Elon Musk is the co-founder of Tesla, SpaceX and Neuralink. His companies produce electric cars, solar energy products, and rockets. He is also the father of six children, two with his first wife, Justine Wilson, and three with musician Grimes. Isaacson isn’t shy about pointing out Musk’s flaws, but he does often ignore those moments when his maverick approach ends up hurting people.
Elon Musk’s Energy
There’s a recurring theme throughout Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X (formerly Twitter), the world’s richest man: certain things are simply “in his nature.”
When you read this book, you come to understand that it’s not Elon Musk’s genius that makes him so successful; it’s his sheer ferocity. He has a single-mindedness that drives him to achieve the impossible. He’ll scream at people, work twenty-hour days for months on end, and come up with absurd shortcuts nobody else would ever think of to make a project happen. Often, it works and happens much faster than anybody believed possible.
For example, when Elon Musk was nineteen and working at Zip2, a web startup he co-founded with his brother Kimbal, he did a series of experiments to see how materials behave under extreme temperatures. He smashed erasers off the ends of pencils into jars of super-cold liquid and measured their physical properties. This helped him better understand the principles of thermodynamics, which he’d later apply to develop rockets and spacecraft capable of flying to the moon and beyond.
The same relentless drive that drives Elon Musk to make a rocket capable of transporting humans to Mars also led him to try a full-force judo throw on a sumo wrestler—which he claims he completed, but which caused him to blow out his C5-C6 intervertebral disc and now leaves him in constant pain. It’s this intense, all-in intensity that Elon Musk brings to everything he does that makes him so good at engineering.
Love Life of Elon Musk
The book opens up Elon Musk’s life in a way that no one has before. He discusses his childhood and education as well as many of the relationships he had with former wives and girlfriends. He also discusses his children with a candor that isn’t always seen in the media. The author Ashlee Vance spent a lot of time talking to Elon about his life so this isn’t just third-hand stuff.
He mentions that his first wife was novelist and fantasy writer Justine Wilson, whom he married in 2007 after meeting her at a nightclub. They had a son who died shortly after birth, twins, and then triplets before they divorced in 2008.
Then there was model Talulah Riley who he dated for a few months before moving on to actress Amber Heard. Heard was his “devil,” who brought out the dark side of his personality. After a tumultuous year of dating, Musk paired up with musician Grimes. Grimes was his “angel,” who was the chaotic good to Heard’s devil. They now have three children, including two boys Strider Sekhar Sirius and Azure Astra Alice.
Elon Musk also opened up about his difficult relationship with his father, Errol, whom he revealed was the biological father of his daughter Vivian Jenna Wilson in 2022. He also discussed his love for his children and his desire to make sure they are not left behind as the world moves forward.
His Education
While Elon Musk’s book focuses on his business and science adventures, it’s also full of personal anecdotes. One that jumped out at me was the account of his time at wilderness survival camp, where every few years, a kid would die. Isaacson didn’t include a source for that claim, but I flipped to the “notes” section to see if there was any evidence of it in news articles.
Another anecdote he mentions is his experience working at the emerald mines in Kenya, where he worked with a local tribesman and his family to sort tanzanite, and then learned to use the mine’s x-ray machine to identify the gems. That led to a job at a jeweler, where Musk became proficient in casting metal and using a saw.
The book also reveals that when Elon Musk was 12 or 13, Musk taught himself programming on the Commodore VIC-20, an early computer that could run BASIC. By 14, he had coded and sold a video game in BASIC and then went on to study at Queen’s University in Canada for two years before moving to the United States. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a bachelor’s degree in Physics and a bachelor’s in Economics from the Wharton School.
The book’s coverage of his business adventures is extensive and unbiased, but it does take a few liberties with some facts. For example, Elon Musk did not start Tesla and SpaceX with the money he made from his emerald business; it was money that was given to him by his father. Isaacson also refers to Musk as a “fervent anti-vaxxer when he has never publicly spoken in that manner.
His Family
Billionaire Elon Musk’s family is an incredibly tight-knit group, and many of them play vital roles in his various enterprises. His sister Kimbal is making waves with her work on sustainable food systems, and his sister Tosca has established herself in the world of film and television. She also serves on the board of directors at SpaceX. And his wife Talulah Riley is a powerhouse in her own right, with an impressive career as a filmmaker and a strong voice behind the scenes at Tesla and The Boring Company.
But there are some thorny issues with the Musk family that make their way into Isaacson’s book. In particular, the author reveals that the summer of 2017 through the fall of 2018 was one of the most hellacious periods in Musk’s life. He often threw temper tantrums, demanded he get his way, and exhibited a general callousness that left people feeling like disposable cogs in a giant machine.
This was likely driven in part by Musk’s daughter Jenna, who publicly criticized her father’s wealth and capitalism more generally. She also started using alternate gender pronouns around 2020 and eventually disowned him. Meanwhile, one of his employees at Neuralink, Shivon Zilis, had twins with her husband with the help of Musk. The children’s names, Strider Sekhar Sirius and Azure Astra Alice reflect the businessman’s fascination with cars and technology.
