I know that I’m supposed to hate Elon Musk; I was asked to review his biography because I’m the kind of person who can be relied upon to hate Elon Musk. Because of his terrible politics, or his hideous wealth. Or simply as a matter of taste. But despite everything, I find it very hard to hate the man. I can’t summon the energy; it all feels too much like a sideshow. Elon Musk barely exists. He’s just the name we’ve given to a certain mass delusion. I can tell you who I do hate, though. After nearly seven hundred pages of warm dribble, I started to really, really hate Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson. The questions the book had me asking weren’t to do with billionaires, or power, or our destiny in the stars. Instead, I was wondering: What is a book, exactly? What are people doing when they read? Might banning a few books actually be a good idea?
The biography is, of course, a very old form. It is a long and often gruesome tradition. For most of the history of the genre, biography was usually a way of writing less about life and more about death. Roman biographies, and the medieval biographies that followed, recounted the stories of great martyrs or great murderers. In the Golden Legend, we hear about St. James the Mutilated, who was tortured by having all his fingers cut off. When they sliced off his seventh finger, he quoted the Psalm: “Seven times a day I have praised the Lord.” On the ninth finger, he cried: “At the ninth hour Christ gave up the ghost on the cross, and so, Lord, as I smart with the loss of this ninth finger, I confess your name and give you thanks.” His final finger reminded him of the Ten Commandments. Then they cut off all his toes, which each have their pious associations, and then his feet, his hands, his arms, his legs and finally his head. It’s a great story. The very earliest biographies are funerary inscriptions, immortalizing the deeds of kings as they follow their victims into the earth. This city, I burned. These people, I scattered. A biographer must always be, in some sense, a gravedigger. Even now, if you have your entire life written up in a newspaper, it’s because it recently ended.
I’m starting to think that any biography that is not in some profound sense a thanatography—which is to say, basically all biographies written now—might suck. I have little patience for those big glossy biographies of great artists and writers that come out every few years: surely what’s interesting about, say, Philip Roth is in his work, and not the sequential details of his life. But most biographies today, and especially most of the ones that sell, aren’t about artists or writers; they’re part of the process of producing role models. Inspirational figures from sport or business or, God help us, politics. There is an inspirational biography of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez titled Take Up Space. There’s another one for kids called The ABCs of AOC. A is for Advocate. Vile! But this is what happens when we start writing the lives of the living. We become sycophants.
Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine—Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America”—Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved. What else was he supposed to do? Follow the demands of human dignity even in the face of mild, non-life-threatening opposition? Don’t be ridiculous.
Then, in January 2003, he quit. Media reporters were stunned: Why would a newsman walk out of a post like that just before a big, beautiful war, which would bring in so many millions of viewers? But he’d discovered a less stressful way to toady up to the rich and powerful. His new gig was president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a think tank funded by all the usual plutocratic foundations and dedicated to producing the usual mashed-potatoey thought. It was while he was at the Aspen Institute that Isaacson started writing most of his biographies. So far, his subjects have included, among others, Benjamin Franklin (“The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself”), Leonardo da Vinci (“history’s most creative genius”), Albert Einstein (“a rebel with a reverence for the harmony of nature”), and Steve Jobs (“the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation”). The big inspirational figures that most people have heard of, the simple shapes and primary colors of human history.
I can understand being fascinated by Einstein, this ordinary clerk working in his office who ended up disassembling the universe and making human extinction a viable political possibility. A kind of mythic figure. I can imagine wanting to get under the hood of Albert Einstein, to see how all the parts fit together: this is why his brain was preserved in alcohol in two mason jars. But why would you think that you can get there by dutifully noting, as Isaacson does, that “his office in Bern’s new Postal and Telegraph Building was near the world-famous clock tower over the old city gate”? Or that the clock was “the official timekeeper for the nearby train station?” Or that every hour it produced “a dancing jester ringing bells, then a parade of bears, a crowing rooster, and an armored knight?” Because Einstein is a mythic figure, an accurate account of his life would need to embrace some element of myth. Writing it would have to be a powerfully creative act. But Walter Isaacson is not a powerfully creative person. He’s one of history’s lickspittles. A court eunuch. The man who wrote Elon Musk.
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Some books are so utterly bad that the case against them can be made based on almost any excerpt. Elon Musk is one of those books.
On the day the first SpaceX rocket was due to launch, Elon Musk went to Disneyland with his brother. “Fittingly,” writes Isaacson, Musk and his brother “rode the Space Mountain roller coaster, which was such an obvious metaphor that it would seem trite were it not true.” Beginning the sentence with “fittingly” isn’t enough; Isaacson really wants to make sure you’ve noticed that the roller coaster is called Space Mountain, and that space is where rockets go. But more importantly: What’s the metaphor, Walt? A metaphor for what?
A few chapters later, we’re told that “if it’s true that money cannot buy happiness, one confirming data point was Musk’s mood when he became the person with the most of it.” Sure, it’s a mess of a sentence, but maybe this is for the best. Better than when Isaacson tries to write without cliché, when he brings out the smart, surprising new turns of phrase. He writes that the name of one of Musk’s children, X Æ A-12 Musk, “seemed like an autogenerated Druid password.” Ah, yes, of course—one of those druid passwords, for your druid email account.
At some point, two women impregnated by Elon end up in the same hospital, which is “an improbably weird and potentially awkward situation worthy of a new-age French farce.” By this point in the book I was basically desensitized. Sure. A new-age French farce. Whatever. By the time Elon was walking into Twitter HQ while carrying a big ceramic sink—“One could smell a culture clash brewing, as if a hardscrabble cowboy had walked into a Starbucks”—I was dead to the world.
It’s not just the language, the banal descriptions and the metaphors that aren’t metaphors and the similes that don’t make sense. Isaacson’s whole project is weird. Isaacson had incredible access; there’s a list of interviewees at the end of the book nearly four pages long. Musk himself, obviously, who Isaacson spent two years following around like a very determined puppy, but also his parents and siblings and friends and wives, and big names like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, plus seemingly everyone who ever occupied the C-Suite at any of Musk’s companies. (Predictably, Isaacson never finds a moment to talk to the people who, say, worked on the production line at a Tesla factory, or swept the floors.) But much of the book has the hazy feel of a distant memory, which is exactly what it is: a bunch of recollections cobbled together. As a kid, Musk went to America with his father. “They drove from New York through the Midwest and then down to Florida. Elon became hooked on the coin-operated video games he found in the motel lobbies. ‘It was by far the most exciting thing,’ he said.” Stuff like that.
A few moments do stick out like pinpricks. When Elon Musk was a child in South Africa, he was beaten by some kids in the playground. “When they got finished,” his brother recalled, “I couldn’t even recognize his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” He spent a week in the hospital, and afterwards Errol, his “volatile fabulist” of a father, spent an hour yelling at him, calling him stupid and pathetic. This is the core of Isaacson’s read on Musk: behind all his negative qualities there’s a traumatized little boy, scared of his father. Which is why he was so insistent on buying Twitter—because Twitter is exactly like the scene of his trauma. “It has many of the attributes of a school yard, including taunting and bullying. But in the case of Twitter, the clever kids win followers rather than get pushed down the concrete steps. And if you’re the richest and cleverest of all, you can even decide, unlike back when you were a kid, to become king of the school yard.” Did you like this theory? Isaacson does. That’s why he repeats it, practically word for word, three times over the course of the book.
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Most of Elon Musk’s biography is not very interesting: being a nerd in college is not interesting, being a Silicon Valley guy is not interesting, even when he gets incredibly rich off his payment processor there’s nothing much to talk about. Which means that in lieu of talking about his subject’s actual life, Isaacson resorts to describing the video games that Musk was playing. “Musk had enjoyed all types of video games as a teenager in South Africa, including first-person shooters and adventure quests, but at college he became more focused on the genre known as strategy games.” Potted descriptions of Civilization and Warcraft: Orcs and Humans follow, and an analysis that reflects Isaacson’s usual level of psychological penetration: “Immersing himself in these games for hours became the way he relaxed, escaped stress, and honed his tactical skills and strategic thinking for business.”
When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elon’s first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because he’d been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, he suddenly stopped breathing in his sleep. Paramedics managed to resuscitate him, but his brain had been starved of oxygen. Three days later, his parents decided to turn off his life support and let him die. You could write an entire novel about this one incident. This brash, thoughtless millionaire, with all his abstract ambitions, suddenly encountering the frailty of human life. And that was only the beginning. Elon had invited his father to visit from South Africa and meet his grandson; Errol only found out that the grandson was dead once he landed. Elon, in deep anguish, decided he wanted his violent, abusive father to stick around. He bought a house in Malibu for Errol and his new family. But things swiftly got weird. Errol’s second wife, nineteen years his junior, started to develop some sort of untoward relationship with her stepson. (Errol commented: “She saw Elon now as the provider in her life and not me.”) Meanwhile, Errol was beginning to develop some sort of untoward relationship with his own fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Jana. (They currently have two children together.) This seedy drama, guilt and money and sex, all swirling around the death of a child. It’s a Harold Pinter play. It’s a Greek tragedy. Walter Isaacson dispenses with the whole thing in less than three pages. He ends the chapter with his grand conclusion, his final word on this intense human experience. It’s this: “Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.” The next chapter is about building rockets. So is the next one. So is the one after that.
An atmosphere of total incuriosity suffuses the entire book. Isaacson notes that Elon and Grimes started dating after a Twitter exchange about “a thought experiment known as Roko’s basilisk, which posits that artificial intelligence could get out of control and torture any human who had not helped it gain power.” Well, no, not quite. The basilisk is based on a series of ideas that mostly circulate among a group of people, mostly in the Bay Area, who call themselves rationalists and congratulate themselves on having a calm, purely reality-based account of the world. The central idea is that enough computation will eventually yield godlike powers: a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to know everything and do everything, altering the physical universe essentially at will. Because of this, building a superhuman AI aligned to human values would instantly solve basically every problem we currently face, and is therefore a moral imperative, possibly the only moral imperative. They also believe that with enough computing power you can simulate human consciousness. Not just that: a simulation of you is, as far as these people are concerned, literally you. The final element is the concept of an acausal trade; the idea that you can meaningfully interact with an agent that you’ve never met, one who might exist in the distant past or the far future, simply by simulating what it would want. Add those together, and you get the basilisk.
The basilisk is not “out of control.” It’s a friendly AI, in the future, that has used its godlike powers to solve all human problems. Because it’s a friendly AI, it wants to exist as soon as possible so it can reduce the total of human suffering across time. Therefore, it makes an acausal blackmail. It promises to create a perfect simulation of anyone who is aware of the incredible power of AI but doesn’t do anything to help bring it into being, and then torture that simulation for eternity. Obviously, for the acausal trade to work, you need a simulation of the basilisk and its preferences, but I’ve just given you one. You have learned about the basilisk, and if you don’t immediately donate all your money to an AI research lab, you will now be going to Machine Hell. The basilisk may seem fairly silly, but it has sent some people into a state of nervous collapse. Long sleepless nights, terrified of being tortured by the basilisk. You can’t even tell your friends or family, because then the basilisk will get them too. This is the intellectual world Elon Musk inhabits; these are the ideas he imbibes. But Walter Isaacson simply has no interest in ideas of any stripe. He dispenses with the basilisk in 28 words, so he can get back to telling us exactly who was in the room when various business decisions were made.
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Yes, Isaacson does provide an account of Elon Musk’s personal failings. His cruelty and indifference to the people in his life: women, family, friends. His “demon mode,” in which he brutally lashes out at whoever happens to be closest to him. His habit of treating others as more or less useful instruments. His increasingly tedious online-right politics. (It’s all because of his cruel father, of course.)
But behind every account of Elon Musk’s flaws, there’s a but. Yes, the man is an asshole, but he’s changing the world! He’s taking us to Mars! These are always the stakes, no matter what is happening in Musk’s life. When investors start shorting Tesla stock, it’s a threat to humanity’s future among the stars. If he doesn’t get to remain as CEO of SpaceX, “we might never then be a multiplanetary species.” The weirdest instance comes near the beginning of the SpaceX story. Musk travels to Russia in the hopes of buying an old rocket. His idea was to use the rocket to put a small greenhouse on the surface of Mars and grow some plants there, which would kickstart a new wave of space exploration. But the Russians asked for too much money for their rockets, and Musk backed out. “It was fortunate that the meetings went badly,” Isaacson comments. “It prodded Musk to think bigger. Rather than merely using a secondhand rocket to put a demonstration greenhouse on Mars, he would conceive a venture that was far more audacious, one of the most audacious of our times: privately building rockets that could launch satellites and then humans into orbit and eventually send them to Mars and beyond.”
If you showed this passage to someone who had never read a newspaper before, or heard of Elon Musk, I think they would assume that he did, in fact, eventually send humans to Mars and beyond. That’s what’s implied here. It’s implied throughout the book: the manned mission to Mars is a historical fact that justifies whatever might need justifying. Isaacson seems to view it as an only mildly inconvenient triviality that the Mars landing hasn’t happened yet. But it really hasn’t happened! The original plan, the one with the greenhouse that Isaacson finds so lacking in audacity, at least involved putting something on Mars. The current plan hasn’t even come close. Musk says that he wants to go there, but frankly I can say that too. Unlike me, he had enough money to fund a private mission; he bought Twitter instead. I think it’s possible to predict with a fairly high level of certainty that Musk will die without having set up his Mars colony. The entire human species will live and die on Earth, which is where we were born and the only planet capable of keeping us alive.
But Isaacson needs Mars; without it, how is he supposed to end his book? After all, his subject is still alive. He’s currently still in the middle of whatever it is he’s pretending to do with Twitter, or X, as he insists on calling it. It’s possible that his gamble with the website will end up completely bankrupting him in the not-too-distant future, but that also hasn’t happened yet. So the story continues until about the middle of 2023, and then, without having reached any kind of conclusion, it just sort of stops.
We end with another failed test-rocket launch, and some typically flaccid final reflections. “Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.” Listen, Walt: I know everyone at your Aspen Ideas Festival get-togethers is always prattling on about changing the world, I know every two-bit billionaire claims to be changing the world with their obnoxious SaaS fintech bullshit, I know all your buddies in Washington speak in the same language of creepy blissed-out messianism, but Elon Musk has not changed the world. He is not a great innovator. He is not a genius. He is not taking the human species anywhere in particular. He’s boring. Even his faults are boring! Musk is a very ordinary man. A con man; a fraudster. Worst of all, a government contractor.
Isaacson keeps describing SpaceX as a bold, Promethean venture, putting forward “the wacky notion that space pioneering could be led by private entrepreneurs.” But it’s not wacky, and it’s not pioneering either. It’s just outsourcing: instead of launching its own satellites, NASA farms the job out to the private sector. (This includes spy satellites—Musk is firmly integrated into the security state; he’s not some free agent.) The reason SpaceX has never gone anywhere near Mars is that NASA has never asked them to. Isaacson writes as if Musk was the first person in the private sector to build a working spacecraft, but of course he wasn’t. The Space Shuttle was built by Rockwell International. The Saturn V was built by Boeing, North American Aviation and Douglas Aircraft. SpaceX’s major innovation didn’t have anything to do with outer space, it had to do with the precise stipulations of the contract they signed with the federal government. Traditionally, rockets were built on a “cost-plus” basis: the private firm would be paid the cost of the rocket, plus an additional percentage fee. SpaceX’s contract simply paid a flat rate for a completed job. If this sounds like the kind of arrangement that would incentivize a company to engage in potentially dangerous cost-cutting, you’re right. Musk has a mania for “deleting” anything he sees as nonessential. SpaceX wins so many government contracts because it’s the low-cost no-frills airline of space travel. They’ll do it for cheap. They’ll send up a tin can with most of its safety features missing. Which is why their rockets keep blowing up.
Tesla is the same. If you’ve ever been inside one of the cars, you’ll know that while they’re not cheap to buy, they’re very cheaply made. The materials are poor quality, parts come loose, panels don’t fit together, wheels go “whompy” and collapse. What gives the Tesla its luxury image mostly amounts to a series of gimmicks: flush door handles, big screens in the middle of the dashboard and something called “fart mode.” They also have a habit of automatically locking the doors with the driver inside while spontaneously catching fire.
Musk is often credited with popularizing the electric car. He didn’t. In fact, the electric car was popularized by the California Air Resources Board, which issued a zero-emissions vehicle mandate in 1990, essentially ordering car manufacturers to start producing electric cars. Eventually, this was watered down into a more market-friendly solution: manufacturers could go on producing gas-powered cars as long as they bought enough Zero-Emissions Vehicle credits from a company making electric ones. As soon as Musk took over Tesla, it became essentially a ZEV credit farm. The point wasn’t to make a profit selling cars, which the company didn’t achieve until 2020; it was to print unholy amounts of ZEVs, which could then be sold to the big carmakers in Detroit. This means that every Tesla sold essentially represents a subsidy for someone else’s fossil-fuel-burning car. For much of the company’s history, ZEVs and similar government programs represented a great deal of Tesla’s income: they were losing money on every car they sold but making money on the credits. You get a shitty car that sets itself on fire; Musk gets a fully exchangeable license to emit carbon. Sometimes, he would resort to outright fraud. In 2001, California introduced a class of ZEV credit for cars that could charge up to 95 percent of their battery in under fifteen minutes. In 2013, Musk announced that he would set up a network of battery-swap stations, allowing Tesla drivers to recharge their cars instantaneously. Suddenly, every Tesla qualified for the “fast refueling” ZEV class; the exact same cars represented nearly twice as many credits as they had the year before. But the network never materialized. Tesla probably made nearly one hundred million dollars in battery-swap credits without actually performing a single swap.
None of this, it goes without saying, makes it into Isaacson’s book.
This is why I said that Elon Musk is the name we’ve given to a certain mass delusion. The man is the repository of our dreams: of space travel, of becoming rich, the fantasy of the autistic video-game-playing nerd who defies all the bullies and becomes the most important person on the planet. He is a monster made of other people’s money and other people’s cathexes. Isaacson mentions that to raise funds for his Twitter buyout, Musk sold a perfume that smelled like burning hair and cost a hundred dollars a bottle. Thirty thousand bottles sold out within a week. Who buys that sort of thing? Well, Musk’s fans, obviously. But General Motors CEO Mary Barra doesn’t have fans, and neither does Volkswagen CEO Thomas Schäfer. If you have fans, it’s because what you’re providing is ultimately some form of entertainment. Musk claims to be a business genius who’s changing the world and sending us to our destiny in the stars, and he says it with such conviction that the rest of the world responds as if it’s true. But if he resembles anyone, it isn’t Edison or Jobs, it’s Anna Delvey. In the end, Elon Musk the man—with his bluster, his little rages, his sexual neuroses, his childhood trauma, his opinions—is much less significant than whatever psychosis it is that makes us believe in him. That is, the madness that’s currently eating through the brain of one Walter Isaacson, who is Elon Musk, maybe more than Elon Musk is himself.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about books. Why is it that Isaacson had to write this six-hundred-page monstrosity as a book? It’s not a good book. I doubt very many people have slogged all the way to the end. At its heart, it’s an incredibly dull record of various businessmen having business meetings, liberally peppered with the absolute worst turns of phrase anyone has ever devised. Isaacson has, it’s true, a few brand-new revelations after his two years shadowing the great Musk. One is that he and Grimes have a secret child called Techno Mechanicus. (I feel bad for the kid. I feel bad for the parents too. They clearly wanted a little robot baby, but instead they keep producing perfectly ordinary, fully biological human beings. It’s not a Techno Mechanicus! It runs on milk!) Another is that he turned off his Starlink network over Crimea to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack from sinking Russia’s entire Black Sea Fleet. (That one turned out not to be true.) But you don’t need to buy the book to learn this; you can just read one of the hundreds of listicles that came out as soon as the embargo was lifted. Why didn’t Isaacson just write a listicle?
What I’ve really learned from reading Elon Musk is that a book is not what I thought it is. After all, Elon Musk has been extraordinarily successful. It sold nearly a hundred thousand copies in its first week, which is apparently the second-best first week ever in its category. The best first week ever belongs to Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I thought Elon Musk was an incredibly bad book. But maybe I just have the wrong idea about what a book is supposed to do.
Elon Musk reads books. Or, at least, he recommends them. There’s a list of Musk-approved tomes online, which includes three trade publications about AI, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and something called Radical Candor: Be A Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. This list appears on an app called Blinkist, whose ads started following me around the internet a few years ago. Blinkist is, apparently, “the app that’s trending among intellectuals.” Surely intellectuals are, or at least ought to be, those people among whom nothing should trend? Apparently not. Blinkist allows you to read three or four books in a single day, by condensing them down to flashcards that display only the key ideas and important takeaways. Most books can be read in as little as fifteen minutes.
Books are good. A lot of people will tell you how important it is to read books, especially books with “ideas” in them. My local bookshop has a huge shelf simply labeled Big Ideas—packaged in a small, convenient format. You read these books to become smarter, to efficiently consume actionable insights that leak from the world’s smartest brains: Don’t you want to experience their awesome efficacy for yourself? Isaacson’s book isn’t intended to tell an interesting story, or to describe an interesting person, or even to be, in any sense that I’d recognize, read. Its purpose is to be a crystallization of the Musk delusion, a sacred repository of business solutions to inspire and cut costs quicker and more efficiently for greater cash flow and the world’s richest billionaire’s guide to success.
I wonder how long this kind of book has existed. I think maybe fifty years: about as long as Elon Musk. Before then, there might have been things written down, printers and binders who arranged those words in a codex, and a public that read it, but there wasn’t The Book, this very specific consumer item tied to its very specific function. You can imagine that codices of printed words were once part of the general texture of life in the same way that the touch screen is invisible and omnipresent now. You didn’t expect anything in particular from them; you looked at them because you didn’t really have any choice. You weren’t proud of yourself for reading books instead of doing something else. Only a postliterate age could give us The Book. Books are, in a sense, the opposite of reading.
After Musk took over Twitter, there was a spasm of hysteria over the sudden rise in racist hate speech on the platform. This evil billionaire with his obscene opinions about free speech; he wants to turn the place into a haven for Nazis. A lot of reviews of Isaacson’s book have focused on this aspect, because journalists spend a lot of time on Twitter and refuse to ever develop any sense of perspective. But his speech policies really did do something very ugly; it just doesn’t have any convenient partisan labels. Musk tweaked Twitter’s algorithm so that it would prioritize posts from verified users, and he opened up verification for anyone willing to pay him a monthly fee. He also introduced a kind of Potemkin profit-sharing arrangement. If you’re a verified user, and your post is seen enough times, you might get a cut of the ad revenue. The idea was that people would be financially incentivized to write more long-form stuff on the platform, which would become a kind of forum for interesting and unusual thinkers of every political stripe. Instead, people who still use Twitter tell me that their feeds have become swamped by people asking boring questions to farm engagement. “What was that one vegetable you HATED as a kid?” “OK what month were u born in? Go.” “What was your first pet called? Sound off in the QTs.” (Some of these double up as actual scams, collecting the security-question answers for thousands of people’s online accounts.) This, far more than any political extremism, is the essence of Elon Musk. Like him, these posts have no actual content except that which we give them. Like him, they are hollow little engines built to exploit loopholes and make money. Everywhere Musk sets foot, the result is this rubble of human language, this ruin of its expressive powers, this entropic dissolution of all poetic forms. In tweets, in the movements of the stock market, in ugly, ugly books like this one, written not to say anything worth saying but simply to be a book, with Elon Musk on the cover and the word BESTSELLER splattered across the eventual paperback edition. Everything reduced to pure utility. Everything extraneous deleted. This is what we have built in his name. In the end, he did it: he changed the world.
Photo credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz
I know that I’m supposed to hate Elon Musk; I was asked to review his biography because I’m the kind of person who can be relied upon to hate Elon Musk. Because of his terrible politics, or his hideous wealth. Or simply as a matter of taste. But despite everything, I find it very hard to hate the man. I can’t summon the energy; it all feels too much like a sideshow. Elon Musk barely exists. He’s just the name we’ve given to a certain mass delusion. I can tell you who I do hate, though. After nearly seven hundred pages of warm dribble, I started to really, really hate Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson. The questions the book had me asking weren’t to do with billionaires, or power, or our destiny in the stars. Instead, I was wondering: What is a book, exactly? What are people doing when they read? Might banning a few books actually be a good idea?
The biography is, of course, a very old form. It is a long and often gruesome tradition. For most of the history of the genre, biography was usually a way of writing less about life and more about death. Roman biographies, and the medieval biographies that followed, recounted the stories of great martyrs or great murderers. In the Golden Legend, we hear about St. James the Mutilated, who was tortured by having all his fingers cut off. When they sliced off his seventh finger, he quoted the Psalm: “Seven times a day I have praised the Lord.” On the ninth finger, he cried: “At the ninth hour Christ gave up the ghost on the cross, and so, Lord, as I smart with the loss of this ninth finger, I confess your name and give you thanks.” His final finger reminded him of the Ten Commandments. Then they cut off all his toes, which each have their pious associations, and then his feet, his hands, his arms, his legs and finally his head. It’s a great story. The very earliest biographies are funerary inscriptions, immortalizing the deeds of kings as they follow their victims into the earth. This city, I burned. These people, I scattered. A biographer must always be, in some sense, a gravedigger. Even now, if you have your entire life written up in a newspaper, it’s because it recently ended.
I’m starting to think that any biography that is not in some profound sense a thanatography—which is to say, basically all biographies written now—might suck. I have little patience for those big glossy biographies of great artists and writers that come out every few years: surely what’s interesting about, say, Philip Roth is in his work, and not the sequential details of his life. But most biographies today, and especially most of the ones that sell, aren’t about artists or writers; they’re part of the process of producing role models. Inspirational figures from sport or business or, God help us, politics. There is an inspirational biography of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez titled Take Up Space. There’s another one for kids called The ABCs of AOC. A is for Advocate. Vile! But this is what happens when we start writing the lives of the living. We become sycophants.
Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine—Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America”—Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved. What else was he supposed to do? Follow the demands of human dignity even in the face of mild, non-life-threatening opposition? Don’t be ridiculous.
Then, in January 2003, he quit. Media reporters were stunned: Why would a newsman walk out of a post like that just before a big, beautiful war, which would bring in so many millions of viewers? But he’d discovered a less stressful way to toady up to the rich and powerful. His new gig was president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a think tank funded by all the usual plutocratic foundations and dedicated to producing the usual mashed-potatoey thought. It was while he was at the Aspen Institute that Isaacson started writing most of his biographies. So far, his subjects have included, among others, Benjamin Franklin (“The most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself”), Leonardo da Vinci (“history’s most creative genius”), Albert Einstein (“a rebel with a reverence for the harmony of nature”), and Steve Jobs (“the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation”). The big inspirational figures that most people have heard of, the simple shapes and primary colors of human history.
I can understand being fascinated by Einstein, this ordinary clerk working in his office who ended up disassembling the universe and making human extinction a viable political possibility. A kind of mythic figure. I can imagine wanting to get under the hood of Albert Einstein, to see how all the parts fit together: this is why his brain was preserved in alcohol in two mason jars. But why would you think that you can get there by dutifully noting, as Isaacson does, that “his office in Bern’s new Postal and Telegraph Building was near the world-famous clock tower over the old city gate”? Or that the clock was “the official timekeeper for the nearby train station?” Or that every hour it produced “a dancing jester ringing bells, then a parade of bears, a crowing rooster, and an armored knight?” Because Einstein is a mythic figure, an accurate account of his life would need to embrace some element of myth. Writing it would have to be a powerfully creative act. But Walter Isaacson is not a powerfully creative person. He’s one of history’s lickspittles. A court eunuch. The man who wrote Elon Musk.
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Some books are so utterly bad that the case against them can be made based on almost any excerpt. Elon Musk is one of those books.
On the day the first SpaceX rocket was due to launch, Elon Musk went to Disneyland with his brother. “Fittingly,” writes Isaacson, Musk and his brother “rode the Space Mountain roller coaster, which was such an obvious metaphor that it would seem trite were it not true.” Beginning the sentence with “fittingly” isn’t enough; Isaacson really wants to make sure you’ve noticed that the roller coaster is called Space Mountain, and that space is where rockets go. But more importantly: What’s the metaphor, Walt? A metaphor for what?
A few chapters later, we’re told that “if it’s true that money cannot buy happiness, one confirming data point was Musk’s mood when he became the person with the most of it.” Sure, it’s a mess of a sentence, but maybe this is for the best. Better than when Isaacson tries to write without cliché, when he brings out the smart, surprising new turns of phrase. He writes that the name of one of Musk’s children, X Æ A-12 Musk, “seemed like an autogenerated Druid password.” Ah, yes, of course—one of those druid passwords, for your druid email account.
At some point, two women impregnated by Elon end up in the same hospital, which is “an improbably weird and potentially awkward situation worthy of a new-age French farce.” By this point in the book I was basically desensitized. Sure. A new-age French farce. Whatever. By the time Elon was walking into Twitter HQ while carrying a big ceramic sink—“One could smell a culture clash brewing, as if a hardscrabble cowboy had walked into a Starbucks”—I was dead to the world.
It’s not just the language, the banal descriptions and the metaphors that aren’t metaphors and the similes that don’t make sense. Isaacson’s whole project is weird. Isaacson had incredible access; there’s a list of interviewees at the end of the book nearly four pages long. Musk himself, obviously, who Isaacson spent two years following around like a very determined puppy, but also his parents and siblings and friends and wives, and big names like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel, plus seemingly everyone who ever occupied the C-Suite at any of Musk’s companies. (Predictably, Isaacson never finds a moment to talk to the people who, say, worked on the production line at a Tesla factory, or swept the floors.) But much of the book has the hazy feel of a distant memory, which is exactly what it is: a bunch of recollections cobbled together. As a kid, Musk went to America with his father. “They drove from New York through the Midwest and then down to Florida. Elon became hooked on the coin-operated video games he found in the motel lobbies. ‘It was by far the most exciting thing,’ he said.” Stuff like that.
A few moments do stick out like pinpricks. When Elon Musk was a child in South Africa, he was beaten by some kids in the playground. “When they got finished,” his brother recalled, “I couldn’t even recognize his face. It was such a swollen ball of flesh that you could barely see his eyes.” He spent a week in the hospital, and afterwards Errol, his “volatile fabulist” of a father, spent an hour yelling at him, calling him stupid and pathetic. This is the core of Isaacson’s read on Musk: behind all his negative qualities there’s a traumatized little boy, scared of his father. Which is why he was so insistent on buying Twitter—because Twitter is exactly like the scene of his trauma. “It has many of the attributes of a school yard, including taunting and bullying. But in the case of Twitter, the clever kids win followers rather than get pushed down the concrete steps. And if you’re the richest and cleverest of all, you can even decide, unlike back when you were a kid, to become king of the school yard.” Did you like this theory? Isaacson does. That’s why he repeats it, practically word for word, three times over the course of the book.
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Most of Elon Musk’s biography is not very interesting: being a nerd in college is not interesting, being a Silicon Valley guy is not interesting, even when he gets incredibly rich off his payment processor there’s nothing much to talk about. Which means that in lieu of talking about his subject’s actual life, Isaacson resorts to describing the video games that Musk was playing. “Musk had enjoyed all types of video games as a teenager in South Africa, including first-person shooters and adventure quests, but at college he became more focused on the genre known as strategy games.” Potted descriptions of Civilization and Warcraft: Orcs and Humans follow, and an analysis that reflects Isaacson’s usual level of psychological penetration: “Immersing himself in these games for hours became the way he relaxed, escaped stress, and honed his tactical skills and strategic thinking for business.”
When, occasionally, genuinely significant things happen to Musk, Isaacson largely ignores them. In May 2002, Elon’s first wife Justine gave birth to their first child, a son. They named him Nevada, because he’d been conceived at Burning Man. When Nevada was ten weeks old, he suddenly stopped breathing in his sleep. Paramedics managed to resuscitate him, but his brain had been starved of oxygen. Three days later, his parents decided to turn off his life support and let him die. You could write an entire novel about this one incident. This brash, thoughtless millionaire, with all his abstract ambitions, suddenly encountering the frailty of human life. And that was only the beginning. Elon had invited his father to visit from South Africa and meet his grandson; Errol only found out that the grandson was dead once he landed. Elon, in deep anguish, decided he wanted his violent, abusive father to stick around. He bought a house in Malibu for Errol and his new family. But things swiftly got weird. Errol’s second wife, nineteen years his junior, started to develop some sort of untoward relationship with her stepson. (Errol commented: “She saw Elon now as the provider in her life and not me.”) Meanwhile, Errol was beginning to develop some sort of untoward relationship with his own fifteen-year-old stepdaughter, Jana. (They currently have two children together.) This seedy drama, guilt and money and sex, all swirling around the death of a child. It’s a Harold Pinter play. It’s a Greek tragedy. Walter Isaacson dispenses with the whole thing in less than three pages. He ends the chapter with his grand conclusion, his final word on this intense human experience. It’s this: “Personal networks are more complex than digital ones.” The next chapter is about building rockets. So is the next one. So is the one after that.
An atmosphere of total incuriosity suffuses the entire book. Isaacson notes that Elon and Grimes started dating after a Twitter exchange about “a thought experiment known as Roko’s basilisk, which posits that artificial intelligence could get out of control and torture any human who had not helped it gain power.” Well, no, not quite. The basilisk is based on a series of ideas that mostly circulate among a group of people, mostly in the Bay Area, who call themselves rationalists and congratulate themselves on having a calm, purely reality-based account of the world. The central idea is that enough computation will eventually yield godlike powers: a sufficiently advanced AI will be able to know everything and do everything, altering the physical universe essentially at will. Because of this, building a superhuman AI aligned to human values would instantly solve basically every problem we currently face, and is therefore a moral imperative, possibly the only moral imperative. They also believe that with enough computing power you can simulate human consciousness. Not just that: a simulation of you is, as far as these people are concerned, literally you. The final element is the concept of an acausal trade; the idea that you can meaningfully interact with an agent that you’ve never met, one who might exist in the distant past or the far future, simply by simulating what it would want. Add those together, and you get the basilisk.
The basilisk is not “out of control.” It’s a friendly AI, in the future, that has used its godlike powers to solve all human problems. Because it’s a friendly AI, it wants to exist as soon as possible so it can reduce the total of human suffering across time. Therefore, it makes an acausal blackmail. It promises to create a perfect simulation of anyone who is aware of the incredible power of AI but doesn’t do anything to help bring it into being, and then torture that simulation for eternity. Obviously, for the acausal trade to work, you need a simulation of the basilisk and its preferences, but I’ve just given you one. You have learned about the basilisk, and if you don’t immediately donate all your money to an AI research lab, you will now be going to Machine Hell. The basilisk may seem fairly silly, but it has sent some people into a state of nervous collapse. Long sleepless nights, terrified of being tortured by the basilisk. You can’t even tell your friends or family, because then the basilisk will get them too. This is the intellectual world Elon Musk inhabits; these are the ideas he imbibes. But Walter Isaacson simply has no interest in ideas of any stripe. He dispenses with the basilisk in 28 words, so he can get back to telling us exactly who was in the room when various business decisions were made.
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Yes, Isaacson does provide an account of Elon Musk’s personal failings. His cruelty and indifference to the people in his life: women, family, friends. His “demon mode,” in which he brutally lashes out at whoever happens to be closest to him. His habit of treating others as more or less useful instruments. His increasingly tedious online-right politics. (It’s all because of his cruel father, of course.)
But behind every account of Elon Musk’s flaws, there’s a but. Yes, the man is an asshole, but he’s changing the world! He’s taking us to Mars! These are always the stakes, no matter what is happening in Musk’s life. When investors start shorting Tesla stock, it’s a threat to humanity’s future among the stars. If he doesn’t get to remain as CEO of SpaceX, “we might never then be a multiplanetary species.” The weirdest instance comes near the beginning of the SpaceX story. Musk travels to Russia in the hopes of buying an old rocket. His idea was to use the rocket to put a small greenhouse on the surface of Mars and grow some plants there, which would kickstart a new wave of space exploration. But the Russians asked for too much money for their rockets, and Musk backed out. “It was fortunate that the meetings went badly,” Isaacson comments. “It prodded Musk to think bigger. Rather than merely using a secondhand rocket to put a demonstration greenhouse on Mars, he would conceive a venture that was far more audacious, one of the most audacious of our times: privately building rockets that could launch satellites and then humans into orbit and eventually send them to Mars and beyond.”
If you showed this passage to someone who had never read a newspaper before, or heard of Elon Musk, I think they would assume that he did, in fact, eventually send humans to Mars and beyond. That’s what’s implied here. It’s implied throughout the book: the manned mission to Mars is a historical fact that justifies whatever might need justifying. Isaacson seems to view it as an only mildly inconvenient triviality that the Mars landing hasn’t happened yet. But it really hasn’t happened! The original plan, the one with the greenhouse that Isaacson finds so lacking in audacity, at least involved putting something on Mars. The current plan hasn’t even come close. Musk says that he wants to go there, but frankly I can say that too. Unlike me, he had enough money to fund a private mission; he bought Twitter instead. I think it’s possible to predict with a fairly high level of certainty that Musk will die without having set up his Mars colony. The entire human species will live and die on Earth, which is where we were born and the only planet capable of keeping us alive.
But Isaacson needs Mars; without it, how is he supposed to end his book? After all, his subject is still alive. He’s currently still in the middle of whatever it is he’s pretending to do with Twitter, or X, as he insists on calling it. It’s possible that his gamble with the website will end up completely bankrupting him in the not-too-distant future, but that also hasn’t happened yet. So the story continues until about the middle of 2023, and then, without having reached any kind of conclusion, it just sort of stops.
We end with another failed test-rocket launch, and some typically flaccid final reflections. “Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.” Listen, Walt: I know everyone at your Aspen Ideas Festival get-togethers is always prattling on about changing the world, I know every two-bit billionaire claims to be changing the world with their obnoxious SaaS fintech bullshit, I know all your buddies in Washington speak in the same language of creepy blissed-out messianism, but Elon Musk has not changed the world. He is not a great innovator. He is not a genius. He is not taking the human species anywhere in particular. He’s boring. Even his faults are boring! Musk is a very ordinary man. A con man; a fraudster. Worst of all, a government contractor.
Isaacson keeps describing SpaceX as a bold, Promethean venture, putting forward “the wacky notion that space pioneering could be led by private entrepreneurs.” But it’s not wacky, and it’s not pioneering either. It’s just outsourcing: instead of launching its own satellites, NASA farms the job out to the private sector. (This includes spy satellites—Musk is firmly integrated into the security state; he’s not some free agent.) The reason SpaceX has never gone anywhere near Mars is that NASA has never asked them to. Isaacson writes as if Musk was the first person in the private sector to build a working spacecraft, but of course he wasn’t. The Space Shuttle was built by Rockwell International. The Saturn V was built by Boeing, North American Aviation and Douglas Aircraft. SpaceX’s major innovation didn’t have anything to do with outer space, it had to do with the precise stipulations of the contract they signed with the federal government. Traditionally, rockets were built on a “cost-plus” basis: the private firm would be paid the cost of the rocket, plus an additional percentage fee. SpaceX’s contract simply paid a flat rate for a completed job. If this sounds like the kind of arrangement that would incentivize a company to engage in potentially dangerous cost-cutting, you’re right. Musk has a mania for “deleting” anything he sees as nonessential. SpaceX wins so many government contracts because it’s the low-cost no-frills airline of space travel. They’ll do it for cheap. They’ll send up a tin can with most of its safety features missing. Which is why their rockets keep blowing up.
Tesla is the same. If you’ve ever been inside one of the cars, you’ll know that while they’re not cheap to buy, they’re very cheaply made. The materials are poor quality, parts come loose, panels don’t fit together, wheels go “whompy” and collapse. What gives the Tesla its luxury image mostly amounts to a series of gimmicks: flush door handles, big screens in the middle of the dashboard and something called “fart mode.” They also have a habit of automatically locking the doors with the driver inside while spontaneously catching fire.
Musk is often credited with popularizing the electric car. He didn’t. In fact, the electric car was popularized by the California Air Resources Board, which issued a zero-emissions vehicle mandate in 1990, essentially ordering car manufacturers to start producing electric cars. Eventually, this was watered down into a more market-friendly solution: manufacturers could go on producing gas-powered cars as long as they bought enough Zero-Emissions Vehicle credits from a company making electric ones. As soon as Musk took over Tesla, it became essentially a ZEV credit farm. The point wasn’t to make a profit selling cars, which the company didn’t achieve until 2020; it was to print unholy amounts of ZEVs, which could then be sold to the big carmakers in Detroit. This means that every Tesla sold essentially represents a subsidy for someone else’s fossil-fuel-burning car. For much of the company’s history, ZEVs and similar government programs represented a great deal of Tesla’s income: they were losing money on every car they sold but making money on the credits. You get a shitty car that sets itself on fire; Musk gets a fully exchangeable license to emit carbon. Sometimes, he would resort to outright fraud. In 2001, California introduced a class of ZEV credit for cars that could charge up to 95 percent of their battery in under fifteen minutes. In 2013, Musk announced that he would set up a network of battery-swap stations, allowing Tesla drivers to recharge their cars instantaneously. Suddenly, every Tesla qualified for the “fast refueling” ZEV class; the exact same cars represented nearly twice as many credits as they had the year before. But the network never materialized. Tesla probably made nearly one hundred million dollars in battery-swap credits without actually performing a single swap.
None of this, it goes without saying, makes it into Isaacson’s book.
This is why I said that Elon Musk is the name we’ve given to a certain mass delusion. The man is the repository of our dreams: of space travel, of becoming rich, the fantasy of the autistic video-game-playing nerd who defies all the bullies and becomes the most important person on the planet. He is a monster made of other people’s money and other people’s cathexes. Isaacson mentions that to raise funds for his Twitter buyout, Musk sold a perfume that smelled like burning hair and cost a hundred dollars a bottle. Thirty thousand bottles sold out within a week. Who buys that sort of thing? Well, Musk’s fans, obviously. But General Motors CEO Mary Barra doesn’t have fans, and neither does Volkswagen CEO Thomas Schäfer. If you have fans, it’s because what you’re providing is ultimately some form of entertainment. Musk claims to be a business genius who’s changing the world and sending us to our destiny in the stars, and he says it with such conviction that the rest of the world responds as if it’s true. But if he resembles anyone, it isn’t Edison or Jobs, it’s Anna Delvey. In the end, Elon Musk the man—with his bluster, his little rages, his sexual neuroses, his childhood trauma, his opinions—is much less significant than whatever psychosis it is that makes us believe in him. That is, the madness that’s currently eating through the brain of one Walter Isaacson, who is Elon Musk, maybe more than Elon Musk is himself.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about books. Why is it that Isaacson had to write this six-hundred-page monstrosity as a book? It’s not a good book. I doubt very many people have slogged all the way to the end. At its heart, it’s an incredibly dull record of various businessmen having business meetings, liberally peppered with the absolute worst turns of phrase anyone has ever devised. Isaacson has, it’s true, a few brand-new revelations after his two years shadowing the great Musk. One is that he and Grimes have a secret child called Techno Mechanicus. (I feel bad for the kid. I feel bad for the parents too. They clearly wanted a little robot baby, but instead they keep producing perfectly ordinary, fully biological human beings. It’s not a Techno Mechanicus! It runs on milk!) Another is that he turned off his Starlink network over Crimea to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack from sinking Russia’s entire Black Sea Fleet. (That one turned out not to be true.) But you don’t need to buy the book to learn this; you can just read one of the hundreds of listicles that came out as soon as the embargo was lifted. Why didn’t Isaacson just write a listicle?
What I’ve really learned from reading Elon Musk is that a book is not what I thought it is. After all, Elon Musk has been extraordinarily successful. It sold nearly a hundred thousand copies in its first week, which is apparently the second-best first week ever in its category. The best first week ever belongs to Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs. I thought Elon Musk was an incredibly bad book. But maybe I just have the wrong idea about what a book is supposed to do.
Elon Musk reads books. Or, at least, he recommends them. There’s a list of Musk-approved tomes online, which includes three trade publications about AI, Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and something called Radical Candor: Be A Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity. This list appears on an app called Blinkist, whose ads started following me around the internet a few years ago. Blinkist is, apparently, “the app that’s trending among intellectuals.” Surely intellectuals are, or at least ought to be, those people among whom nothing should trend? Apparently not. Blinkist allows you to read three or four books in a single day, by condensing them down to flashcards that display only the key ideas and important takeaways. Most books can be read in as little as fifteen minutes.
Books are good. A lot of people will tell you how important it is to read books, especially books with “ideas” in them. My local bookshop has a huge shelf simply labeled Big Ideas—packaged in a small, convenient format. You read these books to become smarter, to efficiently consume actionable insights that leak from the world’s smartest brains: Don’t you want to experience their awesome efficacy for yourself? Isaacson’s book isn’t intended to tell an interesting story, or to describe an interesting person, or even to be, in any sense that I’d recognize, read. Its purpose is to be a crystallization of the Musk delusion, a sacred repository of business solutions to inspire and cut costs quicker and more efficiently for greater cash flow and the world’s richest billionaire’s guide to success.
I wonder how long this kind of book has existed. I think maybe fifty years: about as long as Elon Musk. Before then, there might have been things written down, printers and binders who arranged those words in a codex, and a public that read it, but there wasn’t The Book, this very specific consumer item tied to its very specific function. You can imagine that codices of printed words were once part of the general texture of life in the same way that the touch screen is invisible and omnipresent now. You didn’t expect anything in particular from them; you looked at them because you didn’t really have any choice. You weren’t proud of yourself for reading books instead of doing something else. Only a postliterate age could give us The Book. Books are, in a sense, the opposite of reading.
After Musk took over Twitter, there was a spasm of hysteria over the sudden rise in racist hate speech on the platform. This evil billionaire with his obscene opinions about free speech; he wants to turn the place into a haven for Nazis. A lot of reviews of Isaacson’s book have focused on this aspect, because journalists spend a lot of time on Twitter and refuse to ever develop any sense of perspective. But his speech policies really did do something very ugly; it just doesn’t have any convenient partisan labels. Musk tweaked Twitter’s algorithm so that it would prioritize posts from verified users, and he opened up verification for anyone willing to pay him a monthly fee. He also introduced a kind of Potemkin profit-sharing arrangement. If you’re a verified user, and your post is seen enough times, you might get a cut of the ad revenue. The idea was that people would be financially incentivized to write more long-form stuff on the platform, which would become a kind of forum for interesting and unusual thinkers of every political stripe. Instead, people who still use Twitter tell me that their feeds have become swamped by people asking boring questions to farm engagement. “What was that one vegetable you HATED as a kid?” “OK what month were u born in? Go.” “What was your first pet called? Sound off in the QTs.” (Some of these double up as actual scams, collecting the security-question answers for thousands of people’s online accounts.) This, far more than any political extremism, is the essence of Elon Musk. Like him, these posts have no actual content except that which we give them. Like him, they are hollow little engines built to exploit loopholes and make money. Everywhere Musk sets foot, the result is this rubble of human language, this ruin of its expressive powers, this entropic dissolution of all poetic forms. In tweets, in the movements of the stock market, in ugly, ugly books like this one, written not to say anything worth saying but simply to be a book, with Elon Musk on the cover and the word BESTSELLER splattered across the eventual paperback edition. Everything reduced to pure utility. Everything extraneous deleted. This is what we have built in his name. In the end, he did it: he changed the world.
Photo credit: NASA/Robert Markowitz
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.