle with each of these things and figure out how it fits with your own vision of life.

From the new podcast On Musk with Walter Isaacson , a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeart , available wherever podcasts are .

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Inside the Mind of Elon Musk: What We Learned From His Biography

Walter isaacson’s 688-page book reveals the (strange) man behind the tech mogul.

Tim Appelo,

Billionaire Elon Musk, 52, let Walter Isaacson, 71, bestselling biographer of Steve Jobs, follow him for two years and interview his family and colleagues. The resulting book, Elon Musk (September 12), provides fascinating insights into the mogul’s weird mind, titanic achievements and astounding failures.

Yes, he grew Tesla into a company worth more than its five biggest rivals put together; built a spacecraft company, SpaceX, that sent astronauts into orbit; and bought Twitter — which he famously renamed X and is a huge force in American politics and culture.

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But there’s so much more to those stories, and Musk’s life, which Isaacson details in this weighty, 688-page portrait.

Here are some of the more interesting points from the buzzy biography.

Musk was bullied as a child

While Musk was growing up in his native South Africa, a schoolyard bully stomped on his head, leading to injuries that required decades of corrective surgery. The worst part? His father, Errol Musk, sided with his assailant, berating Elon for an hour. “He yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless,” Musk reports.

But at age 12, Musk learned an important lesson at a wilderness survival camp: "If someone bullied me, I could punch them very hard in the nose, and then they wouldn’t bully me again.”

Musk’s dad was probably the scariest person in his life

Musk compares his father — whom he refuses to speak with — to Jekyll and Hyde: bright and jolly one moment, darkly frightening the next. He says that Errol spins fantasies he seems to believe, embraces bizarre conspiracy theories, has made and lost fortunes, is addicted to high drama and has a peculiar love life. Musk’s mother, the model Maye Musk , 75, fears that her son will become like his father.

He may be on the autism spectrum

“He was never actually diagnosed as a kid,” Maye Musk told Isaacson, “but he says he has Asperger’s, and I’m sure he’s right.” (The term Asperger’s, which once was used to describe someone with autism spectrum disorder who has strong intellectual abilities, is no longer used by the autism community .) He does seem to display some characteristics associated with autism spectrum disorders; the book suggests that he is bad at picking up social cues, for instance. And he said, “It was only by reading books that I began to learn that people did not always say what they really meant.”

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He's got a very dark side

“He’s attracted to chaotic evil,” said the singer Grimes, Musk’s former partner. She told Isaacson, “He associates love with being mean or abusive.” Musk demanded, for example, that she shame him for being fat. Grimes says that when he goes into “demon mode,” he “goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain. Demon mode causes a lot of chaos. But it also gets shit done.”

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He chose unique names for many of his 10 children

​​With his first wife, Justine Wilson Musk, he has five children: Vivian Jenna, Griffin, Kai, Saxon and Damian.

​With Grimes’ friend Shivon Zilis, an executive at his company Neurolink, he has two more kids, Strider and Azure.

He had no children with the actress Talulah Riley, who married and divorced him twice.

Estrangement from his child Jenna helped downsize his lifestyle

Jenna, who has criticized her father’s wealth, has stopped talking to him. Stung by her rejection and criticism, Musk sold his six extravagant homes and moved to a small tract house rented from SpaceX in Boca Chica, Texas. "Possessions kind of weigh you down and they’re an attack vector,” he explains.

He wasn’t exactly happy in 2021 when he became the richest person on earth

When Tesla stock went from $25 a share in late 2019 to $260 on Jan. 7, 2021, Musk's wealth hit $190 billion, surpassing the fortune of the previous richest human, Jeff Bezos, 59. “He just couldn’t let himself enjoy the moment,” Musk's sister-in-law Christiana Musk told Isaacson. “He was throwing up and stricken with excruciating stomach pain.”

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He falls to the floor when he's depressed — or extremely amused

When Musk is too depressed to stand up, his executives have to conduct meetings lying down next to him. And when he discovered that Twitter banned the word “turdburger,” he laughed so hard he fell to the floor, wheezing.

Musk likes to play with fire

When forbidden to play with fire as a child, Musk lit a boxful of matches. He once floored his $1 million McLaren sports car, flipping it and flying into the air, risking death for himself and passenger Peter Thiel, 55, another billionaire entrepreneur, who refused to wear a seatbelt. Both survived unscathed. Amber Heard, the actress whose marriage with Johnny Depp sparked lawsuits and whose affair with Musk was also fiery, told Isaacson, “Elon loves fire, and sometimes it burns him.” 

His impulsive actions are sometimes bad for business

After Musk loaned Ukraine communications satellites to help resist Russia’s invasion, the Pentagon offered $145 million to support his effort, but there was backlash on Twitter. So he angrily tweeted, "The hell with it ... we'll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free." When he abruptly unplugged Twitter’s computer servers and sent them from California to Oregon, it destabilized Twitter for two months and caused a meltdown while he was hosting a Twitter Spaces event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

He has regrets. Or does he ?

“My main regret,” Musk told sister-in-law Christiana Musk, “is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.” But when Isaacson asked him about regrets, Musk quoted a line from his favorite movie, Gladiator : “Are you not entertained?”

Tim Appelo covers entertainment and is the film and TV critic for AARP. Previously, he was the entertainment editor at Amazon, video critic at  Entertainment Weekly , and a critic and writer for  The Hollywood Reporter, People , MTV,  The Village Voice  and  LA Weekly .

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Tech’s Enduring Great-Man Myth

• Amanda Schaffer archive page

Since Steve Jobs’s death, in 2011, Elon Musk has emerged as the leading celebrity of Silicon Valley. Musk is the CEO of Tesla Motors, which produces electric cars; the CEO of SpaceX, which makes rockets; and the chairman of SolarCity, which provides solar power systems. A self-made billionaire, programmer, and engineer—as well as an inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies—he has been on the cover of Fortune and Time . In 2013, he was first on the Atlantic’s list of “ today’s greatest inventors ,” nominated by leaders at Yahoo, Oracle, and Google. To believers, Musk is steering the history of technology. As one profile described his mystique, his “brilliance, his vision, and the breadth of his ambition make him the one-man embodiment of the future .”

Musk’s companies have the potential to change their sectors in fundamental ways. Still, the stories around these advances—and around Musk’s role, in particular—can feel strangely outmoded.

The idea of “great men” as engines of change grew popular in the 19th century. In 1840, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote that “the history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the history of the Great Men who have worked here.” It wasn’t long, however, before critics questioned this one–dimensional view, arguing that historical change is driven by a complex mix of trends and not by any one person’s achievements. “All of those changes of which he is the proximate initiator have their chief causes in the generations he descended from,” Herbert Spencer wrote in 1873 . And today, most historians of science and technology do not believe that major innovation is driven by “a lone inventor who relies only on his own imagination, drive, and intellect,” says Daniel Kevles, a historian at Yale. Scholars are “eager to identify and give due credit to significant people but also recognize that they are operating in a context which enables the work.” In other words, great leaders rely on the resources and opportunities available to them, which means they do not shape history as much as they are molded by the moments in which they live.

Musk insists on a success story that fails to acknowledge the importance of support from the government.

Musk’s success would not have been possible without, among other things, government funding for basic research and subsidies for electric cars and solar panels. Above all, he has benefited from a long series of innovations in batteries, solar cells, and space travel. He no more produced the technological landscape in which he operates than the Russians created the harsh winter that allowed them to vanquish Napoleon. Yet in the press and among venture capitalists, the great-man model of Musk persists, with headlines citing, for instance, “His Plan to Change the Way the World Uses Energy” and his own claim of “changing history.”

The problem with such portrayals is not merely that they are inaccurate and unfair to the many contributors to new technologies. By warping the popular understanding of how technologies develop, great-man myths threaten to undermine the structure that is actually necessary for future innovations.

Space cowboy

Elon Musk , the best-selling biography by business writer Ashlee Vance, describes Musk’s personal and professional trajectory—and seeks to explain how, exactly, the man’s repeated “willingness to tackle impossible things” has “turned him into a deity in Silicon Valley.”

Born in South Africa in 1971, Musk moved to Canada at age 17; he took a job cleaning the boiler room of a lumber mill and then talked his way into an internship at a bank by cold-calling a top executive. After studying physics and economics in Canada and at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, he enrolled in a PhD program at Stanford but opted out after a couple of days. Instead, in 1995, he cofounded a company called Zip2, which provided an online map of businesses—“a primitive Google maps meets Yelp,” as Vance puts it. Although he was not the most polished coder, Musk worked around the clock and slept “on a beanbag next to his desk.” This drive is “what the VCs saw—that he was willing to stake his existence on building out this platform,” an early employee told Vance. After Compaq bought Zip2, in 1999, Musk helped found an online financial services company that eventually became PayPal. This was when he “began to hone his trademark style of entering an ultracomplex business and not letting the fact that he knew very little about the industry’s nuances bother him,” Vance writes.

When eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion, in 2002, Musk emerged with the wherewithal to pursue two passions he believed could change the world. He founded SpaceX with the goal of building cheaper rockets that would facilitate research and space travel. Investing over $100 million of his personal fortune, he hired engineers with aeronautics experience, built a factory in Los Angeles, and began to oversee test launches from a remote island between Hawaii and Guam. At the same time, Musk cofounded Tesla Motors to develop battery technology and electric cars. Over the years, he cultivated a media persona that was “part playboy, part space cowboy,” Vance writes.

Musk sells himself as a singular mover of mountains and does not like to share credit for his success. At SpaceX, in particular, the engineers “flew into a collective rage every time they caught Musk in the press claiming to have designed the Falcon rocket more or less by himself,” Vance writes, referring to one of the company’s early models. In fact, Musk depends heavily on people with more technical expertise in rockets and cars, more experience with aeronautics and energy, and perhaps more social grace in managing an organization. Those who survive under Musk tend to be workhorses willing to forgo public acclaim. At SpaceX, there is Gwynne Shotwell, the company president, who manages operations and oversees complex negotiations. At Tesla, there is JB Straubel , the chief technology officer, responsible for major technical advances. Shotwell and Straubel are among “the steady hands that will forever be expected to stay in the shadows,” writes Vance. (Martin Eberhard, one of the founders of Tesla and its first CEO, arguably contributed far more to its engineering achievements. He had a bitter feud with Musk and left the company years ago.)

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By Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster, 2011

Musk’s companies also rely on public-sector support and good timing, a reality that Musk tries to obscure. When he bristles at NASA’s rules or fails to acknowledge SpaceX’s interdependence with the agency, he can seem delusional: “SpaceX is surfing on years and years of government-funded technology and public-sector support,” as Mariana Mazzucato, an economist at the University of Sussex and author of The Entrepreneurial State , points out.

In 2008, after three failed tries, SpaceX launched its first rocket—enough to earn it a $1.6 billion contract from NASA for flights to the International Space Station. Years later, most of the company’s work and plans involve flights to the ISS, which itself exists only as the result of public investment. The core technology of space travel depends heavily on NASA-funded work. This is not to negate the company’s innovations—in particular, lowering the cost of rocket launches and perhaps fanning visions of space exploration cheap enough for non-billionaires. But SpaceX is not driving the future of space exploration. It is capitalizing on a deep pool of technology and highly trained people that already existed, and it is doing so at a moment when national support for NASA has diminished and the government is privatizing key aspects of space travel.

We should determine technological priorities without giving excessive weight to the visions of a few tech celebrities.

Likewise, Musk’s success at Tesla is undergirded by public-sector investment and political support for clean tech. For starters, Tesla relies on lithium-ion batteries pioneered in the late 1980s with major funding from the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation. Tesla has benefited significantly from guaranteed loans and state and federal subsidies. In 2010, the company reached a loan agreement with the Department of Energy worth $465 million. (Under this arrangement, Tesla agreed to produce battery packs that other companies could benefit from and promised to manufacture electric cars in the United States.) In addition, Tesla has received $1.29 billion in tax incentives from Nevada, where it is building a “gigafactory” to produce batteries for cars and consumers. It has won an array of other loans and tax credits, plus rebates for its consumers, totaling another $1 billion, according to a recent series by the Los Angeles Times .

It is striking, then, that Musk insists on a success story that fails to acknowledge the importance of public-sector support. (He called the L.A. Times series “misleading and deceptive,” for instance, and told CNBC that “ none of the government subsidies are necessary ,” though he did admit they are “helpful.”)

If Musk’s unwillingness to look beyond himself sounds familiar, Steve Jobs provides a recent antecedent. Like Musk, who obsessed over Tesla cars’ door handles and touch screens and the layout of the SpaceX factory, Jobs brought a fierce intensity to product design, even if he did not envision the key features of the Mac, the iPod, or the iPhone. An accurate version of Apple’s story would give more acknowledgment not only to the work of other individuals, from designer Jonathan Ive on down, but also to the specific historical context in which Apple’s innovation occurred. “There is not a single key technology behind the iPhone that has not been state funded,” says economist Mazzucato. This includes the wireless networks, “the Internet, GPS, a touch-screen display, and … the voice-activated personal assistant Siri.” Apple has recombined these technologies impressively. But its achievements rest on many years of public-sector investment. To put it another way, do we really think that if Jobs and Musk had never come along, there would have been no smartphone revolution, no surge of interest in electric vehicles?

This matters because the great-man narrative carries costs. First, it has helped to corrode the culture of Silicon Valley. Great-man lore helps excuse (or enable) some truly terrible behavior. Musk is known, after all, for humiliating engineers and firing employees on a whim. In 2014, when his assistant, who had devoted her life to Tesla and SpaceX for 12 years, asked for a raise, he summarily let her go. Nor can Musk’s rough edges be justified as good for business. Rather, they have the potential to jeopardize crucial relationships with government agencies, according to a former official interviewed by Vance: Musk’s “biggest enemy will be himself and the way he treats people.” Similarly, Jobs was known for entitled behavior and brutishness to employees. Yet as Walter Isaacson has written in his biography, Steve Jobs : “ Nasty was not necessary . It hindered him more than it helped him.” If Silicon Valley, with its well-documented problems with diversity, is to attract a broader pool of talented people, encouraging more supportive managerial practices and telling more inclusive stories about who matters would surely help.

Hero myths like the ones surrounding Musk and Jobs are damaging in other ways, too. If tech leaders are seen primarily as singular, lone achievers, it is easier for them to extract disproportionate wealth. It is also harder to get their companies to accept that they should return some of their profits to agencies like NASA and the National Science Foundation through higher taxes or simply less tax dodging .

And finally, technology hero worship tends to distort our visions of the future. Why should governments do the hard work of fixing and expanding California’s mass transit system when Musk says we could zip people across the state at 760 miles per hour in a “ hyperloop ”? Is trying to colonize Mars, at a cost in the billions of dollars, actually the right direction for future space exploration and scientific research? We should be able to determine long-term technology priorities without giving excessive weight to the particular visions of a few tech celebrities.

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The big Elon Musk biography asks all the wrong questions

In Walter Isaacson’s buzzy new biography, Elon Musk emerges as a callous, chaos-loving man without empathy.

by Constance Grady

There’s a recurring phrase in Walter Isaacson’s new biography Elon Musk . Certain things, Isaacson writes again and again in his dense and thoroughly reported book, are simply “in Musk’s nature,” while others are “not in his nature.” This is a book in which Elon Musk — the richest man in history and surely one of the most infuriating, too — is driven by an immovable internal essence that no one can alter, least of all Musk himself.

Things that are in Musk’s nature according to Isaacson: the desire for total control; obsession; resistance to rules and regulations; insensitivity; a love of drama and chaos and urgency.

Things that are not in Musk’s nature according to Isaacson: deference; empathy; restraint; the ability to collaborate; the instinct to think about how the things he says impact the people around him; doting on his children; vacations.

“He didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked. He was not hardwired to have empathy,” Isaacson writes. “Or, to put it in less technical terms, he could be an asshole.”

The great question of Isaacson’s book is more or less the same question he posed in his 2011 biography of Steve Jobs : Is the innovation worth the assholery? Can we excuse Jobs’s cruelty to his partner Steve Wozniak because we have the iPhone? Can we excuse Musks’s many sins — his capricious firings, his callousness, his willingness to move fast and break things even when the things that get broken are human lives — because after all, he opened up the electric car market and reinvigorated the possibility for American space travel? Is it okay that Musk is an asshole if he’s also accomplishing big things?

“Would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound?” Isaacson muses in the final sentences of the book. “Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training.”

A hundred pages earlier, Isaacson depicted the man he describes as “resisting potty training” personally making the call that Ukraine should cede Crimea to Russia and on those grounds declining to extend satellite services to the Ukrainian military in the disputed territory.

“Risk of WW3 becomes very high,” Musk explained in a private exchange with Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov.

“We look through the eyes of Ukrainians,” Fedorov responded, “and you from the position of a person who wants to save humanity. And not just wants, but does more than anybody else for this.”

The risk-seeking man-child has amassed the power to have world leaders fawn over his unilateral judgment.

Isaacson portrays Musk as someone who loves chaos and has no empathy

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971. His mother was a model who spent most of her time at work; his father was an engineer and a wheeler-dealer with a violent temper. They sent Elon to nursery school when he was 3 because he seemed intelligent.

Musk was not, however, socially gifted. Isolated and friendless, he was prone to calling his peers stupid, at which point they would beat him up. He took refuge reading his father’s encyclopedia, plus comic books and science fiction novels about single-minded heroes who saved mankind.

For Isaacson, all this is the kind of foreshadowing biographers dream of. Most foreboding is the existence of Musk’s father, Errol, who Isaacson describes as having a “Jekyll and Hyde personality” that mirrors Musk’s own.

“One minute he would be super friendly,” says Elon’s brother Kimbal of Errol, “and the next he would be screaming at you, lecturing you for hours — literally two or three hours while he forced you to just stand there — calling you worthless, pathetic, making scarring and evil comments, not allowing you to leave.”

From Errol, Isaacson intimates, Musk inherited his explosive temper and fondness for dismissing anything that displeases him as stupid. He also learned to crave crisis, to the point that decades later, as CEO of six companies, he would develop a practice of arbitrarily picking one of those companies to send into panic mode. A rule he makes his executives intone like a religious litany is to “work with a maniacal sense of urgency.”

Another one of Musk’s rules is that empathy is not an asset, largely because he himself claims not to experience it. For Isaacson, this is one of the other foundations of Musk’s character, part of that unchangeable nature that was created by the mingled forces of Musk’s traumatic childhood and his neurodivergence. The lack of empathy, he argues, is hardwired in, probably due to the condition Musk describes as Asperger’s. (Asperger’s syndrome is a form of autism spectrum disorder that is no longer an official diagnosis . Musk is self-diagnosed.)

Studies suggest that people with autism actually experience just as much affective empathy as neurotypical people , but that is not a possibility either Musk or Isaacson ever discuss. For the narrative of this book, Musk’s callousness must be something beyond his control, one of the fundamental differences that sets him apart from the kinder, smaller people who make up the rest of the human race.

Musk goes through companies as rapidly as he goes through women

After high school, Musk fled: first to Canada, where his mother was born, and next to America. Over two years at Queen’s University and two at Penn, he earned a dual degree: in physics, so he could work as an engineer with an understanding of the fundamentals, and in business, so he would never have to work for anyone but himself. Upon graduating, he turned down a spot at Stanford’s PhD program to start his first business, an early online business directory called Zip2.

At Zip2, we see the beginnings of Musk’s maniacal work ethic take hold — that, and his inability to work well with others. He and his brother Kimbal sleep on futons in their office and shower at the Y down the street. When new engineers come in, Musk devotes extra time to “fixing their stupid fucking code.” He and Kimbal get into physical knockdown fights in the office; once, Musk has to go to the hospital for a tetanus shot after Kimbal bites him. They sell the company after two years for $300 million.

Zip2 establishes the pattern that will follow Musk throughout his professional career. He works exceptionally long hours, frequently camping out in his office, and he rages at anyone who does not. He tends to dismiss all his collaborators as stupid and will get into furious fights with them (albeit mostly not physical). He will end up having alienated a lot of people, created a pretty interesting product, and made a hell of a lot of money.

From Zip2, Musk moved on to X.com, an early online banking company. Musk had grand plans of using X.com to reinvent banking writ large, but he was pushed out when X merged with PayPal to develop a product he saw, disgustedly, as niche.

Licking his wounds, Musk decided that he would focus his energies only on companies that were truly changing the world. To make humankind an interplanetary species, in 2001 he founded SpaceX, with a mission of bringing humans to Mars. To help stave off the worst of climate change, in 2003 he brought together a group of engineers working on the electric car to amp up the fledgling company that was Tesla.

As Isaacson is always noting, it was not in Musk’s nature to give up control. After briefly experimenting with having other CEOs, he took personal control of both SpaceX and Tesla. Today, he’s CEO of six companies. In addition to Tesla and SpaceX, he’s got the Boring Company (for tunnels), Neuralink (for technology that can interface between human brains and machines), X (formerly known as Twitter), and X.AI, an artificial intelligence company he founded earlier this year. Musk goes through companies fast.

He also goes through women. Isaacson chronicles the four major romantic relationships of Musk’s adult life with a shamelessly misogynistic binary. All Musk’s girlfriends in this book are either devils or angels, and accordingly they bring out either the devil or angel in Musk’s uncontrollable nature.

His college girlfriend and first wife, fantasy novelist Justine Wilson, is one of the devils: “She has no redeeming features,” insists Musk’s mother. Per Isaacson, she thrives on drama and brings out Musk’s control freak side. He pushes her to dye her hair platinum blonde and act the part of the new millionaire’s trophy wife. “I am the alpha in this relationship,” he whispers into her ear as they dance on their wedding night.

Musk’s second wife, the English actress Talulah Riley, is meanwhile an angel. She dotes on Musk’s children with Justine, tells the press she sees it as her job to keep Musk from going “king-crazy,” and throws him elaborate theatrical parties. “If he had liked stability more than storm and drama,” Isaacson writes, “she would have been perfect for him.”

It goes on like that. Actress Amber Heard, who Musk dates for a tumultuous year after divorcing Riley, is a devil who “drew him into a dark vortex.” Musician Grimes, with whom he has three children, is an angel, “chaotic good” to Heard’s “chaotic evil.” (Musk repays her chaotic goodness by secretly fathering more children with one of Neuralink’s executives, a friend of Grimes’s, at the same time that he and Grimes are working with a surrogate to have their second child.) The idea that it might be Musk’s responsibility to control his nature, rather than the responsibility of his romantic partners, appears nowhere in this book.

The book’s big problem is that it ignores systemic problems for individual

In 2018, Musk became the richest man in the world and Time’s Person of the Year. From there he spiraled. His political views veered sharply to the right wing and paranoid. His tweets got weirder. Then he outright bought Twitter and commenced polarizing an already polarized user base. He’s still making the rockets that supply the International Space Station and he’s still building the most successful electric car in the world, but his reputation has taken a palpable hit.

In Isaacson’s narrative, Musk’s social downfall is part of his Shakespearean hubris, the tragic flaw that drives him to continually inflict pain on himself: the lack of empathy coupled with the craving for excitement; the genuine intelligence matched by over-the-top arrogance. It drives him to achieve great things and to mess up badly.

For Isaacson, this binary illustrates why Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was destined for trouble. “He thought of it as a technology company” within his realm of expertise, Isaacson writes, and didn’t understand that it was “an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships,” and thus well outside his lane. What does the man who doesn’t believe in empathy know about connecting human beings to one another? But how could the man who needs chaos to function resist the internet’s most visibly chaotic platform?

That’s a genuine insight, but by and large, Isaacson’s focus in this book is not on analysis. Elon Musk is strictly a book of reportage, based on the two years Isaacson spent shadowing Musk and the scores of interviews he did with Musk’s associates. His reporting is rigorous and dogged; you can see the sweat on the pages. If his prose occasionally clunks (Isaacson cites the “feverish fervor” of Musk’s fans and critics), that’s not really the point of this kind of book. Instead, Isaacson’s great weakness shows itself in his blind spots, in the places where he declines to train his dutiful reporter’s eye.

Isaacson spends a significant amount of page time covering one of Musk’s signature moves: ignoring the rules. Part of the “algorithm” he makes his engineers run on every project involves finding the specific person who wrote each regulation they slam up against as they build and then interrogating the person as to what the regulation is supposed to do. All regulations are believed by default to be “dumb,” and Musk does not accept “safety” as a reason for a regulation to exist.

At one point, Isaacson describes Musk becoming enraged when, working on the Tesla Model S, he finds a government-mandated warning about child airbag safety on the passenger-side visor. “Get rid of them,” he demands. “People aren’t stupid. These stickers are stupid.” Tesla faces recall notices because of the change, Isaacson reports, but Musk “didn’t back down.”

What Isaacson doesn’t mention is that Musk consistently ignores safety regulations whenever they clash with his own aesthetic sense, to consistently dangerous results.

According to a 2018 investigation from the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal , Musk demanded Tesla factories minimize the auto industry standard practice of painting hazard zones yellow and indicating caution with signs and beeps and flashing lights, on the grounds he doesn’t particularly care for any of those things. As a result, Tesla factories mostly distinguish caution zones from other zones with different shades of gray.

Isaacson does report that Musk removed safety sensors from the Tesla production lines because he thought they were slowing down the work, and that his managers worried that his process was unsafe. “There was some truth to the complaints,” Isaacson allows. “Tesla’s injury rate was 30 percent higher than the rest of the industry.” He does not report that Tesla’s injury rate is in fact on par with the injury rate at slaughterhouses, or that it apparently cooked its books to cover up its high injury rate .

Isaacson is vague about exactly what kind of injuries occur in the factories Musk runs. Nowhere does he mention anything along the lines of what Reveal reports as Tesla workers “sliced by machinery, crushed by forklifts, burned in electrical explosions, and sprayed with molten metal.” He notes that Musk violated public safety orders to keep Tesla factories open after the Covid-19 lockdown had begun, but claims that “the factory experienced no serious Covid outbreak.” In fact, the factory Musk illegally opened would report 450 positive Covid cases .

No one can accuse the biographer who frankly admits that his subject is an asshole of ignoring his flaws. Yet Isaacson does regularly ignore the moments at which Musk’s flaws scale . He has no interest in the many, many times when Musk did something mavericky and counterintuitive and, because of his power and wealth and platform and reach, it ended up hurting a whole lot of people.

Instead, Isaacson seems most interested in Musk’s cruelty when it’s confined to the level of the individual. He likes the drama of Musk telling his cousin that his solar roof prototype is “total fucking shit” and then pushing him out of the company, or of Musk scrambling to fire Twitter’s executive team before they can resign so he doesn’t have to pay out their severance packages. Those are the moments of this book with real juice to them.

Ultimately, it’s this blind spot that prevents Isaacson from fully exploring the question at the core of Elon Musk : Is Elon Musk’s cruelty worth it since he’s creating technology that might change the world? Because Isaacson is only interested in Musk’s cruelty when it’s personal, in this book, that question looks like: If SpaceX ends up taking us all to Mars and saving humanity, will it matter that Musk was really mean to his cousin?

Widen the scope, and the whole thing becomes much more interesting and urgent. If Elon Musk consistently endangers the people who work for him and the people who buy his products and the people who stand in his way, does it matter if he thinks he’s saving the human race?

Isaacson compares Musk to a “man-child who resists potty-training.” If we look closely at the amount of damage he is positioned to do, how comfortable are we with the power Elon Musk currently has?

Correction, September 15, 11:30 am: A previous version of this story misstated a university Musk attended. It is Queen’s University.

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Who Is Elon Musk?

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Elon Musk, born in Pretoria, South Africa, is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time. Musk has achieved global fame as the chief executive officer (CEO) of electric automobile maker Tesla ( TSLA ) and the private space company SpaceX. Musk was an early investor in several tech companies, and in October 2022, he completed a deal to take X (formerly Twitter) private.

His success and personal style have given rise to comparisons to other colorful tycoons from U.S. history, including Steve Jobs , Howard Hughes, and Henry Ford . He was named the richest person in the world in 2021, surpassing Amazon ( AMZN ) founder Jeff Bezos. However, as of June 22, 2024, Bezos has regained the title of richest man on Earth, making Musk the second richest man.

Let’s look briefly at the life of the man who has scaled the pinnacle of the business world.

Key Takeaways

• Elon Musk is the charismatic CEO of electric car maker Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX.
• Following a contested process, Musk completed a deal to buy the company behind X in October 2022, becoming the owner of the social media company.
• Born and raised in South Africa, Musk spent time in Canada before moving to the United States.
• Educated at the University of Pennsylvania in physics and business, Musk started getting his feet wet as a serial tech entrepreneur with early successes like Zip2 and X.com, which merged with a company that became PayPal.
• Musk has behaved eccentrically from time to time.

Bailey Mariner / Investopedia

Elon Reeve Musk was born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, the oldest of three children. His father was a South African engineer, and his mother was a Canadian model and nutritionist. After his parents divorced in 1980, Musk lived primarily with his father. He would later dub his father “a terrible human being...almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done."

“I had a terrible upbringing. I had a lot of adversity growing up. One thing I worry about with my kids is they don’t face enough adversity,” Musk would later say.

Bullied as a Child

Musk attended the private, English-speaking Waterkloof House Preparatory School—he started a year early—and later graduated from Pretoria Boys High School. A self-described bookworm, he made few friends in those places.

“They got my best (expletive) friend to lure me out of hiding so they could beat me up. And that (expletive) hurt,” Musk said. “For some reason, they decided that I was it, and they were going to go after me nonstop. That’s what made growing up difficult. For a number of years, there was no respite. You get chased around by gangs at school who tried to beat the (expletive) out of me, and then I’d come home, and it would just be awful there as well.”

Early Accomplishments

Technology became an escape for Musk. At 10, he became acquainted with programming using a Commodore VIC-20, an early and relatively inexpensive home computer. Before long, Musk had become proficient enough to create Blastar—a video game in the style of Space Invaders. He sold the BASIC code for the game to a PC magazine for $500.

In one telling incident from his childhood, Musk and his brother planned to open a video game arcade near their school. Their parents nixed the plan.

Musk’s College Years

At 17, Musk moved to Canada. He would later obtain Canadian citizenship through his mother.

After emigrating to Canada, Musk enrolled at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It was there that he met Justine Wilson, an aspiring writer. They would marry and have six sons together, a first son which died shortly after birth, twins, and then triplets, before divorcing in 2008.

Entering the U.S.

After two years at Queen’s University, Musk transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. He took on two majors, but his time there wasn’t all work and no play. With a fellow student, he bought a 10-bedroom fraternity house, which they used as an ad hoc nightclub.

Musk graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics and a second bachelor's degree in economics from the  Wharton School . The two majors foreshadowed Musk’s career, but it was physics that left the deepest impression.

“(Physics is) a good framework for thinking,” he would say later. “Boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there.”

Musk was 24 years old when he moved to California to pursue a Ph.D. in applied physics at Stanford University. But, with the Internet exploding and Silicon Valley booming, Musk had entrepreneurial visions dancing in his head. He left the Ph.D. program after just two days.

In 1995, with $15,000 and his younger brother Kimbal at his side, Musk started Zip2, a web software company that would help newspapers develop online city guides.

In 1999, Zip2 was acquired by Compaq Computer Corporation for $307 million in cash and $34 million worth of stock options. Musk used his Zip2 buyout money to create X.com, a fintech venture before that term was in wide circulation.

X.com merged with a money transfer firm called Confinity, and the resulting company came to be known as PayPal. Peter Thiel ousted Musk as PayPal CEO before eBay ( EBAY ) bought the payments company for $1.5 billion, but Musk still profited from the buyout via his 11.7% PayPal stake.

“My proceeds from PayPal after tax were about $180 million,” Musk said in a 2018 interview. “$100 (million) of that went into SpaceX, $70 (million) into Tesla, and $10 (million) into SolarCity. And I literally had to borrow money for rent.”

In 2017, Musk purchased the X.com domain name back from PayPal, citing its sentimental value.

Musk became involved with the electric cars venture as an early investor in 2004, ultimately contributing about $6.3 million, to begin with, and joined the team, including engineer Martin Eberhard, to help run a company then known as Tesla Motors. Following a series of disagreements, Eberhard was ousted in 2007, and an interim CEO was hired until Musk assumed control as CEO and product architect. Under his watch, Tesla has become the world’s most valuable automaker.

In addition to producing electric vehicles, Tesla maintains a robust presence in the solar energy space, thanks to its acquisition of SolarCity. The company currently produces rechargeable solar batteries and other solar power equipment. The Powerwall is a battery developed for home backup power. Tesla also produces commercial energy infrastructure including grid management programs.

Musk used most of the proceeds from his PayPal stake to found Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the rocket's developer commonly known as SpaceX. By his own account, Musk spent $100 million to found SpaceX in 2002 .

Under Musk’s leadership, SpaceX landed several high-profile contracts with the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Air Force to design space launch rockets. Musk has publicized plans to send an astronaut to Mars by 2025 in a collaborative effort with NASA.

The company was founded in March 2006 as Twitter by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams. Originally a private company, it went public in November 2013. It raised $1.8 billion through its initial public offering (IPO) .

Musk joined the site in June 2009. A frequent poster on the messaging network, Musk disclosed a 9.2% stake in Twitter in March 2022. The company responded by offering Musk a seat on the board, which he accepted before declining days later. Musk then sent a bear hug letter to the board proposing to buy the company at $54.20 per share.

The company’s board adopted a poison pill provision to discourage Musk from accumulating an even larger stake, but they ultimately accepted Musk’s offer after he disclosed $46.5 billion in committed financing for the deal in a securities filing.

In July 2022, Musk attempted to cancel the deal , arguing that X had failed to provide certain information regarding fake accounts. The company sued Musk to require him to complete the deal.

After months of legal wrangling, the billionaire’s plan to buy the social media platform came to fruition, and Musk took control of the company on October 28, 2022. The company was renamed X the following year.

During his May 8, 2021, appearance on the TV show Saturday Night Live , Musk revealed that he has Asperger’s syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. “I’m actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger’s to host SNL . Or at least the first to admit it,” he said. How does the neurodevelopment condition manifest itself? “I don’t always have a lot of intonation or variation in how I speak, which I’m told makes for great comedy,” Musk explained.

On September 7, 2018, Musk smoked cannabis during a filmed interview for The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.

Just a month earlier, Musk posted an infamous tweet claiming he was considering taking Tesla private and had secured the needed funding. Musk subsequently settled a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint alleging he knowingly misled investors with the tweet by paying a $20 million fine along with the same penalty for Tesla and agreeing to let Tesla’s lawyers approve tweets with material corporate information before posting.

In March 2022, Musk filed a court motion to overturn the consent decree stemming from that case. In April 2022 during a live TED Talk, Musk called the SEC regulators on the case “bastards.”

Is Elon Musk Married?

Elon Musk has been divorced three times—twice from his second wife, Talulah Riley. From 2018 to 2022, he was in a relationship with Canadian singer/songwriter Claire Elise Boucher, professionally known as Grimes, with whom he had a son in 2020, a daughter in 2022, and a third child revealed in 2023. They remain best friends. He also has six boys (five living, one died after birth) from his first marriage to Justine Musk. He also shares twins with Shivon Zilis. Musk has a total of 11 children.

How Rich Is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk’s net worth was estimated at $207 billion as of June 24, 2024, making him the second wealthiest person on the planet.

Was Elon Musk Born Rich?

No, Elon Musk was born into a middle-class family. In 1995, when he founded Zip2, he reportedly had more than $100,000 in student debt and struggled to pay rent.

What Does Elon Musk Do at Tesla?

Elon Musk is officially listed as the co-founder and chief executive officer of Tesla on the company’s website. In a 2021 securities filing, the company disclosed an additional Musk title as “Technoking of Tesla.”

What Companies Does Elon Musk Own?

Elon Musk is a large stakeholder in several companies, including Tesla, SpaceX, The Boring Co., Neuralink, and X Corp .

Musk’s early interests in philosophy, science fiction, and fantasy novels are reflected in his idealism and concern with human progress—and in his business career. He works in fields he has identified as crucial to humanity’s future, notably the transition to renewable energy sources, space exploration, and the Internet.

Musk has defied critics, disrupted industries, and made the most money anyone ever has from PayPal, Tesla Motors, SolarCity, and SpaceX—game changers all, despite the inevitable missteps.

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Elon Musk Biography

Birthday: June 28 , 1971 ( Cancer )

Born In: Pretoria, South Africa

Elon Musk is one of the greatest and most prolific modern inventors and is responsible for monumental advancements in futuristic technology like renewable energy and space travel. Many of his innovations seem to be right out of a science-fiction movie, but throughout his career he has brought about huge scientific breakthroughs. After making his first fortune from the internet payment service ‘PayPal’, he invested $100 million in his space travel company, ‘SpaceX’ and began building satellites, launch vehicles and other spacecraft both for NASA and for his own company, creating new milestones with his privately funded spacecraft. Many of his revolutionary ideas and inventions focus on space travel, renewable energy, commercial electric cars and other technologies, that look to a future where fossil fuels and other resources may be in shorter supply. His futuristic and visionary ideas have won him both scientific and philanthropic recognition and awards. The pop culture sometimes portrays him as a sort of real life super hero, dedicated to providing worldwide solutions to international problems. Musk looks to the future, hopes for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe and continues to plan far-reaching futuristic goals such a human colony on Mars. Scroll down to learn all about this illustrious personality.

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Girlfriend: Grimes (2018)

Also Known As: Elon Reeve Musk

Age: 53 Years , 53 Year Old Males

Spouse/Ex-: Justine Musk (m. 2000–2008), Talulah Riley (m. 2010–2012; m. 2013–2016)

father: Errol Musk

mother: Maye Haldeman

siblings: Kimbal Musk , Tosca Musk

children: Damian Musk, Griffin Musk, Kai Musk, Nevada Alexander Musk (died), Saxon Musk, Xavier Musk

Born Country: South Africa

CEOs Automobile Industry

Ancestry: German American, South African American, South African Canadian

Personality: INTJ

City: Pretoria, South Africa

Founder/Co-Founder: PayPal, SpaceX, Zip2, X.com, Musk Foundation, Tesla Motors

education: University Of Pennsylvania

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What companies does elon musk own, what is elon musk's role at tesla, what is neuralink and what is elon musk's involvement with it, what is the hyperloop and how is elon musk associated with it, what are some notable achievements of spacex, founded by elon musk.

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Elon Musk was briefly in a relationship with American actress Amber Heard in 2016, but the couple split owing to their conflicting schedules.

Elon Musk started dating Canadian musician Grimes in 2018. In May 2020, Grimes gave birth to their son. In March 2021, Musk stated that he was single. In March 2022, Grimes revealed that they have broken up and she further stated that they welcomed a daughter through surrogacy in December 2021. 

In 2022, Insider, an American financial and business news website published court documents stating that Musk fathered twins with Shivon Zilis, the company's top executive, in November 2021. As of June 2022, Elon Musk has nine children with three different women.

See the events in life of Elon Musk in Chronological Order

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In 2021, Elon Musk became the world’s richest man (no woman came close), and Time named him Person of the Year: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen ’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.” Right about when Time was preparing that giddy announcement, three women whose ovaries and uteruses were involved in passing down the madcap man-god’s genes were in the maternity ward of a hospital in Austin. Musk believes a declining birth rate is a threat to civilization and, with his trademark tirelessness, is doing his visionary edgelord best to ward off that threat. Shivon Zilis, a thirty-five-year-old venture capitalist and executive at Musk’s company Neuralink, was pregnant with twins, conceived with Musk by in-vitro fertilization, and was experiencing complications. “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” Zilis said. In a nearby room, a woman serving as a surrogate for Musk and his thirty-three-year-old ex-wife, Claire Boucher, a musician better known as Grimes, was suffering from pregnancy complications, too, and Grimes was staying with her.

“I really wanted him to have a daughter so bad,” Grimes said. At the time, Musk had had seven sons, including, with Grimes, a child named X. Grimes did not know that Zilis, a friend of hers, was down the hall, or that Zilis was pregnant by Musk. Zilis’s twins were born seven weeks premature; the surrogate delivered safely a few weeks later. In mid-December, Grimes’s new baby came home and met her brother X. An hour later, Musk took X to New York and dandled him on his knee while being photographed for Time .

“He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable,” the magazine’s Person of the Year announcement read. Musk and Grimes called the baby, Musk’s tenth, Y, or sometimes “Why?,” or just “?”—a reference to Musk’s favorite book, Douglas Adams’s “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ,” because, Grimes explained, it’s a book about how knowing the question is more important than knowing the answer.

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

Elon Musk is currently at or near the helm of six companies: Tesla, SpaceX (which includes Starlink), the Boring Company, Neuralink, X (formerly known as Twitter), and X.AI, an artificial-intelligence company that he founded, earlier this year, because he believes that human intelligence isn’t reproducing fast enough, while artificial intelligence is getting more artificially intelligent exponentially. Call it Musk’s Law: the answer to killer robots is more Musk babies. Plus, more Musk companies. “I can’t just sit around and do nothing,” Musk says, fretting about A.I., in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “ Elon Musk ” (Simon & Schuster), a book that can scarcely contain its subject, in that it raises infinitely more questions than it answers.

“Are you sincerely trying to save the world?” Stephen Colbert once asked Musk on “The Late Show.” “Well, I’m trying to do good things, yeah, saving the world is not, I mean . . . ,” Musk said, mumbling. “But you’re trying to do good things, and you’re a billionaire,” Colbert interrupted. “Yeah,” Musk said, nodding. Colbert said, “That seems a little like superhero or supervillain. You have to choose one.” Musk paused, his face blank. That was eight years, several companies, and as many children ago. Things have got a lot weirder since. More Lex Luthor, less Tony Stark.

Musk controls the very tiniest things, and the very biggest. He oversees companies, valued at more than a trillion dollars, whose engineers have built or are building, among other things, reusable rocket ships, a humanoid robot, hyperloops for rapid transit, and a man-machine interface to be implanted in human brains. He is an entrepreneur, a media mogul, a political provocateur, and, not least, a defense contractor: SpaceX has received not only billions of dollars in government contracts for space missions but also more than a hundred million dollars in military contracts for missile-tracking satellites, and Starlink’s network of four thousand satellites— which provides Pentagon-funded services to Ukraine —now offers a military service called Starshield. Day by day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure, and its energy supply.

And yet. At a jury trial earlier this year, Musk’s lawyer repeatedly referred to his client, a middle-aged man, as a “kid.” The Wall Street Journal has described him as suffering from “tantrums.” The Independent has alleged that selling Twitter to Musk was “like handing a toddler a loaded gun.”

“I’m not evil,” Musk said on “Saturday Night Live” a couple of years ago, playing the dastardly Nintendo villain Wario, on trial for murdering Mario. “I’m just misunderstood.” How does a biographer begin to write about such a man? Some years back, after Isaacson had published a biography of Benjamin Franklin and was known to be writing one of Albert Einstein, the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called him up and asked him to write his biography; Isaacson says he wondered, half jokingly, whether Jobs “saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.” I don’t think Musk sees himself as a natural successor to anyone. As I read it, Isaacson found much to like and admire in Jobs but is decidedly uncomfortable with Musk. (He calls him, at one point, “an asshole.”) Still, Isaacson’s descriptions of Jobs and Musk are often interchangeable. “His passions, perfectionism, demons, desires, artistry, devilry, and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business and the products that resulted.” (That’s Jobs.) “It was in his nature to want total control.” (Musk.) “He didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked.” (Musk.) “He was not a model boss or human being.” (Jobs.) “This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries.” I ask you: Which?

“Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training,” Isaacson concludes in the last lines of his life of Musk. “They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.” It’s a disconcerting thing to read on page 615 of a biography of a fifty-two-year-old man about whom a case could be made that he wields more power than any other person on the planet who isn’t in charge of a nuclear arsenal. Not potty-trained? Boys will be . . . toddlers?

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971. His grandfather J. N. Haldeman was a staunch anti-Communist from Canada who in the nineteen-thirties and forties had been a leader of the anti-democratic and quasi-fascist Technocracy movement. (Technocrats believed that scientists and engineers should rule.) “In 1950, he decided to move to South Africa,” Isaacson writes, “which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.” In fact, apartheid had been declared only in 1948, and the regime was soon recruiting white settlers from North America, promising restless men such as Haldeman that they could live like princes. Isaacson calls Haldeman’s politics “quirky.” In 1960, Haldeman self-published a tract, “The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship & the Menace to South Africa,” that blamed the two World Wars on the machinations of Jewish financiers.

Musk’s mother, Maye Haldeman, was a finalist for Miss South Africa during her tumultuous courtship with his father, Errol Musk, an engineer and an aviator. In 2019, she published a memoir titled “A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success.” For all that she writes about growing up in South Africa in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, she never once mentions apartheid.

Isaacson, in his account of Elon Musk’s childhood, barely mentions apartheid himself. He writes at length and with compassion about the indignities heaped upon young Elon by schoolmates. Elon, an awkward, lonely boy, was bored in school and had a tendency to call other kids “stupid”; he was also very often beaten up, and his father frequently berated him, but when he was ten, a few years after his parents divorced, he chose to live with him. (Musk is now estranged from his father, a conspiracist who has called Joe Biden a “pedophile President,” and who has two children by his own stepdaughter; he has said that “the only thing we are here for is to reproduce.” Recently, he warned Elon, in an e-mail, that “with no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees.”)

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Musk’s childhood sounds bad, but Isaacson’s telling leaves out rather a lot about the world in which Musk grew up. In the South Africa of “Elon Musk,” there are Musks and Haldemans—Elon and his younger brother and sister and his many cousins—and there are animals, including the elephants and monkeys who prove to be a nuisance at a construction project of Errol’s. There are no other people, and there are certainly no Black people, the nannies, cooks, gardeners, cleaners, and construction workers who built, for white South Africans, a fantasy world. And so, for instance, we don’t learn that in 1976, when Elon was four, some twenty thousand Black schoolchildren in Soweto staged a protest and heavily armed police killed as many as seven hundred. Instead, we’re told, “As a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk knew pain and learned how to survive it.”

Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:

And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.

Douglas Adams wrote “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” on a typewriter that had on its side a sticker that read “End Apartheid.” He wasn’t crafting an instruction manual for mega-rich luxury planet builders.

Biographers don’t generally have a will to power. Robert Caro is not Robert Moses and would seem to have very little in common with Lyndon the “B” is for “bastard” Johnson. Walter Isaacson is a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer. This year, he was presented with the National Humanities Medal. But, as a former editor of Time and a former C.E.O. of CNN and of the Aspen Institute, Isaacson also has an executive’s affinity for the C-suite, which would seem to make it a challenge to keep a certain distance from the world view of his subject. Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years and interviewed dozens of people, but they tend to have titles like C.E.O., C.F.O., president, V.P., and founder. The book upholds a core conviction of many executives: sometimes to get shit done you have to be a dick. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable . For the rest of us, Musk’s pettiness, arrogance, and swaggering viciousness are harder to take, and their necessity less clear.

Isaacson is interested in how innovation happens. In addition to biographies of Franklin, Einstein, Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci , he has also written about figures in the digital revolution and in gene editing. Isaacson puts innovation first: This man might be a monster, but look at what he built! Whereas Mary Shelley, for instance, put innovation second: The man who built this is a monster! The political theorist Judith Shklar once wrote an essay called “ Putting Cruelty First .” Montaigne put cruelty first, identifying it as the worst thing people do; Machiavelli did not. As for “the usual excuse for our most unspeakable public acts,” the excuse “that they are necessary,” Shklar knew this to be nonsense. “Much of what passed under these names was merely princely wilfulness,” as Shklar put it. This is always the problem with princes.

Elon Musk started college at the University of Pretoria but left South Africa in 1989, at seventeen. He went first to Canada and, after two years at Queen’s University in Ontario, transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and economics, and wrote a senior paper titled “The Importance of Being Solar.” He had done internships in Silicon Valley and, after graduating, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in materials science at Stanford, but he deferred admission and never went. It was 1995, the year the Internet opened to commercial traffic. All around him, frogs were turning into princes. He wanted to start a startup. Musk and his brother Kimball, with money from their parents, launched Zip2, an early online Yellow Pages that sold its services to newspaper publishers. In 1999, during the dot-com boom, they sold it to Compaq for more than three hundred million dollars. Musk, with his share of the money, launched one of the earliest online banking companies. He called it X.com. “I think X.com could absolutely be a multibillion-dollar bonanza,” he told CNN, but, meanwhile, “I’d like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone .” That would have to wait for a few years, but in 1999 Salon announced, “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” in a profile that advanced what was already a hackneyed set of journalistic conventions about the man-boy man-gods of Northern California: “The showiness, the chutzpah, the streak of self-promotion and the urge to create a dramatic public persona are major elements of what makes up the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. . . . Musk’s ego has gotten him in trouble before, and it may get him in trouble again, yet it is also part and parcel of what it means to be a hotshot entrepreneur.” Five months later, Musk married his college girlfriend, Justine Wilson. During their first dance at their wedding, he whispered in her ear, “I am the alpha in this relationship.”

“ Big Ego of Hotshot Entrepreneur Gets Him Into Trouble ” is more or less the running headline of Musk’s life. In 2000, Peter Thiel’s company Confinity merged with X.com, and Musk regretted that the new company was called PayPal, instead of X . (He later bought the domain x.com, and for years he kept it as a kind of shrine, a blank white page with nothing but a tiny letter “x” on the screen.) In 2002, eBay paid $1.5 billion for the company, and Musk drew on his share of the sale to start SpaceX. Two years later, he invested around $6.5 million in Tesla; he became both its largest shareholder and its chairman. Around then, in his Marvel Iron Man phase, Musk left Northern California for Los Angeles, to swan with starlets. Courted by Ted Cruz during COVID , he moved to Texas, because he dislikes regulation, and because he objected to California’s lockdowns and mask mandates.

Musk’s accomplishments as the head of a series of pioneering engineering firms are unrivalled. Isaacson takes on each of Musk’s ventures, venture by venture, chapter by chapter, emphasizing the ferocity and the velocity and the effectiveness of Musk’s management style—“A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principles” is a workplace rule. “How the fuck can it take so long?” Musk asked an engineer working on SpaceX’s Merlin engines. “This is stupid. Cut it in half.” He pushed SpaceX through years of failures, crash after crash, with the confidence that success would come. “Until today, all electric cars sucked,” Musk said, launching Tesla’s Roadster, leaving every other electric car and most gas cars in the dust. No automotive company had broken into that industry in something like a century. Like SpaceX, Tesla went through very hard times. Musk steered it to triumph, a miracle amid fossil fuel’s stranglehold. “Fuck oil,” he said.

“Comradery is dangerous” is another of Musk’s workplace maxims. He was ousted as PayPal’s C.E.O. and ousted as Tesla’s chairman. He’s opposed to unions, pushed workers back to the Tesla plants at the height of the Covid pandemic—some four hundred and fifty reportedly got infected—and has thwarted workers’ rights at every turn.

Musk has run through companies and he has run through wives. In some families, domestic relations are just another kind of labor relations. He pushed his first wife, Justine, to dye her hair blonder. After they lost their firstborn son, Nevada, in infancy, Justine gave birth to twins (one of whom they named Xavier, in part for Professor Xavier, from “X-Men”) and then to triplets. When the couple fought, he told her, “If you were my employee, I would fire you.” He divorced her and soon proposed to Talulah Riley, a twenty-two-year-old British actress who had only just moved out of her parents’ house. She said her job was to stop Musk from going “king-crazy”: “People become king, and then they go crazy.” They married, divorced, married, and divorced. But “you’re my Mr. Rochester,” she told him. “And if Thornfield Hall burns down and you are blind, I’ll come and take care of you.” He dated Amber Heard, after her separation from Johnny Depp. Then he met Grimes. “I’m just a fool for love,” Musk tells Isaacson. “I am often a fool, but especially for love.”

He is also a fool for Twitter. His Twitter account first got him into real trouble in 2018, when he baselessly called a British diver, who helped rescue Thai children trapped in a flooded cave, a “pedo” and was sued for defamation. That same year, he tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420,” making a pot joke. “Funding secured.” (“I kill me,” he says about his sense of humor.) The S.E.C. charged him with fraud, and Tesla stock fell more than thirteen per cent. Tesla shareholders sued him, alleging that his tweets had caused their stock to lose value. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he went king-crazy, lighting up a joint. He looked at his phone. “You getting text messages from chicks?” Rogan asked. “I’m getting text messages from friends saying, ‘What the hell are you doing smoking weed?’ ”

“Musk’s goofy mode is the flip side of his demon mode,” Isaacson writes. Musk likes this kind of cover. “I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship,” he said in his “S.N.L.” monologue, in 2021. “Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” In that monologue, he also said that he has Asperger’s. A writer in Newsweek applauded this announcement as a “milestone in the history of neurodiversity.” But, in Slate, Sara Luterman, who is autistic, was less impressed; she denounced Musk’s “coming out” as “self-serving and hollow, a poor attempt at laundering his image as a heartless billionaire more concerned with cryptocurrency and rocket ships than the lives of others.” She put cruelty first.

Musk’s interest in acquiring Twitter dates to 2022. That year, he and Grimes had another child. His name is Techno Mechanicus Musk, but his parents call him Tau, for the irrational number. But Musk also lost a child. His twins with Justine turned eighteen in 2022 and one of them, who had apparently become a Marxist, told Musk, “I hate you and everything you stand for.” It was, to some degree, in an anguished attempt to heal this developing rift that, in 2020, Musk tweeted, “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.” That didn’t work. In 2022, his disaffected child petitioned a California court for a name change, to Vivian Jenna Wilson, citing, as the reason for the petition, “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” She refuses to see him. Musk told Isaacson he puts some of the blame for this on her progressive Los Angeles high school. Lamenting the “woke-mind virus,” he decided to buy Twitter. I just can’t sit around and do nothing .

Musk’s estrangement from his daughter is sad, but of far greater consequence is his seeming estrangement from humanity itself. When Musk decided to buy Twitter, he wrote a letter to its board. “I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he explained, but “I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.” This is flimflam. Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold. Twitter does not operate on the principle of representation, which is the cornerstone of democratic governance. It has no concept of the “civil” in “civil society.” Nor has Elon Musk, at any point in his career, displayed any commitment to either democratic governance or the freedom of expression.

Musk gave Isaacson a different explanation for buying the company: “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.” It’s as if Musk had come to believe the sorts of mission statements that the man-boy gods of Silicon Valley had long been peddling. “At first, I thought it didn’t fit into my primary large missions,” he told Isaacson, about Twitter. “But I’ve come to believe it can be part of the mission of preserving civilization, buying our society more time to become multiplanetary.”

Elon Musk plans to make the world safe for democracy, save civilization from itself, and bring the light of human consciousness to the stars in a ship he will call the Heart of Gold, for a spaceship fuelled by an Improbability Drive in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In case you’ve never read it, what actually happens in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is that the Heart of Gold is stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is the President of the Galaxy, has two heads and three arms, is the inventor of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, has been named, by “the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6,” the “Biggest Bang Since the Big One,” and, according to his private brain-care specialist, Gag Halfrunt, “has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.” Person of the Year material, for sure. All the same, as a Vogon Fleet prepares to shoot down the Heart of Gold with Beeblebrox on board, Halfrunt muses that “it will be a pity to lose him,” but, “well, Zaphod’s just this guy, you know?” ♦

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11 WTF Moments From the New Biography ‘Elon Musk’

By Miles Klee

Tuesday saw the release of Elon Musk , author Walter Isaacson’s mammoth new biography of the controversial tech mogul , and hardly a chapter of the nearly 700-page book goes by without a weird anecdote about the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s eccentric, sometimes self-destructive behavior. We are treated to insights about volatile relationships with family and partners, his caustic managerial style, and the toll that burnout takes as Musk struggles to deliver on promises of a fantastical future. Isaacson had total access to Musk himself, and, throughout the narrative, features perspectives from dozens of people in Musk’s inner circle (or formerly close with him) on exactly what makes the man tick.

The Emotional Wreckage of Musk’s First Marriage

Musk split with his first wife, Justine Musk, in 2008, after the relationship devolved into constant and bitter verbal fights, with Musk saying things like, “If you were my employee, I would fire you” or calling her an “idiot,” Justine told Isaacson. She also recalled once trying to explain the concept of empathy to Musk, but he said his lack of such a quality gave him an advantage when it came to running major companies. He also grew irritated by her suggestions that he try therapy, and blamed her own anger on Adderall, which a psychiatrist had prescribed to her for attention deficit disorder. Justine Musk said that although the drug was “an amazing help” for her, Elon “would go around the house throwing away the pills” that he believed were contributing to their marital strife.

Musk Has Suffered From Years of Neck and Back Pain Because of a Birthday Party Stunt

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Tesla’s Autopilot has been involved in hundreds of car crashes and at least 17 fatalities , with such accidents surging along with increased use of the system. Surely, Musk’s habit of exaggerating what it can do hasn’t helped. Though when it comes to Autopilot-involved deaths, he doesn’t seem to think they matter much in the grand scheme, believing the tech “should be judged not on whether it prevented accidents but instead on whether it led to fewer accidents.” After the first two reported Autopilot-involved fatalities in 2016, Musk did not immediately issue a statement, and Isaacson notes that he “could not understand why one or two deaths caused by Tesla Autopilot created an outcry when there were more than 1.3 million traffic deaths annually.” He then got angry during a press conference where reporters opened with questions about those accidents, firing back that they were the ones “killing” people if they turned public sentiment or government regulators against autonomous driving systems.

What Was Secretly on Musk’s Mind During a Rolling Stone Interview

In 2017, Musk gave an interview to Neil Strauss for a Rolling Stone cover story . He seemed distracted from the beginning and walked out on Strauss, coming back several minutes later to explain that he had recently broken up with his girlfriend, actress Amber Heard . Later in the conversation, Musk spoke unforgivingly of his estranged father, Errol Musk. “He was such a terrible human being,” Musk said. “Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” He didn’t offer specifics at the time, but Isaacson reveals that shortly before this, Musk had learned that in 2016, Errol had impregnated Jana Bezuidenhout, a woman more than four decades younger, whom Errol had raised as his stepdaughter. Elon and his siblings were profoundly disturbed by the news, which seemed to weigh on him during his talk with Strauss, who wrote, “There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can’t bring himself to utter the words.”

The Personal Turmoil Behind the Infamous ‘Pedo Guy’ Tweet

An unexpected consequence of smoking weed on joe rogan’s show.

Musk’s 2018 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience was intended to be a bit of damage control at a precarious time for the CEO, who was seen as increasingly erratic. So, naturally, when Rogan offered him a toke on a tobacco-and-cannabis blunt, he confirmed that it was legal before gamely taking a puff. Even so, Tesla investors were rattled as the image of Musk wreathed in pot smoke went viral, and the company’s share price tumbled to almost its lowest point that year. There was one other, hidden ramification, too: “SpaceX was a NASA contractor, and they are big believers in the law,” Musk is quoted as saying in the biography. That meant, for the next couple of years, he was subject to random drug tests. “Fortunately,” he said, “I really don’t like doing illegal drugs.”

Why Musk and Grimes Got into Couples’ Spats

Throughout their courtship and co-parenting journey, Musk and occasional girlfriend Grimes have had their share of blowups, some of them sparked by truly unusual behavior. In 2021, for example, he was obsessed with the civilization strategy game The Battle of Polytopia , which in time began to distract him from work meetings and social events. Grimes started playing as well, noting that video games are one of Musk’s only outlets for relaxation, but, she said, “he takes those so seriously that it gets very intense.” In one game they played together, having agreed to an alliance, she betrayed him with a surprise attack, triggering “one of our biggest fights ever.” When she tried to argue it was only a game and not a big deal, he said, “It’s a huge fucking deal,” and didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day. On the flip side, Grimes was angry with Musk when he sent a photo of her having a C-section during childbirth to friends and family, without her consent. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset,” she told Isaacson.

When Musk’s Reproductive Habits Made for a Curious Coincidence

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At the end of 2022, as Musk tried to get Twitter under control in the wake of a contentious acquisition, he expressed an alarming opinion of a humanitarian crisis in China. Talking to reporter Bari Weiss, Isaacson writes, he said that “Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China, because Tesla’s business could be threatened.” He also told her that the country’s repression of the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim minority group, had two sides. The Chinese government is placing this population in concentration camps and has been widely accused of crimes against humanity with the U.S. even going so far as to call it “ genocide .”

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Elon Musk's daughter Vivian slams Walter Isaacson's Musk biography, saying it portrays her as her father's 'villain backstory'

• Elon Musk's daughter Vivian criticized Walter Isaacson's Musk biography over its portrayal of her.
• She called the book "one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life."
• She also said Isaacson didn't reach out to her directly when he was writing the book.

Vivian Wilson, Elon Musk's daughter, isn't happy with how she says she was depicted in Walter Isaacson's best-selling biography about her father.

Wilson slammed the biography in a series of social-media posts Sunday night.

"To Walter Isaacson, you threw me to the wolves in what was one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life," Wilson wrote in a series of Threads posts.

Wilson said Isaacson's book portrayed her "in a light that is genuinely defamatory" and positioned her and her father as opposing forces.

"I was treated as a VILLAIN BACKSTORY-ORIGIN to excuse or explain away his behavior," Wilson wrote.

Representatives for Musk, Wilson, Isaacson, and his publisher, Simon & Schuster, didn't respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Wilson and Musk's strained relationship was mentioned several times in Isaacson's book.

Musk told the author that his disagreements with Wilson, who is transgender, "became intense when she went beyond socialism to being a full communist and thinking that anyone rich is evil," according to the book.

Isaacson wrote that Musk learned of Wilson's transition from a secondhand source.

"I've made many overtures but she doesn't want to spend time with me," Musk told Isaacson in the book, adding that the rift with his daughter was as painful as the death of his firstborn son , Nevada.

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Wilson legally changed her name in 2022, citing a desire to better reflect her gender identity and to no longer "be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form."

On Sunday, Wilson also wrote on Threads that Isaacson didn't contact her directly for comment after spending months trailing Musk as research for the book. Wilson said she learned about the book a month before its September release last year.

Isaacson told NBC News in July that he'd reached out to Wilson via family members.

Isaacson's book contains quotes about Wilson from Musk's then-partner, Grimes ; his brother Kimbal's wife, Christiana; and Musk's right-hand man Jared Birchall — but there are no quotes from Wilson.

She has had plenty to say recently, though, about her father.

Last month, in an interview with NBC News' David Ingram, Wilson said Musk was a cruel and absent father.

"He was cold," Wilson said. "He's very quick to anger. He is uncaring and narcissistic."

The interview with Wilson was published days after Musk made anti-trans comments about her on July 22, saying she was "dead, killed by the woke mind virus ," and repeatedly misgendering her.

"I think he was under the assumption that I wasn't going to say anything and I would just let this go unchallenged," Wilson told Ingram. "Which I'm not going to do, because if you're going to lie about me, like, blatantly to an audience of millions, I'm not just gonna let that slide."

Watch: How Elon Musk makes and spends his billions

• Main content

Elon Musk said he's 'definitely going to be dead' before humans go to Mars — and you probably will be too

"If it's taken us 18 years just to get ready to do the first people in orbit, we've got to improve our rate of innovation."

When it comes to space exploration , there is one name that has, quite literally, rocketed itself to the top of everyone's mind. Since SpaceX was founded in 2002, the company has launched their Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets on more than 370 missions, and spearheading the company is Elon Musk , the controversial businessman who also holds the reigns at Tesla and X (formerly Twitter).

In the new book " SpaceX: Elon Musk and the Final Frontier " (Motorbooks), science journalist Brad Bergan creates a fascinating picture of Musk's vision and how he came to build a business that has become vital to national agencies like NASA , and other ventures that have ambitions of exploring space.

In this excerpt, he explores the enormous costs involved with space travel, and why, despite the potential riches at stake, it might just be better to stay grounded for a while still.

"If we don't improve our pace of progress, I'm definitely going to be dead before we go to Mars ," said Elon Musk at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington, D.C., according to a report from the Los Angeles Times. "If it's taken us 18 years just to get ready to do the first people in orbit, we've got to improve our rate of innovation or, based on past trends, I am definitely going to be dead before Mars."

It was a sobering reflection of a dark reality that gives anyone pause. Whether you love the promise of space travel, hate the toll modern industries levy on the poor, or are completely indifferent — death is a constant reminder that no matter what you do, or what you build, its final fate will likely happen long after your life has expired.

This is something most readers will have in common with Musk: A human journey to Mars is very likely in the coming decades. But a settlement on Mars developed enough to support non essential personnel, with interplanetary tickets cheap enough to serve as a viable escape hatch from Earth for at least the middle class of the United States? Don't bank on it in your lifetime — at least, not within the time frame where the physically healthiest among us could withstand the environmental and psychological pressures of the months-long journey there.

In terms of cost, Musk has said he's "confident" that moving to Mars could eventually cost less than $500,000 — and "maybe even" less than $100,000. These figures were given in 2019. Not to hold a very rough estimation to an economic magnifying glass, but that's nearly $600,000 and $120,000, in 2023 dollars, adjusted for inflation.

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Still, that latter figure is in reach of a significant portion of the US workforce. In 2023, the average yearly income was $56,940 (before taxes). If inflation stopped, or wages were increased by federal mandate to keep up with inflation, the average American could spend their first 15 years saving money to escape to Mars, less time if there were a way to pay for your ticket in installments, or work off your debt in Martian mines.

Related: Just 22 people are needed to colonize Mars — as long as they are the right personality type, study claims

But without significant changes in the US (fairly service-centric) economy, labor rights, taxes on the richest 1 percent, and leadership — in short, lacking a sociopolitical and economic about-face in the United States, fewer citizens in First World countries would be able to afford a ticket to Mars without finding jobs with salaries that are an order of magnitude or two greater than $60,000. Additionally, the process of installing a functioning, self-sustaining settlement is tantamount to launching a major world war from every side at once.

As for the cost of building a settlement on Mars, this would depend on the cost per ton of lifting material to the Red Planet. In 2017, Musk estimated that the price of moving material to Mars would be $140,000 per ton. That'd be $174,260 in 2023 — let's be conservative and call it $200,000 per ton by the time Starship can start making trips to Mars. In 2017, Musk said $100 billion is a feasible figure for finalizing a settlement on Mars. Sticking with our napkin math, that's nearly $200 billion.

Musk also gave estimates that this could be done as early as the year 2050 — but considering the many setbacks for NASA's Artemis and SpaceX's Starship, and geopolitical dissonance between spacefaring nations when it comes to . . . everything, this is a very idealistic estimate. Another oft-elided eventuality is how space contracts tend to emphasize a need to scale economic activity that has already been established as feasible. Once Musk proved his Falcon 9 rockets could deliver whatever we want to low-Earth orbit, SpaceX's contracts quickly eclipsed launches operated by NASA, and any other entity or nation in the world.

And although that money was used to spare taxpayers from footing the long bill of Starship development, the ongoing need to support and recycle crew from the ISS — not to mention SpaceX's launch of several military assets — has contributed to economically positive horizontal growth for SpaceX. Once we get to the moon, every corporation that can afford to outbid the smaller ones will offer SpaceX, and any other private aerospace firm that can make the journey, untold riches to expand its activities on our lunar neighbor. Then there's the riches of nearby asteroids that contain more money in rare metals than any single person on Earth has ever made or held — some of which, like Davida, 16 Psyche , Diotima, and more, hold quintillions of dollars.

In other words, no one is talking about the possible scenario where Artemis is a smashing success, where SpaceX and Blue Origin and NASA and friends are all expanding a permanent human presence on the moon, and those untold riches are being returned to Earth for the elites of the world. But despite all this success, a mission to Mars is perpetually delayed because there's more money to be made by not going for several decades more.

SpaceX: Elon Musk and the Final Frontier by Brad Bergan — available for $22.46 on Amazon

There are many more interesting stories about Elon Musk's vision for future missions to space in this fascinating book by Brad Bergan.

In it, he explores the course of commercial space travel from the fall of the Soviet Union to now, and how economic pressures and disasters opened the door for companies like SpaceX to launch a new era of space exploration.

We particularly like the high-quality pictures showing the evolution of reusable rockets, and the many different prototypes for landers that will one day land reach the surface of the Moon — and beyond.

Brad Bergan is a former executive editor at Immutable Holdings and a former senior editor at Interesting Engineering and Futurism, specializing in space, finance, and crypto.

• Alexander McNamara Editor-in-Chief, Live Science

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Elon Musk Is Using X to Push His Views, and Donald Trump

Mr. Musk has become a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump. It wasn’t always that way.

By Kate Conger

• Aug. 12, 2024

Elon Musk is all in for Donald Trump’s campaign.

The billionaire endorsed Mr. Trump shortly after the attempt on his life last month. He’s helped form a political action committee to financially support the Trump campaign, and he’s bashed the former president’s political rivals online.

And on Monday, Mr. Musk planned to host a live appearance with Mr. Trump on X, his social media platform.

Mr. Musk, now more than ever, is using X to promote his personal political views. With more than 193 million followers, his account is the biggest on the platform and Mr. Musk has filled it with praise for the former president. He also accelerated attacks on President Biden over the past year, and he’s recently stepped up criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris.

By endorsing a presidential candidate, Mr. Musk has broken with other heads of social media companies , who typically try to avoid public endorsements.

Mr. Musk hasn’t always been so outspoken about his political opinions. SpaceX, his rocket company, receives contracts from the federal government, and Mr. Musk had incentive not to burn relationships with either political party. Tesla has also benefited from tax credits for electric vehicles and other government incentives. But as SpaceX and Tesla have become more dominant in their respective industries, Mr. Musk has faced less pressure to appease political leaders.

Mr. Musk’s use of X as a political megaphone has led to speculation that he is stifling accounts that promote Democratic causes. When an official account for the Harris campaign was caught in a spam filter and was temporarily blocked from receiving new followers, users blamed Mr. Musk for the glitch.

The European Union recently placed restrictions on social media companies under the Digital Services Act that require them to remove misinformation from their platforms. It has opened an inquiry into whether X has violated the act.

Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner, sent Mr. Musk a letter on Monday warning him that he was responsible for moderating misinformation during the livestream with Mr. Trump.

“We are monitoring the potential risks in the E.U. associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political — or societal — events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections,” Mr. Breton wrote.

Linda Yaccarino, X’s chief executive, wrote on the platform in response that the letter was “an unprecedented attempt to stretch a law intended to apply in Europe to political activities in the U.S.” She also pushed back on the idea that X is biased toward any political party, agreeing with an employee who called the platform a “swing state.”

Mr. Musk promoted the upcoming interview. “This is unscripted with no limits on subject matter, so should be highly entertaining!” Mr. Musk posted on Sunday evening.

Ryan Mac contributed reporting.

Kate Conger is a technology reporter based in San Francisco. She can be reached at [email protected]. More about Kate Conger