The big question in the public mind about Elon Musk, as a London cabbie once put it to me, is whether he’s “a pillock or a genius”. The quick answer is that he’s both; a better answer is that there’s a lot of detail between those two extremes – so much so, in fact, that it takes Walter Isaacson 688 pages to cram it all in. But cram it in he does.
Isaacson is an experienced biographer, with lives of Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Jennifer Doudna and Steve Jobs to his credit. With the benefit of hindsight, that last volume looks like a practice run for a life of Elon Musk, who, like Jobs, makes people wonder whether appalling personal behaviour can be separated from the relentless drive that has made him successful.
But at least Jobs was not a Twitter troll, whereas Musk likes shit-posting so much that he bought the company (which may turn out to be the worst decision he’s ever made). And it’s that particular social media addiction that has shaped public perceptions of him, leading people – and the media – to regard him purely as a pillock and overlook his remarkable achievements.
Like what? Well, as he said, introducing himself to the audience of Saturday Night Live: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” But the full roll-call of Musk’s achievements runs like this: PayPal (of which he was a co-founder), Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink (now providing internet links to Ukrainian forces), Neuralink, the Boring Company (a large-scale tunnelling operation) and a new AI company called xAI. Of these, the only really mundane business is the tunnelling company.
One of the merits of Isaacson’s book is the way he delves into how these formidable organisations came into being. It’s clear from his account that none of them would have happened without Musk’s distinctive combination of vision, maniacal determination, personal commitment and ruthlessness. Anyone who thinks, for example, that mass production of cars is easy has never worked in the industry. And in the teeth of the contemptuous derision of the automobile industry, Musk’s firm is now one of the world’s leading car manufacturers.
Similarly, SpaceX is an incredible feat: the engineering challenges of building reliable and reusable rockets are formidable enough. But doing so within budgets that are a fraction of those enjoyed by the American aerospace giants who have been accustomed to “cost-plus” contracts is equally remarkable. The main reason the US is still in the space race, for example, is because Nasa’s stuff rides on SpaceX’s rockets. “When in 2014,” Isaacson writes, “Nasa awarded SpaceX the contract to build a rocket that would take astronauts to the space station, it had on the same day given a competing contract, with 40% more funding, to Boeing. By the time SpaceX succeeded in 2020, Boeing had not even been able to get an unmanned test flight to dock with the station.”
Much of Musk’s industrial success comes from his persistent attention to engineering detail and willingness to overturn practices that had congealed into holy writ in these industries. He is a great believer in “vertical integration” – making things yourself rather than outsourcing to others – for example. So Tesla writes all its own software whereas other car manufacturers outsource theirs to Silicon Valley giants. Musk believes that there must be no barriers between design and manufacturing: designers’ desks should be physically close to the production line. He believes that in redesigning many industrial processes automation is the last thing you should do, not the first. So just as Henry Ford is remembered not so much for the Model T but for the production line that made it, Musk will probably be celebrated for his obsession with “the machine that builds the machine”.
There is, however, a dark side to this industrial creativity. The term that comes continually to mind from reading Isaacson’s account of how Musk runs his pioneering enterprises is “brutal”. A fanatical worker himself, he doesn’t give a toss about employees’ work-life balance. He believes that if people want to prioritise their comfort and leisure they should leave his employment. He emails employees reminding them that “a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle”. Isaacson’s study of Musk’s management style is filled with sudden dismissals, capricious decision-making and apparently sociopathic indifference to the feelings of other people. As one of his oldest friends from university put it: you can work with him or be his friend, but not both.
And yet at least some of his employees also see him as an inspirational figure. This could be because his goals and aspirations are unfailingly ambitious and bold (and sometimes plain wacky). Or it could have something to do with the fact that in a crisis he will pitch in wholeheartedly himself. During the crisis of the production of early Model 3 Teslas, for example, it is said that he slept by the production line for several weeks. (Which, among other things, must make him the oddest billionaire ever.)
What shaped this extraordinary individual? Isaacson seeks an explanation in his early childhood – to being a very bright boy with undiagnosed Asperger’s who was savagely bullied at school and had a sociopathic father, Errol. Errol was “a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure” who would regularly launch into “an hour or more of unrelenting abuse” directed at his young son who would “just have to stand there, not allowed to leave”. Isaacson wonders whether the adult Elon’s mood swings – “light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what those around him dreaded as ‘demon mode’” – are a product of this traumatic upbringing. And going back to that question of whether bad behaviour is linked to success, maybe it really is true that nice guys finish last?
• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson is published by Simon & Schuster (£28). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
