\n<\/p>\n
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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
Mr. Musk\u2019s life so far \u2014 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 \u2014 is detailed through scores of interviews with his family, friends, business associates and Mr. Musk himself.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It opens with a quote from Mr. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, who once said, \u201cThe people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The New York Times bought copies of the book at a retail store that was selling it in advance of its authorized release.<\/p>\n
Mr. Musk bought Twitter<\/a> in October 2022 for $44 billion, after a surprise bid for the company and then a seeming reluctance to follow through with the deal.<\/p>\n Days after Twitter\u2019s 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. \u201cHow else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?\u201d he said. (It was a joke, Mr. Isaacson writes, but Mr. Musk\u2019s sons still didn\u2019t understand his rationale for buying Twitter, an app they rarely used.)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n After acquiring Twitter, Mr. Musk and his lieutenants combed through its employees\u2019 internal communications and social media posts, looking for signs of disloyalty, Mr. Isaacson writes. The \u201cmusketeers,\u201d as Musk loyalists were known inside Twitter, searched Twitter\u2019s Slack archives for keywords including \u201cElon,\u201d and fired dozens of employees who had made snarky comments about Mr. Musk.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n 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\u2019s 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.)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Musk\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Mr. Musk\u2019s 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, \u201cIt was the only time I had ever seen Elon\u2019s hands shaking.\u201d Mr. Isaacson writes, \u201cThere are certain people who occupy a demon\u2019s corner of Musk\u2019s head space. They trigger him, turn him dark, and rouse a cold anger. His father is number one.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n 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. \u201cHe was just clueless about why I\u2019d be upset,\u201d she told Mr. Isaacson.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Mr. Musk\u2019s politics defy simple categorization. Despite his attacks on liberal critics, his rants against \u201cwoke\u201d 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.<\/p>\n Mr. Musk repeatedly professes not to be an admirer of former President Donald J. Trump, telling his biographer, \u201cI\u2019m not Trump\u2019s fan. He\u2019s disruptive.\u201d Mr. Isaacson writes that Mr. Musk harbors a \u201cdeep disdain\u201d for the former president \u201cwhom he considered a con man\u201d and seemed, Mr. Musk says, \u201ckind of nuts.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n 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. \u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mr. Musk \u201csummoned\u201d Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, to a meeting at Twitter\u2019s headquarters in February 2023, shortly after the release of ChatGPT. Mr. Musk angrily asked Mr. Altman to \u201cjustify how he could legally transform a nonprofit funded by donations into a for-profit that could make millions.\u201d The encounter, Mr. Isaacson writes, left Mr. Altman \u201cpained.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Mr. Musk\u2019s decision to start X.AI came partly out of concerns about underpopulation. (He is the father of 10 children.) \u201cThe 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,\u201d Mr. Isaacson writes. Mr. Musk believed that \u201cat some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Mr. Musk\u2019s gave X.AI\u2019s 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. \u201cYou should be able to give it big tasks, such as \u2018Build a better rocket engine,\u2019\u201d Mr. Musk told Mr. Isaacson.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n Mr. Musk\u2019s relationship with the media, which was already strained before he bought Twitter, reached new levels of tension after the deal was announced.<\/p>\n The \u201cSeinfeld\u201d 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. \u201cDo you just want to murder kids in schools?\u201d 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. \u201cNo, no,\u201d Mr. Musk replied, according to Mr. Isaacson. \u201cI\u2019m anti-kid murder.\u201d Mr. Emanuel also seated the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, another Musk critic, at the same table. \u201cIt ended up being a microcosm of Twitter,\u201d Mr. Isaacson wrote.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n As Mr. Musk\u2019s erratic tweets damaged Twitter\u2019s 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. \u201cZaslav 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n For years, Tesla has been the highest-profile business in Mr. Musk\u2019s portfolio of companies, serving as a constant source of pride and stress.<\/p>\n The company\u2019s 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. \u201cYou can\u2019t be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you,\u201d Mr. Musk said. But he also acknowledged that he had found purpose under pressure: \u201cWhen you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it\u2019s not that easy to get motivated every day.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Even as the company found success, it attracted critics in the form of short-sellers who bet against Tesla\u2019s stock. That practice reached a fever pitch in 2018<\/a> as Tesla struggled to meet production goals, infuriating Mr. Musk, who called short-sellers \u201cleeches on the neck of business.\u201d 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\u2019s factory. \u201cThe degree of inside information they had was insane,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n Production sprints and struggles at Tesla and the space exploration company SpaceX also sharpened Mr. Musk\u2019s philosophy, which he distilled into a five-step approach that he called \u201cthe algorithm\u201d 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. \u201cI became a broken record on the algorithm,\u201d Mr. Musk told Mr. Isaacson.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Musk created SpaceX to help humanity become a multi-planetary species. The company\u2019s success so far is a credit to his willingness to accept risks, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI 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,\u201d Mr. Juncosa said of Mr. Musk. \u201cHe had an intuition of what the physics were.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n 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<\/a> defend against Russian invasion. But Mr. Musk has also been criticized for not allowing Ukraine to use the service<\/a> to launch a drone attack on a Russian naval base last year, fearing that it would have provoked a major escalation in the war. \u201cWe did not want to be a part of that,\u201d Mr. Musk said.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n In 2021, SpaceX for the first time successfully sent a crew into orbit without a professional astronaut aboard<\/a>. Afterward, Mr. Musk reflected on the role that he and his company had played in advancing space exploration. \u201cBuilding mass-market electric cars was inevitable,\u201d he said. \u201cIt would have happened without me. But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.\u201d He added, \u201cThis flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n SARAH NIR contributed reporting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n
Personal Life<\/h2>\n
\n
\n
Politics and Trump<\/h2>\n
\n
Artificial Intelligence<\/h2>\n
\n
Elon and the Media<\/h2>\n
\n
Tesla<\/h2>\n
\n
SpaceX<\/h2>\n
\n