Elon Musk’s biography portrays him as a monstrous person – 09/12/2023 – Market

On a night in 2022, the Ukrainian Armed Forces tried to blow up the Russian naval fleet based in Sevastopol, Crimea, with underwater drones. To guide them to the target, they used Starlink, an internet subsidiary of SpaceX, Elon Musk’s space exploration company.

Since the beginning of the war, Musk has provided network infrastructure to safeguard Ukrainian communication, circumventing the attacker’s sabotage.

Upon learning of the offensive, he made a strategic military decision: he ordered the satellites to be deactivated, making the attack unfeasible. He feared that the explosion would lead to an escalation of the conflict. He was probably right. But who is Elon Musk to decide?

“Who is Elon Musk” is the question that biographer Walter Isaacson’s new book focuses on, whose global launch will be this Tuesday, the 12th.

A hypercompetitive anarcho-capitalist parades through more than 600 pages, a physically present and emotionally absent father of ten children —among them, a communist transsexual who renounces her surname—, a workaholic, messianic man who is unaware of empathy.

In the author’s words, someone who “has developed an aura that makes him seem like an alien, as if his mission to reach Mars was a desire to return home.”

Former head of CNN and Time magazine, Isaacson is a journalist and historian with decades of experience in the highest spheres of power in the United States, intimate with the ways of thinking and acting of the Gates, Jobs, Musks and Kissingers.

If the fluidity of the text and the factual investigation leave no doubt as to his talent as a journalist, the historiographical side is opaque.

Musk’s childhood as a white boy in South Africa in the 1970s, for example, ignores apartheid — the biographer doesn’t even seem to see black people. And throughout the entire book, only three interact with him: Kanye West and Azealia Banks, portrayed as insane, and Barack Obama, an institution-name.

Female voices are also shy. Most of them are nothing more than thermometers of the billionaire’s volatile moods. But, justice be done to the author: this is Musk’s world.

Despite this narrow framework, since the beginning of his career, the businessman says he has aimed at the advancement of “humanity”. According to Lucas Hughes, a SpaceX employee, “Elon cares about humanity in a much broader sense.” “Broad” is an understatement; perhaps the precise word is “abstract.”

An exceptional engineer, Musk does not have a philosophical repertoire to match his ambition. During his youth, he read existentialists, but faced with the pessimism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, he contented himself with extracting his utopian vision from the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, cited 11 times throughout the text.

Physically, he appears deterritorialized; invades Tesla’s production lines, demanding cost cuts directly from workers. There are no landscapes, geography is dead. And society, Thatcherite, a set of individuals brought together by ambitions presented as great humanist aspirations, but which end in a puerile competitiveness, studded with phallic jokes.

Contradictions operate at the interpersonal level, always with outbursts of verbal violence on the part of the protagonist. When not, they extrapolate to a clash between the dashing pop icon Musk, on the one hand, against the dusty business caste and the State bureaucracy, on the other.

As the former emerges from the confrontation with a renewed air of cool irresponsibility, an anti-hero of private life is constructed, a necessary obverse to the hero of the public sphere.

The greatest feature of this public “heroism” is the colonizing impetus: the ambition to land on Mars and make man a multiplanetary being. The counterpart is the end of the Earth, which he mitigates with the effort for the energy transition. But, as there is no society, he is incapable of thinking about collective solutions and makes the luxury car the pivot of the revolution.

Quick and direct, the text resembles a sports narration, which allows it to give a thriller tone to the technical parameters of a fuel refrigeration chamber, for example; and facilitates the absorption of the methods of an entrepreneur who, in an era of financialization and deindustrialization, prospers by producing. If this inspires others to value the product more than tax evasion, it has been worth it.

Now, there is no superman. There is a smart and megalomaniac capitalist, shameless about crushing anyone in the path of his rise. Isaacson accepts the sociopathy, but not the banality of his wealthy biographer. And he insists on painting him as the archetypal genius of a self-made culture.

Thus, it sacralizes its class, as if it were the only seller of the miraculous cure for the apocalypse.