“Serial biographer” Walter Isaacson is today publishing a book on the multi-billionaire after spending the last two years in “his shadow”.
He has already recounted the lives of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin… The American journalist Walter Isaacson publishes Tuesday September 12 in the United States, and from Wednesday September 13 in France with Fayard, a biography of the richest man in the world, soberly titled Elon Musk.
>> War in Ukraine: how billionaire Elon Musk found himself involved in the conflict
A biography completely authorized by Musk, since the “serial biographer” spent more than two years in the billionaire’s footsteps, and had numerous interviews with him, as well as with members of his family, collaborators and former employees.
Trump, a “slightly crazy crook”
According to the American press, the book depicts what we already knew a little: a man who is both complex and tortured. So tortured, that his relationships with others are very complicated. His only source of comfort, according to Walter Isaacson, remains his family. With the exception of his father, Errol, who we hardly see and whom he describes as “emotionally and physically abusive“.
On politics, the character is difficult to define: he confides to his biographer that he is not a fan of Trump, whom he describes as “a slightly crazy crook”and that he would have voted for Joe Biden if he had voted in 2020, even if he remembers a dinner “boring to death” with him in San Francisco, when he was Obama’s vice president. Moreover, for Musk, the “virus woke“, in reference to activism which aims to promote and defend all minorities, presents the risk of derailing the colonization of other planets, Mars in the first place, because it is “anti-human in general“and must be”stopped“.
“Attracted by the storm and the drama”
Elon Musk is also described as “attracted by the storm and the drama“, subject to “unpredictable emotional oscillations“, which are manifested in his way of managing the companies of which he is the boss. The book thus recounts a scene between Musk and those he calls his “musketeers“, even though he has just bought Twitter, which has become says of Tesla that it is a constant source of pride and stress, but that the construction of mass electric cars was inevitable and would have happened without it.
The book also mentions several examples of the anger of the native South African, furious when his employees do not meet his expectations or ready to humiliate them if they resist him. For the singer Grimes, former companion of the entrepreneur, the latter goes into “demon mode“when he expresses his irritation, a state which”generates a lot of chaos“, she confided to the biographer.
When Musk chose not to help kyiv to avoid “a mini-Pearl Harbor”
Elon Musk claims to have created SpaceX to help humanity become a “multi-planetary species”. He also describes Starlink, his satellite constellation, as vital for populations in war zones. The book also recounts an episode of the war in Ukraine where Elon Musk chose not to help Ukraine.
It was a year ago, in Crimea. Musk tells Walter Isaacson that the Ukrainians wanted to torpedo the Russian Black Sea Fleet stationed in Sevastopol. They sent six underwater drones loaded with explosives, but the billionaire secretly ordered his engineers to deactivate Starlink, which the Ukrainian army was using to guide these drones, which ended up stranding without touching their target.
“How can I involve Starlink in this war ?”asks the richest man in the world to his biographer. “It was so people could watch Netflix, relax, connect to school, do peaceful things, not drone strikes”, he replies to himself. Elon Musk explains that he was afraid of a nuclear response from Russia, of a “mini Pearl Harbor”. And that’s why he deactivated his satellite network.