Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Elon Musk,” that reveals new details about the private and professional lives of the world’s richest person, hit stores Tuesday.
Isaacson, 71, the bestselling author of biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, shadowed Musk for two years, sitting in on meetings and walking factory floors.
From launching rockets to popularizing electric vehicles, the hefty tome chock full of insights gleaned from interviews with the 52-year-old Musk, his extended entourage and his adversaries is a layered portrait of the mercurial entrepreneur behind SpaceX and Tesla.
In addition to Musk’s inner life, the biography chronicles the turbulent takeover of X, formerly Twitter, and his secretive creation of a new artificial intelligence company as well as Musk’s personal demons and his relationships including a secret third child with the artist known as Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher.
The biography contains multiple references to the emotional scars inflicted by Musk’s father Errol who is described as emotionally and physically abusive.
Musk lived with his father from the age of 10 to the age of 17. Isaacson says the turbulent upbringing caused Musk to become “a tough yet vulnerable man-child with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.”
A friend of Musk's told Isaacson that when Musk agreed to meet his father in 2016 after being estranged, he saw Musk’s hands shaking.
“There are certain people who occupy a demon’s corner of Musk’s head space. They trigger him, turn him dark, and rouse a cold anger. His father is number one,” Isaacson wrote.
Musk’s father is a conspiracy theorist who denied Trump’s election loss and the 9/11 terrorist attacks and spread disinformation about COVID and COVID vaccines. Errol Musk also made racist comments about Black leaders in South Africa in 2022, according to the biography: “With no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees,” he wrote.
The biography also reveals that Musk found out his father had had a second child with his former stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout in July 2022 in an email. "The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce,” Errol Musk wrote. "If I could have another child I would. I can't see any reason not to."
Musk has expressed his concern about the future of humanity and called on people to have children. He has said his decision to father children with three different mothers was driven by his fears of population collapse.
“He feared that declining birth rates were a threat to the long-term survival of human consciousness,” Isaacson wrote.
Grimes says Musk has a “demon mode.” “Demon mode is when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain,” she told Isaacson.
“Demon mode causes a lot of chaos,” she said, but it also gets things done.
In November 2022, Twitter had its first brush with it. In response to an advertising boycott campaign led by online activists, Musk ordered Twitter to ban users who were urging advertisers to boycott the platform even though such a move would fly in the face of his professed dedication to free speech.
Most people at Twitter had seen Musk be arbitrary and insensitive, Isaacson wrote, “but they had not been exposed to the cold fury of his trance-like darkest persona nor learned how to ride out the storm.”
Soon Musk moved onto other things.
On the Friday after the Twitter board accepted Musk’s offer, he flew to Los Angeles to have dinner with his four older boys. They were puzzled by his decision to buy Twitter. “Just from their questioning, it was clear that they didn’t think it was a great idea,” Isaacson wrote.
Musk responded: “I think it’s important to have a digital public square that’s inclusive and trusted.” Then, after a pause, he said: “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?”
Isaacson says that it was clearly a joke but Musk had to reassure his children that he was just kidding. “With Musk, it was sometimes hard to tell,” Isaacson wrote.
Musk told his biographer he was not a fan of Trump and in fact expressed disdain for the former president whom he dismissed as a “con man” and “kind of nuts.”
But Musk isn’t much of a Biden supporter, either.
“When he was vice president, I went to a lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over,” Musk told Isaacson.
His dislike for Biden intensified in August 2021 when the president held an event for electric vehicles at the White House and invited the heads of GM, Ford and Chrysler and the leader of the United Auto Workers Union, but not Musk.
Musk has often expressed disdain for what he calls “woke mind virus” – a derogatory term for progressive politics.
When Isaacson asked him why, Musk said: “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.”
Isaacson writes that Musk’s reaction was in part because of his daughter Jenna’s transition and her embrace of “radical socialist politics.” In 2022, Jenna disowned Musk.
Bill Gates went to see Elon Musk in 2022, hoping he could get him to give away more of his money to philanthropic endeavors. Musk had a bone to pick with Gates, the Microsoft co-founder had shorted Tesla stock, betting it would decline in value. Gates, who thought that the supply of electrical cars would exceed demand and prices would fall, had paid a hefty price, losing $1.5 billion at the time.
“I apologized to him,” Gates told Isaacson. “Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.”
Musk told Isaacson: “How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?"
Musk has had many romantic entanglements but says “the most agonizing” was with Amber Heard while she was divorcing Johnny Depp.
“It was brutal,” said Musk, who dated Heard from January to December 2017.
Musk agreed to be a consultant on Heard's movie “Machete Kills” in order to meet her. That happened a year later when Heard asked for a tour of SpaceX.
"I guess I could be called a geek for someone who can also be called a hot chick," Heard said.
Isaacson said Musk took her for a ride in a Tesla and “she decided that he looked attractive for a rocket engineer.”
In April 2017, Musk flew to Australia where Heard was filming “Aquaman.” He told her she reminded him of Mercy, his favorite character in the video game Overwatch. So she designed a costume to role play the character for him.
The relationship ended on a trip to Rio de Janeiro when Heard supposedly locked herself in their room and claimed Musk had taken her passport. Heard told Isaacson she got “rather dramatic” during the argument but says the two made up afterwards.
In September 2010, after Musk in a top hat married actress Talulah Riley in a Vera Wang princess gown at Dornoch Cathedral, a 13th century church in the Scottish Highlands, the wedded pair threw a party at nearby Skibo Castle.
Musk’s request for the festivities: “There shall be a hovercraft and eels,” a reference to a 1970 Monty Python sketch in which John Cleese plays a Hungarian using a faulty phrasebook.
The request proved to be challenging because a permit is required to transport eels from England to Scotland, but Riley said: “In the end, we did have an amphibious little hovercraft and eels.”
Musk and his friends also crushed three junked cars using an armed personnel carrier.
When X was born, Musk circulated a photo he took of Grimes, also known as Claire Boucher, during her C-section without her consent. Among those who received the photo were her father and brothers.
“It was Elon’s Asperger’s coming out in full,” she told Isaacson. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset.”
According to the biography, Musk and Grimes secretly had a third child named Techno Machanicus – nicknamed Tau – via a surrogate.
Also, Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s company Neuralink, had Musk’s twins in 2021 via in vitro fertilization after he asked to be her sperm donor so that “the kids would be genetically his.”
“He really wants smart people to have his kids,” Zilis said.
The twins were born when Grimes and Musk were expecting their second child. Grimes did not know at the time.
The biography claims that Musk told his satellite communications unit, Starlink, to disable Starlink satellite communications near Russian-occupied Crimea last year to thwart a Ukrainian attack on Russian warships.
“The Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not,” Isaacson said in a post on X. “They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.”
Musk said on X he refused a Ukrainian request to activate the coverage. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” he wrote.
In December 2022, Musk who rarely takes vacations, flew with Grimes and X to Lanai, Hawaii to stay at the home of his billionaire mentor Larry Ellison.
Ellison had built an observatory on the island with a 3,000-pound telescope. Musk had the telescope pointed at Mars and lifted X up to look through the eyepiece.
“This is where you are going to live someday,” Musk told X.
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