Elon Musk book | An abusive father, bullying, toxic relationships…: 15 keys to the biography written by Walter Isaacson

“If you’ve never been punched, you have no idea how that affects the rest of your life.” The boy Elon Musk suffered the most painful experiences at school. He was the smallest, the shortest, it was difficult for him to grasp the social codes. He did not feel the need to interact with other classmates. And he became the target of bullies, receiving brutal beatings, according to the book. But those wounds were not healed at home, where his father, Errol, often aggravated them with episodes of abuse (also towards his mother, whom he would end up divorcing). “Mental torture,” defines Elon.

His father’s impact on his personality is immense. His first wife, Justine, says that the businessman tried to survive by turning off emotionally. This is how Elon protected himself from his father’s insults – some of which Justine mentions are “retarded”; or “idiot” -, turning him into an insensitive being and, at the same time, a lover of risk. Also, of course, it created an aversion to satisfaction. Life is pain, Elon considers. “Adversity shaped me,” says the tycoon. Everything, his biography points out, is due to the post-traumatic stress that he suffered after his childhood. Some see traces of his father in him when he enters a state of mind that those close to him describe as “demonic mode.”

Maye Musk, the mother, decided that Elon should go to kindergarten at the age of three (one before the norm in the 70s in Pretoria, South Africa, where they lived). At that age, the book says, she began handling rockets and explosives at home. Elon himself confesses that he is surprised not to have lost any fingers during his childhood. “He needs someone other than me to talk to. “My son is a genius,” his mother says she told the school principal. But, as they warned him from the center, it was a mistake. He didn’t pay attention, spent most of his time in a trance and didn’t make friends. The director even told them in a meeting: “We have reason to believe that he is retarded.”

The Musks separated and their three children, with their hard-working mother, assumed the little control and freedom to be self-sufficient. Elon became a nocturnal kid who stayed up reading books, which had caused him problems at school. At 10 years old he decided to go live with his father. Because? “I thought I should keep you company,” he replies. He was also attracted to the friendless boy by the manly presence of his father and a collection of encyclopedias, books, and an assortment of engineering tools (Errol’s profession).

Many years later, having already escaped from his father (and South Africa) and having become a good student in high school (although not the best, the biography notes), he arrived at university, where he majored in Physics. At Penn’s, by the way, he also developed a taste for partying. One of the “three modes of relaxation” of the tycoon. Young Elon did a summer internship in Silicon Valley and worked at a video game company where he impressed. And he jumped “on the internet wave & rdquor; that would take him little by little – and business by business – to Tesla (passing, of course, through SpaceX and the colonization of Mars).

An already “internet billionaire” –as described in the biography- Elon Musk became the ideal investor – and surely the only possible one – for the project that would end up in Tesla, which was initially in JB Straubel’s mind. Musk wanted to change people’s idea of ​​the electric car. “No one is going to pay anything like that for something that looks like shit,” said the tycoon in the initial meetings, aware of the high costs of this type of automobile. The goal: a high-performance electric car.

According to Isaacson, Musk is not cut out for domestic tranquility. “Most of his romantic relationships were pure psychological turbulence,” the most distressing of which was the one he had with Amber Heard, which dragged him into a “vortex of darkness.” and of whom Musk says that he is “like the Joker from Batman”. Heard, for her part, came to the conclusion while being with him that Musk “cultivates drama to feel energized.”

The period between the summer of 2017 and the fall of 2018 was “the most hellish” of Musk’s life, “18 months of madness” due to the overload of work at Tesla, his breakup with Heard and the news that his father had had a child with the woman whom he had raised as a stepdaughter. It was the first time Musk seriously considered whether he was bipolar. “In moments of emotional darkness, Musk immerses himself in work obsessively,” explains Isaacson, with “brawls.” up to three days in a row working non-stop, a “fanatical mentality” that he demands of his employees.

The times that Musk has gotten into a garden for tweeting something crazy are countless and the biography explains how hard it is for him to apologize, like when he called a critic a pedophile with the help he sent to the boys trapped in the cave in Thailand, or when he tweeted that he was thinking about taking Tesla private and the SEC opened an investigation, “typical extreme risk bipolar behavior.” that shareholders have never liked him. He made history by being the first person with Asperger’s (or the first to admit it) to do a monologue on Saturday Night Live. “It is not possible to be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not get hurt,” Isaacson points out in the book.

From the joint he smoked with the anti-vaccine podcaster Joe Rogan to frequenting the circles of libertarian Peter Thiel and Jordan Peterson or launching tweets like “Take the red pill,” a famous phrase from ‘The Matrix’ adopted by conspiracy theorists and activists of the Men’s Rights Movement. Musk has gone from being a fan of Barack Obama to anti-woke fervor and meeting with right-wing populists like Jair Bolsonaro and Meloni. In his desire to free the world from the “mental woke virus” is the impulse that led him to buy Twitter. “Are you going to free Twitter from the merry band of censorship?” Rogan told him by message before making the purchase official. Isaacson defines the acquisition as the most expensive display of his impulsivity and relates it to “a personal psychological longing & rdquor; to control the definitive playground that is the social network after a childhood in which he felt harassed and humiliated.

“Musk’s clown mode is the reverse of his demonic mode,” explains Isaacson, who describes “his childish penchant for fart sounds that come programmed into Teslas, poop emojis, and other manifestations of scatological humor.” Teslas have a “fart app” which allows the driver to press a button and have the passenger seat make a gusty sound when someone sits down. “It may be my best work,” he confesses to Isaacson. He is also a big fan of Monty Python and Douglas Adams. In 2018, in the midst of a mental crisis, he launched the old red Tesla into space with a copy of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ inside it.

He met Claire Boucher, a Guadiana couple and mother of three of their 10 children, a successful electronic music and dreampop artist, following a tweet about Roko’s basilisk (a thought experiment that predicts that AI will end up torturing any human that doesn’t help her). On her first date, he took her to a Tesla factory and gave her a test on ‘The Lord of the Rings’ which she passed with flying colors; She gave him a box of animal bones. Together they listened to the ‘Hardcore History’ podcast. They have left it on numerous occasions. “When someone has depression or anxiety, we empathize with that person. But if it’s a person with Asperger’s, what we say about her is that she’s an asshole,” she says about him. “You don’t have to live everything scorchingly all the time” is another of the phrases that he usually tells her. The book reveals that Grimes did not know Musk was the biological father of the twins of Neuralink’s COO and great friend of Musk, Shivon Zilis, who were born almost at the same time as his third child. Zilis coincided in the same hospital as Grimes and Musk’s surrogate mother.

Musk’s life was transformed in May 2020 with the arrival of his son X, the first of those he had with Grimes. “It conveyed an ethereal sweetness that calmed Musk,” Isaacson writes. Musk usually takes it to his meetings (he has it on his lap), on his private jet trips, and on horseback rides through the Space X and Tesla factories. They watch videos of rocket launches together and X “he learned to count backwards from ten before counting from one upwards.” Musk has a total of ten children. Saxon, his son with autism, is especially close to X. Damian is more introverted, at eight he announced that he was vegan and is a classical music and math prodigy. Kai is the most outgoing and the one who usually accompanies Elon to the launches at Cape Canaveral. Another son, Xavier, has declared himself trans (today he is Jenna) and radically anti-capitalist. Musk sold all his houses and decided to live with fewer luxuries so that he could talk to him again. It didn’t work.

An hour before Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, Moscow launched an attack against Viasat, the country’s satellite and internet system. Musk agreed to the desperate requests of the Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister and Zelensky and became one of the great supporters by sending more than 2,000 Starlink satellites for free to Ukraine. But he decided to cut off the internet supply when he learned of an attack by Ukrainian underwater drones on the Russian fleet in Crimea, seeing the operation as a possible Pearl Harbor that would have caused an escalation of violence to the next level, the nuclear one. This episode has earned him wide criticism and recent applause from Putin.

In addition to the clash with Jeff Bezos in the space race, Musk is excited by the rivalry with great magnates like Bill Gates, who in the book speaks well and badly of him. He calls the obsession with Mars “peculiar”: “It’s a pretty crazy approach in which, if a nuclear war occurs on Earth and there are people on Mars, then those people will return to Earth and will still be alive after all the Others have killed each other. He also says of him that “there is no one who has done more to push the limits of science and innovation than him.”