Elon Musk’s empire is valued at unknown figures by Earthlings. As of today, his life has been condensed into just over 700 pages. This Thursday, a comprehensive and addictive biography of the tech mogul by Walter Isaacson is released. An examination of the life and character of a child growing up in South Africa, physicist, businessman, billionaire, through his own testimony and the testimony of many people who met Elon Musk throughout his 52 years.
Below are 15 keys to the book written by renowned biographer Walter Isaacson.
Pain at school and at home
“If you’ve never been punched, you have no idea how it will affect the rest of your life.” The boy named Elon Musk had the most painful experiences at school. He was the smallest, the shortest, and it was difficult for him to grasp social codes. He did not feel the need to interact with other classmates. According to the book, he was brutally beaten and became the target of bullies. But these wounds did not heal at home; his father, Errol, aggravated them with frequent incidents of harassment (also towards his mother, from whom he would divorce). Elon describes it as “mental torture.”
The father and the “evil mode”
His father has a great influence on his personality. His first wife, Justine, says the businessman tried to survive by shutting down emotionally. This is how Elon protected himself from his father’s insults – which some of Justine referred to as “retarded” or “stupid” – and turned him into an insensitive being, as well as a risk-loving being. It also, of course, created an aversion to contentment. Elon thinks life is pain. “Challenges shaped me,” says the businessman. Everything the biography points out is due to the post-traumatic stress he experienced after his childhood. Some see traces of their father in him when he enters what relatives describe as a “demonic mood.”
“My son is a genius”
Mother Maye Musk decided that Elon should go to kindergarten when he was three (one year earlier than the norm in the ’70s in Pretoria, South Africa, where they lived). In the book, it is stated that he started tinkering with rockets and explosives at home at that age. Elon himself admits that he is surprised that he did not lose any fingers in his childhood. “He needs someone to talk to other than me. His mother says she told the school principal, “My son is a genius.” But it was a mistake, as they warned him from headquarters. He didn’t pay attention, spent most of his time in a trance, and didn’t make friends. In fact, the director told them at a meeting: “He We have reason to believe that he is retarded.”
From self-sufficiency to library
The Musks separated, and their three children assumed little control and freedom to become self-sufficient along with their hard-working mother. Elon became a night boy who stayed up reading books, which caused problems at school. When he was 10 years old, he decided to live with his father. Because? “I thought I should keep him company,” he replies. The friendless boy was also attracted by his father’s masculine presence, his collection of encyclopedias, books, and various engineering tools (Errol’s profession).
Some people party on their way to Silicon Valley
Years later, having run away from his father (and South Africa) and being a good student in high school (though not the best, according to his biography’s grades), he came to university, where he studied Physics. Meanwhile, the taste for partying developed at Penn. One of the businessman’s “three relaxation modes”. Young Elon took a summer internship in Silicon Valley and worked at a video game company that impressed him. And he rode the “internet wave” that would slowly and gradually lead him to Tesla (passing through SpaceX and the colonization of Mars, of course).
The only possible investor for Tesla
Already an “internet billionaire” (as his bio calls him), Elon Musk became the ideal and certainly the only possible investor for the project that would lead to the Tesla that JB Straubel initially had in mind. Musk wanted to change people’s minds about electric cars. Aware of the high cost of such cars, the businessman said at the first meetings: “Nobody would pay something like that for something that looks like crap.” Goal: A high-performance electric car.
toxic relationships
According to Isaacson, Musk is not cut out for domestic peace. “Most of his romantic relationships were pure psychological turmoil.” The saddest of these was his relationship with Amber Heard, who dragged him into the “vortex of darkness” and whom Musk said was “like Batman’s Joker.” While with him, Heard concluded that Musk “turned up the drama to feel energized.”
depressive paralysis
The period between summer 2017 and autumn 2018 was the “most hell” of Musk’s life, “18 months of madness” due to his excessive workload at Tesla, his breakup with Heard, and the news that his father had a son. with the woman he raised as his stepdaughter. For the first time, Musk seriously considered whether he was bipolar. “In moments of emotional darkness, Musk obsessively goes to work,” Isaacson explains, with “frenzies” that work for up to three consecutive days at a stretch, a “fanatic mindset” he demands of his employees.
Big mouth, bipolar, Asperger’s
The times Musk has been outed for posting a crazy tweet are countless, and the bio explains how difficult it was for him to apologize; just like he called a critic a pedophile for the aid he sent to children trapped in a cave in Thailand. or “typical bipolar behavior with extreme risk” that shareholders never like, when he tweeted that he was considering taking Tesla private and that the SEC had opened an investigation. He made history by becoming the first person with Asperger’s (or the first to admit it) to monologue on Saturday Night Live. “In a constant struggle for survival, it is impossible to be in adrenaline mode all the time and not get injured,” Isaacson states in the book.
Buying Twitter, an anti-woke move
From drinking with anti-vaccine podcaster Joe Rogan, to frequenting the circles of libertarians Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson, or tweeting things like “Take the red pill,” a famous phrase from “The Matrix” that has been adopted by conspiracy theorists and activists. Men’s Rights Movement. Musk has gone from being a Barack Obama fan to anti-woke enthusiasm and meetings with right-wing populists like Jair Bolsonaro and Meloni. In his desire to save the world from the “mental awakening virus” lies the impetus that led him to buy Twitter. “Will you save Twitter from the merry censorship mob?” Rogan asked in a message before making the purchase official. said. Isaacson describes this purchase as the most costly display of his impulsivity, and attributes it to a “personal psychological longing” to control the social network, his ultimate playground, after a childhood in which he felt abused and humiliated.
eschatological jokes
“Musk’s clown mode is the exact opposite of his demonic mode,” Isaacson explains, describing his “childlike penchant for fart sounds, poop emojis, and other manifestations of bawdy humor programmed into his Tesla.” Teslas have a “fart app” that allows the driver to press a button and have the passenger seat make a fart sound when someone sits down. “This might be my best work,” he admits to Isaacson. He is also a big fan of Monty Python and Douglas Adams. In 2018, in the midst of a mental crisis, he launched his old red Tesla into space with a copy of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ inside.
His love story with Grimes
A Guadian couple and the mother of three of their 10 children met Claire Boucher, a successful electronic music and dreampop artist, after a tweet about Roko’s basilisk (a thought experiment predicting that artificial intelligence would torture any human who did not help). he). On their first date, he took her to a Tesla factory and gave her a quiz on ‘The Lord of the Rings’, which she passed with flying colours; He gave her a box of animal bones. They listened to the ‘Hardcore History’ podcast together. They left him many times. “When someone is experiencing depression or anxiety, we empathize with that person. “But if he’s someone with Asperger’s, what we say about him is that he’s an asshole,” he says. “You don’t have to go through everything scorching all the time” is another of the things he often tells her. The book is about Grimes, Musk’s COO of Neuralink ‘ and reveals that Musk’s older friend, Shivon Zilis, did not know that he was the biological father of her twins, who were born almost at the same time as her third child. Zilis was found in the same hospital as Grimes and Musk’s surrogate mother.
Your relationship with your children
Musk’s life changed with the arrival of his first son with Grimes, X, in May 2020. “It carried an ethereal sweetness that calmed Musk,” Isaacson writes. Musk often takes her to his meetings (he carries her on his lap), on private jet rides, and on horseback tours of Space X and Tesla factories. They watched videos of rocket launches together, and X “learned to count backwards from ten before counting upwards from one.” Musk has ten children in total. His autistic son, Saxon, is especially close to X. Damian is more introverted, declared vegan at the age of eight, and is a classical music and math genius. Kai is the most outgoing and is usually the one who accompanies Elon to launches in Cape Canaveral. Her other son, Xavier, declared himself transgender (today Jenna) and radically anti-capitalist. Musk sold all his houses and decided to live with less luxury so that he could talk to her again. It didn’t work.
Participation in the Ukrainian war
On February 24, 2022, an hour before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Moscow launched an attack on Viasat, the country’s satellite and internet system. Musk accepted the desperate requests of Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister and Zelensky and became one of the biggest supporters by sending more than 2,000 Starlink satellites to Ukraine for free. But when he learned of an attack by Ukraine’s underwater drones on the Russian fleet in Crimea, he decided to cut off his internet supply, viewing the operation as a possible Pearl Harbor that could escalate violence to the next level: nuclear. . This incident brought him widespread criticism and a recent round of applause from Putin.
“Strange” obsession with Mars
In addition to his conflict with Jeff Bezos in the space race, Musk is also excited about the competition with bigwigs such as Bill Gates, who speaks both good and bad about him in the book. He calls the Mars obsession “bizarre”: “It’s a pretty crazy approach; if there’s a nuclear war on Earth and there are people on Mars, then those people will come back to Earth and still be alive after the ‘others’ have died. We killed each other.” .” He also says about himself, “No one has done more to push the boundaries of science and innovation than him.”