Books: Elon Musk

 

I've been pretty impressed by how far Tesla's Full Self-Driving system has come in the past year (even though it is still not really "self-driving"), so I thought it'd be fun to read Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk.

If you're familiar with Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, you'll know what to expect: a portrait of someone who is both a visionary and, at times, a monumental a--hole. The book starts with Musk's childhood in South Africa and runs all the way up to the first launch of SpaceX's Starship in April 2023, so it omits Musk's involvement in the 2024 election and his time at DOGE this past year.

That's probably a good thing, since even without those topics, there's a lot of stuff to cover - the founding of Tesla and its infamous Model 3 production hell, the underdog SpaceX becoming the largest launch provider in the world through sheer force of will (and a whole lot of venture capital), and the chaotic takeover of Twitter after Musk was "red-pilled" during the COVID-19 pandemic. Isaacson was allowed to shadow Musk for two years through all his various endeavors, and the book strains to capture all the drama the world's richest person experiences in that timeframe.

My favorite part of the book was the behind-the-scenes perspective on the engineering challenges faced by Musk's companies - how they settled on stainless steel to make Starship, or used a "Gigapress" to cast huge sections of the Model Y to simplify production. I was less interested in Musk's toxic relationships or his self-inflicted dramas on Twitter.  While Isaacson eventually concludes that it's impossible to separate the dark from the light, that doesn't mean the dark is all that enjoyable to read.