Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer. Throughout the tome, Musk’s confidantes, co-workers, ex-wives and girlfriends present a DSM-5’s worth of psychiatric and other theories for the “demon moods” that darken the lives of his subordinates, and increasingly the rest of us, among them bipolar disorder, OCD, and the form of autism formerly known as Asperger’s. But the idea that any of these conditions are what makes Musk an “asshole” (another frequently used descriptor of him in the book), while also making him successful in his many pursuits, is an insult to all those affected by them who manage to change the world without leaving a trail of wounded people, failing social networks and general despair behind them. The answer, then, must lie elsewhere.
There’s a lot to work with here, but it doesn’t make reading this book any easier. Isaacson comes from the “his eyes lit up” school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI. I drove my espresso machine hard into the night to survive both craft and subject matter. It feels as though, for instance, there are hundreds of pages from start to finish relaying the same scene: Musk trying to reduce the cost of various mundane objects so that he can make more money and fulfil his dream of moving himself (and possibly the lot of us) to Mars, where one or two examples would have been enough. To his credit, Isaacson is a master at chapter breaks, pausing the narrative when one of Musk’s rockets explodes or he gets someone pregnant, and then rewarding the reader with a series of photographs that assuages the boredom until the next descent into his protagonist’s wild but oddly predictable life. Again, it’s not all the author’s fault. To go from Einstein to Musk in only five volumes is surely an indication that humanity isn’t sending Isaacson its best.
The prologue to the book contains what in Hollywood writers’ rooms and lesser MFA programmes is called “the inciting incident”. On a playground in 1980s South Africa, Musk was beaten so severely by a pack of bullies that his nose required corrective surgery even decades later. According to Isaacson, his father sided with the bullies. These are acts of violence and betrayal that do have lifelong consequences, as Musk himself has said (and as my own often-punched nose can attest to). What’s both fascinating and depressing is how Musk has internalised these acts of bullying. Twitter (now known as X) was a slime pit of racist and misogynistic savagery even before Musk bought it, but he has given the bullies all but carte blanche and is now planning to remove the block feature, so that users who are being metaphorically punched in the nose will not be able to lift their arms in defence.
The biggest revelation here involves Musk allegedly telling engineers to “turn off” the coverage of his Starlink satellite systems in Crimea just as Ukrainian drone subs were approaching the Russian fleet in Sevastopol. In response to reporting of this episode in the book, Musk took to X to say: “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol. The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.” Isaacson himself went on to “clarify” his own book and to claim that the Starlink coverage never extended to Crimea in the first place. “Musk did not enable it,” he wrote, “because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.” But in echoing Musk’s statements, Isaacson became a propagator of Russian messaging about Ukraine’s actions leading to a wider war (“Seek peace while you have the upper hand” General Musk bullied the Ukrainians) – a supposition that has been disproven countless times and that marks those who believe in it as useful idiots for the Kremlin.
This wasn’t the first time I held Isaacson’s judgment in low regard. Vaccine sceptic Joe Rogan is “knowledgeable”. Musk’s humour – he took the “w” out of the Twitter sign in San Francisco because “tit” is so inherently funny – has “many levels”. Linda Yaccarino, Musk’s almost comically bumbling CEO of X is “wickedly smart”. The amount of time devoted to the points of view of Musk and his acolytes can’t help but distort the narrative in his favour, especially because Musk is the ultimate unreliable narrator. “Elon didn’t just exaggerate, he made it up,” a former colleague tells us.
Highest on the list of things Musk won’t shut up about is Mars. “We need to get to Mars before I die.” “We got to give this a shot, or we’re stuck on earth forever.” The messianic part of the Muskiverse is his attempt to put 140m miles between himself and his father as he tries to turn humanity into a “multiplanetary civilization” even though we are having a hard enough time making it as a uniplanetary one. But Musk also knows what’s keeping us from reaching the lifeless faraway planet, and he’s not afraid of telling us: “Unless the woke-mind virus … is stopped, civilisation will never become interplanetary.” There is a far more interesting book shadowing this one about the way our society has ceded its prerogatives to the Musks of the world. There’s a lot to be said for Musk’s tenacity, for example his ability to break through Nasa’s cost-plus bureaucracy. But is it worth it when your saviour turns out to be the world’s loudest crank?
So who or what is responsible for Elon Musk? “Growing up in South Africa, fighting was normal,” Musk says, and there’s a whiff of desperate masculinity floating through the book, as rank as a Pretoria boys’ locker room. It is not a coincidence that the back jacket features a fully erect penis (some may argue it is actually one of Musk’s rockets, but I remain unconvinced).
When his parents divorced, a young Musk chose to live with a father he describes as having subjected him to “mental torture”, over his imperfect but loving mother. He will keep coming back to that darkness, and is likely to submerge himself into it all the more as the realities of mortality enfold him. When you are as messed up as our hero, there is a lot of psychological work to be done to stop the downward spiral, work more boring than building a rocket. Work even more boring than this book.
It is no wonder that Musk has renamed Twitter “X” after his favourite letter. X is also a crossing out, the opposite of a tick, and that is what Musk has been steadily doing to his legacy. Isaacson’s book constantly tries to build dramatic tension between the species-saving visionary and the beaten bullied boy. But we know the ending to Musk’s story before we even open it. In the end, the bullies win.
• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is published by Simon & Schuster (£28). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
