Thread by @docrussjackson

#THREAD

‘He is driven by demons’: biographer Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk. With apologies to the @FT, I reproduce below much of this paywalled article, because imho, everyone needs to know more about who the extraordinarily powerful Elon Musk actually is.
ft.com/content/f02d23…

“In 2021, I was kicking around looking for my next book, & a lot of friends, including Mike Bloomberg, said I should do Elon,” American writer Walter Isaacson explains.

Many reviews of the book 'Elon Musk', by Walter Isaacson, are available free, online.
theguardian.com/books/2023/sep…

“So someone set up a phone call with him & we talked for an hour & a half, & I told him that if I do this I need total access, & you have absolutely no control over the book. None.”

Did he accept that?

latimes.com/entertainment-…

Musk is (in)famously obsessive about controlling even the small details of his life.

Isaacson nods. “He just said “OK!” Then he asked me if I minded if he told other people [about the book] and, of course, I said no.”

vox.com/culture/238724…

A few minutes later, Isaacson met up with friends who told him Musk had dispatched a tweet — even during the phone call — announcing Isaacson would be his biographer. Isaacson was shocked. “It was the first example [I saw] of him being totally impetuous.”

smh.com.au/technology/elo…

Why did Musk agree? “He loves history and he has a big enough ego that he thinks of himself as a historical figure — and he has a desire to surprise people with his openness and brutal honesty,” Isaacson says.

news.sky.com/story/elon-mus…

Had Musk done his research before agreeing, by reading Isaacson’s searing biography of Jobs (which Jobs’ family disliked)? “No.”

In 2021, Isaacson duly started shadowing Musk, expecting “this to be easy”, since his new subject was riding high.

time.com/person-of-the-…

A decade earlier two of Musk’s companies — Tesla & SpaceX — had almost drowned in debt. But by 2021, Tesla had sold almost 1mn cars and SpaceX made 31 successful launches. That rebound had made Musk the richest man in the world.

bbc.co.uk/news/technolog…

But then “everything was going so well that [Musk] became uncomfortable”, Isaacson says. “He doesn’t like things when they are going well. He is addicted to drama.” So, perhaps out of boredom, Musk hatched a plan to take over Twitter.

techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elo…

“When I heard that, I knew I would have a rough ride [as his biographer],” Isaacson notes. “I thought it was insane — Musk doesn’t have empathy and so Twitter was not a good fit for him.”

cnbc.com/2021/12/28/elo…

Quite so. In the spring of 2022, Musk offered $44bn for Twitter and plunged into a damaging war with its staff, the media, users and liberal politicians. But Musk did not kick his biographer out.

theverge.com/23026874/elon-…

Instead, Isaacson says, “I sat week after week on the sidelines taking notes. I was in the conference room at all the corporate meetings, attended his Zoom calls. I was at family dinners with his kids.”

news.yahoo.com/elon-musks-fam…

“I worried about that [privacy issue] more than he did,” Isaacson notes tartly, explaining that he was there during the intense internal debates when Musk decided to change Tesla’s approach towards self-driving cars.

theverge.com/2023/8/23/2383…

Musk moved away from one that used pre-designed rules for the AI (eg to not run red lights) into one that studied Tesla video feed from onboard cameras to see how humans actually drive,&d mimic them (even if eg this means sometimes crossing a red light).

cnbc.com/2023/09/09/ai-…

Even more explosively, Isaacson watched Musk embark recently on a hitherto-secretive drive to create an AI company, where he apparently hopes to use the vast stores of data from Twitter & Tesla to leapfrog other AI companies such as OpenAI.

theguardian.com/technology/202…

This could have huge commercial significance for the AI sector.

More controversially, Isaacson observed Musk’s negotiations with the Ukrainian government in late 2022, when its army was using SpaceX’s Starlink comms system to support its military. 

edition.cnn.com/2023/09/07/pol…

Musk prevented the system from being used in areas claimed by Russia. “I have these [messages] in real time as he is turning off Starlink around Crimea because there was a secret drone attack,” Isaacson says.

snopes.com/news/2023/09/1…

Musk gave Isaacson all the encrypted messages with Fedorov, the Ukrainian digital minister, seemingly without asking the Ukrainians, and some of these are in the book.

Might that not put lives at risk in Ukraine? Or hurt the country’s western backers?

uk.news.yahoo.com/elon-musk-powe…

“These text messages are a few months old. If there would have been operational [issues] I would not have published them,” Isaacson insists, noting that SpaceX subsequently cut a deal with the Pentagon that puts control into the hands of the US military.

the-independent.com/news/world/ame…

The article this thread is taken from is dated 15th September. Musk and Isaacson have been revising the details of the story in recent days, suggesting that the service was already deactivated in Crimea at the time of the attack.

Musk fell into the habit of calling or texting Isaacson late at night to reflect on whatever dramas he was engaged in that day. “Elon is very mercurial, but he never told me not to put anything in the book.”

independent.co.uk/independentpre…

Asked if he ever felt like he was becoming Musk's therapist, rather than his biographer, Isaacson says. “I never wanted to be either his therapist or adviser.”

At the Aspen Institute, Isaacson was skilled at stroking powerful egos, even while challenging them intellectually.

Musk & Isaacson's relationship highlights the challenge of writing about a living person: how do you get close enough to capture their essence without being captured yourself? “I learnt not to fill his silences,” Isaacson explains.

.thewrap.com/elon-musk-biog…

“Sometimes it would be Elon & me alone after a meeting & I would ask him a question & he didn’t answer, & there would be four or five minutes of silence where he was processing. That is hard — we journalists sometimes don’t have the ability to stay silent for four minutes!”

At first Isaacson was baffled by this. But then “Shivon Zilis [executive at Musk’s Neuralink company who has had twins with him] told him that “Musk engages in batch processing — he sequentially processes information & at times he zones out.” This makes him sound like a computer.

Elon Musk also experiences wild mood swings. “In front of me he would go into multiple Elon Musk personalities. There are times he gets really dark and he goes into what Grimes [the Canadian singer who is Musk’s on-off girlfriend] calls ‘demon mode’.”

theatlantic.com/technology/arc…

Grimes said Musk would become angry, “But then when he snaps out he will hardly remember what he did in demon mode & turns from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde.” Why?

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

In a recent New Yorker profile of Musk, the writer Ronan Farrow suggested that excessive ketamine use might explain his volatility.

But Isaacson disagrees: “I don’t think it’s a medication issue — he has been this way for a long, long time.”

newyorker.com/magazine/2023/…

Instead, Isaacson cites the “pain of his childhood”:

Musk grew up amid violence in apartheid-era South Africa, and had a difficult relationship with his father; he was left “feeling like an outsider” and haunted by a need to prove himself. thetimes.co.uk/article/musks-…

“He is driven by demons,” Isaacson calmly notes — and then points out that this is not so unusual since many of the brilliant innovators he has previously studied were also haunted by feeling marginalised.

rollingstone.com/culture/cultur…

Whether it was the Jewish Einstein, or the female Doudna operating in a male scientific world, or the illegitimate Leonardo, Isaacson theorises that marginalisation may be connected to innovation.

Imho, it should never be an excuse for bad behaviour.

smashboard.org/the-musk-probl…

Do innovators have to be a psychological mess to have the drive to succeed? Isaacson pulls a face. “I was born in a magical place with truly wonderful parents,” he says, gesturing around him. “And I am never going to send a rocket to Mars.”

fortune.com/2023/09/13/cri…

“Musk goes through manic mood swings and deep depressions and risk-seeking highs, and if he didn’t have that risk-seeking maniacal personality he would not be the person who launched EVs and got rockets into orbit.”

foxbusiness.com/features/elon-…

“So my key point and conclusion is that all people have light and dark strands, whether that is Da Vinci or anyone else. We celebrate the light ones while decrying the dark ones. But those strands are entwined and you can’t disentangle them.”

x.com/duty2warn/stat…

Isaacson thinks that Elon’s demons are also his inspirational angels. Isaacson emphasises another trait that many of the people he has studied also share: a passion for interdisciplinary study.

Isaacson also accepts Musk might be on the autism spectrum.

theconversation.com/elon-musk-how-…

Leonardo, say, explored the arts, humanities and science in combination, while Jobs used the principles of calligraphy to design computers. Isaacson argues that building interdisciplinary curriculums is one secret of unleashing more innovation.

linkedin.com/pulse/elon-mus…

“At Tulane we try to make sure that everyone has a double major in science and humanities — we need kids who are creative, not just those who can code.”

But could Musk’s “demons” overwhelm him? Isaacson hedges his bets.

robbreport.com/lifestyle/news…

“I always think he is going to go off the edge with that maniacal intensity — he is spread far too thin,” he admits, noting that Musk is now in charge of six companies: the social media platform X, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, the Boring Company — and his secretive AI group, xAI.

“I thought he would blow Twitter up. But every morning I wake up and see it’s turning into @X which is what he always wanted,” Isaacson adds.

So, too, in Musk’s private life; he has had 11 children by three mothers.

pagesix.com/article/elon-m…

“He has this maniacal belief in having lots of children.” But some of his children are by IVF. “It’s not like he is having all these romantic affairs.” Many, like him, are based in Austin, since “he likes having his children around. But it’s not a Norman Rockwell painting.”

Do the mothers get on? “Not with each other,” Isaacson jokes. And sometimes not with Musk: Grimes revealed tensions over their kids in a subsequently deleted message on social media, & it emerged that she has more children by him than previously realised.

independent.co.uk/life-style/elo…

Isaacson is asked if he ended up liking Elon. “‘Like’ is such an anodyne word — it doesn’t describe the intensity of reactions that Elon can provoke in a person. There are times he is fun to be around and times he is an asshole.”

vanityfair.com/news/2022/04/e…

“I try to show all of these Elons in the book & then let people judge.”

Did Musk surprise Isaacson? “Yes.” The intensity of his moods, obsessive addiction to, & focus on, engineering, & the fact he became more intensely political while writing about him.

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

Isaacson insists Musk “doesn’t like Trump — he thinks he is a conman”, but concedes that Musk has now developed “an anti-establishment populism that you can see in Robert F Kennedy Jr & Vivek Ramaswamy — a conspiratorial mindset about the establishment”.

dazeddigital.com/life-culture/a…

This is alarming with the 2024 election looming & Musk running @X.

Who he might Isaacson write about next? “I haven’t decided. All my headspace is Elon right now.” The same could be said of much of corporate America; maybe we're all addicted to drama.

france24.com/en/live-news/2…