Elon Musk’s new biography shows tortured billionaire – 09/10/2023 – Tech

A new biography of Elon Musk portrays the billionaire businessman as a complex and tortured figure whose brilliance is often dimmed by his inability to relate on a human level to those around him — his wives, his children and those he loved. trusted to help build the space exploration and electric car companies that made him the richest man on Earth.

Musk’s life so far – his difficult childhood in South Africa, tempestuous romantic relationships, success as a visionary who created SpaceX and Tesla and the impetuous decision to buy Twitter – is detailed in countless interviews with his family, friends , business partners and Musk himself.

The book, which will be released on Tuesday (12), was written by journalist Walter Isaacson, whose previous works chronicled the lives of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin.

It begins with a quote from Jobs, co-founder of Apple, who once said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

The New York Times purchased copies of the book from a store that sold it before its official release.

Twitter, now known as X

Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, after a surprise bid for the company and then an apparent reluctance to go ahead with the deal.

Days after Twitter’s board approved the deal, Musk told his four teenage children that he had bought the social network to influence the upcoming US presidential election. “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?” he said. (It was a joke, Isaacson writes, but Musk’s kids still don’t understand his reason for buying Twitter, an app they rarely use.)

After acquiring Twitter, Musk and his advisers scoured his employees’ internal communications and social media posts for signs of disloyalty, writes Isaacson. The “musketeers,” as Musk loyalists on Twitter were known, searched the company’s files on Slack for keywords like “Elon” and fired dozens of employees who made snarky comments about their boss.

Musk carried out a surprise operation at the platform’s data center in Sacramento, California, last winter, shortly after acquiring the company. He decided to move the servers there to another Twitter “data center” to cut costs, but the company’s infrastructure leaders warned him that moving the expensive equipment safely could take months. In a fit of rage, Musk decided to move the servers himself, recruiting a small team and several moving trucks to move them on Christmas Eve. (He later said he regretted the decision, which caused service disruptions.)

Personal life

Musk’s extended family has been a source of comfort amid the frequent turmoil of his industry-wide business interests, Isaacson writes. But his relationship with his father, Errol, is a source of trauma that stays with him.

Musk’s father is described as emotionally and physically abusive, and quoted speaking disparagingly of black people. Musk agreed in 2016 to meet with his father, from whom he was largely estranged, a friend recalls to Isaacson: “It was the only time I saw Elon’s hands shake.” Isaacson writes: “There are certain people who occupy a demonic corner in Musk’s head. They goad him, make him dark, and awaken cold rage. His father is number one.”

As musician Grimes, aka Claire Boucher, gave birth to her son, X, in May 2020, Musk took a photo of the birth and shared it with friends and family, including her father and siblings. Grimes was understandably horrified and struggled to delete it. “He just didn’t understand why I was upset,” she told Isaacson.

Politics and Trump

Musk’s politics defy simple categorization. Despite his attacks on liberal critics, his rants against “woke” Democrats, and his occasional advocacy of far-right conspiracy theories, he is portrayed as more disillusioned with the left-wing tendency of the Democratic Party than a fan of the Republican.

Musk has repeatedly professed not to be an admirer of former President Donald J. Trump, telling his biographer, “I’m not a fan of Trump. He’s disruptive.” Isaacson writes that Musk has a “deep disdain” for the former president, “whom he considers a crook” and seemed, according to Musk, “a little crazy.”

But he’s also not a Biden supporter, although he tells Isaacson he would have voted for Biden in 2020 if he had. (He decided not to vote because he was registered in California and considered it a waste because the state was uncompetitive in presidential elections.) Musk describes a meeting with Biden several years ago in which he was unimpressed. “When he was vice president, we had lunch together in San Francisco, and he was talking in a monotone for an hour and it was really boring, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and she says the same stupid phrases over and over again.”

Artificial intelligence

Musk has long been concerned about artificial intelligence, which he considers a potential existential threat. He co-founded OpenAI before breaking ties with the organization in 2018, and recently announced that he was forming a rival AI company, X.AI.

Musk “summoned” Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, to a meeting at Twitter headquarters in February 2023, shortly after the launch of ChatGPT. Musk angrily asked Altman to “justify how he could legally turn a grant-funded nonprofit into a for-profit organization that could make millions.” The encounter, Isaacson writes, left Altman “sore.”

Musk’s decision to start X.AI resulted in part from concerns about the underpopulation. (He is the father of ten children.) “The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was leveling off because people didn’t have enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computational intelligence was growing exponentially,” Isaacson writes. Musk believed that “at some point, biological brainpower will be eclipsed by digital brainpower.”

Musk gave the first X.AI employees three goals: to create an AI chatbot capable of writing code, an AI chatbot trained to be politically neutral, and an AI capable of reasoning and seeking the truth. “You should be able to give him big tasks, like ‘Build a better rocket engine,'” Musk told Isaacson.

elon and the media

Musk’s relationship with the media, already tense before he bought Twitter, reached new heights after the deal was announced.

“Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David confronted Elon Musk at the 2022 wedding of Ari Emanuel, chief executive of media conglomerate Endeavor, who sat them at the same table. “Do you want to just murder children in schools?” David asked Musk, questioning him about his support for Republican candidates following the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left 19 students dead. “No, no,” Musk responded, according to Isaacson. “I am anti-child murder.” Emanuel also seated MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, another Musk critic, at the same table. “It turned out to be a microcosm of Twitter,” Isaacson wrote.

As Musk’s erratic tweets strained the social network’s relationship with advertisers, he sought advice from bold names in the media on how to repair the rift. One of them was David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, the Warner Bros. film studio. and CNN. They talked for over an hour. “Zaslav said Musk was doing self-defeating things that made it harder to attract aspirational brands. He should focus on improving the product, adding longer video offerings and making ads more effective.”

Tesla

For years, Tesla has been the most prominent business in Musk’s portfolio of companies, serving as a constant source of pride and stress.

The company’s early struggles contributed to a long and difficult period for Musk, which took a physical and mental toll, he told Isaacson in a 2021 interview. “You can’t be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not feel aggrieved,” Musk said. But he also acknowledged that he finds purpose under pressure: “When you’re no longer in survive or die mode, it’s not as easy to stay motivated every day.”

Even when the company found success, it attracted critics in the form of short sellers who bet against Tesla shares. This practice reached a fever pitch in 2018 as Tesla struggled to meet production targets, infuriating Musk, who called salespeople “leeches on companies’ necks.” But he acknowledged that some of these traders have also collected an impressively accurate picture of the company, from “insiders” and even from drones that have flown over the Tesla factory. “The degree of inside information they had was crazy,” he said.

Production jumps and struggles at Tesla and space exploration company SpaceX also honed Musk’s philosophy, which he distilled into a five-step approach he called “the algorithm” and which he repeatedly invoked to employees. It involved, in order: questioning orders, excluding parts or processes, simplifying and optimizing, accelerating processes and, finally, automating. “I’ve become a broken record about the algorithm,” Musk told Isaacson.

SpaceX

Musk created SpaceX to help humanity become a multi-planetary species. The company’s success thus far is a credit to its willingness to accept risks, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

During the countdown to a crucial launch in 2015, an unidentified liquid began dripping from a Falcon 9 rocket, startling Mark Juncosa, a director at SpaceX. Musk deliberated briefly before deciding to proceed, resulting in a successful launch. At the time, Juncosa assumed that Musk had based this decision on a complex risk assessment, but realized he was wrong after reviewing the images years later. “I thought he did some quick, complex calculations to decide what to do, but he actually just shrugged his shoulders and gave the order,” Juncosa said of Musk. “He had an intuition of what physics is.”

To achieve interplanetary flights in the future, SpaceX needed to find a way to make money in the present. Thus, in 2015, Musk announced Starlink, seeking to enter the lucrative market for providing internet services, in this case through a constellation of satellites in low orbit. The service became a vital lifeline for people in war zones and helped the Ukrainian military defend itself against the Russian invasion. But Musk has also been criticized for not allowing Ukraine to use the service to launch a drone attack on a Russian naval base last year, fearing it would provoke a major escalation in the war. “We didn’t want to be a part of it,” Musk said.

In 2021, SpaceX successfully launched a crew into orbit for the first time without a professional astronaut on board. Musk later reflected on the role he and his company played in advancing space exploration. “Building electric cars for the mass market was inevitable,” he said. “It would have happened without me. But becoming a space civilization is not inevitable.” He added: “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human intervention.”

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves