Good morning.
With a big new bio coming out on Sept. 12 by Walter Isaacson, the most written about guy in the business world is being written about even more than usual. That guy is Elon Musk.
In his book titled Elon Musk, Isaacson, the best-selling biographer of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, gives the inside story on the CEO of Tesla Inc. and Space X and owner of X (formerly Twitter) after shadowing him for two years and spending hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and even adversaries.
In a Sept. 6 post on X, Musk responded to a TIME magazine cover story by Isaacson based on his assessment of Musk's sentiments about A.I., commenting: “Not quite how I would tell the story, but very accurate for an observer who only saw part of the puzzle.”
Isaacson writes in the piece that Musk's fears about A.I. have led to battles with Google cofounder Larry Page and OpenAI's Sam Altman. Along with explaining the connection between Altman and Page that goes back more than a decade, he recalls one of his own conversations with Musk.
“What can be done to make A.I. safe?” Isaacson writes that Musk asked him. “I keep wrestling with that. What actions can we take to minimize A.I. danger and assure that human consciousness survives?”
Isaacson writes: “He spoke in a low monotone punctuated by bouts of almost manic laughter. The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was leveling off, because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially, like Moore’s Law on steroids. At some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.”
Another hot topic surrounding Musk? His self-indicting assessment of X's financial position. My colleague Shawn Tully talks about it in his latest piece, writing “According to Elon Musk’s own math, the company formerly known as Twitter has lost 90% of its value and could be worth just $4 billion.”
"Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, funded $13 billion by loans from big-name commercial and investment banks, and $31 billion in equity," Tully writes. "Of the latter portion, Musk contributed about $24 billion of his own cash, while a group of investor friends including Larry Ellison, Ron Baron, and Prince Al Waleed of Saudi Arabia provided $7 billion."
Musk’s post on X on Labor Day evening “may rank as the most negative, in fact self-indicting, assessment a corporate leader has ever issued about their own enterprise,” according to Tully. In the post, he blames the Anti-Defamation League for most of X’s revenue loss. “I don’t see any scenario where they’re responsible for less than 10% of the value destruction, so around $4 billion,” he said. You can read Tully's back-of-the-envelope calculations about what that means X's total value might be here.
Linda Yaccarino, the CEO of X, will be a speaker at Fortune’s annual Most Powerful Women Summit next month. So, she may give an update on how things are going at the company. In the meantime, will you be reading the book?
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
