By Christopher Harper
I doubt I will ever own an electric car. I have no desire to be a colonizer of Mars. But I’m happy that Elon Musk is interested in EVs and Mars and bought Twitter, now known as X.
As a result, I decided to learn more about the 52-year-old Musk and read Walter Isaacson’s useful and somewhat flawed biography of the billionaire entrepreneur.
Isaacson details the trials and tribulations of Musk’s ventures as he used his engineering background to dig deep into the workings of automobiles, space flight, artificial intelligence, and social media.
A member of a wealthy South African family, Musk was born in Pretoria and immigrated to Canada at 18, obtaining citizenship through his Canadian-born mother. He moved to California in 1995 to attend Stanford but dropped out after a few days.
Musk co-founded the online software company Zip2 with his brother Kimbal. After Compaq paid $307 million to acquire Zip2, Musk bootstrapped his earnings into various businesses, starting in 1999 with X.com, an online bank.
With the $100 million he made from eBay’s purchase of PayPal, Musk founded SpaceX, a spaceflight services company. Two years later, he became an early investor in EV manufacturer Tesla Motors, Inc. (now Tesla, Inc.). He became its chairman and product architect, assuming the position of CEO in 2008. Seven years later, he co-founded OpenAI, a nonprofit artificial intelligence research company. In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink, a company developing interfaces between human brains and computers. In 2022, he acquired Twitter for $44 billion. He merged the company into the newly created X Corp. and rebranded the service as X the following year.
Isaacson reports how Musk almost went bankrupt in 2008 when Tesla couldn’t meet its production quotas, and SpaceX had trouble getting its rockets to fly successfully. But Musk marched down to the production floors of his businesses, reengineering key components, cutting costs, and turning the corporations into viable operations. According to Forbes, by 2012, he was the wealthiest person in the world.
Isaacson’s intimate portrait of Musk describes his bullying in early life at home and school. He also suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, a form of autism, which makes him capable of intense concentration on complicated details of running his businesses but also makes him rather meteoric and unpredictable in his decisions and his relationships with partners and employees.
Unfortunately, Isaacson tells the stories chronologically, so the year-by-year structure jumps from business to business rather than giving a comprehensive picture of one operation at a time.
Twitter is the most interesting example of Musk’s tenacity. Only weeks after buying the company, he fired more than 75 percent of what he considered bloated staff, mainly because of what he considered the leftist bent of the enterprise’s massive “content moderation.” He invited journalists to investigate the previous regime of Twitter, which provided interesting reading and even congressional hearings into the way the company was run and how the content moderators had censored various stories, such as those on Hunter Biden.
What comes across is that Musk is an amazing entrepreneur and visionary–albeit a rather complicated character to understand.
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