Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson

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Isaacson followed Musk for the next two years, visiting his SpaceX and Tesla factories and attending board meetings. Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? It is accepted by you that Daunt Books has no control over additional charges in relation to customs clearance. After all, just before issuing his clarification, Isaacson had been touting a walk through the SpaceX factory with CBS’s David Pogue to promote his book. The thing you learn after a while on the Musk beat is that his most self-aggrandizing statements usually bear the least resemblance to reality.

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. However, Musk denied the allegation, saying satellites in the region were not turned on, and that he chose not to activate them.

The Washington Post followed it up, publishing the excerpt where Isaacson claimed Musk had essentially shut down a military offensive on a personal whim. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. 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.

It debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending September 16, 2023. is] a head-spinning tale about a vain, brilliant, sometimes cruel figure whose ambitions are actively shaping the future of human life. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist. One of the things that anyone covering Elon Musk for long enough has to reckon with is that he loves to tell hilarious lies. As the people closest to him will attest, he lacks empathy — something that Isaacson describes as a “gene” that’s “hard-wired.Isaacson later said in an interview that "Elon is very mercurial, but he never told me not to put anything in the book. While writing that it is "strictly a book of reportage" and that "[Isaacson's] reporting is rigorous and dogged", the reviewer noted that the book "asks all the wrong questions". He pushes employees at his companies — he now runs six, including X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — to slash costs and meet brutal deadlines because he needs to pour resources into the moonshot of colonizing space “before civilization crumbles.

Here are some other ones: If Musk were more receptive to criticism, would his companies be in better shape? Yet even as Musk struggles to relate to the actual humans around him, his plans for humanity are grand. In the following paragraph, Isaacson quotes text messages from Fedorov, who had “secretly shared with him [Musk] the details of how the drone subs were crucial” to the Ukrainians.In 10 years, the big revelation that Musk switched off the Ukrainian internet access during a battle may not be the most embarrassing thing Isaacson has committed to the page.

He really said he’d replace the rear seats with thrusters, and journalists spent time trying to figure out what the fuck that meant.If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.