Takeaways From a New Elon Musk Biography: Ukraine, Trump and Extra

A brand new biography of Elon Musk portrays the billionaire entrepreneur as a posh, tortured determine whose brilliance is usually overshadowed by his incapability to narrate on a human stage to the folks round him — his wives, his youngsters and people on whom he relied to assist develop the area exploration and electrical automotive companies that made him the wealthiest man on Earth.

Mr. Musk’s life up to now — his tough childhood in South Africa, his stormy romantic relationships, his success as a visionary who constructed SpaceX and Tesla, and his impetuous determination to purchase Twitter — is detailed via scores of interviews together with his household, pals, enterprise associates and Mr. Musk himself.

The e-book, which might be launched on Tuesday, is by Walter Isaacson, the journalist whose earlier 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 as soon as mentioned, “The people who find themselves loopy sufficient to suppose they’ll change the world are those who do.”

The New York Occasions purchased copies of the e-book at a retail retailer that was promoting it prematurely of its licensed launch.

Twitter, Now Generally known as X

Mr. Musk purchased Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, after a shock bid for the corporate after which a seeming reluctance to observe via with the deal.

• Days after Twitter’s board authorized the deal, Mr. Musk advised his 4 teenage sons that he had bought the social community to sway the following U.S. presidential election. “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?” he mentioned. (It was a joke, Mr. Isaacson writes, however Mr. Musk’s sons nonetheless didn’t perceive his rationale for purchasing Twitter, an app they hardly ever used.)

• After buying Twitter, Mr. Musk and his lieutenants combed via its staff’ inside communications and social media posts, on the lookout for indicators of disloyalty, Mr. Isaacson writes. The “musketeers,” as Musk loyalists have been recognized inside Twitter, searched Twitter’s Slack archives for key phrases together with “Elon,” and fired dozens of staff who had made snarky feedback about Mr. Musk.

• Mr. Musk staged a shock raid on a Twitter knowledge facility in Sacramento, Calif., final winter, shortly after buying the corporate. Mr. Musk had determined to maneuver servers housed within the facility to a different Twitter knowledge heart to chop prices, however Twitter’s infrastructure leaders warned him that shifting the costly tools safely may take months. In a match of anger, Mr. Musk determined to maneuver the servers himself, enlisting a small workforce and a flock of shifting vans to haul them away on Christmas Eve. (He later mentioned he regretted the choice, which led to service outages.)

Private Life

Mr. Musk’s sprawling household has been a supply of consolation amid the frequent turmoil of his industry-spanning enterprise pursuits, Mr. Isaacson writes. However his relationship together with his father, Errol, is a supply of trauma that continues to be with him.

• Mr. Musk’s father is described as emotionally and bodily abusive and is quoted talking disparagingly of Black folks. When Mr. Musk agreed in 2016 to satisfy his father, from whom he has been largely estranged, a good friend recollects to Mr. Isaacson, “It was the one time I had ever seen Elon’s fingers shaking.” Mr. Isaacson writes, “There are specific individuals who occupy a demon’s nook of Musk’s head area. They set off him, flip him darkish, and rouse a chilly anger. His father is primary.”

• Whereas the musician Grimes, also referred to as Claire Boucher, was giving delivery to his son X in Could 2020, Mr. Musk took an image of the supply and shared it together with his family and friends, together with her father and brothers. Grimes was understandably horrified and scrambled to get it deleted. “He was simply clueless about why I’d be upset,” she advised Mr. Isaacson.

Politics and Trump

Mr. Musk’s politics defy easy categorization. Regardless of his assaults on liberal critics, his rants in opposition to “woke” Democrats and his occasional promotion of far-right conspiracy theories, he’s portrayed as extra disillusioned with the leftward drift of the Democratic Celebration than he’s a fan of Republicans.

• Mr. Musk repeatedly professes to not 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 previous president “whom he thought-about a con man” and appeared, Mr. Musk says, “type of nuts.”

• However neither is he a Biden supporter, although he tells Mr. Isaacson that he would have voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 had he forged a poll. (He determined to not vote as a result of he was registered in California and thought of it a waste as a result of the state was not aggressive within the presidential election.) Mr. Musk describes an encounter with Mr. Biden a number of years in the past through which he got here away unimpressed. “When he was vp, I went to a lunch with him in San Francisco the place he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like a kind of dolls the place you pull the string and it simply says the identical senseless phrases again and again.”

Synthetic Intelligence

Mr. Musk has lengthy been fearful about synthetic intelligence, which he considers a possible existential risk. He was a co-founder of OpenAI earlier than breaking ties with the group in 2018, and lately introduced he was forming a rival A.I. firm, X.AI.

• Mr. Musk “summoned” Sam Altman, the chief govt of OpenAI, to a gathering at Twitter’s headquarters in February 2023, shortly after the discharge of ChatGPT. Mr. Musk angrily requested Mr. Altman to “justify how he may legally rework a nonprofit funded by donations right into a for-profit that might make tens of millions.” The encounter, Mr. Isaacson writes, left Mr. Altman “pained.”

• Mr. Musk’s determination to start out X.AI got here partly out of issues about underpopulation. (He’s the daddy of 10 youngsters.) “The quantity of human intelligence, he famous, was leveling off as a result of folks weren’t having sufficient youngsters. In the meantime, the quantity of laptop intelligence was going up exponentially,” Mr. Isaacson writes. Mr. Musk believed that “sooner or later, organic brainpower could be dwarfed by digital brainpower.”

• Mr. Musk’s gave X.AI’s early staff three objectives: Create an A.I. chatbot able to writing code, an A.I. chatbot educated to be politically impartial and a man-made intelligence that might motive and pursue fact. “It’s best to be capable to give it huge duties, akin to ‘Construct a greater rocket engine,’” Mr. Musk advised Mr. Isaacson.

Elon and the Media

Mr. Musk’s relationship with the media, which was already strained earlier than he purchased Twitter, reached new ranges of rigidity after the deal was introduced.

• The “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David confronted Elon Musk on the marriage ceremony in 2022 of Ari Emanuel, the chief govt of the media conglomerate Endeavor, who had seated them on the similar desk. “Do you simply need to homicide youngsters in colleges?” Mr. David requested Mr. Musk, grilling him on his assist of Republican candidates within the wake of the college capturing in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 college students useless. “No, no,” Mr. Musk replied, based on Mr. Isaacson. “I’m anti-kid homicide.” Mr. Emanuel additionally seated the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, one other Musk critic, on the similar desk. “It ended up being a microcosm of Twitter,” Mr. Isaacson wrote.

• As Mr. Musk’s erratic tweets broken Twitter’s relationship with advertisers, he sought counsel from boldfaced names within the media {industry} on the way to restore the rift. One was David Zaslav, the chief govt of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, the Warner Bros. film studio and CNN. They spoke for greater than an hour. “Zaslav advised him that he was doing self-destructive issues that made it tougher to draw manufacturers that have been aspirational. He ought to deal with enhancing the product by including longer video choices and making advertisements more practical.”

Tesla

For years, Tesla has been the highest-profile enterprise in Mr. Musk’s portfolio of corporations, serving as a continuing supply of satisfaction and stress.

• The corporate’s early struggles contributed to an extended, tough interval for Mr. Musk, one which took a bodily and psychological toll, he advised Mr. Isaacson in a 2021 interview. “You possibly can’t be in a continuing battle for survival, all the time in adrenaline mode, and never have it damage you,” Mr. Musk mentioned. However he additionally acknowledged that he had discovered function underneath stress: “When you find yourself now not in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that simple to get motivated every single day.”

• Whilst the corporate discovered success, it attracted critics within the type of short-sellers who wager in opposition to Tesla’s inventory. That observe reached a fever pitch in 2018 as Tesla struggled to satisfy manufacturing objectives, infuriating Mr. Musk, who referred to as short-sellers “leeches on the neck of enterprise.” However he acknowledged that a few of these merchants had additionally collected an impressively correct image of the corporate from insiders and even drones flying over Tesla’s manufacturing facility. “The diploma of inside data they’d was insane,” he mentioned.

• Manufacturing sprints and struggles at Tesla and the area exploration firm SpaceX additionally sharpened Mr. Musk’s philosophy, which he distilled right into a five-step strategy that he referred to as “the algorithm” and which he repeatedly invoked to staff. It concerned, so as: questioning necessities, deleting components or processes, simplifying and optimizing, accelerating processes, and, lastly, automating. “I turned a damaged file on the algorithm,” Mr. Musk advised Mr. Isaacson.

SpaceX

Mr. Musk created SpaceX to assist humanity turn out to be a multi-planetary species. The corporate’s success up to now is a credit score to his willingness to just accept dangers, typically efficiently and typically not.

• Throughout the countdown to a pivotal launch in 2015, an unidentified liquid started dripping from a Falcon 9 rocket, scary Mark Juncosa, a high SpaceX official. Mr. Musk deliberated briefly earlier than deciding to proceed, leading to a profitable launch. On the time, Mr. Juncosa assumed that Mr. Musk had primarily based that call on a sophisticated danger evaluation, however realized he was incorrect after reviewing footage years later. “I assumed he had completed some advanced fast calculations to determine what to do, however in reality he simply shrugged his shoulders and gave the order,” Mr. Juncosa mentioned of Mr. Musk. “He had an instinct of what the physics have been.”

• To realize interplanetary flight sooner or later, SpaceX wanted to discover a option to earn cash within the current. So in 2015, Mr. Musk introduced Starlink, searching for to faucet into the profitable market of offering web service, on this case via a constellation of low-orbit satellites. The service has turn out to be an important lifeline to folks in conflict zones and helped the Ukrainian navy defend in opposition to Russian invasion. However Mr. Musk has additionally been criticized for not permitting Ukraine to make use of the service to launch a drone assault on a Russian naval base final yr, fearing that it could have provoked a significant escalation within the conflict. “We didn’t need to be part of that,” Mr. Musk mentioned.

• In 2021, SpaceX for the primary time efficiently despatched a crew into orbit and not using a skilled astronaut aboard. Afterward, Mr. Musk mirrored on the function that he and his firm had performed in advancing area exploration. “Constructing mass-market electrical vehicles was inevitable,” he mentioned. “It will have occurred with out me. However turning into a space-faring civilization isn’t inevitable.” He added, “This flight was an awesome instance of how progress requires human company.”

SARAH NIR contributed reporting.