Review of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk: The boy who owns the playground

Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk examines the tech mogul's troubled childhood, his college years, and his journey to becoming a billionaire. Isaacson's narrative of Musk's greatness is saturated with Musk's own perspective, while his failings are glossed over. Isaacson suggests that Musk's 'supervillain' side is inseparable from his 'superhero' side, raising questions about the power of the world's wealthiest man.

Walter Isaacson, a professor of history and former editor of Time magazine, belongs to the ‘great man’ school of biography writing. His previous subjects include Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs, which offers a ball park of where Elon Musk sits in the biographer’s estimation. Two tropes are integral to the ‘great men make history’ worldview: one, there is something that sets them apart from the average species stock, and two, their flaws are the flipside of the very ingredients that constitute their greatness.

For the first — the key to Musk’s greatness — where should one look? Twitter, obviously.

For Elon Musk, 2021 had been a glorious year. After years at the edge of bankruptcy, Tesla, valued at $1 trillion, was producing a million cars a year; After blowing up millions of dollars in several failed launches, SpaceX, valued at $100 billion, was putting more satellites in orbit than any other company or country; The Boring Company, which builds tunnels to move freight at high speed, was worth $5.6 billion; Neuralink, which is developing implantable brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), was worth $1 billion; and Time magazine, after duly noting that he was a “clown” and a “cad” who “likes to live-tweet his poops”, went on to praise him as “our avatar of infinite possibility” and anointed him Person of the Year.

As Isaacson notes ruefully, “If only he could leave well enough alone.” Musk could not. In early 2022, he decided he wanted a piece of Twitter. And then he realised he wanted all of it. Why did he want it? His impulsive bid for Twitter goes to the heart of what makes Musk tick, and sometimes, blow up.

According to Isaacson, one trigger is his estranged transgender daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson (named Xavier Alexander Musk by her parents). In her petition in court seeking a name change, she had stated, “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” Musk, who had lost a child, did not take it well. He blamed it on her progressive school in Los Angeles, and on the “woke-mind virus” whose nerve centre, Musk felt, was Twitter. He told Isaacson, “I just can’t sit around and do nothing.” He had to purge Twitter of its woke culture so that it became “an open space for all opinions”.

The second motive Isaacson offers is that there was a “psychological, personal yearning.” For Musk, “Twitter was the ultimate playground,” and Isaacson links it to his traumatic experiences as a child, where he was repeatedly bullied and beaten so badly he was getting corrective surgeries on his nose decades later. But that wasn’t the worst part. When Musk went home after a pummelling on the playground, his abusive father would side with the bully. “The PTSD from his childhood also instilled in him an aversion to contentment,” writes Isaacson, and Claire Boucher, mother of three of Musk’s 11 children, seconds this hypothesis, saying, “I just don’t think he knows how to savour success and smell the flowers.” This inability combined with a poor emotional intelligence that “caused him to react to slights far too emotionally” and a relentless inner drive not only made him “fight every battle fiercely” but also to seek out new ones.

Once Musk had signed the deal to buy out Twitter, he could have allowed things to run their course. But he was so angry with the Twitter management that he hatched a Machiavellian plan to unleash a precision strike on CEO Parag Agrawal and his leadership team so he saved a ton of money while they lost major severance benefits. Such ruthlessness was straight out of Polytopia, the high stakes strategy game that Musk liked to play for hours at a time.