Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson

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On November 10, 2023, it was announced that A24 had purchased the film rights for an adaptation to be directed by Darren Aronofsky. Having made a pattern of writing biographies of important men — and one important woman, Jennifer Doudna of CRISPR fame — Isaacson is now in the position of a kind of kingmaker.

When Musk tweets, “Take the red pill,” in 2020, Isaacson notes that it’s a reference to The Matrix but does not add that The Matrix is a movie made by two people who later came out as trans. While Isaacson manages to detail what makes Musk awful, he seems unaware of what made Musk an inspiring figure for so long. Jill Lepore of The New Yorker wrote that "Isaacson's new biography depicts a man who wields more power than almost any other person on the planet but seems estranged from humanity itself". Is achieving the specific vision Musk has for the world worth the injuries he’s inflicted on his workforce?There was a way to find out what’s true here, and it would have been to interview more sources, both Ukrainian and US military ones. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure.

This reporting did not pass the smell test to me, and I said so at the time; I wondered about the sourcing.From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era – a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence. One of the greatest biographers in America has written a massive book about the richest man in the world.

But I remember the days of the “ alien dreadnought,” the promises for swappable batteries that never materialized, and the countless other things Musk said that turned out to be, at best, exaggeration. In fact, The Matrix itself is a trans story — in the ’90s, prescription estrogen was literally a red pill . Presumably one or more of the Musks — Elon is quoted directly as saying the counselors told him not to die like another kid in a previous year. I could find no support for it in any of the news articles that Isaacson listed as sources for this chapter. There is a very obvious question that Isaacson had the access to explore: how did Musk’s meddling with the safety sensors, the seat-of-the-pants fixes changes to the manufacturing process, and general “production hell” affect that injury rate?One of the other things Isaacson doesn’t mention is the alleged racist working conditions at Tesla’s Fremont factory.