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Genius, billionaire, laughingstock: how Elon Musk's biography turned out to be his exposure
Elon Musk, a detailed biography of the scandalous billionaire, was released in Russian. Its author, Walter Isaacson, became famous for books about Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein — but his new work not only creates a legend about his hero, but also exposes it. Egor Mikhailov tells what the problems of the book are — and why it is still worth reading.
Elon Musk is a genius. Not because he is a great engineer or a breakthrough thinker, and certainly not because he is a good leader. No, he has one unconditional superpower: he knows how to make everyone talk about him. It seems that the discussion of Elon Musk is the very energy on which his excessively inflated ego works, and if so, then this engine will not stop for a long time. Every tweet of Musk, every public statement, every idiotic joke becomes the subject of conversation. And there is no real discussion: by 2024, more or less everyone has a ready-made opinion about who Musk is – a genius and visionary who thinks at a level inaccessible to an ordinary earthling, or a pea buffoon, the living embodiment of all the sins of capitalism.
The release of Walter Isaacson's book is unlikely to change this paradigm: are there many people in the world who are ready to master a seven-hundred-page biography in order to change their opinion about Elon Musk? However, Isaacson has done a tremendous job, not only accompanying Musk for two years, communicating with his relatives, friends, employees and former partners (who do not always have good memories of him). And, despite the fact that the book was not perfect, it can tell us a lot - not only about the main character, but also about how we treat charming billionaires who promise to change the world.
Compositionally, Elon Musk is divided into two almost equal parts. Chapters one through forty-six tell the story of his rise. Childhood in South Africa, moving to Canada, and then to the United States, meetings and partings, PayPal and Tesla, SpaceX and a cameo in Iron Man 2. And all this at supersonic speed: according to Isaacson, Musk gives 100 percent to every case and demands the same from everyone around him - getting indignant when someone mentions "stupid things" like labor protection or vacations. The cost of these successes is sometimes high: at one point, high requirements and reduced safety standards led to the fact that "the Tesla plant recorded 30% more work-related injuries than the industry average."
And after some meetings, Isaacson writes, engineers experience "post-mask stress disorder" — such a "friendly" atmosphere reigns at them.
But all this is for the sake of a great goal: to create a self-driving car, to launch an ideal financial system, to send a man to Mars! Isaacson is fascinated by the figure of Musk, and the narrative in his book seems to form a story of achieving goals that justify any means. "He changes the reality around him. He is a real inventor, but he believes in his own lies," Musk's younger brother says in the book. We are not talking about Elon himself, but about his father, an abuser, conspiracy theorist and former co-owner of murky emerald businesses. But it is not for nothing that Isaacson's interlocutors one after another say that they often see in the hero of the book the traits of his parent: impulsiveness, harshness, intractability, aggressiveness, inclination to conspiracy theories. The plot about a man who tries, but cannot break with the family spell, fascinates the author. He admits this in the very first pages: "This is one of the most resonant motifs in mythology. To what extent does the great journey of a Star Wars hero require the exorcism of the demons received from Darth Vader and the fight against the dark side of the Force?" Of course, Isaacson is a great storyteller, and he even builds a real story according to the laws of fiction, otherwise we would not be interested in reading it (and reading Elon Musk is incredibly interesting). But this disclosure of the technique exposes the main problem of the book. Isaacson tries, but still can barely resist the insane charm of his hero: Musk's gravity is too powerful. Sometimes it seems that he is not writing a biography, but carving a statue from a block of marble. The monument comes out impressive, but still Musk is not a monument, but a living person who is too early to put on a pedestal.
Most interesting of all are those moments when Isaacson seems to be trying not to focus on Musk's unsightly sides, but, being a good journalist, cannot hide them. The first launch of the Falcon 1 rocket turned out to be a failure: a fire broke out due to a fuel leak, the rocket crashed into the water. Musk immediately appointed one of the best engineers to blame, who soon left the company. When the fallen rocket was examined, it turned out that the engineer had nothing to do with it: the connecting nut rusted and cracked. "The culprit of the accident was the sea air Kwaja ", writes Isaacson, although he knows that this is not the whole truth. And in passing, he reports a little later: Elon Musk himself was responsible, with whose personal approval the same nut was made of cheaper aluminum. In general, this is what the legend of Musk is built on: he gathers the best engineers and programmers around him over and over again, inspires with crazy ideas, exhausts them with unrealistic deadlines, accepts praise for their merits — and, with rare exceptions, blames them for failures.
But the dramatic laws say that the hero's ascent to the top must be followed by a fall. And Musk does not disappoint. In 2018, he unexpectedly got into a skirmish with an English speleologist and publicly called him a pedophile - this led to the fall of Tesla shares and litigation. What was the trigger for such an act, impulsive even by Musk's standards? Maybe the recent breakup with Amber Heard. Maybe business (the author reports on Musk's failure due to the fact that an employee of a battery plant in Nevada leaked information to the press about the waste thrown away). Isaacson blames the lack of feedback: when a person stops correlating his actions with the opinion of others, he begins to do strange things - and this is the most plausible version.
From this moment, the story of the Musk that we know now begins. A follower of all kinds of conspiracy theories. A supporter of freedom of speech in words, hypocritically banning journalists who dared to criticize him. A man who never thinks twice before tweeting something that will bring down his own company's shares. Isaacson recounts how Musk once impulsively tweeted at 3 a.m., "My pronouns are Judge/Fauci," managing to "ridicule transgender people, spur conspiracy theories about 81-year-old Department of Health Anthony Fauci, scare off some more advertisers, and make new enemies who have sworn to buy Teslas."
"It's dangerous to think that speaking without thinking is the same as telling the truth," laments Detective Benoit Blanc in the film The Glass Onion, and these words, of course, apply to Musk. Unfortunately, there were no people left next to him who would tell him about it. And if there is, he is unlikely to listen to them. Such a detachment from reality is characteristic of many super-rich people - suffice it to recall the same J.K. Rowling or Kanye West - but Musk, with his desire for space, flew much further than anyone else.
Ironically, Musk himself speaks about the need for feedback in the book: "We all make mistakes. It is important that a person receives feedback, listens to criticism and corrects himself." Only, obviously, he himself underestimates how much criticism he needs. And the inability to perceive it did not appear out of nowhere, this is the root principle of Elon Musk's work. "I learned never to say no to him," engineer Thomas Mueller, one of SpaceX's first employees, admits to Isaacson. "It's better to say that you try, and then explain why it didn't work." It seems that this strategy still allows Musk's employees to keep the business afloat, even when one breakdown follows another. Isaacson agrees: the peculiar way of doing business motivates people to "achieve what they thought was impossible. But as a result, there were those who were afraid to report bad news and question the decisions being made."
Musk surrounds himself with the best specialists, but quickly gets rid of those who contradict him - this self-confident strategy has made him the richest man in the world, it also turns him into a laughing stock.
Musk distances himself even from loved ones. The most discussed problem of the book was the plot with Vivian Jenna Wilson, Musk's daughter - and one of the few in his life with whom Isaacson did not talk while working on the book: Vivian believed that he was afraid that her words would spoil "the sympathetic image of an incorrigible person." In 2020, Musk found out about her transgenderism, in the same year he bought Twitter and after that began to spread transphobic statements himself. One of the first to be personally unbanned by Musk on the social network was Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson: his account was blocked by Twitter for posting transphobic messages about actor Elliot Page. In a strange way, in the Russian translation of the book, this episode was distorted: allegedly Peterson refused to "call the famous transman a woman" - in reality, and in Isaacson's book, of course, everything was the opposite.
However, perhaps there is another reason why the last chapters of the book are much more critical of its hero. If Isaacson reconstructed the story of Musk's ascent to the top of fame from eyewitness accounts and documents, then in recent years he observed with his own eyes. Isn't this the reason why the cheerful trickster-visionary from the first half of the volume by the end of the story increasingly seems to be an ill-mannered bully in the body of an adult, whose success is explained by a happy coincidence of circumstances no less than by merits - and even then often not by his merits, but by the people around him?
When you accompany the "king of the world" for two years in a row, it is quite possible to notice that he is not always dressed.
Be that as it may, Isaacson is fascinated by mask-like figures, and he concludes the book on a shaky enthusiastic note: "Sometimes the great innovators are risk-conscious children of great age who stubbornly refuse to potty train. They can be reckless, unpleasant and even destructive. They can also be insane. So crazy that they think they can change the whole world.
" All this, of course, is true. But it seems that in 2024 it is time to stop building monuments to older children during their lifetime and evaluate them by their deeds, and not by the legend that they create about themselves. And then you can notice: yes, such people really change the world. But if a person stubbornly refuses to "potty train", then it is much more likely that he will simply shit himself.
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