Review

Walter Isaacson is a superb biographer (The Code Breaker, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, and more) and this is evident once again in Elon Musk. Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years, engaging in countless meetings, reviewing correspondence, and conducting numerous interviews and late-night conversations trying to make sense of the man who had become the world's richest man. Growing up in South Africa, he was bullied in school and relentlessly emotionally abused by his father, Errol Musk. Both Elon and his brother Kimbal, who no longer speak to their father, say that he was a volatile fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated, and at other times delusional. "He had a Jekyll-and-Hyde nature, they say. One minute he would be friendly, the next he would launch into an hour or more of unrelenting abuse. He would end every tirade by telling Elon how pathetic he was" and Elon had to stand there and take it. "It was mental torture" Elon says. Conditioned in childhood that life is pain, Musk says that "Adversity shaped me and that "My pain threshold became very high." These early years clearly had an impact on him. He developed a fervor, a siege mentality that drove him to epic quests. Born in 1971, he escaped his father at age 17 by immigrating to Canada and later went to the University of Pennsylvania where he received degrees in economics and physics. In 1995, he moved to California to attend Stanford, but quickly dropped out and, with his brother, Kimbal, co-founded an online city guide software company, Zip 2. This was acquired by Compaq for $307 million in 1999. That same year he took $12 million of that money to co-found X.com, a direct bank. X.com merged with Confinity in 2000 to form PayPal. In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion, and, with $100 million of that, Musk founded Space X, and the rest is history: Tesla, Solar City, OpenAI, Neurolink, and Boring. In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion and in March of 2023, he founded xA1, an artificial intelligence company. These actions are the companies, but this book is about the way his life, his marriages, his 11 children, and most importantly what he was made of: His all-out, take-no-prisoners, maniacal, obsessive drive to move faster, take more risks, break rules and traditions in order to accomplish the goals he set for himself--and for humanity. All readers with relish Isaacson's superb writing to capture the essence of Elon Musk.

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