Could a chill, normal dude do all this stuff?

Elon Musk By Walter Isaacson | Simon & Schuster UK, 2023, 688 pages

Walter Isaacson could not have chosen a more fascinating subject than Elon Musk for the latest of his biographies, which include well known portraits of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger and Benjamin Franklin.

And Musk is not out of place among this pantheon of history-altering men. The biography has been a number one New York Times non-fiction bestseller, a number two Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller, as well as the book of the year in various outlets.  

This account of Musk’s life gets to April 2023, in other words as far as his takeover and radical rehaul of Twitter in 2022, his development of AI for driverless cars, and the development of the most powerful rockets ever built.

Since the publication of this biography in September, Musk has been appointed by President-elect Trump to lead, alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, a planned Department of Government Efficiency to streamline US government expenditure; and now he is making headlines daily on this side of the Atlantic through his political tweets on X.

He has locked horns with the British political establishment over its handling of Pakistani grooming gangs (“Prison for Starmer”) and recently endorsed the AfD (Alternative for Germany) party as “the last spark of hope for Germany” in the upcoming February elections there and called the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz a “fool”.

A year ago, Musk also got involved in Ireland’s then proposed and now thankfully abandoned hate speech legislation, saying that he would fight against it. Predictably he increasingly becoming a hate figure of the left everywhere.

But even were Musk to do nothing more in the world of technology or now politics he has already earned his place alongside the world’s greats.

His life reads like something from a Marvel comic: through his space company SpaceX he has revolutionised space exploration, developing not only the biggest rockets ever built, but making them reusable. Through SpaceX’s subsidiary Starlink, he has changed the world of satellites. He owns Tesla, the world’s top electric vehicle seller, which may yet utterly change the way we use cars. In 2022 he famously bought Twitter – now X – for $44 billion, laid off nearly 80 percent of its workforce, and exposed and completely purged it of its radically woke bias. Musk also owns the tunnelling company “The Boring Company”, Neuralink which develops implantable brain–computer interfaces, as well as the AI research organization OpenAI.

He is the world’s richest person with a net worth currently estimated to be A$421 billion.

Walter Isaacson comes back repeatedly to key features of Elon Musk’s personality: his “almost freakish love of risk”, an incredible capacity for focused work, and his Asperger’s-tinged determination and harshness.

The question arises whether his ruthless driving (and firing) of employees is justified. As he himself said on Saturday Night Live in 2021: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

He has a point. The same point is made by Bill Gates, as quoted in the book: “You can feel whatever you want about Elon’s behavior … but there is no one in our time who has done more to push the bounds of science and innovation than he has.”

Isaacson describes him as a visionary. His constantly restated ambition to send humans to Mars could be dismissed as the stuff of science fiction were it not for his track record: driverless electric cars, reusable giant rockets, household robots, etc.

He calls himself a “disrupter”– he enters into the world of finance, or motoring, or rockets (and now politics) – refusing to accept the established rules of the game, its regulations or perceived limitations, and is willing to aggressively challenge any rule, regulation or law as long as it is not a law of physics.

Isaacson makes passing reference to one of the concerns Musk has regarding technological progress in the West in general, and in the US in particular. He believes that technology – in particular technology related to space travel – has slowed down; there has been no progress in sending men to the moon since the early 1970s and, before its being retired, the Space Shuttle’s achievements were minor.

 “Technology does not automatically progress,” Musk said. “This flight [history’s first private orbital mission] was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”

This echoes the belief of Musk’s friend Peter Thiel that innovation in the West in most fields – bar that of the digital world – has in fact stagnated over the last half century. For Thiel, Musk is bucking this trend through Tesla and SpaceX –“the most exciting example of a company showing determinate optimism today”.

It is telling that Thiel would use the word optimism. Musk does appear to rebel against the growing innovation-chilling pessimism of the West, embodied in excessive regulation and a lack of daring. Quizzed in an interview about the fact that his promises about self-driving cars had not yet materialised he replied: “Yeah, I’m sometimes a little too optimistic about time frames … But would I be doing this if I wasn’t optimistic?”

There is one area of Musk’s life where his sci-fi aura takes a \ dystopian turn: his views and actions regarding parenting.

Admirably he frets that populations around the world are falling and that people are not having enough children. He himself has had at least twelve children, but with three women, through IVF in at least five cases, and through surrogacy in the case of two other children. He appears to undervalue monogamy, as well as being undisturbed by IVF and surrogacy. Perhaps this is a legacy of his brutal childhood in South Africa, in particular the cruelty of his father.

Elon Musk is certainly a most fascinating and complicated man. Through his wealth, ownership of X, and readiness to intervene in politics internationally, he has become one of the world’s most influential men.

This biography is a splendid introduction to a man who will feature in headlines for years to come. I can’t wait for Volume 2.

Does Musk’s role in the Trump Administration worry you?  

AUTHOR

Fr Gavan Jennings

Rev. Gavan Jennings is a priest of the Opus Dei Prelature. He studied philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland and the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome and is currently the editor of Position Papers.

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