Elon Musk Biography By Walter Isaacson

[Cosmacelf]

So now that I’ve read the book, here’s my hot take.

It isn’t bad. I did learn a lot about Elon. Yes there were cringy parts when Issacson let his biases seep through, but not too many, and they didn’t last long.

I learned a lot about how Elon parents (he takes “bring your kid to work day” to the extreme), how he juggles all his time commitments (a lot of sleeping under desks even now), and how impulsive he is. Sometimes his impulsive decisions are 100% correct and very prescient, other times they are 100% wrong and he has to repair as he goes.

I did not learn much about Tesla, other than the tidbits about FSD. Indeed, there was little other than vignettes about specific incidents regarding all his companies. Issacson was very dismissive about Boring, so we learned nothing at all about that.

So, I guess as a biography of the person, he did a half decent job.

 

[Buckminster]

Another Walter interview:
Walter Isaacson Discusses Elon Musk Biography

 

[WADan]

Is it fair criticism?

How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson

Access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk gets lots of chances to sell his own mythology.

www.theverge.com

 

[heltok]

Is it fair criticism?

How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson

Access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk gets lots of chances to sell his own mythology.

www.theverge.com

No.

 

[Buckminster]

Is it fair criticism?

How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson

Access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk gets lots of chances to sell his own mythology.

www.theverge.com

Walter knows that if he is to be on the right side of history he needs to choose a side. He hasn't yet. He knows that it is a fair fight - Elon Vs the world. He will choose at the US election time when we know the winner.

 

[Kvitravn]

Is it fair criticism?

How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson

Access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk gets lots of chances to sell his own mythology.

www.theverge.com

Well, if you already have a grudge towards Elon then I suppose compiling every smear and negative you can find in one article and wrapping Isacsson in into it is one way to denigrate them both.

If, on the other hand, you can see how much Elons success is pissing off a lot of greedy and small minded people... it just becomes a cheap political hack job.

 

[navguy12]

Is it fair criticism?

How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson

Access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk gets lots of chances to sell his own mythology.

www.theverge.com

Yes.

 

[Cosmacelf]

Is it fair criticism?

How the Elon Musk biography exposes Walter Isaacson

Access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk gets lots of chances to sell his own mythology.

www.theverge.com

Last paragraph:

"While Isaacson manages to detail what makes Musk awful, he seems unaware of what made Musk an inspiring figure for so long. Musk is a fantasist, the kind of person who conceives of civilizations on Mars. That’s what people liked all this time: dreaming big, thinking about new possible worlds. It’s also why Musk’s shifting political stance undercuts him. The fantasy of the conservative movement is small and sad, a limited world with nothing new to explore. Musk has gone from dreaming very, very big to seeming very, very small. In the hands of a talented biographer, this kind of tragic story would provide rich material."

So the author here says that Musk is inspiring because Musk fantasizes big dreams???

I dunno, but I see TONS of people with "big ideas". No, that isn't why Musk is admired, he is admired because he ACCOMPLISHED those big ideas. It isn't his dreaming, fantasizing, or exaggerations, it is that he built the world's biggest rocket company and EV company (on the way to the biggest car company).

As to the second half of the author's paragraph, that says a lot about the author and how the author sees the world. It isn't a rational indictment of Musk.

So, no, not fair criticism.

 

[Buckminster]

If you're consuming Isaacson's biography of Musk, this review of a review is worth a read:

Elizabeth Lopatto on Walter Isaacson’s ‘Elon Musk’

Link to: https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/1/23895069/walter-isaacson-biography-musk-review

daringfireball.net

Lopatto's review itself is the usual mishmash of crap that The Verge usually writes about Musk/Tesla. It's not even worth looking at.

But Gruber's observations are worth understanding if you want to know what Isaacson gets wrong. Isaacson is simply not a technologist of any sort, so he is incapable of telling truth from fabrication -- he just has to decide what subject matter expert to trust. Gruber provides a link to his own critique of Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography, and having listened to both biographies I can tell you that Isaacson gets everything wrong in exactly the same way.

Not that it isn't worth reading, and not that he doesn't get lots of stuff right. But the essentials of each man's work and accomplishments is utterly beyond him. He knows neither what is true nor what is important. It remains for somebody else to write an excellent Elon Musk biography.

If you're interested in reading a better Steve Jobs biography, give this a try: Becoming Steve Jobs - Wikipedia. Not perfect, but significantly better than Isaacson's work.

 

[Kvitravn]

...Musk is admired because he ACCOMPLISHED those big ideas. It isn't his dreaming, fantasizing, or exaggerations, it is that he built the world's biggest rocket company and EV company (on the way to the biggest car company).

As to the second half of the author's paragraph, that says a lot about the author and how the author sees the world. It isn't a rational indictment of Musk.

So, no, not fair criticism.

What a neat summary of Isacssons bias.

He doesn't understand tech and he doesn't understand the sheer speed and efficiency to be had from focused application of really talented and driven people.

Only problem with such an incisive summary is that it kills the thread

 

[dfwatt]

Book has just been published today. This is a previous non-investor thread:
Isaacson Biography of Elon Musk

Reactions of this biography of course are going to be all over the board. As someone in the behavioral sciences who has done empirical research on the psychosocial and behavioral territory that Elon occupies, and who has also clinically treated folks with similar abuse histories, you have to be concerned about both the victim of abuse but also how committed they are to the very painful emotional repair work, which is the only path that avoids the abused becoming a new generation of abuser. That's still very much an open question in my mind, and although Elon appears very devoted to his kids and determined not to go down his father's path, in other ways he appears seduced by the notion that becoming an authoritarian and a powerful bully is the best way to avoid further abuse, particularly the ways which his stormy professional trajectory has involved recapitulations of the abuse, including esp. in the media, where he is like a moth to the flame of trolling and mutual bashing.

The book will likely serve to both increase awareness about the long-term consequences of child abuse but also about how genius, trauma, and extraordinary accomplishment may be much more tied together than we typically appreciate. While these connections have been long appreciated in the arts, perhaps they are true for many if not all forms of Genius.

I do believe that much of the noise in the media about Elon and Tesla (intensified by the book) however miss a few key points, And since I've had this discussion so many times with friends alienated by Elon and some of his less than admirable behavior, I decided to boilerplate it:

Top 8 Reasons to Buy a Tesla Even If You Don't like Elon Musk - Why We Shouldn't Miss the Forest For All the Trees

• If your notion is that CEOs of major companies need to be philosopher kings or show high levels of empathy and prosocial behavior to feel good about buying their products, it's doubtful you could buy anything, including toilet paper. When was the last purchase you made where this question was even relevant? If you're honest, most people answer that the purchase of an EV is one of the few times they've ever even thought about this – largely again because of Elon's polarizing personality and views. 99.99% of the time, people don't even bother to look up to see who the CEO might be for the corporation whose products they are purchasing – and outside of locally sourced food, it's not clear that much of consumer goods (forget about anything technological!) or anything else that you need day-to-day is produced outside of multinational corporations. As a general rule, their CEOs are narcissistic personality disorders or worse – and many of them make Elon Musk look like Citizen of the Year. Forget about GM – Mary Barra just makes *sugar* up all the time and is caught lying and exaggerating on a regular basis, and is relentlessly self-aggrandizing, claiming that she deserves her record high salary because she's done such a great job, as GM sales tank and they miss target after target around EVs. GM killed the original electric vehicle, despite owners loving it because they were concerned it was going to cut into their profits on gas vehicles. So please don't even think about GM! VW group has the grossly sociopathic diesel gate scandal which they have not fully repudiated and where they are still actively acting out their distaste for being sanctioned and being forced to underwrite Electrify America by making all of their chargers unreliable. Ford actually looks the best in this metric, with Jim Farley taking regular helpings of humble pie and being frankly more honest than almost any other automotive CEO in outlining the deep *sugar* his company is in, so I suppose if your criteria for technology is that you have to buy the tech from the nicest CEO, the person you'd most like to have a beer with on a Friday afternoon, he would be your guy. Carlos Tavares of Stellantis is borderline crazy and certainly more grandiose than Elon – at least Elon produces winner after winner, while Carlos just runs his mouth and self-aggrandizes, and blames everybody else for his company's massive electrification failure and non-competitiveness. You absolutely can't support Toyota, because their CEO is drunk on hydrogen bullshit and lying about electrification, and trying to get emission standards rolled back so that he can get a fig leaf to cover the failure of Toyota around electrification, a case of betting on the losing horse big time because the government was paying you to bet on that losing horse. So Toyota and their hydrogen BS is a classic case of not being able to expect somebody to understand something because their salary depends on their not understanding it. Not exactly intellectual or scientific courage in that sense. Honda pretty much ditto. Mitsubishi, Mazda, and almost everybody else in Japan gets docked for denial/obfuscation of climate change urgency and for profoundly underestimating both Tesla and the disruptive technology they are selling, which is driving exponential adoption of electric vehicles. Even such trans-corporate entities as the French National Automotive Manufacturers Group is joining in the sociopathy and outright lying around simply making *sugar* up, claiming that Tesla's and now other companies Giga castings are bad for the environment, unsafe and should be legislated away! The fact that all the French automakers are so far behind Tesla is bad for France, but that's not quite what they're saying. Long story short, how many other purchases do you consider the putative character structure of the CEO in your purchase considerations? And frankly I could make a strong case that although Elon has problems with narcissism, he's not sociopathic and he is if anything honest to a fault. And is that question of CEO character structure really and truly more important than how good and reliable the technology might be, or how committed the manufacturer is to making it the best technology and value that they can for the money? Are you buying a product to do virtue signaling or as vote for the corporate CEO or are you buying a product because you believe it does the job and is well made, and even perhaps class leading? Of course, Tesla is far from perfect, and there are horror stories about Tesla's poor service but just about every car company has those horror stories. We've had nothing but great service, but again anecdotal reports don't mean anything. Tesla for sure has major work do on the service side but that's another story for another time.
• Speaking of caring about the customer, if a corporation consistently makes the safest product in its class that wins all of the crash and other safety tests, year after year after year, it's pretty hard to conclude that the CEO of that Corporation doesn't give a rat's ass about anybody. Driving is after all the most dangerous thing that we all do daily. Tesla's cars and most especially the Model Y win crash test after test, and that's before we even get to the question of active safety, (accident avoidance) where I'd argue they are even farther ahead of most of the competition, quirks of autopilot and FSD aside. So, the product itself contradicts the notion that the Corporation and its CEO don't care about anyone else.
• Speaking of which, Tesla and Elon Musk have done more to advance the cause of sustainable transportation and energy than anybody – and in case you haven't noticed, global warming is accelerating and our transition to sustainability is flagging, excepting around the disruptive technology adoption of electric vehicles and rooftop solar, in good part due to the popularity of Tesla vehicles and the declining cost of solar, again that in part associated with downward pressure on system prices once again coming in good part from Tesla. Electric vehicle sales are on the exponential ramp of the sigmoid curve demonstrated by all disruptive technologies. Where would that transition be without Tesla? In the toilet, or at least a whole lot further behind.
• If you're planning on getting an electric vehicle that does not use the Tesla supercharging network, don't bother driving it on a road trip until you can actually use the Tesla charging network – which is probably at least a year or two away in terms of everybody adopting the NACS charging connection standard. Don't even think about driving cross country and using Charge Point, Electrify America, etc. etc. You'll wish you didn't have an electric vehicle.
• In relationship to the most critical numbers of range, performance, usable space at a given price point, Tesla is still way out ahead of the competition, and they are driving prices down for everybody, in relationship to electric vehicles. Admittedly they have yet to produce a $25,000 vehicle – the so-called Everyman’s car – but that's coming. And their base models of their most popular vehicles (3/Y) are now well under the average purchase price of a new vehicle, even without federal EVs subsidies.
• For all the crap Elon gets, and for sure some of it is deserved around his authoritarian acting-out and intolerance for dissent, he deserves a lot of credit for creating a culture of continuous improvement and refinement at Tesla, pushing back against all the obfuscation and widespread industry bullshit (the so-called ‘accepted wisdom’) about how electrification of transportation was impossible, and being simply unrelenting in his vision of how to create and implement a sustainable future. His ‘algorithm’ as outlined in his recent biography by Isaacson is nothing less than a radical application of the scientific method – question every assumption, and show me the evidence! It's not novel but then again, the ruthless application of these core tenants of the scientific method to the every single aspect of the design and manufacturing process is novel. So, although he has clear problems with pathological narcissism and major problems with empathy, and for many people distasteful political opinions, you have to take the good with the bad or, the bad with the ingenious. He's done more to advance progress towards sustainable transportation and energy than anybody. Yes, he's benefited enormously financially in that process, but I honestly don't believe that he cares that much about being a billionaire, except that it gives him resources and street credibility (and of course the endless media attention that he rather enjoys too much) to tackle his next impossible technological goal – in this case, getting to Mars. Once again, people may consider all that crazy, but people who underestimate Elon and how capable he is of getting nearly impossible technological objectives completed have been proven wrong over and over – see the reusable rockets story. I do think he will find it a whole lot harder to stay on Mars than to get to Mars . . . but that's another story.
• Tesla's software is simply industry-leading in so many ways – and electric vehicles are basically electric drivetrain skateboards with a whole lot of computing power. Tesla has made us take for granted the notion of a full operating system revision . . . .in cars! Once again, a massive disruption of the establishment meme that the car you got five years ago is exactly the same today as when you bought it. No longer true. While on the subject, vertical integration and doing things in-house – something that the legacy automakers can't do because they're getting dozens and dozens of controllers from different sources with different software operating each of them – is clearly the way to go. Ford can't even do a true operating system update because of this. They wish they could but they can't, at least not yet.
• Tesla cars are simply lots of fun to drive. While this is trivialized, it keeps people engaged in what is otherwise a boring task. An engaged driver is a lot safer than a bored one. As somebody once said, your job in life is to just remain at least moderately amused most of the time! So this is a big plus even though people trivialize it.
• And while were on the subject of this, although there are for sure problem with autopilot and the full self driving beta that isn't really full self driving, these computer-based driving aids make long distance driving less tiring, less stressful and therefore less dangerous. Tesla is also way closer to solving the deceptively complex puzzle box of full self driving than anybody else. Way closer. And although you can argue about whether single modality visual processing is the way to go on this, there is absolutely no question that Tesla taking a neural network approach is a far smarter pathway than what other folks are doing.

 

[Park2670]

Reactions of this biography of course are going to be all over the board.

Didnt want to quote your entire post, so I just took a tiny bit.

What a well thought out, well typed, and well said statement. Thank you for the post, I agree and will continue to look at the future and what Elon will change in our lives.

 

[DrChaos]

Last paragraph:

"While Isaacson manages to detail what makes Musk awful, he seems unaware of what made Musk an inspiring figure for so long. Musk is a fantasist, the kind of person who conceives of civilizations on Mars. That’s what people liked all this time: dreaming big, thinking about new possible worlds. It’s also why Musk’s shifting political stance undercuts him. The fantasy of the conservative movement is small and sad, a limited world with nothing new to explore. Musk has gone from dreaming very, very big to seeming very, very small. In the hands of a talented biographer, this kind of tragic story would provide rich material."

So the author here says that Musk is inspiring because Musk fantasizes big dreams???

I dunno, but I see TONS of people with "big ideas". No, that isn't why Musk is admired, he is admired because he ACCOMPLISHED those big ideas. It isn't his dreaming, fantasizing, or exaggerations, it is that he built the world's biggest rocket company and EV company (on the way to the biggest car company).

As to the second half of the author's paragraph, that says a lot about the author and how the author sees the world. It isn't a rational indictment of Musk.

I happen to believe it is correct. Tesla's and SpaceX's origin were 20+ years ago now, and it was the earlier period when Musk was more disciplined that he provided good leadership and value. Something bad really has happened to him, likely of his own doing.

His twitter debacle means that nobody will ever be going to Mars---$40 billion pays for quite a bit of space stuff especially with as economically efficient a company as SpaceX.

Personal life is way more chaotic and he's decompensating even more.

I put the change at 2017-2018. I think he has been abusing amphetamines since the "production hell" on the first Model 3 line. Amphetamines let you work long hours (witness his worship of 'hardcore' work) and they also give feelings of narcissistic invincibility and reduce empathy. (The Wehrmacht was high on speed as they smashed through France, their opponents thought they were crazy super soldiers)

Elon Musk Bought Twitter Out Of Boredom, Reveals His Biography

Elon Musk is a man who lives for drama. Seldom does a day pass when he is not in the headlines. But what exactly goes on in the billionaire's mind? Well, his new biography book, written by Walter Isaacson, has further shed light on the world's richest person's decision to buy Twitter (now named...

www.indiatimes.com

https://i.redd.it/t5kllmblxwrb1.jpg

www.reddit.com

Why was Twitter ever his problem to deal with? If he was really bored he needed to get back to SpaceX and plan the actual Mars missions that he was going to fund with his Tesla profits. That's why people admired him, not for shitposting on Twitter.

 

[Cosmacelf]

His twitter debacle means that nobody will ever be going to Mars---$40 billion pays for quite a bit of space stuff especially with as economically efficient a company as SpaceX.

That's not how investing works. First, he personally didn't pay $40B. He paid something like $15B and then had other investors, and then borrowed a bunch of money. ie., it was a leveraged investment, just like people buy houses with only 25% down. Second, that investment is trending to at the very least break even financially, so he at least didn't waste his $15B. Best case scenario is that it is eventually worth more than the buying price, and with the leverage, he will make out like a bandit when he eventually does an IPO with it.

Why was Twitter ever his problem to deal with? If he was really bored he needed to get back to SpaceX and plan the actual Mars missions that he was going to fund with his Tesla profits. That's why people admired him, not for shitposting on Twitter.

Yes, we all want our personal Elon to boss around and have him do our bidding for us. Life's not like that.

 

[heltok]

Also the book says that Elon is most productive when he has chaos in his life. Before twitter he was a bit bored yes, unproductively bored and needed some action to keep him productive.

I also don't think we should underappreciate the value of the dataset of X. Optimus will be trained of their physical robots, on robots in simulation and on a language model based on open datasets, private datasets(such as twitter) and future private datasets(from future X). If you want to know what happens, which dataset do you use? Do you get your news from google, from cnn or from X? Imo the tv show Westworld has it right, the company that owns the dataset of how people interact will be able to take over the world... hehe

I think when Optimus is making $1T/year, Elon's $15B for getting exclusive access to the dataset will be considered a steal.

 

[Midpack]

It's too bad most readers here won't read the Isaacson book. Why Tesla and other companies under Elon's control do what they do would make a lot more sense.

People who think Tesla would be better off if Elon didn't get into all the details are largely mistaken. It's because of his work standards, vision and innovativeness that Tesla did succeed after years where that didn't seem likely. Sure today he might be able to rely on others more, and does, he's not like most CEOs.

And for the people who whine about changes like USS parking sensors and stalkless design, they need only read Elon's (one of many) credos to 'delete, delete, delete - if you don't have to add back 10% of what you delete, you're not pushing the envelope enough.' They all say Tesla is just about cutting costs for no reason or just greed/disregard for the customer - that's nonsense. If they hadn't been that aggressive, Tesla wouldn't have brought production costs down enough to sell at a price that legacy auto can't begin to match anytime soon. Tesla will have to find new approaches, and even add some parts/systems back - but they are so far ahead of everyone else (except possibly BYD) that legacy auto is going to go through a painful and costly transition if EVs continue to grow at the expense of ICE vehicles...

 

[DrChaos]

It's too bad most readers here won't read the Isaacson book. Why Tesla and other companies under Elon's control do what they do would make a lot more sense.

People who think Tesla would be better off if Elon didn't get into all the details are largely mistaken. It's because of his work standards, vision and innovativeness that Tesla did succeed after years where that didn't seem likely. Sure today he might be able to rely on others more, and does, he's not like most CEOs.

He was better and more effective until about 5-7 years ago. He has declined in ability, and increased in arrogance. Henry VIII was a decent monarch in the beginning of his reign as well, but turned into one of the worst. Particularly after a brain injury---which I think Elon has from drugs.

And for the people who whine about changes like USS parking sensors and stalkless design, they need only read Elon's (one of many) credos to 'delete, delete, delete - if you don't have to add back 10% of what you delete, you're not pushing the envelope enough.'

The problem now is when they *don't add back* when it clearly hurts performance and obvious customer satisfaction. Like parking sensors and rain sensor and radar (and turn stalks, should have taken out one, not two)---Elon is overoptimistic on the ability of vision and machine learning to compensate *reliably* and not just in best cases in a demo, and doesn't listen.

They all say Tesla is just about cutting costs for no reason or just greed/disregard for the customer - that's nonsense. If they hadn't been that aggressive, Tesla wouldn't have brought production costs down enough to sell at a price that legacy auto can't begin to match anytime soon.

An efficient and capable HVAC is a great win. But it was complex enough that he let the engineers control the performance requirements---if it resulted in bad AC, bad heat, and bad control of battery temp and many failures, then the simplification would have been a bad idea. The octovalve succeeded tremendously. Sensor removal fails and he doesn't admit it.

Tesla will have to find new approaches, and even add some parts/systems back - but they are so far ahead of everyone else (except possibly BYD) that legacy auto is going to go through a painful and costly transition if EVs continue to grow at the expense of ICE vehicles...

 

[SO16]

It's too bad most readers here won't read the Isaacson book. Why Tesla and other companies under Elon's control do what they do would make a lot more sense.

People who think Tesla would be better off if Elon didn't get into all the details are largely mistaken. It's because of his work standards, vision and innovativeness that Tesla did succeed after years where that didn't seem likely. Sure today he might be able to rely on others more, and does, he's not like most CEOs.

And for the people who whine about changes like USS parking sensors and stalkless design, they need only read Elon's (one of many) credos to 'delete, delete, delete - if you don't have to add back 10% of what you delete, you're not pushing the envelope enough.' They all say Tesla is just about cutting costs for no reason or just greed/disregard for the customer - that's nonsense. If they hadn't been that aggressive, Tesla wouldn't have brought production costs down enough to sell at a price that legacy auto can't begin to match anytime soon. Tesla will have to find new approaches, and even add some parts/systems back - but they are so far ahead of everyone else (except possibly BYD) that legacy auto is going to go through a painful and costly transition if EVs continue to grow at the expense of ICE vehicles...

Agreed.

Just wish Tesla wouldn’t remove something until the replacement is at least close to on par.

 

[Midpack]

He was better and more effective until about 5-7 years ago. He has declined in ability, and increased in arrogance. Henry VIII was a decent monarch in the beginning of his reign as well, but turned into one of the worst. Particularly after a brain injury---which I think Elon has from drugs.

The problem now is when they *don't add back* when it clearly hurts performance and obvious customer satisfaction. Like parking sensors and rain sensor and radar (and turn stalks, should have taken out one, not two)---Elon is overoptimistic on the ability of vision and machine learning to compensate *reliably* and not just in best cases in a demo, and doesn't listen.

Again, IF YOU READ THE BOOK...you obviously have not. You're exactly the type of reader my first post was aimed at...went right over your head.

There are several examples in the book where they added hardware/software features back at Tesla, SpaceX and the solar products. Just because they don't add back what YOU decide they should or when, doesn't mean anything. You mention radar, but HW4 has HD radar capability - so that may be added. The stalkless argument is overblown, but that's been detailed before. I know a Model X owner who prefers stalkless - but without a poll, everything here is anecdotal, and often from posters who have never even tried it.

Your "brain injury" and "drugs" statement is complete BS AFAIK, what's your credible source?

 

[Midpack]

Agreed.

Just wish Tesla wouldn’t remove something until the replacement is at least close to on par.

That is a fair criticism IMO. They should have perfected an alternative before removing USS parking sensors it seems.

My beef with Tesla is you order a car without knowing what hardware you will get, that seems unfair. But I don't overlook all that I like about Tesla vehicles because I don't like everything about them. Others are welcome to choose another car based on their own priorities.