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Elon Musk Hardcover – September 12, 2023

• Print length 688 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Simon & Schuster
• Publication date September 12, 2023
• Dimensions 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1982181281
• ISBN-13 978-1982181284
• See all details

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

About the author, product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 688 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982181281
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982181284
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.25 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 1.9 x 9.25 inches
• #1 in Computer & Technology Biographies
• #3 in Scientist Biographies
• #4 in Biographies of Business & Industrial Professionals

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About the author

Walter isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is writing a biography of Elon Musk. He is the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race; Leonardo da Vinci; Steve Jobs; Einstein: His Life and Universe; Benjamin Franklin: An American Life; The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution; and Kissinger: A Biography. He is also the coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made. He is a Professor of History at Tulane, has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chairman of CNN, and editor of Time magazine.

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Customers find the book interesting, brilliant, and captivating. They describe the insight as incredibly insightful, refreshingly objective, and credible. Readers praise the writing quality as well-written, flowing seamlessly, and easy to read. They also describe the biography as compelling, impartial, and wonderful. Reader also find the character portrayal fascinating, quirky, and erratic. They appreciate the well-designed book.

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Customers find the book interesting, brilliant, and captivating. They say it leaves them with a profound understanding and lingering curiosity. Readers appreciate the subject's quirks and honesty. They also say it's worth the purchase, fascinating, and shocking at the same time.

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Customers find the biography compelling, interesting, and wonderful. They say the author is extraordinary at making the reader follow the ideas and science. Readers mention the book explores Musk's complex personality, visionary thinking, and relentless drive. They also appreciate the great interviews that flesh out the reality of Musk.

"...In conclusion, "Elon Musk" by Walter Isaacson is an exceptional biography that offers a profound and intimate look at the life and mind of a modern..." Read more

"...This biography is a masterclass in storytelling , offering a captivating and nuanced exploration of Musk's life, from his childhood to his..." Read more

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Customers find the character portrayal fascinating, well-balanced, and fantastic. They say the author does a fantastic job of portraying an unbiased depiction of Musk's work, family life, and morals.

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"...And about Elon Musk - an amazing guy - temperamental, moody, genius, flawed , spontaneous. He has accomplished so much in such a short time...." Read more

" Interesting character . Well written" Read more

"...Isaacson tackles it all, painting a portrait that's both nuanced and comprehensive...." Read more

Customers find the book to be insightful, well-designed, and breathtaking. They appreciate the detail and mention it provides a behind-the-scenes look into Elon Musk's life.

"..." by Walter Isaacson is an exceptional biography that offers a profound and intimate look at the life and mind of a modern visionary...." Read more

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Customers have mixed opinions about the story length. Some mention it's engaging, interesting, and gripping. Others say it'll be disjointed and time-jumping at times.

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"...is accurate, though as a genuine believer in that mission, seemed awfully short ...." Read more

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Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some mention it's fast, timely, and easy to grasp. Others say it'll be a waste of time and boring.

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"...Elon Musk - an amazing guy - temperamental, moody, genius, flawed, spontaneous . He has accomplished so much in such a short time...." Read more

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Musk’s Mission Impossible: Freedom of Speech with Galactic Reach

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Elon Musk Wants to Save Humanity. The Only Problem: People.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of the billionaire entrepreneur depicts a mercurial “man-child” with grandiose ambitions and an ego to match.

Credit... Illustration by Jan Robert Dünnweller; Photo reference by Steven Ferdman/Getty Images

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By Jennifer Szalai

• Published Sept. 9, 2023 Updated Sept. 11, 2023
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ELON MUSK , by Walter Isaacson

At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person , the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.” As the people closest to him will attest, he lacks empathy — something that Isaacson describes as a “gene” that’s “hard-wired.”

Yet even as Musk struggles to relate to the actual humans around him, his plans for humanity are grand. “A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single-planet civilization and being a multiplanet one”: Musk would “maniacally” repeat this message to his staff at SpaceX, his spacecraft and satellite company, where every decision is motivated by his determination to get earthlings to Mars. He pushes employees at his companies — he now runs six, including X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — to slash costs and meet brutal deadlines because he needs to pour resources into the moonshot of colonizing space “before civilization crumbles.” Disaster could come from climate change, from declining birthrates, from artificial intelligence. Isaacson describes Musk stalking the factory floor of Tesla, his electric car company, issuing orders on the fly. “If I don’t make decisions,” Musk explained, “we die.”

By “we,” Musk presumably meant Tesla in that instance. But Musk likes to speak of his business interests in superhero terms, so it’s sometimes hard to be sure. Isaacson, whose previous biographical subjects include Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs, is a patient chronicler of obsession; in the case of Musk, he can occasionally seem too patient — a hazard for any biographer who is given extraordinary access. At one point, Isaacson asks why Musk is so offended by anything he deems politically correct, and Musk, as usual, has to dial it up to 11. “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit and anti-human in general, is stopped,” he declares, “civilization will never become multiplanetary.” There are a number of curious assertions in that sentence, but it would have been nice if Isaacson had pushed him to answer a basic question: What on earth does any of it even mean?

Isaacson has ably conveyed that Musk doesn’t truly like pushback. Some of his lieutenants insist that he will eventually listen to reason, but Isaacson sees firsthand Musk’s habit of deriding as a saboteur or an idiot anyone who resists him. The musician Grimes, the mother of three of Musk’s children (the existence of the third, Techno Mechanicus, nicknamed Tau, has been kept private until now), calls his roiling anger “demon mode” — a mind-set that “causes a lot of chaos.” She also insists that it allows him to get stuff done.

It’s a convenient assessment, one that Isaacson seems mostly to accept. “As Shakespeare teaches us,” he writes, “all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex.” Well, yes — but couldn’t this describe anyone? What is there to say specifically about Musk himself?

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7 Takeaways From Walter Isaacson’s New Biography of Elon Musk

The book peers into the tycoon’s private life and his leadership style at Tesla, SpaceX and X, formerly known as Twitter

Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk went on sale Tuesday, offering a behind-the-curtain look into the businesses and lifestyle of the world’s richest man. Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years.

Ariel Zambelich/The Wall Street Journal

Running more than 600 pages, “Elon Musk” is the latest in a series of biographies by Isaacson, a Tulane University history professor and former editor of Time magazine. Here are seven takeaways.

Private Life

The book explores Musk’s difficult childhood and dives into his troubled relationship with his father. It describes how the billionaire and his on-again, off-again girlfriend Grimes secretly had a third child—bringing the total number of his known, living children to 10.

Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Huffington Post

Leadership Style

The book describes examples of Musk’s “hardcore” management style. At SpaceX, for example: “Musk has a rule about responsibility: every part, every process and every specification needs to have a name attached. He can be quick to personalize blame when something goes wrong.”

SpaceX’s Starship launch in April ended with an explosion a few minutes into the flight. Photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty

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Isaacson puts forth the idea of “demon mode” to explain the temperamental impulses behind some of Musk’s successes—and setbacks. Grimes coined the term in an interview with Isaacson. “Demon mode is when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain,” Boucher said in the book. “Demon mode,” she added, “causes a lot of chaos but it also gets s— done.”

Tap speaker icon for sound

Isaacson said that Musk’s demons stem from his childhood and a psychologically abusive father. Musk’s father, Errol Musk, pictured, disputed the suggestion that he exposed his son to psychological abuse and took issue with the “demon mode” characterization of his son’s behavior.

Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty

“The Algorithm”

Musk has five commandments for how he wants problems solved by his workers, a framework he calls “the algorithm.” In short, Musk urges his employees to: question every requirement; delete any part or process you can; simplify and optimize; accelerate cycle time; and automate.

Michael Reynolds/EPA/Shutterstock

In the book, Musk acknowledges he talks about the approach often. “I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Musk is quoted as saying. “But I think it’s helpful to say it to an annoying degree.”

Taking Over Twitter

Musk told his team to root out employees of Twitter who were untrustworthy. Musk’s lieutenants scoured Slack messages and social-media posts looking for disgruntled employees, searching for keywords including “Elon.” Dozens were fired.

Workers in July install a sign atop the San Francisco headquarters of X. Photo: Noah Berger/AP

Musk’s behavior after taking over Twitter was damaging enough to Tesla’s brand that board members intervened. “The giant elephant in the room was that he was acting like a f—ing idiot,” said his brother, Kimbal Musk, according to Isaacson.

Jordan Vonderhaar/Bloomberg News

Driving Tesla

The book goes deep on a handful of initiatives, including new products. Isaacson writes that Tesla plans to make a robotaxi with a “Cybertruck futuristic feel.” Musk has been all-in on the idea, and adamant that the vehicle not have mirrors, pedals or a steering wheel.

Musk with a Cybertruck. Photo: Angela Piazza/Caller-Times/USA Today Network/Reuters

Guiding SpaceX

The book shows an intense cost focus embedded in SpaceX from its earliest days. It also spotlights moments where Musk pushes out employees or icily demands information and is furious when they don’t deliver. And it reinforces Musk’s dedication to launching a mission to Mars, a flight that he plans to attempt using SpaceX’s Starship rocket.

Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty

Artificial Intelligence

Musk has given three major objectives to his newest company, the artificial-intelligence venture called xAI: Make an AI bot that can code; produce a chatbot to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT; and, in a grander goal, develop a form of AI that would want to preserve humanity and “care about understanding the universe.”

Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty

Cover photo: Julia Nikhinson/Reuters Produced by Brian Patrick Byrne

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‘He is driven by demons’: biographer Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk

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In 2021, Elon Musk became the world’s richest man (no woman came close), and Time named him Person of the Year: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen ’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.” Right about when Time was preparing that giddy announcement, three women whose ovaries and uteruses were involved in passing down the madcap man-god’s genes were in the maternity ward of a hospital in Austin. Musk believes a declining birth rate is a threat to civilization and, with his trademark tirelessness, is doing his visionary edgelord best to ward off that threat. Shivon Zilis, a thirty-five-year-old venture capitalist and executive at Musk’s company Neuralink, was pregnant with twins, conceived with Musk by in-vitro fertilization, and was experiencing complications. “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” Zilis said. In a nearby room, a woman serving as a surrogate for Musk and his thirty-three-year-old ex-wife, Claire Boucher, a musician better known as Grimes, was suffering from pregnancy complications, too, and Grimes was staying with her.

“I really wanted him to have a daughter so bad,” Grimes said. At the time, Musk had had seven sons, including, with Grimes, a child named X. Grimes did not know that Zilis, a friend of hers, was down the hall, or that Zilis was pregnant by Musk. Zilis’s twins were born seven weeks premature; the surrogate delivered safely a few weeks later. In mid-December, Grimes’s new baby came home and met her brother X. An hour later, Musk took X to New York and dandled him on his knee while being photographed for Time .

“He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable,” the magazine’s Person of the Year announcement read. Musk and Grimes called the baby, Musk’s tenth, Y, or sometimes “Why?,” or just “?”—a reference to Musk’s favorite book, Douglas Adams’s “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ,” because, Grimes explained, it’s a book about how knowing the question is more important than knowing the answer.

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

Elon Musk is currently at or near the helm of six companies: Tesla, SpaceX (which includes Starlink), the Boring Company, Neuralink, X (formerly known as Twitter), and X.AI, an artificial-intelligence company that he founded, earlier this year, because he believes that human intelligence isn’t reproducing fast enough, while artificial intelligence is getting more artificially intelligent exponentially. Call it Musk’s Law: the answer to killer robots is more Musk babies. Plus, more Musk companies. “I can’t just sit around and do nothing,” Musk says, fretting about A.I., in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “ Elon Musk ” (Simon & Schuster), a book that can scarcely contain its subject, in that it raises infinitely more questions than it answers.

“Are you sincerely trying to save the world?” Stephen Colbert once asked Musk on “The Late Show.” “Well, I’m trying to do good things, yeah, saving the world is not, I mean . . . ,” Musk said, mumbling. “But you’re trying to do good things, and you’re a billionaire,” Colbert interrupted. “Yeah,” Musk said, nodding. Colbert said, “That seems a little like superhero or supervillain. You have to choose one.” Musk paused, his face blank. That was eight years, several companies, and as many children ago. Things have got a lot weirder since. More Lex Luthor, less Tony Stark.

Musk controls the very tiniest things, and the very biggest. He oversees companies, valued at more than a trillion dollars, whose engineers have built or are building, among other things, reusable rocket ships, a humanoid robot, hyperloops for rapid transit, and a man-machine interface to be implanted in human brains. He is an entrepreneur, a media mogul, a political provocateur, and, not least, a defense contractor: SpaceX has received not only billions of dollars in government contracts for space missions but also more than a hundred million dollars in military contracts for missile-tracking satellites, and Starlink’s network of four thousand satellites— which provides Pentagon-funded services to Ukraine —now offers a military service called Starshield. Day by day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure, and its energy supply.

And yet. At a jury trial earlier this year, Musk’s lawyer repeatedly referred to his client, a middle-aged man, as a “kid.” The Wall Street Journal has described him as suffering from “tantrums.” The Independent has alleged that selling Twitter to Musk was “like handing a toddler a loaded gun.”

“I’m not evil,” Musk said on “Saturday Night Live” a couple of years ago, playing the dastardly Nintendo villain Wario, on trial for murdering Mario. “I’m just misunderstood.” How does a biographer begin to write about such a man? Some years back, after Isaacson had published a biography of Benjamin Franklin and was known to be writing one of Albert Einstein, the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called him up and asked him to write his biography; Isaacson says he wondered, half jokingly, whether Jobs “saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.” I don’t think Musk sees himself as a natural successor to anyone. As I read it, Isaacson found much to like and admire in Jobs but is decidedly uncomfortable with Musk. (He calls him, at one point, “an asshole.”) Still, Isaacson’s descriptions of Jobs and Musk are often interchangeable. “His passions, perfectionism, demons, desires, artistry, devilry, and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business and the products that resulted.” (That’s Jobs.) “It was in his nature to want total control.” (Musk.) “He didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked.” (Musk.) “He was not a model boss or human being.” (Jobs.) “This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries.” I ask you: Which?

“Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training,” Isaacson concludes in the last lines of his life of Musk. “They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.” It’s a disconcerting thing to read on page 615 of a biography of a fifty-two-year-old man about whom a case could be made that he wields more power than any other person on the planet who isn’t in charge of a nuclear arsenal. Not potty-trained? Boys will be . . . toddlers?

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971. His grandfather J. N. Haldeman was a staunch anti-Communist from Canada who in the nineteen-thirties and forties had been a leader of the anti-democratic and quasi-fascist Technocracy movement. (Technocrats believed that scientists and engineers should rule.) “In 1950, he decided to move to South Africa,” Isaacson writes, “which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.” In fact, apartheid had been declared only in 1948, and the regime was soon recruiting white settlers from North America, promising restless men such as Haldeman that they could live like princes. Isaacson calls Haldeman’s politics “quirky.” In 1960, Haldeman self-published a tract, “The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship & the Menace to South Africa,” that blamed the two World Wars on the machinations of Jewish financiers.

Musk’s mother, Maye Haldeman, was a finalist for Miss South Africa during her tumultuous courtship with his father, Errol Musk, an engineer and an aviator. In 2019, she published a memoir titled “A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success.” For all that she writes about growing up in South Africa in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, she never once mentions apartheid.

Isaacson, in his account of Elon Musk’s childhood, barely mentions apartheid himself. He writes at length and with compassion about the indignities heaped upon young Elon by schoolmates. Elon, an awkward, lonely boy, was bored in school and had a tendency to call other kids “stupid”; he was also very often beaten up, and his father frequently berated him, but when he was ten, a few years after his parents divorced, he chose to live with him. (Musk is now estranged from his father, a conspiracist who has called Joe Biden a “pedophile President,” and who has two children by his own stepdaughter; he has said that “the only thing we are here for is to reproduce.” Recently, he warned Elon, in an e-mail, that “with no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees.”)

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Musk’s childhood sounds bad, but Isaacson’s telling leaves out rather a lot about the world in which Musk grew up. In the South Africa of “Elon Musk,” there are Musks and Haldemans—Elon and his younger brother and sister and his many cousins—and there are animals, including the elephants and monkeys who prove to be a nuisance at a construction project of Errol’s. There are no other people, and there are certainly no Black people, the nannies, cooks, gardeners, cleaners, and construction workers who built, for white South Africans, a fantasy world. And so, for instance, we don’t learn that in 1976, when Elon was four, some twenty thousand Black schoolchildren in Soweto staged a protest and heavily armed police killed as many as seven hundred. Instead, we’re told, “As a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk knew pain and learned how to survive it.”

Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:

And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.

Douglas Adams wrote “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” on a typewriter that had on its side a sticker that read “End Apartheid.” He wasn’t crafting an instruction manual for mega-rich luxury planet builders.

Biographers don’t generally have a will to power. Robert Caro is not Robert Moses and would seem to have very little in common with Lyndon the “B” is for “bastard” Johnson. Walter Isaacson is a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer. This year, he was presented with the National Humanities Medal. But, as a former editor of Time and a former C.E.O. of CNN and of the Aspen Institute, Isaacson also has an executive’s affinity for the C-suite, which would seem to make it a challenge to keep a certain distance from the world view of his subject. Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years and interviewed dozens of people, but they tend to have titles like C.E.O., C.F.O., president, V.P., and founder. The book upholds a core conviction of many executives: sometimes to get shit done you have to be a dick. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable . For the rest of us, Musk’s pettiness, arrogance, and swaggering viciousness are harder to take, and their necessity less clear.

Isaacson is interested in how innovation happens. In addition to biographies of Franklin, Einstein, Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci , he has also written about figures in the digital revolution and in gene editing. Isaacson puts innovation first: This man might be a monster, but look at what he built! Whereas Mary Shelley, for instance, put innovation second: The man who built this is a monster! The political theorist Judith Shklar once wrote an essay called “ Putting Cruelty First .” Montaigne put cruelty first, identifying it as the worst thing people do; Machiavelli did not. As for “the usual excuse for our most unspeakable public acts,” the excuse “that they are necessary,” Shklar knew this to be nonsense. “Much of what passed under these names was merely princely wilfulness,” as Shklar put it. This is always the problem with princes.

Elon Musk started college at the University of Pretoria but left South Africa in 1989, at seventeen. He went first to Canada and, after two years at Queen’s University in Ontario, transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and economics, and wrote a senior paper titled “The Importance of Being Solar.” He had done internships in Silicon Valley and, after graduating, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in materials science at Stanford, but he deferred admission and never went. It was 1995, the year the Internet opened to commercial traffic. All around him, frogs were turning into princes. He wanted to start a startup. Musk and his brother Kimball, with money from their parents, launched Zip2, an early online Yellow Pages that sold its services to newspaper publishers. In 1999, during the dot-com boom, they sold it to Compaq for more than three hundred million dollars. Musk, with his share of the money, launched one of the earliest online banking companies. He called it X.com. “I think X.com could absolutely be a multibillion-dollar bonanza,” he told CNN, but, meanwhile, “I’d like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone .” That would have to wait for a few years, but in 1999 Salon announced, “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” in a profile that advanced what was already a hackneyed set of journalistic conventions about the man-boy man-gods of Northern California: “The showiness, the chutzpah, the streak of self-promotion and the urge to create a dramatic public persona are major elements of what makes up the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. . . . Musk’s ego has gotten him in trouble before, and it may get him in trouble again, yet it is also part and parcel of what it means to be a hotshot entrepreneur.” Five months later, Musk married his college girlfriend, Justine Wilson. During their first dance at their wedding, he whispered in her ear, “I am the alpha in this relationship.”

“ Big Ego of Hotshot Entrepreneur Gets Him Into Trouble ” is more or less the running headline of Musk’s life. In 2000, Peter Thiel’s company Confinity merged with X.com, and Musk regretted that the new company was called PayPal, instead of X . (He later bought the domain x.com, and for years he kept it as a kind of shrine, a blank white page with nothing but a tiny letter “x” on the screen.) In 2002, eBay paid $1.5 billion for the company, and Musk drew on his share of the sale to start SpaceX. Two years later, he invested around $6.5 million in Tesla; he became both its largest shareholder and its chairman. Around then, in his Marvel Iron Man phase, Musk left Northern California for Los Angeles, to swan with starlets. Courted by Ted Cruz during COVID , he moved to Texas, because he dislikes regulation, and because he objected to California’s lockdowns and mask mandates.

Musk’s accomplishments as the head of a series of pioneering engineering firms are unrivalled. Isaacson takes on each of Musk’s ventures, venture by venture, chapter by chapter, emphasizing the ferocity and the velocity and the effectiveness of Musk’s management style—“A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principles” is a workplace rule. “How the fuck can it take so long?” Musk asked an engineer working on SpaceX’s Merlin engines. “This is stupid. Cut it in half.” He pushed SpaceX through years of failures, crash after crash, with the confidence that success would come. “Until today, all electric cars sucked,” Musk said, launching Tesla’s Roadster, leaving every other electric car and most gas cars in the dust. No automotive company had broken into that industry in something like a century. Like SpaceX, Tesla went through very hard times. Musk steered it to triumph, a miracle amid fossil fuel’s stranglehold. “Fuck oil,” he said.

“Comradery is dangerous” is another of Musk’s workplace maxims. He was ousted as PayPal’s C.E.O. and ousted as Tesla’s chairman. He’s opposed to unions, pushed workers back to the Tesla plants at the height of the Covid pandemic—some four hundred and fifty reportedly got infected—and has thwarted workers’ rights at every turn.

Musk has run through companies and he has run through wives. In some families, domestic relations are just another kind of labor relations. He pushed his first wife, Justine, to dye her hair blonder. After they lost their firstborn son, Nevada, in infancy, Justine gave birth to twins (one of whom they named Xavier, in part for Professor Xavier, from “X-Men”) and then to triplets. When the couple fought, he told her, “If you were my employee, I would fire you.” He divorced her and soon proposed to Talulah Riley, a twenty-two-year-old British actress who had only just moved out of her parents’ house. She said her job was to stop Musk from going “king-crazy”: “People become king, and then they go crazy.” They married, divorced, married, and divorced. But “you’re my Mr. Rochester,” she told him. “And if Thornfield Hall burns down and you are blind, I’ll come and take care of you.” He dated Amber Heard, after her separation from Johnny Depp. Then he met Grimes. “I’m just a fool for love,” Musk tells Isaacson. “I am often a fool, but especially for love.”

He is also a fool for Twitter. His Twitter account first got him into real trouble in 2018, when he baselessly called a British diver, who helped rescue Thai children trapped in a flooded cave, a “pedo” and was sued for defamation. That same year, he tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420,” making a pot joke. “Funding secured.” (“I kill me,” he says about his sense of humor.) The S.E.C. charged him with fraud, and Tesla stock fell more than thirteen per cent. Tesla shareholders sued him, alleging that his tweets had caused their stock to lose value. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he went king-crazy, lighting up a joint. He looked at his phone. “You getting text messages from chicks?” Rogan asked. “I’m getting text messages from friends saying, ‘What the hell are you doing smoking weed?’ ”

“Musk’s goofy mode is the flip side of his demon mode,” Isaacson writes. Musk likes this kind of cover. “I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship,” he said in his “S.N.L.” monologue, in 2021. “Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” In that monologue, he also said that he has Asperger’s. A writer in Newsweek applauded this announcement as a “milestone in the history of neurodiversity.” But, in Slate, Sara Luterman, who is autistic, was less impressed; she denounced Musk’s “coming out” as “self-serving and hollow, a poor attempt at laundering his image as a heartless billionaire more concerned with cryptocurrency and rocket ships than the lives of others.” She put cruelty first.

Musk’s interest in acquiring Twitter dates to 2022. That year, he and Grimes had another child. His name is Techno Mechanicus Musk, but his parents call him Tau, for the irrational number. But Musk also lost a child. His twins with Justine turned eighteen in 2022 and one of them, who had apparently become a Marxist, told Musk, “I hate you and everything you stand for.” It was, to some degree, in an anguished attempt to heal this developing rift that, in 2020, Musk tweeted, “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.” That didn’t work. In 2022, his disaffected child petitioned a California court for a name change, to Vivian Jenna Wilson, citing, as the reason for the petition, “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” She refuses to see him. Musk told Isaacson he puts some of the blame for this on her progressive Los Angeles high school. Lamenting the “woke-mind virus,” he decided to buy Twitter. I just can’t sit around and do nothing .

Musk’s estrangement from his daughter is sad, but of far greater consequence is his seeming estrangement from humanity itself. When Musk decided to buy Twitter, he wrote a letter to its board. “I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he explained, but “I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.” This is flimflam. Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold. Twitter does not operate on the principle of representation, which is the cornerstone of democratic governance. It has no concept of the “civil” in “civil society.” Nor has Elon Musk, at any point in his career, displayed any commitment to either democratic governance or the freedom of expression.

Musk gave Isaacson a different explanation for buying the company: “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.” It’s as if Musk had come to believe the sorts of mission statements that the man-boy gods of Silicon Valley had long been peddling. “At first, I thought it didn’t fit into my primary large missions,” he told Isaacson, about Twitter. “But I’ve come to believe it can be part of the mission of preserving civilization, buying our society more time to become multiplanetary.”

Elon Musk plans to make the world safe for democracy, save civilization from itself, and bring the light of human consciousness to the stars in a ship he will call the Heart of Gold, for a spaceship fuelled by an Improbability Drive in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In case you’ve never read it, what actually happens in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is that the Heart of Gold is stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is the President of the Galaxy, has two heads and three arms, is the inventor of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, has been named, by “the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6,” the “Biggest Bang Since the Big One,” and, according to his private brain-care specialist, Gag Halfrunt, “has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.” Person of the Year material, for sure. All the same, as a Vogon Fleet prepares to shoot down the Heart of Gold with Beeblebrox on board, Halfrunt muses that “it will be a pity to lose him,” but, “well, Zaphod’s just this guy, you know?” ♦

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Walter Isaacson’s ‘Elon Musk’: Full coverage of the news-making biography

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The rollout of Walter Isaacson’s “Elon Musk,” a biography of the world’s richest man — whose six companies dominate rockets, electric cars, social media and more and whose fits of ego are equally outsize — was as ambitious and noisy as the subject himself. Here’s how The Times covered Isaacson’s hefty inside account. Also, watch this space for more on the Times’ Oct. 1 Book Club, where Isaacson will speak with Times columnist Anita Chabria in his only Los Angeles appearance.

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time . He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
• Length: 688 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982181284

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Raves and Reviews

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year "Whatever you think of Mr. Musk, he is a man worth understanding— which makes this a book worth reading." — The Economist "With Elon Musk , Walter Isaacson offers both an engaging chronicle of his subject’s busy life so far and some compelling answers..." — Wall Street Journal "Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk , published Monday, delivers as promised — a comprehensive, deeply reported chronicle of the world-shaping tech mogul’s life, a twin to the author’s similarly thick 2011 biography of Steve Jobs . Details ranging from the personally salacious to the geopolitically volatile have already made the rounds — the rare example of a major book publication causing a news cycle in its own right...What Isaacson’s biography reveals through its personalized lens on Musk’s work with Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, and more is not only what Musk wants, but how and why he plans to do it. The portrait that emerges is one that resembles a hard-charging, frequently alienating Gilded Age-style captain of industry, with a particular fixation on AI that ties everything together....Isaacson’s book is like a decoder ring, tying the mercurial Musk’s various obsessions into a coherent worldview with a startlingly concrete goal at its center." — Politico "[The book] has everything you'd expect from a book on Musk—stories of tragedy, triumph, and turmoil.... While the stories are fascinating and guaranteed to spark a mountain of coverage, founders and entrepreneurs will also unearth valuable lessons." — Inc. "Isaacson has gathered information from the man’s admirers and critics. He lays all of it out.... The book is bursting with stories....A deeply engrossing tale of a spectacular American innovator. " — New York Journal of Books "One of the greatest biographers in America has written a massive book about the richest man in the world. This fast-paced biography, based on more than a hundred interviews...[is] a head-spinning tale about a vain, brilliant, sometimes cruel figure whose ambitions are actively shaping the future of human life." —Ron Charles on CBS Sunday Morning "A painstakingly excavation of the tortured unquiet mind of the world’s richest man… Isaacson’s book is not a soaring portrait of a captain of industry, but rather an exhausting ride through the life of a man who seems incapable of happiness." — The Sunday Times "An experienced biographer’s comprehensive study." —The Observer "Walter Isaacson’s all-access biography… Its portrait of the tech maverick is fascinating." —The Telegraph "Isaacson boils Musk down to two men… the result is a beat-by-beat book that follows him insider important rooms and explores obscure regions of his mind." —The Times

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Inside 'Elon Musk': Wild details from revealing Walter Isaacson biography

Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Elon Musk,” which reveals new details about the private and professional lives of the world’s richest person , hit stores Tuesday. 

Isaacson, 71, the bestselling author of biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, shadowed Musk, 52, for two years, sitting in on meetings and walking factory floors.

From launching rockets to popularizing electric vehicles, the hefty tome chock-full of insights gleaned from interviews with Musk, his extended entourage and his adversaries is a layered portrait of the mercurial entrepreneur behind SpaceX and Tesla.

In addition to Musk’s inner life, the biography chronicles the turbulent takeover of X , formerly Twitter, and his secretive creation of a new artificial intelligence company as well as Musk’s personal demons and his relationships, including a secret third child with the artist known as Grimes, whose real name is Claire Boucher.

Elon Musk’s rocky relationship with his father, Errol

The biography contains multiple references to the emotional scars inflicted by Musk’s father, Errol, who is described as emotionally and physically abusive.

Musk lived with his father from age 10 to 17. Isaacson says the turbulent upbringing caused Musk to become “a tough yet vulnerable man-child with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive.”

A friend of Musk's told Isaacson that when Musk agreed to meet his father in 2016 after being estranged, he saw Musk’s hands shaking.

“There are certain people who occupy a demon’s corner of Musk’s head space. They trigger him, turn him dark, and rouse a cold anger. His father is number one,” Isaacson writes. 

Musk’s father is a conspiracy theorist who denied President Donald Trump’s election loss and the 9/11 terrorist attacks and spread disinformation about COVID-19 and COVID-19 vaccines. Errol Musk also made racist comments about Black leaders in South Africa in 2022, according to the biography: “With no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees,” he wrote.

Elon Musk’s obsession with population collapse

The biography also reveals that Musk found out his father had had a second child with his former stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout in July 2022 in an email. "The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce,” Errol Musk wrote. "If I could have another child I would. I can't see any reason not to."

Musk has expressed his concern about the future of humanity and called on people to have children. He has said his decision to father children with three mothers was driven by his fears of population collapse.

“He feared that declining birth rates were a threat to the long-term survival of human consciousness,” Isaacson wrote.

Beware Elon Musk's ‘demon mode’

Grimes says Musk has a “demon mode.” “Demon mode is when he goes dark and retreats inside the storm in his brain,” she told Isaacson.

“Demon mode causes a lot of chaos,” she said, but it also gets things done.

In November 2022, Twitter had its first brush with it. In response to an advertising boycott campaign led by online activists, Musk ordered Twitter to ban users who were urging advertisers to boycott the platform even though such a move would fly in the face of his professed dedication to free speech.

Most people at Twitter had seen Musk be arbitrary and insensitive, Isaacson wrote, “but they had not been exposed to the cold fury of his trance-like darkest persona nor learned how to ride out the storm.”

Soon Musk moved on to other things.

Elon Musk jokes about buying Twitter to elect Trump in 2024

On the Friday after the Twitter board accepted Musk’s offer, he flew to Los Angeles to have dinner with his four older boys. They were puzzled by his decision to buy Twitter. “Just from their questioning, it was clear that they didn’t think it was a great idea,” Isaacson wrote.

Musk responded: “I think it’s important to have a digital public square that’s inclusive and trusted.” Then, after a pause, he said: “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?”

Isaacson says it was clearly a joke but Musk had to reassure his children that he was just kidding. “With Musk, it was sometimes hard to tell,” Isaacson wrote.

Musk told his biographer he was not a fan of Trump and in fact expressed disdain for the former president, whom he dismissed as a “con man” and “kind of nuts.”

Elon Musk is not a Joe Biden fan 

But Musk isn’t much of a Joe Biden supporter, either. 

“When he was vice president, I went to a lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over,” Musk told Isaacson.

His dislike for Biden intensified in August 2021 when the president held an event for electric vehicles at the White House and invited the heads of GM, Ford and Chrysler and the leader of the United Auto Workers Union, but not Musk.

Elon Musk's problem with the ‘woke mind virus’

Musk has often expressed disdain for what he calls “woke mind virus” – a derogatory term for progressive politics. 

When Isaacson asked him why, Musk said: “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.”

Isaacson writes that Musk’s reaction was in part because of his daughter Jenna’s gender transition and her embrace of “radical socialist politics.” In 2022, Jenna disowned Musk .

Elon Musk’s Bill Gates blowup

Bill Gates went to see Elon Musk in 2022, hoping he could get him to give away more of his money to philanthropic endeavors. Musk had a bone to pick with Gates , the Microsoft co-founder had shorted Tesla stock, betting it would decline in value. Gates, who thought that the supply of electrical cars would exceed demand and prices would fall, had paid a hefty price, losing $1.5 billion at the time. 

“I apologized to him,” Gates told Isaacson. “Once he heard I’d shorted the stock, he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.”

Musk told Isaacson: “How can someone say they are passionate about fighting climate change and then do something that reduced the overall investment in the company doing the most?"

Elon Musk’s ‘brutal’ relationship with Amber Heard

Musk has had many romantic entanglements but says “the most agonizing” was with Amber Heard while she was divorcing Johnny Depp.

“It was brutal,” said Musk, who dated Heard from January to December 2017.

Musk agreed to be a consultant on Heard's movie “Machete Kills” so he could meet her. That happened a year later when Heard asked for a tour of SpaceX. 

"I guess I could be called a geek for someone who can also be called a hot chick," Heard said.

Isaacson said Musk took her for a ride in a Tesla and “she decided that he looked attractive for a rocket engineer.”

In April 2017, Musk flew to Australia, where Heard was filming “Aquaman.” He told her she reminded him of Mercy, his favorite character in the video game Overwatch. So she designed a costume to role play the character for him.

The relationship ended on a trip to Rio de Janeiro when Heard supposedly locked herself in their room and claimed Musk had taken her passport. Heard told Isaacson she got “rather dramatic” during the argument but says the two made up afterward.

Elon Musk demanded eels and a hovercraft for Talulah Riley wedding 

In September 2010, after Musk in a top hat married actress Talulah Riley in a Vera Wang princess gown at Dornoch Cathedral, a 13th-century church in the Scottish highlands, the pair threw a party at nearby Skibo Castle.

Musk’s request for the festivities: “There shall be a hovercraft and eels,” a reference to a 1970 Monty Python sketch in which John Cleese plays a Hungarian using a faulty phrasebook.

The request proved to be challenging because a permit is required to transport eels from England to Scotland, but Riley said: “In the end, we did have an amphibious little hovercraft and eels.”

Musk and his friends also crushed three junked cars using an armed personnel carrier.

Elon Musk shared a photo of Grimes’ C-section

When X was born, Musk circulated a photo he took of Grimes during her C-section without her consent. Among those who received the photo were her father and brothers.

“It was Elon’s Asperger’s coming out in full,” she told Isaacson. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset.”

According to the biography, Musk and Grimes secretly had a third child named Techno Machanicus – nicknamed Tau – via a surrogate. 

Also, Shivon Zilis, an executive at Musk’s company Neuralink, had Musk’s twins in 2021 via in vitro fertilization after he asked to be her sperm donor so “the kids would be genetically his.” 

“He really wants smart people to have his kids,” Zilis said.

The twins were born when Grimes and Musk were expecting their second child. Grimes did not know at the time.

Elon Musk sets record straight on Starlink

The biography claims Musk told his satellite communications unit, Starlink, to disable Starlink satellite communications near Russian-occupied Crimea last year to thwart a Ukrainian attack on Russian warships.

“The Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not,” Isaacson said in a post on X . “They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.”

Musk said on X that he refused a Ukrainian request to activate the coverage . “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation,” he wrote.

Elon Musk wants his kids to live on Mars

In December 2022, Musk who rarely takes vacations, flew with Grimes and X to Lanai, Hawaii, to stay at the home of his billionaire mentor Larry Ellison.

Ellison had built an observatory on the island with a 3,000-pound telescope. Musk had the telescope pointed at Mars and lifted X up to look through the eyepiece.

“This is where you are going to live someday,” Musk told X.

Elon Musk Biography Shoots to Top of Bestseller List Ahead of Release

Walter Isaacson's latest tome will release on Sept. 12.

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Best-selling author and historian Walter Isaacson has penned the definitive biographies of some of the most powerful figures in history, from Steve Jobs to Albert Einstein, and this month he’ll finally be releasing his highly anticipated tome about Elon Musk . The biography, simply tiled “Elon Musk, ” officially releases on Sept. 12 and is currently available to pre-order on Amazon , where it’s already a No. 1 bestseller.

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Musk’s childhood weaves its way through much of the book, as Isaacson has hinted in numerous interviews leading up to its release. Growing up in South Africa, Musk was regularly beaten by bullies and would come home to an emotionally abusive father. As he grew older, the wounds from his tumultuous upbringing lingered, likely explaining his infamous attraction to risk, maniacal intensity and epic sense of mission.

“We start the book with this astonishingly difficult childhood in South Africa with a father who is Darth Vader and who is still alive, but haunts Elon every day,” Isaacson told tech reporter Kara Swisher earlier this month. “He’s the most interesting person on the planet right now doing the most interesting things and driving people crazy in the process.”

One of the biggest bombshells in the book is the revelation that Musk allegedly thwarted a Ukranian drone attack on Russian ships. According to the book, the SpaceX CEO turned off Starlink near Crimea to disrupt Ukraine’s strike against a Russian fleet. As the drones loaded with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes.

“Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson is now available to pre-order on Amazon, and is also available on Kindle for $16.99 and Audible for free with this 30-day trial.

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Book review: walter isaacson’s fascinating ‘elon musk’.

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At a retreat over the summer, one of the attendees was rather rich and rather famous in the technology space. Having made enormous sums of money in a variety of startups and corporate settings, this entrepreneur had started all over yet again.

My question to him was if he still had the energy to pursue the impossible when failure to achieve it would in no way shrink his own living standards, along with those of his family. He well understood the question, only to comment that one reason he accepted venture capital funding (despite not needing it) was to keep the outside pressure on him. It wasn’t exactly the same as being in full start-up mode, but as close as someone worth hundreds of millions could approximate.

This conversation came to mind quite a lot in reading Walter Isaacson’s excellent new biography of Elon Musk, appropriately titled Elon Musk . Long after Musk’s fortune (one measured in hundreds of billions) was of the world’s greatest variety, Musk was (and still is) acting like Alabama coach Nick Saban at the end of championship games that his team has already won: stern, uncompromising, unrelenting. Yelling .

In Musk’s case, he somehow finds the time to direct herculean energy to companies that include Tesla, SpaceX, Solar City, Neuralink, the Boring Company, a robot company bent on creating humanoids (Optimus), throw in Twitter, etc. etc. etc. Back to this review’s introduction, at one point Isaacson (he shadowed Musk for two years) found himself at an Optimus meeting during which a frequently dissatisfied Musk told his employees to “Pretend we are a startup about to run out of money.” Well, yes. If Musk’s ambition, like that of the unnamed entrepreneur, were beaches and splendor, then we wouldn’t be reading about him. For Musk it’s about creating things against all odds. A major reason he’s very rich has to do with the fact that he’s always in start-up mode .

Musk needs to operate on the proverbial edge. As he explained it to Isaacson in 2021, “When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated every day.” In Musk’s case, it seems he’s always putting the proverbial chips on the table. He put his first $13 million from Zip2 into what became Paypal, the $250 million from Paypal was directed to SpaceX ($100 million) and Tesla ($70 million) among others, only for those two alone to nearly bankrupt him. Capital gains provide him with the means to continually pursue the impossible.

It brings up two points that can’t be made enough. To read Isaacson, along with past Musk biographers like Ashlee Vance and Jimmy Soni , is to see just how impressively foolish is the Federal Reserve, “easy money,” “costless capital” narrative that pundits from both sides of the ideological spectrum routinely write about in all-knowing fashion. Supposedly cash was “free” from 2009 until recent years. One hopes these always on the sideline commentators pick up Isaacson’s book, or ideally all three. The most persistent theme in each is how Musk has routinely stared death and bankruptcy in the face. Money is never easy .

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Hopefully from this simple realization they’ll also happen on another truth: not only can the Fed not create credit, it also rather crucially cannot create time . At one point in the midst of Musk’s Twitter acquisition, and while in conversation with Isaacson, this singular individual juggling multiple companies and multiple kids, admitted that “I think I just need to think about Twitter less. Even this conversation right now is not time well spent.” Musk clearly wasn’t insulting Isaacson. At the same time, imagine what a day is like for Musk. One guesses is that following him would exhaust the follower. It’s a quick hint to Isaacson that a book about what it was like to shadow Musk might actually be more interesting than the book about his subject. And that’s saying something.

Needless to say, Musk doesn’t nor can he waste time. There’s the famous Brian Billick (Super Bowl winning coach of the Baltimore Ravens) quip about arriving for work a half hour before Jon Gruden says he does, and more broadly about how NFL coaches have a tendency to claim an overused sofa at team offices. Is this true, or is some of this just talk? In Musk’s case, his shadow confirms the 7-day weeks, sleeping on the factory floors, plus in the words of Musk, the expectation that he would “pull a rabbit out of the hat” over and over again, as the norm. Not only is capital never cheap or “costless” as the simpleminded claim, neither is time. Musk’s is spoken for. Economic growth is a consequence of indefatigable people being matched with capital. The Fed’s influence could not be overstated enough.

So is education and its value overstated. Isaacson reports that the principal at Musk’s elementary school in South Africa thought he was retarded. Musk himself looks back on school and comments that “I wasn’t really going to put an effort into things I thought were meaningless.” After which, what could Musk’s teachers and future professors teach him? Isaacson reminds readers with some regularity that Musk had designs on changing humanity through “the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.” It all reads as ho-hum now in a sense, but it’s ho-hum because people like Musk have, or soon will, achieve their once ridiculed goals.

Indeed, in a book full of classic re-tells of business stories, Isaacson writes of Kimbal Musk (Elon’s brother) meeting with the head of The Toronto Star about Zip2’s (Zip2 Musk’s first startup, a searchable database of companies married to mapping capabilities), only for this seasoned executive to ask him “Do you honestly think you’re going to replace this?” “This” was a thick Yellow Pages book…

Of course, this is what the wealth unequal do, and more important it explains how they become wealth unequal in the first place: they pursue notions of commerce that, if they’ve actually been thought about by established businesses or businessmen, they’ve been ridiculed. Entrepreneurs like Musk don’t meet needs, rather they lead them. Which is another reason to be grateful for rich people. Absent them, how would the most ridiculed ideas be given a chance to succeed?

As readers know, or should know, Musk’s career has been defined by achieving in the face of enormous skepticism. Only the rich have the means to lose money on business ideas that are viewed as outlandish. Musk is both a doer and investor, which says so much.

Having made $21 million on Zip2, Musk directed $13 million of it to what became PayPal. Musk, Peter Thiel, Max Levchin and the other free thinkers at PayPal were literally trying to digitize banking and payments at a time when something north of 90% of all transactions were still completed via U.S. Mail. Isaacson writes that Musk earned $250 million in the sale of PayPal, a company that at present has a $59 billion valuation. At times it’s been higher than $300 billion. Shout it from the rooftops that the unequal get that way by leading us in directions we never knew we wanted, but that we wouldn’t return from.

Having made $250 million, Musk put the proverbial chips on the table again. One of his ventures was a $70 million investment in Tesla. Isaacson notes that Michael Moritz, one of the world’s greatest VCs, explained to Musk while turning him down for funding that “we’re not going to compete against Toyota,” that the whole Tesla concept was “mission impossible.” At present, Tesla’s market valuation at $743 billion is more than double that of Toyota’s. Sometimes investors focused on investing in the impossible pass on what exceeds the bounds of impossible. A $743 billion valuation is all the evidence one need of just how much Musk reaches when he gets to work.

Crucially, it’s more than that. In thinking about how many times Tesla nearly went bankrupt (Isaacson writes of how Musk’s second wife’s family – Talulah Riley – literally offered to mortgage their house to help Musk with several hundred thousand dollars – he wouldn’t allow it), it’s difficult to forget the ridicule formerly endured by Jeff Bezos. An appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno comes to mind, during which Amazon’s lack of profitability became a laugh line for the host as Bezos squirmed uncomfortably. In Musk’s case, it was more than endless laughter about his electric car company. It’s instead Isaacson’s anecdote about how by 2018, “Tesla had become the most shorted stock in history.” Shorting is a crucial driver of market progress, and also the riskiest market speculation of all. This is how deep-seated skepticism about Musk formerly was. Even the smart money thought his ideas were completely nuts.

That so many were so short Tesla shares requires mention in concert with Musk’s present status as the world’s richest man. A major driver of his wealth has come from the run-up in Tesla shares. As Isaacson explains it, around the time that the world’s most prominent “short” (Jim Chanos) “declared that Tesla stock was basically worthless,” Musk “made the opposite bet. The Tesla board granted him the boldest pay package in American history, one that would pay him nothing if the stock price did not rise dramatically but that had the potential to pay out $100 billion or more if the company achieved an extraordinarily aggressive set of targets, including a leap in the production numbers, revenue, and stock price.” It was an all-or-nothing bet on himself, and Musk bet correctly. Just as money is never “easy,” neither is wealth creation. Musk’s wealth is born of miracle after miracle. And it’s also a consequence of a relentless of focus on costs.

In thinking about costs, to read Isaacson’s book is to be reminded of why, when politicians claim they’ll run the government like a business, they’re lying . For one, governments aren’t in the business of innovation, of offering something better or all new. Really, who if they have a good idea would hatch it in government? From there, governments are never in “survive-or-die” mode simply because they can always count on inflows from those in actual business world, including Musk. According to Isaacson, Musk himself is a major benefactor of the federal government. In 2021, his tax federal bill was $11 billion, the largest in history.

Back to government and business, Isaacson’s book really hums when he writes about Musk’s focus on costs. With the SpaceX rockets, Isaacson notes that Musk “did not try to eliminate all possible risks,” and he didn’t because he couldn’t do so while also aiming to be the low-cost provider of rockets into space. In which case, Musk was and is always looking to get rockets into space with fewer and fewer expensive inputs. In Musk’s words, “If we don’t end up adding back some parts later, we haven’t deleted enough.” And while Boeing’s space business employs 50,000, Isaacson indicates that it’s 500 at SpaceX. These are but two of many reasons that SpaceX is such a bargain for the federal government. Though wise minds can argue the good or bad of a “U.S.” space program, they can’t pretend that Musk is some kind crony ripping off the taxpayer.

This is important, particularly considering the desire of libertarians over the years to claim that Musk is a “crony capitalist.” Libertarians in particular would gain so much from reading Isaacson and others. To see how unlikely the success of SpaceX and Tesla were, to see how close Musk came to financial ruin more than once, is to understand that no “crony capitalist” would have ever pursued either venture. As mentioned in the discussion of time, Musk in so many ways has no life so dominated are his days by at least “a hundred command decisions,” decisions that will not infrequently be wrong. SpaceX isn’t a crony exploit when it’s remembered how substantially Musk undercuts the competition, and then the $7,500/car that normally wise free thinkers (I consider myself a libertarian, albeit minus all the world-is-ending pessimism) focus on completely misses the point: if we ignore that every maker of electric cars enjoyed and enjoys the same tax credit per car sold, we can’t ignore Tesla’s strategy, which was “to enter at the high end of the market, where customers are prepared to pay a premium.” In other words, a $7,500 tax credit was meaningless to initial Tesla buyers, but the quality of the car wasn’t. When the Model S won Motor Trend’s 2012 Car of the Year, the vote was unanimous. Libertarians have rendered “crony capitalist” and “rent seeking” meaningless by casting aspersions on seemingly all who allegedly receive government handouts. What they miss is that the problem isn’t crony capitalists, rather it’s a federal government that has its hands in everything.

Isaacson doesn’t spend too much time on the coronavirus crack-up by the political class, but that’s one of the book’s many good qualities. Put another way, the chapters in Isaacson’s accounting of Musk are short. This allows him to touch on all manner of subjects and business happenings, but not so much that the biography is slowed down. There’s a little bit about everything. Still, he spends enough time on the virus panic by the political class to point to Musk’s oh-so-correct assertion that “The harm from the coronavirus panic far exceeds that of the virus itself.” Indeed. The virus had been spreading for months, it had been in the news since early January of 2020, and people were adjusting. Freely. As even the New York Times admitted after politicians panicked, it was in the “red” U.S. states that locked down last in which people were taking the biggest precautions. On the matter of health and living, force is superfluous. At the same time, expert control is the stuff of crises. The experts won. Musk could have seen it coming. Isaacson quotes Musk as observing from “the algorithm” that informs decision-making at his companies that “Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them.” If there’s one line I would remove from own book about the virus panic (titled, When Politicians Panicked ), it would be the one about how the federal government’s only role in 2020 should have been “be careful.” I was wrong. Freedom, and freedom from the experts, is most important when we know so little about what perhaps threatens us.

Unknown to me until Isaacson’s book is that Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI with Sam Altman. How does he do it!? Disappointing to this non-techie is Musk’s own skepticism and fear of AI. My own view is that precisely because AI will enable machines to surpass humans, the future is amazing. It will be defined by more and more of us working all the time not because we have to (4 and 3-day work weeks will be the future, as I argued in The End of Work ), but because we want to. And we’ll want to because the automation of so much will free us to specialize in wonderful ways. Just as parabolic skis turned intermediates into experts on the slopes, AI will amplify the genius that resides within all of us. Not according to Musk. Isaacson reports that he views AI as “our biggest existential threat.” It doesn’t sound like him.

Musk also fears falling birthrates. That he does contradicts his fear of AI. Think about it. If machines are poised to do and think for us, logic dictates that the babies lucky enough to be coming into the world now will be the productive equivalent of thousands from the past.

Most appealing were Musk’s comments about the why behind his products and services. About the Cybertrucks that many no doubt await, Musk has been clear that “I don’t care if no one buys it,” that “I don’t do focus groups.” Amen. Entrepreneurs once again lead consumer desires as opposed to meeting them.

Most economically informative in a book that could teach economics exponentially better than the textbooks actually used to teach economics, was Musk’s comment to Isaacson that “If you make things fast, you can find out fast.” Please use the latter as a metaphor for the healthy nature of recessions. During recessions, we rush to mistakes because we’re forced to. Recessions are the recovery, contra interventionist politicians who delay the recovery with wasteful spending. Capital is limited as this book makes clear over and over again. How counter to reason and logic that politicians and economists believe government spending is necessary during downturns. Quite the opposite.

Most uplifting beyond the world’s richest man constantly inventing the future is Neuralink, yet another Musk creation. One of the aims of this corporation is to “restore full-body functionality to someone who has a severed spinal cord.”

Are there weaknesses? My take is that the first 100-200 pages of the book didn’t grab as quickly as the final 400 did. There were also odd insertions that don’t indict Isaacson, but do indict the economics of modern publishing. There quite simply isn’t enough editing. After one of the SpaceX rocket crashes on Kwajalein, Isaacson inserted apropos of seemingly nothing that brother Kimbal “tried to cheer everyone up that evening by cooking an outdoor meal.” It read as out of place, and what validates this assertion is that later in the book Isaacson explains that Kimbal’s cooking had periodically calmed corporate nerves before. Eighteen pages later Isaacson wrote of Musk’s 6,000 square foot house in Bel-Air, then in the very next paragraph he writes of a “tender” period in Musk’s marriage to first wife Justine, when “they would walk to Kepler’s Books near Palo Alto, arms around each other’s waists.” The two anecdotes didn’t go together.

Early in the book, Isaacson writes of the first internet boom, “when one could just slap .com onto any fantasy and wait for the thunder of Porsches to descend from Sand Hill Road with venture capitalists waving checks.” Isaacson knows better. He knows better from Musk himself, but also because he’s written so much about Silicon Valley genius. It’s never that easy. That he’s written a book about Musk certifies Musk as a genius, only for Zip2 and PayPal to be created amid the first internet boom. Musk never had it as easy as Isaacson describes it when the internet first became a thing, and he hasn’t had it easy since.

From Isaacson’s wonderful book, readers will understand why Musk hasn’t nor will he ever have it easy. “Fantasy” is difficult, and even more difficult to find financing for. In which case, we can be grateful that Musk’s ambitions are much bigger than money despite money being a highly worthy driver of ambition. Musk really is trying to change the world given his view that the “arteries harden” of civilizations that “quit taking risks.” How fortunate we are to have Elon Musk, how fun it is to read about him, and how exciting if we could know now whom Isaacson will write about ten years from now. If we could know, we would be worth many millions, and perhaps billionaires by the time the book comes out.

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We Don’t Need Another Antihero

In Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, the focus on psychology diverts us from the questions we should be asking about the world’s richest man.

This past December, Elon Musk’s extended family gathered for Christmas. As was their tradition, they pondered a question of the year, which seemed strategically designed for Elon to answer: “What regrets do you have?”

By that point in 2022, Musk had personally intervened in Russia’s war by controlling Ukraine’s internet access; had failed to tell his on-and-off girlfriend and co-parent Grimes that he had also fathered twins with one of his employees, and had been forced by a judge to follow through on a $44 billion purchase of Twitter; then fired most of its staff and alienated most of its advertisers. His main regret, he told his family, according to an account in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Elon Musk , “is how often I stab myself in the thigh with a fork, how often I shoot my own feet and stab myself in the eye.”

In Isaacson’s study of the world’s richest man, the reader is consistently reminded that Musk is powerless over his own impulses. Musk cannot control his desperate need to stir up drama and urgency when things are going well, Isaacson explains. He fails to show any kind of remorse for the multiple instances of brutally insulting his subordinates or lovers. He gets stuck in what Grimes has dubbed “demon mode”—an anger-induced unleashing of insults and demands, during which he resembles his father Errol, whom Isaacson describes as emotionally abusive.

To report the book, Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years, answering his late-night text messages, accompanying him to Twitter’s office post-acquisition, attending his meetings and intimate family moments, watching him berate people. Reading the book is like hearing what Musk’s many accomplishments and scandals would sound like from the perspective of his therapist, if he ever sought one out (rather than do that, he prefers to “take the pain,” he says—though he has diagnosed himself at various moments as having Asperger’s syndrome or bipolar disorder or post-traumatic stress disorder).

Choosing to use this access mostly for pop psychology may appeal to an American audience that loves a good antihero, but it’s a missed opportunity. Unlike the subjects of most of Isaacson’s other big biographies, including Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Leonardo da Vinci, Musk is still alive, his influence still growing. We don’t need to understand how he thinks and feels as much as we need to understand how he managed to amass so much power, and the broad societal impact of his choices—in short, how thoroughly this mercurial leader of six companies has become an architect of our future.

What does it mean that Musk can adjust a country’s internet access during a war? (The book only concludes that it makes him uncomfortable.) How should we feel about the fact that the man putting self-driving cars on our roads tells staff that most safety and legal requirements are “wrong and dumb”? How will Musk’s many business interests eventually, inevitably conflict? (At one point, Musk—a self-described champion of free speech—concedes that Twitter will have to be careful about how it moderates China-related content, because pissing off the government could threaten Tesla’s sales there. Isaacson doesn’t press further.)

The cover of Elon Musk shows Musk’s face in high contrast staring straight, with hands folded as if in prayer, evoking a Great Man of History and a visual echo of the Jobs volume. Isaacson’s central question seems to be whether Musk could have achieved such greatness if he were less cruel and more humane. But this is no time for a retrospective.

Read: Demon mode activated

As readers of the book are asked to reflect on the drama of Musk’s past romantic dalliances, he is meeting with heads of state and negotiating behind closed doors. Last Monday, Musk convened with Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; on Tuesday, Israel’s prime minister publicly called him the “unofficial president” of the United States. Also, Neuralink, Musk’s brain-implant start-up—mostly discussed in the book as the employer of one of the mothers of Musk's 11 known children—was given approval from an independent review board to begin recruiting participants for human trials. The book does have a few admiring pages on Neuralink’s technology, but doesn’t address a 2022 Reuters report that the company had killed an estimated 1,500 experimented-on animals, including more than 280 sheep, pigs, and monkeys, since 2018. (Musk has said that the monkeys chosen for the experiments were already close to death ; a gruesome Wired story published Wednesday reported otherwise .)

Isaacson seems to expect major further innovation from Musk—who is already sending civilians into space, running an influential social network, shaping the future of artificial-intelligence development, and reviving the electric-car market. How these developments might come about and what they will mean for humanity seems far more important to probe than Isaacson’s preferred focus on explaining Musk’s abusive, erratic, impetuous behavior.

In 2018, Musk called the man who rescued children in Thailand’s caves a “pedo guy,” which led to a defamation suit—a well-known story. A few weeks later, he claimed that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share, attracting the scrutiny of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Isaacson covers these events by diagnosing Musk as unstable during that period and, according to his brother, still getting over his tumultuous breakup with the actor Amber Heard. (Ah, the toxic-woman excuse.) He was also, according to his lawyer Alex Spiro, “an impulsive kid with a terrible Twitter habit.” Isaacson calls that assessment “true”—one of the many times he compares Musk, now 52, to a child in the book.

The people whose perspectives Isaacson seems to draw on most in the book are those whom Musk arranged for him to talk with. So the book’s biggest reveal may be the extent to which his loved ones and confidants distrust his ability to be calm and rational, and feel the need to work around him. A close friend, Antonio Gracias, once locked Musk’s phone in a hotel safe to keep him from tweeting; in the middle of the night, Musk got hotel security to open it.

All of this seems reminiscent of the ways Donald Trump’s inner circle executed his whims, justifying his behavior and managing their relationship with him, lest they be cut out from the action. Every one of Trump’s precedent-defying decisions during his presidency was picked apart by the media: What were his motivations? Is there a strategy here? Is he mentally fit to serve? Does he really mean what he’s tweeting? The simplest answer was often the correct one: The last person he talked to (or saw on Fox News) made him angry.

Read: What Russia got by scaring Elon Musk

Musk is no Trump fan, according to Isaacson. But he’s the media’s new main character, just as capable of getting triggered and sparking shock waves through a tweet. That’s partially why Isaacson’s presentation of the World’s Most Powerful Victim is not all that revelatory for those who are paying attention: Musk exposes what he’s thinking at all hours of the day and night to his 157.6 million followers.

In Isaacson’s introduction to Elon Musk , he explains that the man is “not hardwired to have empathy.” Musk’s role as a visionary with a messianic passion seems to excuse this lack. The thinking goes like this: All of his demands for people to come solve a problem right now or you’re fired are bringing us one step closer to Mars travel, or the end of our dependence on oil, or the preservation of human consciousness itself. His comfort with skirting the law and cutting corners in product development also serves a higher purpose: Musk believes, and preaches in a mantra to employees at all of his companies, that “the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.”

By presenting Musk’s mindset as fully formed and his behavior as unalterable, Isaacson’s book doesn’t give us many tools for the future—besides, perhaps, being able to rank the next Musk blowup against a now well-documented history of such incidents. Instead of narrowing our critical lens to Musk’s brain, we need to widen it, in order to understand the consequences of his influence. Only then can we challenge him to do right by his power.

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About the Author

11 WTF Moments From the New Biography ‘Elon Musk’

By Miles Klee

Tuesday saw the release of Elon Musk , author Walter Isaacson’s mammoth new biography of the controversial tech mogul , and hardly a chapter of the nearly 700-page book goes by without a weird anecdote about the Tesla and SpaceX CEO’s eccentric, sometimes self-destructive behavior. We are treated to insights about volatile relationships with family and partners, his caustic managerial style, and the toll that burnout takes as Musk struggles to deliver on promises of a fantastical future. Isaacson had total access to Musk himself, and, throughout the narrative, features perspectives from dozens of people in Musk’s inner circle (or formerly close with him) on exactly what makes the man tick.

The Emotional Wreckage of Musk’s First Marriage

Musk split with his first wife, Justine Musk, in 2008, after the relationship devolved into constant and bitter verbal fights, with Musk saying things like, “If you were my employee, I would fire you” or calling her an “idiot,” Justine told Isaacson. She also recalled once trying to explain the concept of empathy to Musk, but he said his lack of such a quality gave him an advantage when it came to running major companies. He also grew irritated by her suggestions that he try therapy, and blamed her own anger on Adderall, which a psychiatrist had prescribed to her for attention deficit disorder. Justine Musk said that although the drug was “an amazing help” for her, Elon “would go around the house throwing away the pills” that he believed were contributing to their marital strife.

Musk Has Suffered From Years of Neck and Back Pain Because of a Birthday Party Stunt

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Tesla’s Autopilot has been involved in hundreds of car crashes and at least 17 fatalities , with such accidents surging along with increased use of the system. Surely, Musk’s habit of exaggerating what it can do hasn’t helped. Though when it comes to Autopilot-involved deaths, he doesn’t seem to think they matter much in the grand scheme, believing the tech “should be judged not on whether it prevented accidents but instead on whether it led to fewer accidents.” After the first two reported Autopilot-involved fatalities in 2016, Musk did not immediately issue a statement, and Isaacson notes that he “could not understand why one or two deaths caused by Tesla Autopilot created an outcry when there were more than 1.3 million traffic deaths annually.” He then got angry during a press conference where reporters opened with questions about those accidents, firing back that they were the ones “killing” people if they turned public sentiment or government regulators against autonomous driving systems.

What Was Secretly on Musk’s Mind During a Rolling Stone Interview

In 2017, Musk gave an interview to Neil Strauss for a Rolling Stone cover story . He seemed distracted from the beginning and walked out on Strauss, coming back several minutes later to explain that he had recently broken up with his girlfriend, actress Amber Heard . Later in the conversation, Musk spoke unforgivingly of his estranged father, Errol Musk. “He was such a terrible human being,” Musk said. “Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done.” He didn’t offer specifics at the time, but Isaacson reveals that shortly before this, Musk had learned that in 2016, Errol had impregnated Jana Bezuidenhout, a woman more than four decades younger, whom Errol had raised as his stepdaughter. Elon and his siblings were profoundly disturbed by the news, which seemed to weigh on him during his talk with Strauss, who wrote, “There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can’t bring himself to utter the words.”

The Personal Turmoil Behind the Infamous ‘Pedo Guy’ Tweet

An unexpected consequence of smoking weed on joe rogan’s show.

Musk’s 2018 appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience was intended to be a bit of damage control at a precarious time for the CEO, who was seen as increasingly erratic. So, naturally, when Rogan offered him a toke on a tobacco-and-cannabis blunt, he confirmed that it was legal before gamely taking a puff. Even so, Tesla investors were rattled as the image of Musk wreathed in pot smoke went viral, and the company’s share price tumbled to almost its lowest point that year. There was one other, hidden ramification, too: “SpaceX was a NASA contractor, and they are big believers in the law,” Musk is quoted as saying in the biography. That meant, for the next couple of years, he was subject to random drug tests. “Fortunately,” he said, “I really don’t like doing illegal drugs.”

Why Musk and Grimes Got into Couples’ Spats

Throughout their courtship and co-parenting journey, Musk and occasional girlfriend Grimes have had their share of blowups, some of them sparked by truly unusual behavior. In 2021, for example, he was obsessed with the civilization strategy game The Battle of Polytopia , which in time began to distract him from work meetings and social events. Grimes started playing as well, noting that video games are one of Musk’s only outlets for relaxation, but, she said, “he takes those so seriously that it gets very intense.” In one game they played together, having agreed to an alliance, she betrayed him with a surprise attack, triggering “one of our biggest fights ever.” When she tried to argue it was only a game and not a big deal, he said, “It’s a huge fucking deal,” and didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day. On the flip side, Grimes was angry with Musk when he sent a photo of her having a C-section during childbirth to friends and family, without her consent. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset,” she told Isaacson.

When Musk’s Reproductive Habits Made for a Curious Coincidence

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At the end of 2022, as Musk tried to get Twitter under control in the wake of a contentious acquisition, he expressed an alarming opinion of a humanitarian crisis in China. Talking to reporter Bari Weiss, Isaacson writes, he said that “Twitter would indeed have to be careful about the words it used regarding China, because Tesla’s business could be threatened.” He also told her that the country’s repression of the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim minority group, had two sides. The Chinese government is placing this population in concentration camps and has been widely accused of crimes against humanity with the U.S. even going so far as to call it “ genocide .”

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South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.

Who Is Elon Musk?

Elon Musk is a South African-born American entrepreneur and businessman who founded X.com in 1999 (which later became PayPal), SpaceX in 2002 and Tesla Motors in 2003. Musk became a multimillionaire in his late 20s when he sold his start-up company, Zip2, to a division of Compaq Computers.

Musk made headlines in May 2012, when SpaceX launched a rocket that would send the first commercial vehicle to the International Space Station. He bolstered his portfolio with the purchase of SolarCity in 2016 and cemented his standing as a leader of industry by taking on an advisory role in the early days of President Donald Trump 's administration.

In January 2021, Musk reportedly surpassed Jeff Bezos as the wealthiest man in the world.

Musk was born on June 28, 1971, in Pretoria, South Africa. As a child, Musk was so lost in his daydreams about inventions that his parents and doctors ordered a test to check his hearing.

At about the time of his parents’ divorce, when he was 10, Musk developed an interest in computers. He taught himself how to program, and when he was 12 he sold his first software: a game he created called Blastar.

In grade school, Musk was short, introverted and bookish. He was bullied until he was 15 and went through a growth spurt and learned how to defend himself with karate and wrestling.

Musk’s mother, Maye Musk , is a Canadian model and the oldest woman to star in a Covergirl campaign. When Musk was growing up, she worked five jobs at one point to support her family.

Musk’s father, Errol Musk, is a wealthy South African engineer.

Musk spent his early childhood with his brother Kimbal and sister Tosca in South Africa. His parents divorced when he was 10.

At age 17, in 1989, Musk moved to Canada to attend Queen’s University and avoid mandatory service in the South African military. Musk obtained his Canadian citizenship that year, in part because he felt it would be easier to obtain American citizenship via that path.

In 1992, Musk left Canada to study business and physics at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with an undergraduate degree in economics and stayed for a second bachelor’s degree in physics.

After leaving Penn, Musk headed to Stanford University in California to pursue a PhD in energy physics. However, his move was timed perfectly with the Internet boom, and he dropped out of Stanford after just two days to become a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation in 1995. Musk became a U.S. citizen in 2002.

Zip2 Corporation

Musk launched his first company, Zip2 Corporation, in 1995 with his brother, Kimbal Musk. An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune . In 1999, a division of Compaq Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.

In 1999, Elon and Kimbal Musk used the money from their sale of Zip2 to found X.com, an online financial services/payments company. An X.com acquisition the following year led to the creation of PayPal as it is known today.

In October 2002, Musk earned his first billion when PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock. Before the sale, Musk owned 11 percent of PayPal stock.

Musk founded his third company, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, in 2002 with the intention of building spacecraft for commercial space travel. By 2008, SpaceX was well established, and NASA awarded the company the contract to handle cargo transport for the International Space Station—with plans for astronaut transport in the future—in a move to replace NASA’s own space shuttle missions.

Falcon 9 Rockets

On May 22, 2012, Musk and SpaceX made history when the company launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space with an unmanned capsule. The vehicle was sent to the International Space Station with 1,000 pounds of supplies for the astronauts stationed there, marking the first time a private company had sent a spacecraft to the International Space Station. Of the launch, Musk was quoted as saying, "I feel very lucky. ... For us, it's like winning the Super Bowl."

In December 2013, a Falcon 9 successfully carried a satellite to geosynchronous transfer orbit, a distance at which the satellite would lock into an orbital path that matched the Earth's rotation. In February 2015, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 fitted with the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, aiming to observe the extreme emissions from the sun that affect power grids and communications systems on Earth.

In March 2017, SpaceX saw the successful test flight and landing of a Falcon 9 rocket made from reusable parts, a development that opened the door for more affordable space travel.

A setback came in November 2017, when an explosion occurred during a test of the company's new Block 5 Merlin engine. SpaceX reported that no one was hurt, and that the issue would not hamper its planned rollout of a future generation of Falcon 9 rockets.

The company enjoyed another milestone moment in February 2018 with the successful test launch of the powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. Armed with additional Falcon 9 boosters, the Falcon Heavy was designed to carry immense payloads into orbit and potentially serve as a vessel for deep space missions. For the test launch, the Falcon Heavy was given a payload of Musk's cherry-red Tesla Roadster, equipped with cameras to "provide some epic views" for the vehicle's planned orbit around the sun.

In July 2018, Space X enjoyed the successful landing of a new Block 5 Falcon rocket, which touched down on a drone ship less than 9 minutes after liftoff.

BFR Mission to Mars

In September 2017, Musk presented an updated design plan for his BFR (an acronym for either "Big F---ing Rocket" or "Big Falcon Rocket"), a 31-engine behemoth topped by a spaceship capable of carrying at least 100 people. He revealed that SpaceX was aiming to launch the first cargo missions to Mars with the vehicle in 2022, as part of his overarching goal of colonizing the Red Planet.

In March 2018, the entrepreneur told an audience at the annual South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, that he hoped to have the BFR ready for short flights early the following year, while delivering a knowing nod at his previous problems with meeting deadlines.

The following month, it was announced that SpaceX would construct a facility at the Port of Los Angeles to build and house the BFR. The port property presented an ideal location for SpaceX, as its mammoth rocket will only be movable by barge or ship when completed.

Starlink Internet Satellites

In late March 2018, SpaceX received permission from the U.S. government to launch a fleet of satellites into low orbit for the purpose of providing Internet service. The satellite network, named Starlink, would ideally make broadband service more accessible in rural areas, while also boosting competition in heavily populated markets that are typically dominated by one or two providers.

SpaceX launched the first batch of 60 satellites in May 2019, and followed with another payload of 60 satellites that November. While this represented significant progress for the Starlink venture, the appearance of these bright orbiters in the night sky, with the potential of thousands more to come, worried astronomers who felt that a proliferation of satellites would increase the difficulty of studying distant objects in space.

Tesla Motors

Musk is the co-founder, CEO and product architect at Tesla Motors, a company formed in 2003 that is dedicated to producing affordable, mass-market electric cars as well as battery products and solar roofs. Musk oversees all product development, engineering and design of the company's products.

Five years after its formation, in March 2008, Tesla unveiled the Roadster, a sports car capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds, as well as traveling nearly 250 miles between charges of its lithium ion battery.

With a stake in the company taken by Daimler and a strategic partnership with Toyota, Tesla Motors launched its initial public offering in June 2010, raising $226 million.

In August 2008, Tesla announced plans for its Model S, the company's first electric sedan that was reportedly meant to take on the BMW 5 series. In 2012, the Model S finally entered production at a starting price of $58,570. Capable of covering 265 miles between charges, it was honored as the 2013 Car of the Year by Motor Trend magazine .

In April 2017, Tesla announced that it surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker. The news was an obvious boon to Tesla, which was looking to ramp up production and release its Model 3 sedan later that year.

In September 2019, using what Musk described as a "Plaid powertrain," a Model S set a speed record for four-door sedan at Laguna Seca Raceway in Monterey County, California.

The Model 3 was officially launched in early 2019 following extensive production delays. The car was initially priced at $35,000, a much more accessible price point than the $69,500 and up for its Model S and X electric sedans.

After initially aiming to produce 5,000 new Model 3 cars per week by December 2017, Musk pushed that goal back to March 2018, and then to June with the start of the new year. The announced delay didn't surprise industry experts, who were well aware of the company's production problems, though some questioned how long investors would remain patient with the process. It also didn't prevent Musk from garnering a radical new compensation package as CEO, in which he would be paid after reaching milestones of growing valuation based on $50 billion increments.

By April 2018, with Tesla expected to fall short of first-quarter production forecasts, news surfaced that Musk had pushed aside the head of engineering to personally oversee efforts in that division. In a Twitter exchange with a reporter, Musk said it was important to "divide and conquer" to meet production goals and was "back to sleeping at factory."

After signaling that the company would reorganize its management structure, Musk in June announced that Tesla was laying off 9 percent of its workforce, though its production department would remain intact. In an email to employees, Musk explained his decision to eliminate some "duplication of roles" to cut costs, admitting it was time to take serious steps toward turning a profit.

The restructuring appeared to pay dividends, as it was announced that Tesla had met its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 cars per week by the end of June 2018, while churning out another 2,000 Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. "We did it!" Musk wrote in a celebratory email to the company. "What an incredible job by an amazing team."

The following February, Musk announced that the company was finally rolling out its standard Model 3. Musk also said that Tesla was shifting to all-online sales, and offering customers the chance to return their cars within seven days or 1,000 miles for a full refund.

In November 2017, Musk made another splash with the unveiling of the new Tesla Semi and Roadster at the company's design studio. The semi-truck, which was expected to enter into production in 2019 before being delayed, boasts 500 miles of range as well as a battery and motors built to last 1 million miles.

Model Y and Roadster

In March 2019, Musk unveiled Tesla’s long-awaited Model Y. The compact crossover, which began arriving for customers in March 2020, has a driving range of 300 miles and a 0 to 60 mph time of 3.5 seconds.

The Roadster, also set to be released in 2020, will become the fastest production car ever made, with a 0 to 60 time of 1.9 seconds.

In August 2016, in Musk’s continuing effort to promote and advance sustainable energy and products for a wider consumer base, a $2.6 billion dollar deal was solidified to combine his electric car and solar energy companies. His Tesla Motors Inc. announced an all-stock deal purchase of SolarCity Corp., a company Musk had helped his cousins start in 2006. He is a majority shareholder in each entity.

“Solar and storage are at their best when they're combined. As one company, Tesla (storage) and SolarCity (solar) can create fully integrated residential, commercial and grid-scale products that improve the way that energy is generated, stored and consumed,” read a statement on Tesla’s website about the deal.

The Boring Company

In January 2017, Musk launched The Boring Company, a company devoted to boring and building tunnels in order to reduce street traffic. He began with a test dig on the SpaceX property in Los Angeles.

In late October of that year, Musk posted the first photo of his company's progress to his Instagram page. He said the 500-foot tunnel, which would generally run parallel to Interstate 405, would reach a length of two miles in approximately four months.

In May 2019 the company, now known as TBC, landed a $48.7 million contract from the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority to build an underground Loop system to shuttle people around the Las Vegas Convention Center.

In October 2022, Musk officially bought Twitter and became the social media company's CEO after months of back and forth.

DOWNLOAD BIOGRAPHY'S ELON MUSK FACT CARD

Musk’s Tweet and SEC Investigation

On August 7, 2018, Musk dropped a bombshell via a tweet: "Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured." The announcement opened the door for legal action against the company and its founder, as the SEC began inquiring about whether Musk had indeed secured the funding as claimed. Several investors filed lawsuits on the grounds that Musk was looking to manipulate stock prices and ambush short sellers with his tweet.

Musk’s tweet initially sent Tesla stock spiking, before it closed the day up 11 percent. The CEO followed up with a letter on the company blog, calling the move to go private "the best path forward." He promised to retain his stake in the company, and added that he would create a special fund to help all current investors remain on board.

Six days later, Musk sought to clarify his position with a statement in which he pointed to discussions with the managing director of the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund as the source of his "funding secured" declaration. He later tweeted that he was working on a proposal to take Tesla private with Goldman Sachs and Silver Lake as financial advisers.

The saga took a bizarre turn that day when rapper Azealia Banks wrote on Instagram that, as a guest at Musk's home at the time, she learned that he was under the influence of LSD when he fired off his headline-grabbing tweet. Banks said she overheard Musk making phone calls to drum up the funding he promised was already in place.

The news quickly turned serious again when it was reported that Tesla's outside directors had retained two law firms to deal with the SEC inquiry and the CEO's plans to take the company private.

On August 24, one day after meeting with the board, Musk announced that he had reversed course and would not be taking the company private. Among his reasons, he cited the preference of most directors to keep Tesla public, as well as the difficulty of retaining some of the large shareholders who were prohibited from investing in a private company. Others suggested that Musk was also influenced by the poor optics of an electric car company being funded by Saudi Arabia, a country heavily involved in the oil industry.

On September 29, 2018, it was announced that Musk would pay a $20 million fine and step down as chairman of Tesla's board for three years as part of an agreement with the SEC.

Inventions and Innovations

In August 2013, Musk released a concept for a new form of transportation called the "Hyperloop," an invention that would foster commuting between major cities while severely cutting travel time. Ideally resistant to weather and powered by renewable energy, the Hyperloop would propel riders in pods through a network of low-pressure tubes at speeds reaching more than 700 mph. Musk noted that the Hyperloop could take from seven to 10 years to be built and ready for use.

Although he introduced the Hyperloop with claims that it would be safer than a plane or train, with an estimated cost of $6 billion — approximately one-tenth of the cost for the rail system planned by the state of California — Musk's concept has drawn skepticism. Nevertheless, the entrepreneur has sought to encourage the development of this idea.

After he announced a competition for teams to submit their designs for a Hyperloop pod prototype, the first Hyperloop Pod Competition was held at the SpaceX facility in January 2017. A speed record of 284 mph was set by a German student engineering team at competition No. 3 in 2018, with the same team pushing the record to 287 mph the next year.

AI and Neuralink

Musk has pursued an interest in artificial intelligence, becoming co-chair of the nonprofit OpenAI. The research company launched in late 2015 with the stated mission of advancing digital intelligence to benefit humanity.

In 2017, it was also reported that Musk was backing a venture called Neuralink, which intends to create devices to be implanted in the human brain and help people merge with software. He expanded on the company's progress during a July 2019 discussion, revealing that its devices will consist of a microscopic chip that connects via Bluetooth to a smartphone.

High-Speed Train

In late November 2017, after Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel asked for proposals to build and operate a high-speed rail line that would transport passengers from O'Hare Airport to downtown Chicago in 20 minutes or less, Musk tweeted that he was all-in on the competition with The Boring Company. He said that the concept of the Chicago loop would be different from his Hyperloop, its relatively short route not requiring the need for drawing a vacuum to eliminate air friction.

In summer 2018 Musk announced he would cover the estimated $1 billion needed to dig the 17-mile tunnel from the airport to downtown Chicago. However, in late 2019 he tweeted that TBC would focus on completing the commercial tunnel in Las Vegas before turning to other projects, suggesting that plans for Chicago would remain in limbo for the immediate future.

Flamethrower

Musk also reportedly found a market for The Boring Company's flamethrowers. After announcing they were going on sale for $500 apiece in late January 2018, he claimed to have sold 10,000 of them within a day.

Relationship with Donald Trump

In December 2016, Musk was named to President Trump’s Strategy and Policy Forum; the following January, he joined Trump's Manufacturing Jobs Initiative. Following Trump’s election, Musk found himself on common ground with the new president and his advisers as the president announced plans to pursue massive infrastructure developments.

While sometimes at odds with the president's controversial measures, such as a proposed ban on immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, Musk defended his involvement with the new administration. "My goals," he tweeted in early 2017, "are to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy and to help make humanity a multi-planet civilization, a consequence of which will be the creating of hundreds of thousands of jobs and a more inspiring future for all."

On June 1, following Trump's announcement that he was withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, Musk stepped down from his advisory roles.

Personal Life

Wives and children.

Musk has been married twice. He wed Justine Wilson in 2000, and the couple had six children together. In 2002, their first son died at 10 weeks old from sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Musk and Wilson had five additional sons together: twins Griffin and Xavier (born in 2004) and triplets Kai, Saxon and Damian (born in 2006).

After a contentious divorce from Wilson, Musk met actress Talulah Riley. The couple married in 2010. They split in 2012 but married each other again in 2013. Their relationship ultimately ended in divorce in 2016.

Girlfriends

Musk reportedly began dating actress Amber Heard in 2016 after finalizing his divorce with Riley and Heard finalized her divorce from Johnny Depp . Their busy schedules caused the couple to break up in August 2017; they got back together in January 2018 and split again one month later.

In May 2018, Musk began dating musician Grimes (born Claire Boucher). That month, Grimes announced that she had changed her name to “ c ,” the symbol for the speed of light, reportedly on the encouragement of Musk. Fans criticized the feminist performer for dating a billionaire whose company has been described as a “predator zone” among accusations of sexual harassment.

The couple discussed their love for one another in a March 2019 feature in the Wall Street Journal Magazine , with Grimes saying “Look, I love him, he’s great...I mean, he’s a super-interesting goddamn person.” Musk, for his part, told the Journal, “I love c’s wild fae artistic creativity and hyper-intense work ethic.”

Grimes gave birth to their son on May 4, 2020, with Musk announcing that they had named the boy "X Æ A-12." Later in the month, after it was reported that the State of California wouldn't accept a name with a number, the couple said they were changing their son's name to "X Æ A-Xii."

Musk and Grimes welcomed their second child, a daughter named Exa Dark Sideræl Musk, in December 2021. The child was delivered via a surrogate.

Nonprofit Work

The boundless potential of space exploration and the preservation of the future of the human race have become the cornerstones of Musk's abiding interests, and toward these, he has founded the Musk Foundation, which is dedicated to space exploration and the discovery of renewable and clean energy sources.

In October 2019 Musk pledged to donate $1 million to the #TeamTrees campaign, which aims to plant 20 million trees around the world by 2020. He even changed his Twitter name to Treelon for the occasion.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Elon Musk
• Birth Year: 1971
• Birth date: June 28, 1971
• Birth City: Pretoria
• Birth Country: South Africa
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: South African entrepreneur Elon Musk is known for founding Tesla Motors and SpaceX, which launched a landmark commercial spacecraft in 2012.
• Space Exploration
• Internet/Computing
• Astrological Sign: Cancer
• University of Pennsylania
• Queen's University, Ontario
• Stanford University
• Nacionalities
• South African
• Interesting Facts
• Elon Musk left Stanford after two days to take advantage of the Internet boom.
• In April 2017, Musk's Tesla Motors surpassed General Motors to become the most valuable U.S. car maker.

We strive for accuracy and fairness.If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us !

CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Elon Musk Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/business-leaders/elon-musk
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: October 31, 2022
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• I'm very pro-environment, but let's figure out how to do it better and not jump through a dozen hoops to achieve what is obvious in the first place.
• Failure is an option here. If things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.

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Elon Musk’s Biography Reveals Design Inspiration For Tesla’s $25K EV And Robotaxi

Musk was initially fixated on the robotaxi before welcoming the idea of a mass-market ev..

Once the hullabaloo and frenzy around the Tesla Cybertruck and the updated Model 3 settles, Tesla enthusiasts’ focus will likely shift toward its upcoming affordable mass-market EV. A new report sheds light on the design direction the EV could follow, and how Tesla conceived the project.

Axios had exclusive access to excerpts from Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s upcoming biography written by American author and journalist Walter Isaacson.

Musk was apparently so adamant about building an autonomous robotaxi – with no pedals and steering wheel – that his deputies had to convince him in a “non-challenging way” of the need to build an inexpensive “global car” to thrust the brand into achieving an ambitious 50 percent annual growth target, the excerpts suggested.

Tesla's design boss Franz von Holzhausen and a few others convinced Musk to build both, a $25,000 global EV, and a robotaxi on a next-generation engineering platform and the same assembly lines, potentially to reduce manufacturing complexities, rationalize costs, and make the end product affordable.

Read More EV News Here:

Several reports have highlighted Tesla’s focus on revolutionizing manufacturing using methods like giga casting , which many carmakers have adopted . The report highlighted how Musk loved both design concepts, which sported futuristic styling like the Cybertruck.

Tesla confirmed the $25,000 EV during its Battery Day event in 2020 , with an initial schedule of introducing it this year. The delay is likely due to the brand's focus on ramping up Model Y production, bringing the Cybertruck  and the refreshed Model 3 to life, and advancing its FSD development.

While there’s no official revised timeline for the $25,000 Tesla EV, stock analysts predicted early this year that Tesla might unveil it in 2024 . The brand might  initially manufacture its next-generation EVs in Austin at the Gigafactory Texas , before possibly shifting production to its 4200-acre under-construction plant in Santa Catarina, Mexico.

Musk’s other bold claims from the biography include boosting production capacity to “20 million a year,” and transforming Tesla into a “10 trillion company.”

Note: The featured rendering is only for representation, and might not accurately preview the upcoming EV's design.

Source: Axios

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Elon Musk and Grimes Have a Third Child, New Biography Says

Elon musk and on-again, off-again girlfriend grimes are parents of three children, not two as previously believed, according to an upcoming biography about the tesla ceo..

Elon Musk  and Grimes  share three children, not two as previously believed, according to a new biography about the Tesla CEO.

In addition to being parents to son  X Æ A-12 , 3, and daughter  Exa Dark Sideræl , 20 months, the on-again, off-again couple at one point welcomed a child named Techno Mechanicus , nicknamed Tau , the New York Times  noted in a Sept. 9 review of  Walter Isaacson 's book  Elon Musk , set to be released Sept. 12.

E! News has reached out to Musk and Grimes' reps for comment and has not heard back.

The SpaceX CEO, 52 and now a father of 11, and the musician, 35, have dated on and off since 2018 and welcomed their daughter, nicknamed Y , via surrogate. Grimes had revealed her existence in a 2022 Vanity Fair  interview, adding that she and Musk have "always wanted at least three or four" children.

Grimes also told the magazine that the two were living in separate houses and were "best friends." She later tweeted, "Me and E have broken up *again* since the writing of this article haha, but he's my best friend and the love of my life, and my life and art are forever dedicated to The Mission now."

Musk also shares 19-month-old twins  Strider and  Azure with  Shivon Zilis , an executive at Neuralink, one of the companies he co-founded. Their names were first revealed publicly in a Sept. 6  Time  magazine cover story adapted from Isaacson's upcoming biography.

"He really wants smart people to have kids," Zilis is quoted as saying about Musk, who offered to be her sperm donor so that, Isaacson adds, "the kids would be genetically his," according to the recent  New York Times  review of the book.

Before starting a family with Grimes and Zilis, Musk previously welcomed six children, including twins, with ex-wife  Justine Musk .

See Musk's complicated family tree below:

Maye Musk (Mom)

Maye was born in Saskatchewan, Canada and emigrated with her parents to Pretoria, South Africa in 1950, when she was 7. She and Elon's father,  Errol Musk , split in 1979. After Elon moved to Canada at age 17, Maye obtained Canadian citizenship by birthright and moved there too. There, she established a dietician practice and became President of the Consulting Dieticians of Canada. She also worked as a model. In 2019, after Elon sold his company Zip2 for more than $300 million, he bought his mom an apartment in New York City, where she lived for 13 years and continued her modeling career after being signed to the IMG Models agency. "I brought my children up like my parents brought us up when we were young: to be independent, kind, honest, considerate and polite," Maye wrote in an essay  for CNBC. "I taught them the importance of working hard and doing good things."

Errol Musk (Dad)

Elon's father is an engineer and like Elon, was born in South Africa. Though Errol said in a 2015 Forbes interview that he used to often take his kids on trips overseas — "Their mother and I split up when they were quite young and the kids stayed with me. I took them all over the world."—his relationship with Elon isn't picture perfect. In an emotional 2017 Rolling Stone interview, Elon criticized his father and talked about his upbringing, saying that after his parents split, he moved in with his dad, which, he said, "was not a good idea." However, Errol told  Rolling Stone , "I love my children and would readily do whatever for them." Following his divorce from Maye, Errol married Heide , whose daughter  Jana Bezuidenhout was 4 years old at the time. Errol and Heide went on to have two daughters together before they, too, broke up.  Years later, Jana reached out to Errol following a breakup of her own. "We were lonely, lost people," Errol explained  in a 2018 interview with The Sunday Times . "One thing led to another—you can call it God's plan or nature's plan." Either way, the duo became romantic and welcomed son Elliott in 2017 and then a baby girl in 2019. As Errol put it to The Sun , "The only thing we are on Earth for is to reproduce. If I could have another child I would. I can't see any reason not to."

Kimbal Musk & Tosca Musk (Siblings)

Kimbal, born in 1972, is a restauranteur and the founder of The Kitchen, a collective of five restaurants that source directly from local farmers. He also runs a non-profit, Big-Green, that has built 200 learning gardens in schools across the U.S., the outlet said. Tosca, born in 1974, is a filmmaker. In 2017, she founded Passionflix, a female-focused streaming service that targets the billion-dollar romance novel industry. 

Justine Wilson (Ex-Wife)

Elon and Canadian-born Justine, his college sweetheart from Queen's University in Ontario , married in 2000. In a 2010 article she penned for  Marie Claire , titled I Was a Starter Wife: Inside America's Messiest Divorce , Justine said that while dancing at their wedding reception, Elon told her, "I am the alpha in this marriage." "I shrugged it off," Wilson wrote, "just as I would later shrug off signing the postnuptial agreement, but as time went on, I learned that he was serious." The two faced an unthinkable tragedy when their baby boy Nevada Alexander died at 10 weeks from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). "Nevada went down for a nap, placed on his back as always, and stopped breathing," Justine wrote in her article. The couple pursued IVF to conceive again and went on to welcome five more kids: Twins Vivian  and Griffin and triplets Kai , Saxon and Damian .  In 2008, Elon filed for divorce.

Griffin, Kai, Damian & Saxon Musk (Sons)

In 2022, Elon revealed he took Griffin and the triplets to meet Pope Francis . While he was honored to meet the head of the Catholic church, Elon added of his 'fit, "My suit is tragic." 

Vivian Jenna Wilson (Daughter)

Also in 2022, Griffin's twin sister filed a petition to change her full name in accordance with her new gender identity, writing, "I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form."

In July 2024, Elon spoke out about his daughter's transition. "I lost my son, essentially," he said in a Daily Wire interview with Jordan Peterson , adding that his child, who he referred to by her birth name, was "dead, killed by the woke mind virus."

He also alleged that he was "tricked" into signing medical documents granting Vivian gender-affirming treatments.

She disputed his comments. "He was not by any means tricked," she said in an NBC News . "He knew the full side effects."

Talulah Riley (Ex-Wife)

Elon and Talulah—who starred on HBO's Westworld— married in 2010. "It all happened very fast," she told CBS News . "We were engaged after, I think, two weeks of knowing each other." The two divorced in 2012, then remarried a year later before divorcing again in 2016. In June 2024, she wed Love Actually  alum Thomas Brodie-Sangster .

Amber Heard (Ex-Girlfriend)

Elon and Amber went public with their romance in early 2017, a year after she filed for divorce from Johnny Depp and Elon ended his (second) marriage to Talulah. Though their relationship didn't last long .

"I just broke up with my girlfriend," Elon told Rolling Stone   at the time. " I was really in love , and it hurt bad...Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think."

Grimes (Ex-Girlfriend)

Elon and the singer dated on-and-off for four years, starting in 2018. In September 2021, Elon told Page Six that he and Grimes "are, I'd say, probably semi-separated," adding, "It's mostly that my work at SpaceX and Tesla requires me to be primarily in Texas or traveling overseas and her work is primarily in LA. She's staying with me now and Baby X is in the adjacent room." However, in March 2022, she told Vanity Fair that they "live in separate houses" and are "best friends." She later tweeted, "Me and E have broken up *again* since the writing of this article haha, but he's my best friend and the love of my life, and my life and art are forever dedicated to The Mission now."  When news broke in September 2023 that the couple share three children together, the "Crystal Ball" singer confirmed that, yes, their most recent addition Techno Mechanicus had joined son  X Æ A-12 , 3, and daughter  Exa Dark Sideræl .

X Æ A-Xii Musk (Son)

In 2020, Elon and Grimes welcomed their first child together, a son. They soon modified the spelling of his name in order to meet California's legal guidelines, which only permit letters from the English alphabet. Switching over to roman numerals, the parents agreed to spell his name, X Æ A-Xii. "X, the unknown variable," Grimes explained on Twitter . "Æ, my elven spelling of Ai (love &/or Artificial intelligence) A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent."  Grimes continued, "A=Archangel, my favorite song" adding a rat and sword emoji. "Metal rat."

Exa Dark Sideræl & Techno Mechanicus Musk (Kids)

In her 2022  Vanity Fair interview, Grimes revealed she and Elon privately welcomed a baby girl via surrogacy. "Exa is a reference to the supercomputing term exaFLOPS (the ability to perform 1 quintillion floating-point operations per second)," she said. "Dark, meanwhile, is the unknown. People fear it but truly it's the absence of photons. Dark matter is the beautiful mystery of our universe.'" Sideræl—pronounced "sigh-deer-ee-el"—is, according to mom, "the true time of the universe, star time, deep space time, not our relative earth time," and a nod to her favorite Lord of the Rings character, Galadriel, who "chooses to abdicate the ring."

Walter Isaacson revealed in his biography  Elon Musk that Exa was born in December 2021 via surrogate.

The book also stated that around Father's Day 2022, the on-again, off-again couple welcomed a child named Techno Mechanicus , nicknamed  Tau , also via surrogate. The biography includes a photo, dated June 2022, of Elon feeding the baby boy.

Strider & Azure (Kids)

In 2022,  Business Insider published court documents that stated Elon welcomed twins in November 2021 with Neuralink executive Shivon Zilis . The babies were born in Austin, Texas, where he lives.

He also seemingly weighed in on the report on X , writing, "Doing my best to help the underpopulation crisis. A collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far."

"Mark my words," he added, "they are sadly true."

Walter Isaacson wrote in his 2023 biography Elon Musk that the twins' full names are  Strider Sekhar Sirius and  Azure Astra Alice .

Baby No. 12

In 2024, Elon and Zilis welcomed their third baby together. The billionaire confirmed the news in June 2024, telling  Page Six , "All our friends and family know," adding, "Failure to issue a press release, which would be bizarre, does not mean 'secret.'"

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Elon Musk reveals first Mars mission date as China brings forward its launch by two years

Elon Musk has announced that the first SpaceX missions to Mars aboard the next-generation Starship rocket are planned for 2026.

The SpaceX boss said the launch date is scheduled for when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens in November 2026, which could see up to eight uncrewed Starhip missions to the Red Planet.

The announcement comes just two days after China’s space agency pushed forward its own mission to Mars by two years. The Tianwen-3 sample return mission will now take place in 2028, according to an update from the program’s chief designer.

SpaceX’s ambitious timeline will depend on the successful development of its Starship rocket, which is being built to carry up to 100 people on interplanetary journeys.

The private space company has already performed two orbital flight tests of Starhip prototypes in 2024, but both rockets exploded before landing.

“The first Starships to Mars will launch in two years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens. These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in four years,” the tech boss wrote on his social media platform X over the weekend.

“Flight rate will grow exponentially from there, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years. Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet.”

SpaceX’s Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, measuring roughly 120 metres when its upper stage is placed atop its Super Heavy booster.

It is designed to be fully reusable, with the massive booster rocket returning to its launch tower after delivering the upper stage to orbit.

Mr Musk hopes to build a fleet of hundreds of Starships in order to transport people and cargo around the solar system, having already secured a multi-billion dollar contract with Nasa to assist with the US space agency’s Artemis Moon missions.

The billionaire’s ultimate goal is to establish a self-sustaining colony on Mars by 2050 in order to fulfil his hope of making humanity a multi-planetary species.