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Elon Musk Hardcover – September 12, 2023

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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
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982181281
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982181284
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.78 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
#1 in Computer & Technology Biographies
#3 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals
#4 in Scientist Biographies

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About the author

Walter isaacson.

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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Elon Musk By Walter Isaacson

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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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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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Elon Musk Hardcover – Sept. 12 2023

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Print length 688 pages
Language English
Publisher Simon & Schuster
Publication date Sept. 12 2023
Dimensions 15.56 x 4.83 x 23.5 cm
ISBN-10 1982181281
ISBN-13 978-1982181284
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (Sept. 12 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982181281
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982181284
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 807 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.56 x 4.83 x 23.5 cm
#2 in Computing Industry History
#8 in Captains of Industry
#10 in Business Biographies (Books)

About the author

Walter isaacson.

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Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson Hardcover – 12 Sept. 2023

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Print length 688 pages
Language English
Publisher Simon & Schuster UK
Publication date 12 Sept. 2023
Dimensions 15.3 x 4.4 x 23.4 cm
ISBN-10 1398527491
ISBN-13 978-1398527492
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster UK; 1st edition (12 Sept. 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1398527491
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1398527492
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.3 x 4.4 x 23.4 cm
3 in Computer Scientist Biographies
5 in Reference Material for Young Adults
7 in Engineering & Technology References

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Elon Musk has his demons. Walter Isaacson does his best to dissect them.

Isaacson’s new biography, ‘Elon Musk,’ attempts to reconcile the tech billionaire’s flaws with his achievements

If you were trying to reverse-engineer from Elon Musk’s life a blueprint for creating the sort of tech icon who, at 52 years old, merits a 688-page biography by Walter Isaacson, the resulting plans would be fairly straightforward — just rather hard to execute.

Take a bright, exceedingly headstrong, socially maladjusted young boy and forge his character in an abusive, friendless childhood. For solace, give him only science fiction novels, superhero comics, and a cadre of younger siblings and cousins to boss around, imbuing him with delusions of grandeur and a taste for unchecked power.

If he survives that, send him to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. Give him a relentless work ethic, an addiction to risk and a moral compass that puts his own interests at its magnetic north pole. Add a keen eye for brilliant engineering minds he can mine for ideas and push to achieve the seemingly impossible, while he hogs the profits and credit. And then hope that he gets very lucky at pivotal moments along the way, so that his compulsive risk-taking doesn’t blow up in his face, even when his rockets do.

The traits that conspired to make Musk the world’s richest man were all in evidence when Isaacson decided in 2021 to make him the subject of his next biography. “ Elon Musk ,” being published Tuesday, must have seemed a natural extension of Isaacson’s “great man” canon, which includes biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs . (Isaacson’s subjects are almost all men.)

But Einstein, Franklin and Jobs were dead by the time Isaacson’s biographies hit bookstores (albeit by just weeks in Jobs’s case), whereas Musk — chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X (formerly Twitter) — remains very alive. In the past two years, Musk’s public image has morphed from that of the hard-charging high-tech visionary who inspired Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark in “ Iron Man ” into something more disturbing and polarizing.

How do you take the full measure of an increasingly troubled figure whose life’s work and legacy still hang in the balance? At stake is not just Musk’s place in history, but also his place in the present and the future. If Isaacson fails to pin that down in a satisfying way, it might be because Musk is such a fast-moving target, and Isaacson prioritizes revealing anecdotes and behind-the-scenes reportage over a sophisticated critical lens.

Fortunately, the juicy details are plentiful, especially in the book’s final third, which covers the two especially volatile years Isaacson spent shadowing Musk. (There are wild capers and personal dramas worthy of a soap opera throughout, but most of the ones you’ll encounter earlier in the book have been well documented before, including in Ashlee Vance’s thorough 2015 Musk biography.)

New details include that Musk single-handedly scuttled a Ukrainian sneak attack on a Russian naval fleet in Crimea (more on that below). We learn that Musk’s girlfriend Grimes was in an Austin hospital visiting a surrogate pregnant with their then-secret second child in 2021 at the same time Musk’s employee Shivon Zilis was in the same hospital pregnant with then-secret twins fathered by Musk via IVF, unbeknownst to Grimes. (“Perhaps it is no surprise,” Isaacson deadpans, “that Musk decided to fly west that Thanksgiving weekend to deal with the simpler issues of rocket engineering.”) And we discover that Musk and Grimes have a third, previously unreported child, named Techno Mechanicus Musk, bringing Musk’s tally of known offspring to 11.

This being an Isaacson biography, though, it’s clear he intends for “Elon Musk” to be more than a bunch of interesting stories about a controversial guy. He frames it as a character study, a quest to understand and perhaps reconcile the contradictions at Musk’s core. But the central question he sets out to answer in the book’s prologue feels a bit too easy. It’s the same one that lay at the heart of “ Steve Jobs ”: Are Musk’s personal demons and flaws also what make his spectacular achievements possible? Seven pages in, there are no prizes for guessing what Isaacson’s answer will be. Though the destination lacks suspense, the ride is entertaining enough, particularly for those who haven’t closely followed Musk’s high jinks. And despite the book’s length, it zips along thanks to Isaacson’s economical prose and short chapters.

Musk, who at age 5 traipsed solo across Pretoria to reach a cousin’s birthday party after his parents left him home as a punishment, has always had a little crazy in him. To help explain it, Isaacson introduces us early on to Elon’s brutal, “Jekyll-and-Hyde” father, Errol Musk. He’s a man Elon mostly despises but also, in his worst moments, resembles. When Musk’s first wife, Justine, reached her wit’s end with him, she would warn, “You’re turning into your father.”

Elon’s childhood in South Africa reads like the origin story for a superhero, or maybe a supervillain, at least as he and his family members tell it. That may be by design: Musk has a penchant for self-mythologizing, casting himself as the sole hero of complex origin stories like that of Tesla’s founding.

Already, one of the book’s critical passages has sparked geopolitical drama — and an embarrassing public walk-back by Isaacson. In an excerpt from the book published in The Washington Post on Friday , Isaacson recounts how Musk single-handedly foiled a Ukrainian sneak attack on a Russian naval fleet in Crimea by cutting off the Starlink satellite internet service Ukraine’s drones were relying on. Isaacson writes that Musk made the decision because he feared that the attack could lead to nuclear war, based on his conversation weeks earlier with a Russian ambassador.

But when CNN obtained the excerpt and reported on it, Musk tweeted a different account. He said he didn’t cut Ukraine’s Starlink service in Crimea; it was already deactivated there, and he refused the Ukrainians’ emergency request to activate it so they could carry out the attack. Isaacson tweeted Friday that Musk’s version of the story was accurate, meaning the passage in his book is misleading.

The larger concern is whether Isaacson’s heavy reliance on Musk as a primary source throughout his reporting kept him too close to his subject. Swaths of the book are told largely through Musk’s eyes and those of his confidants. And the majority of tales about his exploits cast him as the genius protagonist even as they expose his self-destructive tendencies or his capacity for cruelty.

To the author’s credit, the book boasts a large number of citations for sources and interviews. Isaacson also takes care to include corroborating or conflicting accounts of controversial episodes, such as Musk’s vicious grudge against Tesla’s original founders. (If you ever want to make an enemy for life, try standing between Musk and full credit for a project he was involved in.) And, contrary to some of his most adamant critics, Musk really does seem to possess a remarkable brain for physics, engineering and business — if perhaps not for running a social media firm. Isaacson persuasively dismisses the notion that Musk owes his success largely to inherited wealth, or that he’s a huckster profiting only from the inventions of others. Musk’s companies have thrived both because of and in spite of him.

Isaacson at times interjects his own, sometimes dryly funny, counterpoints to some of Musk’s more outlandish claims. After he quotes Musk enthusing about his far-fetched Hyperloop plan, “This is going to change everything,” Isaacson begins the next paragraph: “It didn’t change everything.” (What it did change, by some reckonings, were California’s plans to build a high-speed rail line, which Musk has acknowledged he sought to undermine.)

In one of his most entertaining and revealing bits of original reporting, Isaacson fills in the backstory behind a series of technical glitches that plagued Twitter in late 2022 and early 2023, and it does not disappoint.

Read an excerpt from “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson

Steamrolling past Twitter employees’ warnings, Musk insisted on immediately moving thousands of the company’s computer servers from a Sacramento data center to another facility to save money. When they balked, insisting it would take months to do safely, Musk dragooned a carful of friends and family into canceling their Christmas plans to drive to Sacramento, where he personally disconnected one of the servers with the help of a security guard’s pocket knife. He then called in a team of employees to start loading the rest onto a semi truck and some moving vans.

On many occasions over the years, Musk has horrified deputies with these sorts of stunts, only to be vindicated when they pay off handsomely. But in this case it turned out the employees, whom he had threatened to fire for their timidity, had been right. The move caused cascading glitches in Twitter’s software, including the ones that afflicted a highly anticipated live audio event with presidential candidate Ron DeSantis the following May.

The Musk we know today is different from the Musk Isaacson began following in 2021. Since then, he has lurched rightward politically, embracing conspiracy theories and railing that the “woke mind virus” could unravel civilization; staged a dramatic takeover of Twitter, restoring banned accounts including Donald Trump’s while alienating advertisers and the mainstream media; been accused of sexual misdeeds and revealed as the secret father of multiple additional children; founded a new AI company; and become a power broker in both the Ukraine war and Republican politics. And that’s leaving out a lot.

Isaacson pins the changes at least partly on the pandemic, which drew out Musk’s conspiratorial side, supercharged his Twitter addiction and amped up his natural mistrust of bureaucratic regulations as covid-19 restrictions hampered Tesla production in California and China. In some ways, as Isaacson points out, Musk is becoming more like his father, Errol, whom Isaacson has found in recent years to be descending into full-on paranoia, conspiracism and overt racism.

So what does Isaacson ultimately make of Elon? In a brief, final assessment, Isaacson takes us back to where he started. The tech tycoon’s “epic feats” don’t excuse his “bad behavior,” but “it’s important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly.”

A harder but more fruitful question than how to reconcile Musk’s idealism and remarkable achievements with his “demon mode,” as Grimes calls it, might have been: What does it say about our world today that so much depends on a man like Musk? That the fate of electric vehicles, self-driving cars, public infrastructure projects, global space exploration, the rules of online discourse, and military combatants can be altered at the whim of a notoriously whimsical man? And if he ever does go full Errol, will there be anything we can do about it?

By Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster. 688 pp. $35

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Print length 688 pages
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Publisher ? Simon & Schuster Ltd
Publication date 11 September 2023
ISBN-10 1398527491
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Publisher ‏ : ‎ ? Simon & Schuster Ltd (11 September 2023); Simon & Schuster UK
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1398527491
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1398527492
Reading age ‏ : ‎ Customer suggested age: 16 years and up
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 810 g
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 15.3 x 4.4 x 23.4 cm
Country of Origin ‏ : ‎ India
Importer ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster India
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#18 in Engineering & Technology (Books)
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Elon Musk Biography Shoots to Top of Bestseller List Ahead of Release

Walter Isaacson's latest tome will release on Sept. 12.

By Anna Tingley

Anna Tingley

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Best-selling author and historian Walter Isaacson has penned the definitive biographies of some of the most powerful figures in history, from Steve Jobs to Albert Einstein, and this month he’ll finally be releasing his highly anticipated tome about Elon Musk . The biography, simply tiled “Elon Musk, ” officially releases on Sept. 12 and is currently available to pre-order on Amazon , where it’s already a No. 1 bestseller.

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For two years, Isaacson followed the billionaire entrepreneur through his SpaceX and Tesla factories and board meetings, while spending hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers and adversaries. In addition to leading the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence, Musk also made the controversial choice to take over Twitter (now X) during the book’s writing.

Musk’s childhood weaves its way through much of the book, as Isaacson has hinted in numerous interviews leading up to its release. Growing up in South Africa, Musk was regularly beaten by bullies and would come home to an emotionally abusive father. As he grew older, the wounds from his tumultuous upbringing lingered, likely explaining his infamous attraction to risk, maniacal intensity and epic sense of mission.

“We start the book with this astonishingly difficult childhood in South Africa with a father who is Darth Vader and who is still alive, but haunts Elon every day,” Isaacson told tech reporter Kara Swisher earlier this month. “He’s the most interesting person on the planet right now doing the most interesting things and driving people crazy in the process.”

One of the biggest bombshells in the book is the revelation that Musk allegedly thwarted a Ukranian drone attack on Russian ships. According to the book, the SpaceX CEO turned off Starlink near Crimea to disrupt Ukraine’s strike against a Russian fleet. As the drones loaded with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.

“Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson is now available to pre-order on Amazon, and is also available on Kindle for $16.99 and Audible for free with this 30-day trial.

Elon Musk $33.07 $28.94 Buy Now On Amazon

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8 major takeaways from the explosive new book about Elon Musk that lifts the lid on the world's richest person

Walter Isaacson's biography on Elon Musk hit shelves last Tuesday.
The author trailed the Musk for about three years and provides a peek into the billionaire's mind.
The book details everything from Musk's relationship with his father to his "hardcore" work ethic and "demon mode."

Elon Musk has dominated headlines for years, but a new book proves there is still plenty to learn about the world's richest man.

After shadowing Musk for three years, Walter Isaacson provided a peek behind the curtain into the life of one of the most powerful men in the world in his biography on the Tesla CEO.

The book hit shelves on September 12 and it had some eye-popping details about the billionaire — from big reveals on his relationship with Ukraine and the birth of his eleventh child to details on Musk's hardcore work ethic and emotional swings.

Here are eight things we learned from the biography.

Musk's moods vary a lot, and those close to him fear his 'demon mode.'

The book explains how Musk's moods can swing wildly .

"He has numerous minds and many fairly distinct personalities," Grimes told Isaacson. "He moves between them at a very rapid pace. You just feel the air in the room change, and suddenly the whole situation is just transferred over to his other state."

Isaacson said that throughout his time with Musk, he'd also witnessed the billionaire's emotional volatility, saying he'd switch between "light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional."

"When we hang out, I make sure I'm with the right Elon," Grimes said. "There are guys in that head who don't like me, and I don't like them." These vary from the version of him "who's down for Burning Man and will sleep on a couch, eat canned soup, and be chill" and his so-called "demon mode" — "when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain."

During these periods, Musk is likely to unleash his rage on employees or order up a work surge, according to Isaacson. Grimes said despite the darkness associated with "demon mode," it's also the mode where he "gets shit done."

Elon Musk's relationship with his father massively affected his personality and outlook on the world.

One character who appears frequently throughout the book is Elon Musk's father, Errol Musk.

The biography is peppered with descriptions of incidents where Elon Musk claims his father bullied and demeaned him ( something Errol Musk has denied ), as well as comments from Elon Musk's former girlfriends and wives about how Errol Musk ultimately influenced his son's personality and outlook on the world.

After his parents divorced, Elon Musk originally lived with his mother before spending about seven years living with his father in Pretoria from the age of 10.

"It turned out to be a really bad idea," Elon Musk told Isaacson. "I didn't yet how how horrible he was."

His younger brother Kimbal Musk told Isaacson that their father had "zero compassion" and often "went ballistic."

"It was mental torture," Elon Musk told Isaacson. "He sure knew how to make anything terrible."

Elon Musk's mother, Maye Musk , said there was a fear her son "might become his father."

Both Elon and Kimbal Musk no longer speak to their father, Isaacson wrote.

But the years that he spent with his father have somewhat shaped Elon Musk's personality, according to the book.

"I think he got conditioned in childhood that life is pain," Grimes, Elon Musk's former girlfriend, told Isaacson. She also noted that because of how his father brought him up, Musk sometimes lets himself be treated badly and "associates love with being mean or abusive."

Justine Musk , Elon Musk's first wife, told Isaacson said that during their arguments, Elon would belittle and insult her, calling her a "moron," an "idiot," or "stupid and crazy."

"When I spent some time with Errol, I realized that's where he'd gotten the vocabulary," Justine Musk told Isaacson.

Ex-wife Talulah Riley also told Isaacson that Errol Musk's treatment of his son "had a profound effect on how he operates."

"Inside the man, he's still there as a child, a child standing in front of his dad ," she said.

Musk's 'hardcore' work ethic has always been a part of him.

Musk is well known for his "hardcore" work mindset , which in some cases involved sleeping and eating in the office. His late-night habits seem to stem from his childhood, when he would stay up until 6 a.m. reading, Isaacson wrote.

While he worked at Zip2, his first business, Musk and his brother slept in the office, showered at the YMCA, and mainly ate at Jack in the Box, the book said. One early Zip2 employee told Isaacson that he even had to tell Musk to go home and shower before customer meetings.

"At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day and through much of the night, without vacations, and he expected others to do the same," Isaacson wrote. "His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video-game binges."

Musk has applied the same intensity to other aspects of his life, too, including learning to fly planes. "I tend to do things very intensely," he told Isaacson.

Musk expects his employees to display the same workaholic nature. At banking company X.com, which later became PayPal following a merger, he told staff that the site would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend and "prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in a nervous and nervous-making frenzy and slept under his desk most nights," Isaacson wrote.

After buying Twitter more than two decades later, he told its staff to commit to an "extremely hardcore" work schedule with "long hours at a high intensity" if they wanted to keep their jobs.

He's been difficult to work with from the start.

Horror stories about working with Elon Musk are hardly a new phenomenon — from quickly laying off over half of Twitter's workforce to forcing some Tesla workers to work through Thanksgiving — working at one of his companies has become the stuff of urban legends. And it turns out tensions were often near a boiling point, even at Musk's first startup.

Musk's brother once "tore off a hunk of flesh" from Musk's hand while the brothers wrestled on the floor in Zip2 's office back in the 90s, according to Isaacson. The biographer said the two men would wrestle during periods of "intense stress."

Similarly, Musk's college dorm-mate quit working at Zip2 just six weeks after starting at the company because he couldn't handle working with Musk, according to the book.

"I knew I could either be working with him or be his friend, but not both," Musk's longtime friend and former dorm-mate, Navaid Farooq, told Isaacson.

Musk later explained the reasoning behind his intensity after he chewed out a SpaceX worker who had lost his child the week prior.

"I give people hardcore feedback, mostly accurate, and I try not to to do it in a way that's ad hominem," Musk told Isaacson. "I try to criticize the action, not the person. We all make mistakes. What matters is whether a person has a good feedback loop, can seek criticism from others, and can improve. Physics does not care about feelings. It cares about whether you got the rocket right."

Musk reacts physically to stress but it also motivates him. He can't handle peace.

During stressful periods at work and in his personal life, Musk would stay awake at night and vomit, Isaacson wrote.

The biographer said that at one point Musk's stomach pain had a doctor checking for appendicitis.

In 2008 when Tesla was facing the potential of bankruptcy, Musk's wife at the time, Talulah Riley, told Isaacson she worried the stress would cause Musk to have a heart attack.

"He was having night terrors and just screaming in his sleep and clawing at me," she said. "It would go to his gut, and he would be screaming and retching. I would stand by the toilet and hold his head."

Musk's ex-girlfriend Grimes says she recalls similarly sleepless nights during her relationship with the billionaire.

Musk appears to seek out these periods of high stress, according to some.

"You don't have to be in a state of war at all times," Shivon Zilis, the mother of two of Musk's children and a director at Neuralink, told Musk when he was gearing up to buy Twitter. "Or is it that you find greater comfort when you're in periods of war?"

Musk told Zilis it's one of his "default settings."

"I guess I've always wanted to push my chips back on the table or play the next level of the game."

Though, Musk has admitted to Isaacson his intensity has taken a toll on him physically.

"From 2007 onwards, until maybe last year, it's been nonstop pain. There's a gun to your head, make Tesla work, pull a rabbit out of your hat, then pull another rabbit out of the hat," Musk told Isaacson in 2021.

"You can't be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you. But there's something else I've found this year. It's that fighting to survive keeps you going for quite a while. When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it's not that easy to get motivated every day," he added.

Musk can be a difficult person to date.

Isaacson interviewed many of the women Musk used to date or be married to. It becomes clear that Musk can be a difficult person to date because of a range of factors, including his laser focus on his businesses and his lack of empathy and social awareness.

"Elon and I were used to having big arguments in public," Justine Musk told Isaacson. "I don't think you can be in a relationship with Elon and not argue."

Musk postponed his honeymoon with Justine by months so that he could sort out X.com's merger with PayPal , and they had to cut it short amid turmoil at the company.

Justine told Isaacson that Elon Musk told her to dye her hair blonder and that she felt like she was being turned into a "trophy wife."

"I met him when he didn't have much at all," she told Isaacson. "The accumulation of wealth and fame changed the dynamic."

"The strong will and emotional distance that makes him difficult as a husband may be reasons for his success in running a business," she added.

Meanwhile, his emotional volatility and inability to understand other people's emotions at times can be hard to deal with, Grimes told Isaacson.

Isaacson wrote that Musk sent a picture of his then-girlfriend Grimes having a C-section when she had X to their friends and family, including her father and brothers. Grimes said he was "clueless" about why she'd be upset about it.

But he has a tender side too.

Though the book describes Musk's volatile relationships with many people, including relatives, friends, partners, and business associates, it also details how he can be tender at times. In particular, Isaacson paints a picture of Musk as a doting father to X AE A-XII, also known as "baby X," his first child with Grimes .

Isaacson wrote that X "had an otherworldly sweetness that calmed and beguiled Musk, who craved his presence. He took X everywhere."

Musk also moved in with his father aged 10 because he didn't want him to be lonely, Isaacson wrote. Musk's cousin Peter Rive told Isaacson that playing "Dungeons and Dragons" together as a child brought out the "incredibly patient" and "beautiful" parts of Musk's personality.

When a close friend of Musk's ex-wife Talulah Riley died in 2021, he flew over to England to be with her, "and he just made me laugh instead of cry," she told Isaacson.

Musk's politics are beginning to echo his father's.

While Musk has cut off communication with his father, Errol Musk, Isaacson said the billionaire's political stance is beginning to mimic his father's.

Isaacson said Errol's sons were sometimes off-put by their father's political rants. For example in 2022, Errol sent Musk an email in which he called the COVID-19 pandemic "a lie" and dubbed President Joe Biden a '"freak, criminal, pedophile president' who was out to destroy everything that the US stood for, 'including you,'" Isaacson wrote.

The biographer said Musk had begun to show a similar propensity which was in part triggered by his daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson 's decision to cut ties with him. Isaacson said that Musk blamed the disconnect on the "woke mind virus."

Over the past few years Musk has gone from from supporting the Democratic party to publicly dissing President Joe Biden, reposting anti-transgender content on X, and promoting conspiracy theories.

"Musk's tweet showed his growing tendency (like his father) to read wacky fake-news sites purveying conspiracy theories, a problem that Twitter had writ at large," Isaacson wrote of Musk's decision to post about a conspiracy theory related to the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband.

And, like his father, Musk's politics have been met with distaste from much of his family.

"It's not okay," Kimbal Musk told his brother after he tweeted "My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci." "It's not funny. You can't do that shit."

The biography is in stores now.

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

The biography, by Walter Isaacson, portrays Mr. Musk as a complex, tortured figure.

Elon Musk, wearing a navy blue suit and white shirt, holds his hands together.

By Jeremy W. Peters , Niraj Chokshi and Benjamin Mullin

A new biography of Elon Musk portrays the billionaire entrepreneur as a complex, tortured figure whose brilliance is often overshadowed by his inability to relate on a human level to the people around him — his wives, his children and those on whom he relied to help develop the space exploration and electric car businesses that made him the wealthiest man on Earth.

Mr. Musk’s life so far — his difficult childhood in South Africa, his stormy romantic relationships, his success as a visionary who built SpaceX and Tesla, and his impetuous decision to buy Twitter — is detailed through scores of interviews with his family, friends, business associates and Mr. Musk himself.

The book, which will be released on Tuesday, is by Walter Isaacson, the journalist whose previous works have chronicled the lives of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin.

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

The New York Times bought copies of the book at a retail store that was selling it in advance of its authorized release.

Twitter, Now Known as X

Mr. Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, after a surprise bid for the company and then a seeming reluctance to follow through with the deal.

Days after Twitter’s board approved the deal, Mr. Musk told his four teenage sons that he had purchased the social network to sway the next U.S. presidential election. “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?” he said. (It was a joke, Mr. Isaacson writes, but Mr. Musk’s sons still didn’t understand his rationale for buying Twitter, an app they rarely used.)

After acquiring Twitter, Mr. Musk and his lieutenants combed through its employees’ internal communications and social media posts, looking for signs of disloyalty, Mr. Isaacson writes. The “musketeers,” as Musk loyalists were known inside Twitter, searched Twitter’s Slack archives for keywords including “Elon,” and fired dozens of employees who had made snarky comments about Mr. Musk.

Mr. Musk staged a surprise raid on a Twitter data facility in Sacramento, Calif., last winter, shortly after acquiring the company. Mr. Musk had decided to move servers housed in the facility to another Twitter data center to cut costs, but Twitter’s infrastructure leaders warned him that moving the expensive equipment safely could take months. In a fit of anger, Mr. Musk decided to move the servers himself, enlisting a small team and a flock of moving vans to haul them away on Christmas Eve. (He later said he regretted the decision, which led to service outages.)

Personal Life

Mr. Musk’s sprawling family has been a source of comfort amid the frequent turmoil of his industry-spanning business interests, Mr. Isaacson writes. But his relationship with his father, Errol, is a source of trauma that remains with him.

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

While the musician Grimes, also known as Claire Boucher, was giving birth to his son X in May 2020, Mr. Musk took a picture of the delivery and shared it with his friends and family, including her father and brothers. Grimes was understandably horrified and scrambled to get it deleted. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset,” she told Mr. Isaacson.

Politics and Trump

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

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

But neither is he a Biden supporter, though he tells Mr. Isaacson that he would have voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 had he cast a ballot. (He decided not to vote because he was registered in California and considered it a waste because the state was not competitive in the presidential election.) Mr. Musk describes an encounter with Mr. Biden several years ago in which he came away unimpressed. “When he was vice president, I went to a lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over.”

Artificial Intelligence

Mr. Musk has long been worried about artificial intelligence, which he considers a potential existential threat. He was a co-founder of OpenAI before breaking ties with the organization in 2018, and recently announced he was forming a rival A.I. company, X.AI .

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

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

Mr. Musk’s gave X.AI’s early employees three goals: Create an A.I. chatbot capable of writing code, an A.I. chatbot trained to be politically neutral and an artificial intelligence that could reason and pursue truth. “You should be able to give it big tasks, such as ‘Build a better rocket engine,’” Mr. Musk told Mr. Isaacson.

Elon and the Media

Mr. Musk’s relationship with the media, which was already strained before he bought Twitter, reached new levels of tension after the deal was announced.

The “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David confronted Elon Musk at the wedding in 2022 of Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of the media conglomerate Endeavor, who had seated them at the same table. “Do you just want to murder kids in schools?” Mr. David asked Mr. Musk, grilling him on his support of Republican candidates in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 students dead. “No, no,” Mr. Musk replied, according to Mr. Isaacson. “I’m anti-kid murder.” Mr. Emanuel also seated the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, another Musk critic, at the same table. “It ended up being a microcosm of Twitter,” Mr. Isaacson wrote.

As Mr. Musk’s erratic tweets damaged Twitter’s relationship with advertisers, he sought counsel from boldfaced names in the media industry on how to repair the rift. One was David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, the Warner Bros. movie studio and CNN. They spoke for more than an hour. “Zaslav told him that he was doing self-destructive things that made it harder to attract brands that were aspirational. He should focus on improving the product by adding longer video offerings and making ads more effective.”

For years, Tesla has been the highest-profile business in Mr. Musk’s portfolio of companies, serving as a constant source of pride and stress.

The company’s early struggles contributed to a long, difficult period for Mr. Musk, one that took a physical and mental toll, he told Mr. Isaacson in a 2021 interview. “You can’t be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you,” Mr. Musk said. But he also acknowledged that he had found purpose under pressure: “When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated every day.”

Even as the company found success, it attracted critics in the form of short-sellers who bet against Tesla’s stock. That practice reached a fever pitch in 2018 as Tesla struggled to meet production goals, infuriating Mr. Musk, who called short-sellers “leeches on the neck of business.” But he acknowledged that some of those traders had also collected an impressively accurate picture of the company from insiders and even drones flying over Tesla’s factory. “The degree of inside information they had was insane,” he said.

Production sprints and struggles at Tesla and the space exploration company SpaceX also sharpened Mr. Musk’s philosophy, which he distilled into a five-step approach that he called “the algorithm” and which he repeatedly invoked to employees. It involved, in order: questioning requirements, deleting parts or processes, simplifying and optimizing, accelerating processes, and, finally, automating. “I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Isaacson.

Mr. Musk created SpaceX to help humanity become a multi-planetary species. The company’s success so far is a credit to his willingness to accept risks, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

During the countdown to a pivotal launch in 2015, an unidentified liquid began dripping from a Falcon 9 rocket, frightening Mark Juncosa, a top SpaceX official. Mr. Musk deliberated briefly before deciding to proceed, resulting in a successful launch. At the time, Mr. Juncosa assumed that Mr. Musk had based that decision on a complicated risk assessment, but realized he was wrong after reviewing footage years later. “I thought he had done some complex quick calculations to decide what to do, but in fact he just shrugged his shoulders and gave the order,” Mr. Juncosa said of Mr. Musk. “He had an intuition of what the physics were.”

To achieve interplanetary flight in the future, SpaceX needed to find a way to make money in the present. So in 2015, Mr. Musk announced Starlink, seeking to tap into the lucrative market of providing internet service, in this case through a constellation of low-orbit satellites. The service has become a vital lifeline to people in war zones and helped the Ukrainian military defend against Russian invasion. But Mr. Musk has also been criticized for not allowing Ukraine to use the service to launch a drone attack on a Russian naval base last year, fearing that it would have provoked a major escalation in the war. “We did not want to be a part of that,” Mr. Musk said.

In 2021, SpaceX for the first time successfully sent a crew into orbit without a professional astronaut aboard . Afterward, Mr. Musk reflected on the role that he and his company had played in advancing space exploration. “Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable,” he said. “It would have happened without me. But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.” He added, “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”

Sarah Nir contributed reporting.

Jeremy W. Peters covers media and its intersection with politics, law and culture. He is the author of “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted.” He is a contributor to MSNBC. More about Jeremy W. Peters

Niraj Chokshi covers the business of transportation, with a focus on airlines. More about Niraj Chokshi

Benjamin Mullin is a media reporter for The Times, covering the major companies behind news and entertainment. More about Benjamin Mullin

The World of Elon Musk

The billionaire’s portfolio includes the world’s most valuable automaker, an innovative rocket company and plenty of drama..

Neuralink: Elon Musk’s first human experiment with a computerized brain device developed significant flaws, but the subject Noland Arbaugh, who is paralyzed and the first patient to take part in the human clinical trial , has few regrets.

Wooing World Leaders: Musk has fostered relationships with a constellation of right-wing heads of state — including Argentina’s Javier Milei and India’s Narendra Modi — to push his own politics and expand his business empire .

Tesla: Musk has gutted the part of the carmaking company responsible for building charging stations for electric vehicles , sowing uncertainty about the future of the largest and most reliable U.S. charging network.

X: An Australian court extended an injunction ordering the social media platform to remove videos depicting the recent stabbing of a bishop , setting the country’s judicial system up for a clash with Musk.

A $47 Billion Pay Deal: Despite facing criticism that Tesla is overly beholden to Musk , its board of directors said that the company would essentially give him everything he wanted, including the biggest pay package in corporate history.

We Don’t Need Another Antihero

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, the focus on psychology diverts us from the questions we should be asking about the world’s richest man.

This past December, Elon Musk’s extended family gathered for Christmas. As was their tradition, they pondered a question of the year, which seemed strategically designed for Elon to answer: “What regrets do you have?”

By that point in 2022, Musk had personally intervened in Russia’s war by controlling Ukraine’s internet access; had failed to tell his on-and-off girlfriend and co-parent Grimes that he had also fathered twins with one of his employees, and had been forced by a judge to follow through on a $44 billion purchase of Twitter; then fired most of its staff and alienated most of its advertisers. His main regret, he told his family, according to an account in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon 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.”

In Isaacson’s study of the world’s richest man, the reader is consistently reminded that Musk is powerless over his own impulses. Musk cannot control his desperate need to stir up drama and urgency when things are going well, Isaacson explains. He fails to show any kind of remorse for the multiple instances of brutally insulting his subordinates or lovers. He gets stuck in what Grimes has dubbed “demon mode”—an anger-induced unleashing of insults and demands, during which he resembles his father Errol, whom Isaacson describes as emotionally abusive.

To report the book, Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years, answering his late-night text messages, accompanying him to Twitter’s office post-acquisition, attending his meetings and intimate family moments, watching him berate people. Reading the book is like hearing what Musk’s many accomplishments and scandals would sound like from the perspective of his therapist, if he ever sought one out (rather than do that, he prefers to “take the pain,” he says—though he has diagnosed himself at various moments as having Asperger’s syndrome or bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder).

Choosing to use this access mostly for pop psychology may appeal to an American audience that loves a good antihero, but it’s a missed opportunity. Unlike the subjects of most of Isaacson’s other big biographies, including Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci, Musk is still alive, his influence still growing. We don’t need to understand how he thinks and feels as much as we need to understand how he managed to amass so much power, and the broad societal impact of his choices—in short, how thoroughly this mercurial leader of six companies has become an architect of our future.

What does it mean that Musk can adjust a country’s internet access during a war? (The book only concludes that it makes him uncomfortable.) How should we feel about the fact that the man putting self-driving cars on our roads tells staff that most safety and legal requirements are “wrong and dumb”? How will Musk’s many business interests eventually, inevitably conflict? (At one point, Musk—a self-described champion of free speech—concedes that Twitter will have to be careful about how it moderates China-related content, because pissing off the government could threaten Tesla’s sales there. Isaacson doesn’t press further.)

The cover of Elon Musk shows Musk’s face in high contrast staring straight, with hands folded as if in prayer, evoking a Great Man of History and a visual echo of the Jobs volume. Isaacson’s central question seems to be whether Musk could have achieved such greatness if he were less cruel and more humane. But this is no time for a retrospective.

Read: Demon mode activated

As readers of the book are asked to reflect on the drama of Musk’s past romantic dalliances, he is meeting with heads of state and negotiating behind closed doors. Last Monday, Musk convened with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; on Tuesday, Israel’s prime minister publicly called him the “unofficial president” of the United States. Also, Neuralink, Musk’s brain-implant start-up—mostly discussed in the book as the employer of one of the mothers of Musk's 11 known children—was given approval from an independent review board to begin recruiting participants for human trials. The book does have a few admiring pages on Neuralink’s technology, but doesn’t address a 2022 Reuters report that the company had killed an estimated 1,500 experimented-on animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, since 2018. (Musk has said that the monkeys chosen for the experiments were already close to death ; a gruesome Wired story published Wednesday reported otherwise .)

Isaacson seems to expect major further innovation from Musk—who is already sending civilians into space, running an influential social network, shaping the future of artificial-intelligence development, and reviving the electric-car market. How these developments might come about and what they will mean for humanity seems far more important to probe than Isaacson’s preferred focus on explaining Musk’s abusive, erratic, impetuous behavior.

In 2018, Musk called the man who rescued children in Thailand’s caves a “pedo guy,” which led to a defamation suit—a well-known story. A few weeks later, he claimed that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share, attracting the scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Isaacson covers these events by diagnosing Musk as unstable during that period and, according to his brother, still getting over his tumultuous breakup with the actor Amber Heard. (Ah, the toxic-woman excuse.) He was also, according to his lawyer Alex Spiro, “an impulsive kid with a terrible Twitter habit.” Isaacson calls that assessment “true”—one of the many times he compares Musk, now 52, to a child in the book.

The people whose perspectives Isaacson seems to draw on most in the book are those whom Musk arranged for him to talk with. So the book’s biggest reveal may be the extent to which his loved ones and confidants distrust his ability to be calm and rational, and feel the need to work around him. A close friend, Antonio Gracias, once locked Musk’s phone in a hotel safe to keep him from tweeting; in the middle of the night, Musk got hotel security to open it.

All of this seems reminiscent of the ways Donald Trump’s inner circle executed his whims, justifying his behavior and managing their relationship with him, lest they be cut out from the action. Every one of Trump’s precedent-defying decisions during his presidency was picked apart by the media: What were his motivations? Is there a strategy here? Is he mentally fit to serve? Does he really mean what he’s tweeting? The simplest answer was often the correct one: The last person he talked to (or saw on Fox News) made him angry.

Read: What Russia got by scaring Elon Musk

Musk is no Trump fan, according to Isaacson. But he’s the media’s new main character, just as capable of getting triggered and sparking shock waves through a tweet. That’s partially why Isaacson’s presentation of the World’s Most Powerful Victim is not all that revelatory for those who are paying attention: Musk exposes what he’s thinking at all hours of the day and night to his 157.6 million followers.

In Isaacson’s introduction to Elon Musk , he explains that the man is “not hardwired to have empathy.” Musk’s role as a visionary with a messianic passion seems to excuse this lack. The thinking goes like this: All of his demands for people to come solve a problem right now or you’re fired are bringing us one step closer to Mars travel, or the end of our dependence on oil, or the preservation of human consciousness itself. His comfort with skirting the law and cutting corners in product development also serves a higher purpose: Musk believes, and preaches in a mantra to employees at all of his companies, that “the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

By presenting Musk’s mindset as fully formed and his behavior as unalterable, Isaacson’s book doesn’t give us many tools for the future—besides, perhaps, being able to rank the next Musk blowup against a now well-documented history of such incidents. Instead of narrowing our critical lens to Musk’s brain, we need to widen it, in order to understand the consequences of his influence. Only then can we challenge him to do right by his power.

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Empathy Is Not an Asset

Elon musk doesn’t tell us much about elon musk, but it just might tell you plenty about your next boss..

Who, exactly, is going to read a 600-page book about Elon Musk? That’s the real question raised by the publication of Walter Isaacson’s doorstop biography on Tuesday, and it’s not merely rhetorical. The book’s release may have provided critics and observers with the opportunity to muse on Musk’s character , to comb Isaacson’s reporting for sensational (and in one instance, incorrect ) scoops, and to unload a bunch of zingers at the expense of both the billionaire and his Boswell. But Elon Musk doesn’t contain much in the way of genuine revelation, because Musk himself, while volatile, isn’t especially deep or complicated. In place of self-reflection, he offers up armchair diagnoses to explain his own personality—Asperger’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, ADHD—but it’s not as if he’s prepared to do anything about that, and the Musk that Isaacson introduces in the first few chapters of the book is virtually the same man by the end.

Just as Musk idolators refuse to believe that he sometimes doesn’t know what he’s doing, people repelled by Musk’s politics and boorish behavior like to insist that he’s little more than a huckster who hijacks other people’s innovations and then markets himself as a genius. Perhaps the exhaustive accounts Isaacson offers of SpaceX launches and Tesla product development processes are meant to dispel this notion. He certainly substantiates the picture of Musk as brilliant and talented, albeit across a somewhat narrow spectrum. Isaacson’s Musk is less an inventor than a perfecter, a specialist in what Musk calls “building the machine that makes the machine,” honing rockets and cars down to their essentials and designing factories that can produce them quickly at drastically reduced cost. At the same time, Musk’s jejune notion of “coolness,” derived from science-fiction novels and video games, attunes him to the 12-year-old boy inside every man who can’t bring himself to buy an electric vehicle unless it looks like a sleek spaceship rather than a golf cart.

There’s more of this procedural material in Elon Musk than there is dish about its subject’s florid personal life—the abusive father, the celebrity pals and girlfriends, the rivalry with Jeff Bezos, the ranting about “the woke mind virus,” etc. This might seem a misplaced emphasis to those who view Musk primarily as a player in the culture wars. But people like that are not the people who will buy Isaacson’s book, which will surely chart on the bestseller lists released next week. Isaacson isn’t writing for other journalists or critics. Far more interesting than the portrait Elon Musk offers of its subject is the detectable outline of its intended reader. That shadowy figure may be even more disturbing than Musk at his worst.

By Walter Isaacson. Simon and Schuster.

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The former editor in chief of Time, with its coveted Person-of-the-Year issue, and the former president of the Aspen Institute, with its TED-like annual Ideas Festival, Isaacson has long drawn from the lucrative wells of the great man theory—the belief that history is shaped by extraordinary individuals rather than larger structural or economic forces. You can buy his bestselling 2011 biography of Steve Jobs in a box set with Isaacson’s biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci, marketed as “ The Genius Biographies .” They resemble traditional biographies superficially, but are clearly meant to be read with a more utilitarian purpose. An Amazon reviewer who praises the books for presenting “a wealth of knowledge I’m already implementing to enrich my life” puts it well. These books are less biography as literature than biography as self-help. They’re aimed at a readership of strivers whose gender makeup can be inferred by the fact that Isaacson’s 2021 biography of the Nobel Prize–winning biochemist Jennifer Doudna—a work that admirably aims to counter the great man theory—isn’t included in the pack.

Elon Musk is Isaacson’s return to the more popular vein of Steve Jobs . Even the biography’s cover emphasizes the parallel (and probably delights Musk). Isaacson repeatedly compares Musk with Jobs: in his meticulous attention to detail, in his emphasis on elegant design as an indispensable element of a product’s success, in the seeming impossible deadlines he imposed on his staff. Both men engaged in behavior that epitomizes a set of entrepreneurial and Silicon Valley beliefs, even if Musk wasn’t really in the tech industry during the 22-year period after he got pushed out of PayPal and before he bought Twitter. Isaacson uses buzz phrases like “move fast and break things” and lauds Musk’s hunger for risk as the font of his ability to “innovate.” (An odd thing about the way business gurus go on and on about innovation is that they can’t seem to describe it without using the most tired, chewed-up clichés.)

As he did with Steve Jobs , Isaacson organizes his Musk biography around the central question of whether his subject could have been such a genius if he weren’t also such an asshole. “Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged?” he writes. Don’t you have to be kind of crazy not just to believe you can “change the world”—the ultimate Silicon Valley cliché—but to actually change it? Maybe the only way to obtain “excellence” from one’s workers is to berate and intimidate them, to demand that they work 14-hour days and ditch birthday parties and family holidays the minute the boss crooks his finger. In Musk’s case, Isaacson speculates, “one can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones. But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly.” Isaacson claims that Musk’s “epic feats” don’t excuse his worst behavior, but really, that’s what Elon Musk is: a 600-page excuse.

Is it true that the space-travel industry had become so sleepy and “sclerotic” that it needed a renegade like Musk to jar it awake? Very likely. Did Musk’s Tesla give the electric car market—and with it progress toward a sustainable-energy economy—a tremendous boost forward? Yes. But these genuine successes are partly the result of peculiarities in Musk’s character, such as his comprehensive grasp of materials science (a subject he considered going to graduate school to study), his ability to remember almost everything he reads, his obsessive immersion in the task at hand, and his persistence, which borders on the superhuman. His bad treatment of those around him is often a byproduct of these traits, but whether it’s a necessary byproduct is open to question—a question Isaacson never really gets around to asking. Somehow, the fetishizing of change and innovation always stops short of a revolution in interpersonal relations.

The danger with books like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk is that they encourage the lazy reversal of Isaacson’s formula: If a boss abuses and exploits his staff and family, then he must be a genius transforming the world! As Slate’s Nitish Pahwa recently pointed out, every CEO talks like Elon Musk now—firing employees on a whim, piling impossible workloads on those who remain, and demanding a degree of commitment and loyalty that they have no intention of reciprocating. No doubt they feel validated in this by an example like Musk. But such CEOs forget that Musk is an engineer at heart, overseeing a workforce of fellow engineers and above all giving them a chance to work on the kinds of projects that they dreamed about being a part of as kids. It’s one thing to ask someone to give 400 percent when the goal is to fire a rocket into outer space and colonize Mars. It’s another kettle of fish if you’re complaining about workers’ lack of wholehearted commitment to your luxury real estate firm. Isaacson interviewed several SpaceX and Tesla employees who said they tolerated Musk’s erratic and sometimes brutal management style only because the projects themselves were so thrilling. Even so, some of them still quit after a year or two of turmoil.

Furthermore, like many engineers—who tend to see themselves as the only truly practical and effective people in their workplaces—Musk overestimates how many of life’s problems can be solved by engineers. At Twitter, he has made a string of mistakes and miscalculations as a result of this blind spot, from launching Twitter Blue without sufficient safeguards to prevent impersonators, to failing to anticipate that advertisers don’t want to be associated with the sort of toxic content that flooded the site after he rolled back much of the moderation. Addicted to Twitter himself— Elon Musk features more than one scene in which Musk checks out of an intimate family moment to tweet—Musk can’t seem to see how his self-professed inability to “read social cues” or consider other people’s feelings might be a bit of an liability in trying to run a social network.

Isaacson acknowledges all these shortcomings. But compared to the pages and pages of admiring descriptions of SpaceX launches—the glamor of space travel can dazzle writers as well as engineers—this amounts to a tiny caveat. What goes unstated in Elon Musk is that luck, timing, and (before Twitter) a focus on enterprises to which his freakish talents are uniquely suited also explain much of Musk’s success. How could he serve as a role model for anyone but Elon Musk? The readers—and there will be many of them—who come away from Isaacson’s biography thinking they’ve gleaned such valuable managerial principles as “empathy is not an asset” may, indeed, end up changing the world. But they won’t be changing it for the better.

Let’s put a stake in the ‘great man’ biography — starting with Isaacson’s ‘Elon Musk’

Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference in Paris.

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By Walter Isaacon Simon & Schuster: 688 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

The opening pages of “Elon Musk,” the new doorstop biography from Walter Isaacson , the bestselling chronicler of the great innovative men of modern history, are jarring, especially to anyone expecting to be greeted with plucky tales of unlikely genius.

On the first page, we’re told that Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, owner of X (formerly Twitter), and currently the world’s richest man, was born into a land of incredible violence in South Africa , “with machine gun attacks and knife killings common,” where boys have to “wade through pools of blood” on the way to concerts and are sent to wilderness camps that resemble “a paramilitary Lord of the Flies,” per Musk. Young Elon is bullied relentlessly — by his classmates but also by his abusive father — until he grows big enough to fight back.

Introducing the 688-page biography this way seems designed to address Musk’s recent turn toward combativeness and cruelty — if not justifying it, then offering a skeleton key to understanding where it’s rooted. But as we learn throughout the book, the Musks are persistent fabulists, prone to embellishment and fabrication, and this becomes the first of many narrative sequences that the reader must consider with an eye to truth versus narrative convenience.

Elon Musk at a news conference in Cape Canaveral, Fla., in January.

The biggest ideas and pettiest rages in Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography

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Sept. 11, 2023

And Isaacson’s truth is, above all, selective. Given Musk’s recent coziness with white nationalists and peddlers of junk race science and his ongoing tirade against the Anti-Defamation League , whom he blames (rather than himself) for chasing advertisers from Twitter, it seems startling that nothing in those opening pages touches on his experiences with apartheid . Much of that horrendous violence unfolding in 1980s South Africa was precipitated by a brutally racist government; we discover only that it taught Musk to survive adversity. “My pain threshold is very high,” he tells Isaacson.

We do learn that Musk’s Canadian grandfather was involved in a fringe political party with antisemitic views and relocated his family to South Africa because he liked the government better — he is described as harboring “quirky conservative views” — and that Musk’s father is now outspokenly racist. But in a book that goes to great lengths to dissect the transmission of habits and ideas from father and son, Elon is allowed to stay mum.

Silences like that come to haunt the capacious hull of “Elon Musk” — to the point that they risk drowning out the project altogether.

After the burst of violence in the introduction, we move into more familiar territory, led on by Isaacson’s brisk, propulsive prose: Musk is a spacy, lonely outsider who is bright but has trouble making friends. He disappears into video games and science fiction and soon dreams of horizons far beyond his hometown, and sets out to North America with an entrepreneurial spirit in tow. He graduates with a dual degree in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, gets accepted into a PhD program at Stanford, but decides instead to set out into the buzzing startup scene of Silicon Valley.

He founds Zip2 with his brother Kimbal , sells it , and makes a lot of money. He founds the first iteration of X.com, merges with PayPal, and makes even more. Initially the CEO of both companies, he’s pushed out of each — in a bit of foreshadowing, Musk is booted from PayPal because of his monomaniacal dedication to the porn-adjacent letter X, as well as the idea that PayPal should try to “take over the world’s financial system.” His dismissal, brought about in a coup led by Peter Thiel and other members of the so-called PayPal mafia, leaves him with a large pool of cash, an ax or two to grind and an aspiration to take on loftier goals.

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, attends the opening of the Tesla factory Berlin Brandenburg in 2022.

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Sept. 8, 2023

Here the limitations of Isaacson’s project are revealed: Musk had pushed some of the worst ideas of his young career. From a business perspective, it seemed his colleagues were correct to oust him, preserve their product and make them all fabulously wealthy in an IPO and later sale to EBay . But here’s Isaacson’s diagnosis: “He was a visionary who didn’t play well with others.” The word “visionary,” in this application, is doing a lot of work.

The narrative is filled with moments of similar dissonance, with Isaacson quick to praise Musk’s incessant risk-taking after a disaster, or to excuse his rude behavior to underlings as necessary to get things done, or to nod along in prose while Musk announces his latest idea that will transform the world. He does occasionally push back, as when Musk claims the Hyperloop will change everything (“It did not change everything”), but Isaacson mostly accepts Musk’s confident prognostications as gospel.

Isaacson — biographer of Steve Jobs , Albert Einstein , Henry Kissinger , Benjamin Franklin — is concerned with the study of world-moving men (and occasionally a woman ). What makes innovators tick? What makes them so successful? (In the case of Musk, the prognosis can be summarized as: a large appetite for risk, a willingness to alienate colleagues, a detailed knowledge of industry and science, an ability to process work tasks like an algorithm and a predilection for drawing lessons from video games and “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . ”)

Elon Musk and Grimes speak while wearing formal attire in front of a crowd of photographers.

Elon Musk confirms he and Grimes privately welcomed a third child, Techno Mechanicus

Elon Musk and Grimes have a third child named Techno Mechanicus, the tech mogul confirmed ahead of the release of Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography.

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This sort of framing may have made sense in the early aughts, when so many were dizzy with optimism that Amazon’s everything store and the iPhone would transform the world for the better. It makes less sense 12 years after “ Steve Jobs ” — now that we’ve seen the toll the tech giants have levied on society: labor exploitation at Amazon, Uber and, yes, Tesla; misinformation and harassment on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and, yes, Twitter. These costs are almost entirely omitted from the equation of “Elon Musk.”

That may be because there is a tacit pact between author and subject in the Isaacson “great man” biography: The author will unearth unflattering personal anecdotes and share stories about the subject’s capacity to be cruel. In exchange, the subject’s greatness will be treated as an assumption, the raison d’etre for the book itself. In honor of Isaacson’s habit of using pithy, memorable phrases to describe a phenomenon, we might call it “the Isaacson Accord.”

And so it is in “Elon Musk,” whose subject is described as “a visionary” and a “risk-taking innovator” and, most pointedly, “the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future.” Musk’s many fans will surely take those descriptors as a given. But that seems all the more reason to challenge the assumptions. Because the Isaacson Accord turns out to be a devil’s bargain. We get a lot of palace intrigue, well-told anecdotes and some genuine insight into Musk’s familial psychology; but the good stuff almost comes in spite of Isaacson’s constant framing of Musk as a moody but brilliant world-mover.

Worse, in exchange for unprecedented access, the Isaacson Accord demands that a lot of the most difficult and pressing questions go unasked and, therefore, unanswered.

Isaacson repeatedly says one of Musk’s unparalleled strengths as a manager is his intimate knowledge of the factory floors where his products are made. Yet there is not a single mention of the sweeping allegations of racial discrimination at Tesla’s flagship Fremont factory that resulted in juries finding Tesla liable for millions in damages. Workers of color say they were called the N-word and saw swastikas painted on the bathroom. In 2021, Tesla was ordered to pay $137 million to one employee who suffered racist abuse, though that amount was later reduced.

Walter Isaacson is the author of the biography, "Elon Musk," which will be published Sept. 12, 2023.

Walter Isaacson brings ‘Elon Musk’ to book club this fall

L.A. Times Book Club lineup features Elon Musk biographer Walter Isaacson and Christian Cooper, author of ‘Better Living Through Birds.”

Aug. 5, 2023

Likewise, there is no examination of the union drives at Tesla plants, or the wrongful termination case Tesla lost after firing a worker involved in organizing. In all the discussion of Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot program, there is no mention of the blockbuster revelation from a former engineer that one of the first key promotions of Autopilot was staged , contributing to the false sense of security buyers had in the program.

And while a major focus of the book is the impact of Musk’s abusive father and the traits that might have been passed down, Isaacson speeds past any explanation of the falling out with Musk’s trans daughter, Jenna , allowing Musk to file it away as her political views simply having grown too radical. Isaacson does not list her as a source in the book, as her twin brother, and does not say whether he tried to reach out. Musk’s story, about Jenna having succumbed to the “woke mind virus,” stands.

No biography can or should be totally comprehensive, but it’s pretty easy to conclude which sorts of topics and conversations Isaacson decided it would be best to avoid altogether. I started “Elon Musk” wondering if the world needed another book positioning Musk as a great man — Ashlee Vance’s book of the same title ably covered many of the same bases — and finished thinking it’s time to retire the entire genre of “great innovator” biographies, period.

The idea that the future is created by flawed geniuses who happen to accumulate great wealth is outmoded and simplistic, and it encourages a flattened view of how technology is developed and whom it impacts. Just scan the list of sources Isaacson includes in the book: executives, venture capitalists, founders and high-ranking engineers. Yes, Isaacson spoke to “adversaries” like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, but not (at least per the list) to line workers, not to Jenna, not to anyone whose family member died in an Autopilot crash, nor anyone who tried to organize a Tesla plant.

The bottom line: This is the story Musk himself wants told. Sure, he might have excluded a handful of the details that proved personally embarrassing, but nothing here challenges the idea that Elon Musk is an all-too-human hero valiantly trying to save humanity from the threats he sees cascading down upon us. It’s the book Musk would have written himself.

Elon Musk visits Auschwitz after uproar over antisemitic messages on X

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Dec. 22, 2023

SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk arrives on the red carpet for the Axel Springer media award, in Berlin, Germany, Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020. (Britta Pedersen/Pool via AP)

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Brian Merchant was the Los Angeles Times’ technology columnist. He’s the author of “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone” and the forthcoming “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.” Merchant is the co-founder of Terraform, Vice Media’s speculative fiction website, and the co-editor of the anthology “Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn.” Previously, he was a senior editor at Motherboard, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, the Atlantic, Fast Company, and Slate, among others.

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Tesla, Inc. (TSLA) has intentionally leaked glimpses of its Robotaxi vehicle in a new video.

The automaker posted this video on X in favor of its CEO Elon Musk to convince shareholders to vote for Elon Musk in getting his 2018 Performance Award compensation of around $50 billion.

According to Elon Musk, the Tesla team put this video together by their own will and he did not ask for it. “The Tesla team put this together of their own volition (I did not ask for it). Thanks!,” he wrote in an X post on Monday.

However, our focus today is on two Robotaxi images that Tesla inserted at the start of this video. They almost flash away in less than a second — hardly visible to the common observer.

But the Tesla community takes a keen interest in the company’s developments, therefore, these Tesla Robotaxi pictures were caught instantly by enthusiasts.

We have put forward two especially important proposals for our Annual Meeting of Stockholders—and we need your vote. Protect your rights as stockholders & protect the value of your investment by voting FOR the ratification of the 2018 CEO Performance Award & FOR Reincorporating… pic.twitter.com/ONmB7oZfyM — Tesla (@Tesla) May 20, 2024

Tesla Robotaxi (Cybercab) Interior

Tesla intentionally inserted a picture of the interior of the Robotaxi and one of the exterior of the upcoming vehicle. Earlier this year, Elon Musk announced that the Tesla Robotaxi will be unveiled on 8th August 2024. However, months before the event, Tesla leaked these pictures to spark further interest in the vehicle and keep its community excited.

The first picture is of the interior of the Robotaxi. The reason for strongly believing this is that no existing Tesla vehicle’s interior matches this setup. Two flat front-row seats without a center console with just a touchscreen display in the middle. More interestingly, there is no steering wheel visible in this picture.

A Tesla Design team member giving Tesla Robotaxi interior briefing to the company's Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen.

The more interesting thing about this ultra-minimalistic interior is the absence of a steering wheel. What’s the purpose of having a Robotaxi if it doesn’t completely drive itself? So, it’s clear that on 8/8, the automaker will be unveiling a steering-less vehicle that completely runs on Autopilot (Full Self-Driving).

Tesla Robotaxi (Cybercab) is built on the automaker’s next-gen smaller and more affordable electric car platform. This next-gen Tesla car is expected to be in a price range of under $25,000. From the leaked pictures, it looks like it will be a two-seater vehicle intended for city driving or shorter journeys.

However, this image might be from an initial rendering from an internal presentation of the Tesla Cybercab. We might see significant changes at the unveil and even after that as the production begins next year (as per Elon Musk during the Q1 2024 earnings call) .

Because of the absence of the steering wheel, Tesla will most probably offer Robotaxi service in geofenced areas in the first phase of the rollout. As Full Self-Driving is solved, Tesla will expand the Cybercab/Robotaxi service to locations where regulators approve it.

Robtaxi Exterior

A teaser shot of the exterior of the Tesla Cybercab (Robotaxi) was also inserted into the intro of Elon Musk’s vote video (above). This photo is most probably of the rear bumper and diffuser of the vehicle.

Elon Musk shared a concept image of the Tesla Robotaxi aka Cybercab in his biography written by Walter Isaacson last year. I found this image on Page no. 501 of the book while reading the book. If we look at the teaser photo and the concept image one by one, we can easily get the idea that this is part of the Tesla Robotaxi (look below).

A conceptual render of the smaller two-seat autonomous Tesla Robotaxi vehicle based on the leaked design from the Tesla Design Center in 2023.

To enhance the leaked Cybercab picture, I removed the shadows and darkness from the image. Increasing the brightness helped expose the visible exterior of the vehicle.

From what I can understand looking at this picture, the Tesla Cybercab Robotaxi will have a look closer to the Cybertruck . It may not be as boxy or pointy as the Cybertruck but seems to have borrowed some of the design pattern from the unorthodox Tesla EV pickup truck.

Tesla has to keep the design simple and minimalistic to reduce costs. The other benefit of simplicity will result in a much smoother production ramp-up of the vehicle. Tesla CEO Elon Musk believes the next-gen ≤$25K smaller Tesla vehicle and the Robotaxi will be the best-selling cars of the future.

Tesla Model Y Accessories by EVANNEX (Sponsored Banner).

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12 books for dealing with grief, bereavement or loss.

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Joan Didion, author of "The Year of Magical Thinking," speaks at the College of Marin in Kentfield, ... [+] California in February, 1977.

Grief is a profound and complicated experience. The process of grief entails far more than just sadness—it often takes control, and fills us with countless confusing and exasperating emotions. Yet through it all, many people find the most solace in the written word.

Books about loss can be a comforting companion. They offer us unexpected insights and stories—and sometimes even laughter—through the most unimaginably challenging times. Whether it’s a novel that transports you to another world, a memoir that shares the rawness of loss or a self-help guide with practical advice, books on grief can be a powerful means to rediscover life after loss.

Top Books On Grief And Grieving

In this list, I’ve gathered 12 books for bereavement that approach grief from different angles. Each provides a unique perspective on navigating the path toward acceptance and peace. Based on user reviews and therapist recommendations, these books can be a thoughtful gift for a grieving friend or a meaningful addition to your personal post-loss journey.

1. When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

When Breath Becomes Air is a poignant memoir from the late Dr. Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgeon diagnosed with terminal lung cancer at the age of 36. The 2016 biography offers a candid look at Kalanithi’s journey—from a dedicated surgeon to a patient facing his own mortality—as he grapples with the transition from saving lives to understanding the value of his own.

This book is an ideal read for anyone trying to come to terms with terminal illness—their own or of a loved one. Its raw and introspective narrative can resonate deeply with anyone who has faced loss or is searching for meaning while anticipating grief. You can find the memoir at Penguin Random House .

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‘reacher’ season 3 casts a villain that looks like he ate reacher, biden vs trump 2024 election polls biden leads trump by only single digits in new york latest survey shows, 2. on grief and grieving by elizabeth kübler-ross & david kessler.

On Grief and Grieving is a seminal work by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, published in 2005. The book explores the well-known five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—providing a framework for understanding the complex emotions that accompany loss.

Through real-life examples and compassionate insights, the authors delve into how these stages manifest and how to navigate them. This book is particularly beneficial for those seeking structure in their grieving process, those who appreciate a more clinical approach to understanding grief or those seeking a guided path through mourning. It can be purchased at Simon & Schuster .

3. Notes On Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a bittersweet reflection on loss. The 2021 memoir follows Adichie’s experience with the sudden death of her father, exploring the waves of emotion, memory and deep sense of absence that follow such a significant loss. Through a series of intimate essays, Adichie shares her grief with raw honesty and vulnerability.

This book is an ideal purchase for those who appreciate heartfelt narratives and are seeking comfort from someone who knows and understands the reality of unexpected grief. It can be especially helpful for those looking for a sense of shared experience, and the solace that can come from knowing they’re not alone in their feelings of loss. You can find the memoir at Penguin Random House Canada .

4. The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke

The Long Goodbye by Meghan O’Rourke is a touching memoir, published in 2011, that explores the deep and complex emotions that accompany the loss of a loved one. O’Rourke reflects on her experience of losing her mother to cancer, the slow unraveling of her life and the process of rebuilding in the aftermath.

The book provides an unrefined account of the pain, confusion and disorientation that often follows the death of a close family member. The Long Goodbye is especially valuable for those coping with long-term illness—either themselves or vicariously—offering a voice that speaks to the drawn-out nature of grief. O’Rourke’s memoir can be found at Penguin Random House .

5. The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science Of How We Learn From Love And Loss by Mary Frances O’Connor

The Grieving Brain by Mary-Frances O’Connor is an enlightening exploration of the neuroscience behind grief, published in 2022. O’Connor, a renowned neuroscientist and grief expert, delves into the brain’s response to loss and provides a scientific perspective on the grieving process.

She explains how different areas of the brain contribute to the experience of grief, covering topics like why grief can be so overwhelming and how it evolves over time. This novel is ideal for readers seeking insight on why we grieve, and how we can learn to cope with loss from a logical, research-based, neurological standpoint. You can find the book at HarperCollins .

6. The Year Of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, a profound memoir published in 2005, is a deeply personal account of grief and loss. Didion explores the sudden death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, and the subsequent confusion and shock that followed.

Through her candid and introspective retelling, Didion delves into the surreal experience of grief, and the struggle to accept reality while yearning for the impossible. This book is ideal for those who have lost a partner or spouse, as it offers a compassionate exploration of the chaotic emotions that often accompany this profound loss. You can find Didion’s memoir at Penguin Random House .

7. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness is a compelling and emotionally charged novel. Published in 2011, the story follows a young boy coping with his mother’s terminal illness, who is visited by a monster. Through a series of intense and often unsettling tales, the monster helps him confront his deepest fears and the harsh realities surrounding him.

This book masterfully weaves together elements of fantasy and psychological depth. It’s particularly suited for younger readers and teens dealing with grief, as it helps readers make sense of the complex and unimaginable nature of grief. However, its universal themes and gripping storytelling make it resonant for anyone seeking an empathetic portrayal of the grieving process. You can find the novel on the Walker website.

8. PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern

PS, I Love You by Cecelia Ahern is a heartwarming novel that was published in 2004. The story follows a young widow struggling to cope with the sudden loss of her husband. Before his death, he writes a series of letters containing instructions and messages intended to help her navigate her grief. As she reads, she slowly heals, finds hope and learns to live without him by her side.

This book is ideal for those seeking an uplifting approach to grief, with moments of humor and warmth amid sorrow. It is an ideal novel for those who have lost a partner or spouse, or anyone looking for a comforting read that celebrates love even in the face of loss. The novel is available from Hachette .

9. It’s OK That You’re Not OK by Megan Devine

It's OK That You're Not OK by Megan Devine—a grief advocate and psychotherapist—is a compassionate guide to navigating grief, published in 2017. It offers a refreshing perspective on loss, challenging conventional wisdom about how people “should” grieve. She emphasizes that grief is not something to be fixed or rushed, but instead embraced as a natural part of the healing process.

This book is ideal for those who feel external pressure to “move on” quickly, as it validates the diverse emotions that often accompany grief. It creates a safe space to explore the realities of living with loss—without judgment or pressure to conform. You can find the book on the Sounds True website.

10. Bearing The Unbearable: Love, Loss, And The Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore

Bearing the Unbearable by Joanne Cacciatore is a powerful exploration of bereavement, published in 2017. Cacciatore, a leading grief counselor and researcher, delves into the profound pain that comes with losing a loved one, shares personal stories from her own experience and those of her clients, and emphasizes that grief is a natural response to love and should be honored rather than suppressed.

This guide is best suited for those dealing with deep and intense grief, particularly after the loss of a child or a tragic event. It is an ideal read for people seeking empathy and practicality following profound loss. You can find the book at Explore .

11. Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter is an innovative and poetic novel published in 2015. It tells the story of a family reeling from the sudden death of their mother, with the central figure being a shape-shifting character who enters their lives to help them navigate the aftermath. The narrative alternates between the perspectives of the grieving father and his two young sons, exploring the confusing and sometimes surreal emotions that accompany grief.

This book is an ideal purchase or gift for those who appreciate experimental narratives and poetic storytelling. It’s especially suited for readers seeking a more abstract and metaphorical exploration of grief, offering an imaginative approach to understanding the process of healing. The novel is available from Faber .

12. It’s Okay To Laugh: (Crying Is Cool Too) by Nora McInerny Purmort

It's Okay to Laugh by Nora McInerny is a heartfelt and humorous memoir published in 2016. McInerny describes her journey through a series of major life events, including the loss of her husband to brain cancer, the miscarriage of her child and the death of her father—all within a short span of time. Despite the heaviness of these experiences, she brings a lighthearted and irreverent approach to her storytelling, balancing grief with moments of humor and warmth.

This book is ideal for those who believe that laughter can be a healing balm, even during loss and grief. McInerny’s honest and relatable voice offers a refreshing perspective on navigating grief with a touch of humor. You can find the memoir at HarperCollins .

Bottom Line

Books can be an unexpected source of comfort and enlightenment during times of grief. These 12 carefully selected books span memoirs, guides and novels, each offering a unique perspective on bereavement. Whether you’re seeking empathy, guidance or a touch of humor, these books can empower you through your journey of healing and remembrance.

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From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era - a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over ...
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The biography of Elon Musk begins with the prescient words of Steve Jobs: The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. It is apparent in this book that Elon Musk developed a siege mentality that included an attraction for storm and drama. Musk thrived on crises, deadlines, and wild surges of work.
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The book not only provides a window into Musk's life but also addresses pressing issues like sustainable energy, space exploration, and artificial intelligence. 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 visionary.
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Elon Musk. Walter Isaacson. Simon and Schuster, Sep 12, 2023 - Biography & Autobiography - 688 pages. #1 New York Times bestseller. From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era—a rule-breaking visionary who helped to ...
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Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson. Hardcover - 12 Sept. 2023. by Walter Isaacson (Author) 4.7 14,177 ratings. Editors' pick Hand-selected reads. See all formats and editions. #1 New York Times non-fiction bestseller. #2 Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller. SHORTLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARD.
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"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 ...
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