The Elon Musk enigma: Noble? Nuts ? Or both

by Elka Worner

Former Time magazine editor Walter Isaacson shadowed Elon Musk for two years in preparation for writing his newly released, 688-page biography, “Elon Musk.” Isaacson sat in on Musk’s meetings, conducted hundreds of interviews with colleagues, family, adversaries, and ex-wives, and poured over emails and texts.

What he concluded, he told the Los Angeles Times Book Club at a talk co-hosted by Pages on Saturday, October 1,  at the El Segundo Performing Arts Center, is, “He’s halfway between noble and nuts.”

Musk is the world’s richest man, a disruptor and visionary who defied the naysayers to create the world’s most valuable car company by manufacturing sleek and sexy Teslas. He revolutionized space travel by reusing rockets.

“He sees himself as this epic figure that’s going to save the planet,” Isaacson said. 

“Elon Musk” is an honest, and sometimes scathing account of someone who craves drama and turmoil, and feels uneasy when things are going well.

As a socially awkward, and scrawny kid in his native South Africa, Musk had “no good ability to understand incoming emotional signals,” or or the “to make people like him.” He was beaten up, often.

One day some kids pushed Musk down a flight of concrete steps. “His brother said they pummeled his face so badly that he couldn’t recognize him,” Isaacson said. Musk ended up in the hospital for a week.

“Those scars still exist, but those are minor compared to what happenes when he goes home, and his father makes him stand there for more than an hour in front of him, rigid not saying a word while his father berates him, tells him it’s his fault, and takes the side of the kid who beat him up, and says, ‘you’ll never amount to anything,’” Isaacson said.

His childhood demons shaped the older Musk — his drive, epic sense of mission, and maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive, Isaacson said. 

“Musk is a risk taker driven by his demons,” he said.

“The interesting thing about being around him at all times, is that like his father, he’s a Jekyll and Hyde. He can switch personalities in an instant, can go from light, giddy and funny to being very dark,” Isaacson said.

He treats others in the harsh, authoritative way he was treated, often lacking empathy. “He can run an enterprise very well partly because he doesn’t feel that much about the people who happen to be in the room,” Isaacson said.

That single-minded focus enabled Musk to take an almost bankrupt Tesla and make it more valuable than the next nine auto companies combined, send people into orbit from his Hawthorne-based SpaceX, and buy Twitter and rebrand it as X.

Musk believes political correctness is one of the worst things happening to America. “Woke mind virus” drove him to buy Twitter. He experienced “wokness” personally when his eldest child, at age 16, came out as transgender.

His daughter legally changed her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson, saying, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”

While Musk got “his head around the transition,” he doesn’t understand her very progressive, left-wing politics, which led his daughter to call herself a Marxist who hates capitalism and billionaires,” Isaacson said. Musk believes that ideology was ingrained into her at Crossroads, a progressive private school in Santa Monica.

“I had my daughter taken away from me by all these things, and she won’t speak to me now,” Musk told Isaacson.

Despite all he has going on professionally and personally, Musk still makes time to focus on his quest to colonize Mars, Isaacson said.

“In the middle of some big crisis, he will still hold a meeting that he does every week called Mars Colonizer, where they’re discussing what clothing they’re going to have for people on Mars when they form a colony, what type of government they’re going to have.”

While most people consider living on Mars a pipe dream, for Musk it is a reality.

“He will go into this thing where he looks deep into the future, and talks about the importance of getting humanity to Mars…. When he’s in those moods, he’s earnest and believes it.”

Isaacson has profiled some of history’s greatest disruptors, including Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and biochemist Jennifer Doudna. What he admires most about his subjects is not their brilliance, but their creativity.

“The connection between the humanities and sciences, that’s where the creativity occurs,” he said.

An audience member asked which of the people he has written about he would most like to be trapped with on an island, the biographer did not hesitate to answer, Leornardo Da Vinci. “What an awesome character. Leonardo is the only person in history who tried to know everything you could possibly know about everything that was knowable.” ER