How much have we learned from Elon Musk’s latest biography, written by star biographer Walter Isaacson?
The Guardian says eight, Barron’s says three – while just as many headlines seem to focus on how many kids he has (I think it’s 11.)
The best – and shortest – book review comes from tech journo legend Kara Swisher, who tweeted, natch: “Sad & smart son slowly morphs into mentally abusive father he abhors except with rockets, cars & more money. Often right, sometimes wrong, petty jerk always. Might be crazy in good way, but also a bad way. Pile o’ babies. Not Steve Jobs. You’re welcome.”
The headlines of the book reviews say it all: “Elon Musk has his demons. Walter Isaacson does his best to dissect them,” wrote The Washington Post. Its book critic, Will Oremus, criticised Isaacson for prioritising “revealing anecdotes and behind-the-scenes reportage over a sophisticated critical lens” – the “juicy details” notwithstanding.
With the headline “How Elon Musk went from superhero to supervillain,” the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore quite rightly pointed out that “for the rest of us, Musk’s pettiness, arrogance, and swaggering viciousness are harder to take”.
Arguably the best descriptive headline was from Jennifer Szalai at the New York Times: “Elon Musk wants to save humanity. The only problem: people.” She writes: “Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him ‘bad at picking up social cues’. As the people closest to him will attest, he lacks empathy — something that Isaacson describes as a ‘gene’ that’s ‘hard-wired’.”
Suffice to say, it does not present Pretoria’s richest and most entrepreneurial son in a good light.
But the most controversial aspect – which Isaacson has already been forced to walk back – is the role Musk played in the Russian invasion of Ukraine through his Starlink satellite connectivity business.
Details emerged in Isaacson’s book that Musk ordered Starlink to be switched off near Crimea so Ukraine could not use drones to attack Russian warships.
READ MORE: State Capture, Elon Musk style
“As a result,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted, these ships fired Kalibr missiles at Ukrainian cities and “civilians, children are being killed”.
He added: “This is the price of a cocktail of ignorance and big ego. However, the question still remains: why do some people so desperately want to defend war criminals and their desire to commit murder? And do they now realize that they are committing evil and encouraging evil?”
Isaacson tweeted a reply that “the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.”
I’m buying my Kindle copy today and will start reading.