Biographer Walter Isaacson unravels Elon Musk‘s dark and colourful life, besides his incredible mind
It has almost become a literary rule that however rich you are, immortality comes only after Walter Isaacson writes your biography. It is not clear if Elon Musk called the famed writer like Steve Jobs did but Musk was sure the most cooperative subject if there was one. Often inviting the author to sit in in his highly charged meetings which lasts throughout the day and night and meticulously filling up details of his hyper-charged, rollercoaster ride to fame and unimaginable richness. In the few hours before the Twitter takeover, Musk texted the author some details of the boardroom action. Such was his involvement in the biography.
American biographies or autobiographies are classics of their own, filled with candour, darkness of life, the unimaginable boundaries crossed and the many dreams that occur to geniuses. In this biography, as in others, there is no attempt to whitewash a life and present it as white as a lily which is what Indian biographies are all about.
A life as colourful as dark
Musk’s life is as colourful as it is dark. But his mind is the eternal light that led him, and now guides the world, in many ways. An amazing and incredible mind it is, and the range, the passion, the madness, the drive and, of course, the genius is unfathomable for us in India, where lives are lived according to uncrossable Lakshman Rekha drawn across life and time and various moral codes set by religion and superstition. Where caution is always thrown to the wind, where multimillion dollar risks are daily decisions, where all rules are rewritten, where talented engineers are thrown out for objecting. This is the Musk world. Isaacson has a fascination for geniuses like we all do, but no one has striven as hard to try to unravel and map them as he has done, authoring biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, and now Musk.
Musk, like in many American biographies we have read, had a traumatic childhood with an erratic and half-mad father Errol, who was good one moment and cruelly screechy the other. Musk and his siblings — his brother Kimbal and sister Tosca — suffered those early traumas with a brave face. Signs of his genius were there for everyone to see during their South African childhood. Musk, during one reading binge as a boy, gobbled up both the encyclopaedias his father had. A school friend once told him: “Look at the moon. It must be a million miles away. Elon replied: “No, it’s like 2,39,000 miles away depending on the orbit.” He loved comics, and could be found on the floor of bookshops reading up any book he could find, and superheroes because they saved the world all the time. Like all such geeky kids, he had the habit of switching off and escaping to another world and at those moments of silent intensity, his mind raced across galaxies and maths and physics. “I use my brains to compute. Not for incoming information,” young Musk told a friend who wondered why he would switch off time and again. “Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes, he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch.”
A geeky genius
Such a geek can only end up as a genius. Who could have guessed he would change computing, finance, automobiles and rocketry forever? After returning to the US via a student visa in Canada, where he hardly had any money, Musk was a relentless worker and ideator who went from plan to plan till he himself coded a payments platform which later joined up with PayPal. The detailed story of how he engineered rockets from nothing to form his SpaceX company, the story of how Tesla began, and the tension-ridden $44-billion yes-and-no takeover of Twitter contain the coda for a futuristic world. Like all geniuses, Musk lives in the future.
When Musk saw a prototype of an electric car called Tzero, he was blown away. “You have to turn this into a real product. That could really change the world,” Musk told the maker. From there onward, Musk moved with lighting speed to make the electric car possible. He set crazy deadlines, helped make all parts of the car, ideated about design and drove his team crazy. For him, engineering and design are closely linked; he has moved both departments into one floor or room in all his companies.
Elon, like his father Errol, was frightfully toxic and impossible to work with. He never took ‘no’ for an answer. Engineers who brought in experience, be it for rockets or his cars, were ordered to make parts in the factory to cut costs and given deadlines which were impossible. To find a place to mark his first trial launch of a SpaceX rocket, they found an Atoll called Kwaj near Honolulu by the simple ploy of searching the map for places closest to the equator.
No dream too big
In short, Musk has shown us a different way of thinking and doing things. He never gave up on anything. There is no science he did not know. No code he could not write. No part he could not mould. No dream or big money he would not chase. No person he loved forever.
Two of the biggest inventor entrepreneurs we know, Musk and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, are both obsessed by space, an obsession that grew by reading science fiction. Both feel that earth will not survive long and the moon and mars need to be colonised. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin will surely change the way we explore space, with reusable rockets and giant spacecraft which can hold hundreds of people. Just imagine the thinking and designing that goes into all that.
If anyone could unravel Musk, it is Isaacson. The author himself is a mix of Jobs and Musk, processing so much of information to come out with stories of valour and defeat and money and the galaxy itself as if his books are some sort of space rockets full of thrust and possibilities, leading you onto unexplored areas. That too is genius.
