This book is largely boomercore and offers little more than Wikipedia's entry on the man. Isaacson doesn't go out of his way to paint Elon in too keen of a light, but he's also way less critical (in indirect, sometimes subtle ways) than I think he's deserving of, specifically w.r.t. his interpersonal relations.

The first fifth of the book is dedicated to his childhood and growing up in South Africa, enduring various forms of emotional/psychological abuse at the hands of his father, Erol Musk who –despite being an apparently competent engineer himself by Elon's own admission– eventually succumbed to delusions of grandeur and susceptibility to conspiracies. Without too much coaxing/narrative bending from Isaacson, Elon does totally seem like a victim of the "I will not become my father" arc, but the frustrating thing about the man is the lack of self-awareness of his moral failures along this line.

He had several notable romantic engagements:

• Talulah Riley (twice divorced)
• Justine Musk (6 children, 5 surviving)
• Amber Heard (lol nightmare woman)
• Grimes (3 children)
• Shivon Zilis (Director of Operations @ Neuralink, four children via surrogacy together)

Of his 13 children, he (and Grimes) have given them names including: X Æ A-Xii, Exa Dark Sideræl, Techno Mechanicus (aka Tau), Seldon Lycurgus, Azure, Strider, Arcadia, as well as some less Boy Named Sue-esque cognomens.

Kimbal (brother)'s recollection of Errol blasting off on Elon ends with him recalling that their father had zero compassion, however the blow up was caused by Elon telling a boy that he was stupid right after his father had killed himself. I don't think that anyone near to this man is a good judge of compassion, empathy, or character. Throughout the book, we get glimpses of his narcissism, desire to be in control, childishness, etc. I don't even know if I would characterize him as "brilliant" or super driven because, despite his commercial success and desire to give off this aura of "I can do anything if I put my mind to it," he's so aspergery and bipolar and manic that he literally can't, but refuses to acknowledge those shortcomings or put any effort to correcting them.

Isaacson characterizes him as a chaos junkie, ginning up drama to distract himself from his erstwhile responsibilities, and all this stuff indirectly leads to him neglecting or otherwise becoming estranged from his children, except for X. I don't know if we're supposed to feel bad for him because of the "searing pain of his loneliness and fear of being alone" when at the same time he's fully described as being a self-absorbed asshole. Isaacson doesn't quite connect the dots here, and instead continues to characterize him as someone who demonstrates incisive mastery over various parts of his life, just not the social aspects. Elon denies his diagnoses of asperger's and bipolar, instead attributing his "demon mode" [sic] perdios to selective lymbic suppression in response to childhood PTSD. Again, nothing that is described about his childhood under Erol seems proportionate to how much of an asshole Elon is today. Everyone experiences some degree of trauma growing up, and most people don't excise the part of their brain that treats other people with dignity.

A quotation from his mother Maye Musk about the time spent working while maintaining custody of Elon and his siblings was that the "freedom taught them to be responsible" which is a boastful way to say that you neglected your kids (which I think Elon shares, stating that his children were largedly taught by Reddit, or their classmates, or the internet).

Isaacson places a lot of stock in the Sci-fi books that Elon read growing up, and ofc the lamest one included (Hitchikers) is the one that informed so much of Elon's personality as a quirky boi. Despite the epigraph citing Obama's autobiographical quotation about

every man is trying to live up to his father's expectations or make up for their father's mistakes....

Elon does both poorly at the same time. He also continuously lashes out at his employees – usually junior people who are caught off guard.

Where I penalize this book are the numerous instances where Isaacson make categorical groupings of things that he's clearly out of his depth to speak about, like video games, or software, or math. Again, I'm never expecting these bio-authors to be engineers, but I am expecting them or their editors to get some eyes on these passages before sending the manuscript to the shop. E.g. repeated comparisons between motherfucking Polytopia and business strategy or tactical acumen. Foreshadowing Elon's cunning or strategical abilities by saying that he clobbered his college roommate in games of Civ 1, where they would put their computers against each other LAN-party style and go head to head for hours. Civ 1 is a singleplayer game. Offering no critical comment on Elon's analogy of "almost winning a Quake II competition if someone on their team hadn't pushed the computer so hard" as if it's a horse race or something....? Calling Elden Ring an empire building game, batch processing being an “old school” computing technique, etc. etc.

He also doesn't offer too critical a reading of the PayPal affair, or OpenAI's founding which would portray Elon as more of an egocentric grifter obsessed with being considered "a founder" instead of a hostile tokeover baby which is more accurate IMO.

Similarly, Isaacson appears to try to bolster the "misunderstood savant" characterization of Musk with the inclusion of anecdotes about how he'd walk onto the factory floor and ask 'why' w.r.t. an optimization problem's implausibility, These inclusions are shortly followed by "and then we tried it and we worked" and how he'd do this shit all the time. This implies one of two things: 1) a non-trivial amount of people in Elon's employment are incompetent (something that he prides himself in not being the case, his "hardcore" culture doesn't seem to attract non-cracked individuals), or 2) that he pulled this veering-out-of-his-lane stunt several other times in ways that didn't work and just poorly micromanaged all his companies poorly, neglecting the ones that didn't interest him at the time but simultaneously being unwilling to cede the reigns to anyone else.

"Physics does not care about your feelings" after berating an employee who's newborn just died is crazy. Having all these ambitions for civilization, colonizing mars, and humanity in the abstract, macro sense – Elons mistakes the trees for the forest. "i can work with people if they have a good feedback loop" is also insanely narcissistic.

His libertarian stints juxtaposed his personal authoritarianism w.r.t. Tesla privacy stuff and Twitter Admin controls (good for me but not for thee) are also so immature and concerning, and Isaacson does little more to call these things into question other than point them out.

musk getting involved in AI because he wanted to work on “alignment” and was worried about it becoming politicized is a mischaracterization of 100% of what the rest of the field was working on…

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