Elon Musk
by
3/99
Critics' Rating Index
94/99
Readers' Rating Index
97/99
Scholars' Citation Index
97/99
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About This Book
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 lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Oh, and took over Twitter. When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist. His father's impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive. At the beginning of 2022—after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth—Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. "I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life," he said. It was a wistful comment, not a New Year's resolution. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world's ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground. For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?
Reviews
"It's clear from his account that none of them would have happened without Musk's distinctive combination of vision, maniacal determination, personal commitment and ruthlessness."
"An engaging chronicle ..."
"Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator."
"The details of...domestic intrigues are, in the book and in Musk's life, largely beside the point."
"He frames it as a character study, a quest to understand and perhaps reconcile the contradictions at Musk's core."
"Isaacson is dazzled by his subject."
"I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter ..."
"Instead of narrowing our critical lens to Musk's brain, we need to widen it, in order to understand the consequences of his influence."
"Musk's childhood sounds bad, but Isaacson's telling leaves out rather a lot about the world in which Musk grew up."
"The author will unearth unflattering personal anecdotes and share stories about the subject's capacity to be cruel."
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