Elon Musk is an enigma. One would not be wrong to construe this as a clichéd sentence. But then, one way to understand a cliché is to see it as a truth that is tired of repeating itself. Walter Isaacson’s bombshell biography of Musk is precisely this: a deeply reported book that lays bare the facts of Musk’s life. But it is also a work haunted by questions.
From the beginning, we are not shown a man we know today: the mercurial Co-founder of Tesla, or the man who, by a snap of his fingers, bought the microblogging behemoth Twitter and transformed it into X, and all that would come later. Instead, in the opening pages of Isaacson’s magnum opus, Musk is a frightened kid growing up in violence-ridden apartheid-torn South Africa, who from the very start, “knew pain”, but also knew how to survive it.
This cycle of pain and survival is a theme tattooed all over the book. But what kind of pain, one might curiously ask. Two kinds, actually. On the one hand, we see Musk as a boy trying desperately to fit in, but failing. “He was the youngest and smallest student in his class,” Isaacson writes, adding that Musk had difficulty picking up social cues. A boy who was bullied mercilessly in school, beaten up, bloodied. In fact, in a candid confession, Musk tells Isaacson, “If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you [for] the rest of your life.”
But school was the least of his problems. His biggest challenge came from his family, especially his father, Errol. Musk came from a broken family, with his parents divorcing when he was barely eight. But the figure of his father looms large over Musk’s life. As Isaacson notes, Errol could at times be jovial and fun, but then a dark cloud would come over him and he would become abusive and possessed with fantasies and conspiracy theories. In one scary event from Musk’s life, one day Errol sat in his underwear near a kitchen table with a plastic roulette wheel, because he wanted to see whether microwaves would affect it. At other times, he would get obsessed with Fibonacci numbers, trying to find an occult link to it. As Musk later confesses, “I don’t know how he went from being great at engineering to believing in witchcraft. But he somehow made that evolution.” All of this led Musk to realise that he had to leave South Africa, a place he found claustrophobic, leading him to become an immigrant, first to Canada and later on to the US.
But then came survival. To hide from his acute social anxiety, Musk first took refuge in science-fiction books, video games and fantasy role-playing tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons. Isaacson notes that Musk realised quite early on that the only way to overcome his problems was dogged determination: to achieve what he wanted, anyhow, no matter how difficult the task.
We see this play out beautifully years later when in 2008, bogged down by financial difficulties, Tesla was on the verge of shutting down. It took Musk’s dogged determination to save Tesla, and thereby the electric vehicle dream. As the narrative goes, to save Tesla, Musk wanted to raise $20 million in new equity funding. While other investors were on board, VantagePoint Capital’s Alan Salzman wasn’t. “Salzman was trying to insist that we hitch our wagon to a legacy car company and I’m like, that ship is literally sinking,” Musk told Isaacson. Things escalated so much that Salzman was determined to remove Musk as the CEO. With ugly boardroom squabbles, Musk realised giving out more equity wasn’t prudent and decided debt was more preferable, and eventually managed to get it approved by his board. As he remarks, “Had it gone the other way, Tesla would have been dead and maybe too the dream of electric cars for many years. At the time, all of the major US car companies had quit making electric vehicles.”
But if Musk is a survivor, he is also mercurial, unpredictable. If there is one thing that emerges through Isaacson’s biography, it is the fact that Musk is a fiercely complicated individual, who, apart from his incredible breadth of innovation—which the author is clearly in awe of—is known to exhibit many of the traits Errol was notorious for. After his break-up with the Hollywood actress Amber Heard, Isaacson describes Musk as someone who oscillated between periods of “depression, stupor, giddiness, and manic energy”. He would have violent mood swings, leading to “catatonic trances and depressive paralysis,” as Isaacson notes. This behaviour affected not just his relationship with his family, but also those he would work with, at Tesla, SpaceX and other firms.
Equally problematic is the recent slide towards far-right wing views, which Musk is known to champion, and which, in particular, Isaacson comes down heavily upon. He laments that given Musk’s vast intellectual gifts, the world’s richest man could have done more for free speech and transparency, but, instead, has become exactly antithetical to those principles, as the Twitter-takeover saga exemplifies.
In fact, we emerge out of the book loaded with questions. The pre-eminent one is this: what exactly is Musk emblematic of? And, although Isaacson doesn’t say this directly, a careful reading between the lines allows us a clue: much like a Shakespearean tragic hero was known for his greatness, he was undone by one thing—a fatal flaw. For Isaacson, Musk is one. And his tragic flaw is one that many men in history are known to have possessed—hubris.
@arnav_d
