Book Review - Elon Musk - Wall Street Journal

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https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/ ... up-11d0f5c


‘Elon Musk’ Review: Move Fast, Blow Things Up
At a certain point Musk realized that technological progress was not inevitable. It could stop. It could backslide.

Review By Arthur Herman - Mr. Herman’s most recent book is “The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World.”
Sept. 11, 2023


There is probably no contemporary figure more baffling—and polarizing—than Elon Musk. Alongside his outsize entrepreneurial ventures—Tesla and SpaceX, among them—there is his public persona: charming, puckish, combative, mercurial. He has aroused admiration and scorn in about equal measure. What are we to make of him?

With “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson offers both an engaging chronicle of his subject’s busy life so far and some compelling answers to that question. After spending two years with Mr. Musk—and interviewing employees, friends and family members, including Mr. Musk’s two ex-wives—Mr. Isaacson sees parallels between Mr. Musk and one of his other biographical subjects, someone who also combined charismatic leadership and a difficult personality: Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

In Mr. Musk’s case, key formative experiences came out of his childhood in South Africa. Elon stood out in school more for his eccentric behavior than his academic record. At least one school official thought he was “retarded.” The physical bullying he received was so severe that he once had to be hospitalized and kept home for a week.

His family recognized that they were dealing with a “genius child,” as his mother puts it, with a focused mind and an unstoppable curiosity. He also had what Mr. Musk admits today is Asperger’s syndrome: It made him hard to deal with but also hard to stop once he had a goal in mind and vision to work for.

The vision component came early on. He had moved to the U.S. in his late teens and was studying physics and economics at the University of Pennsylvania: “I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity,” he tells Mr. Isaacson. “I came up with three: the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.” He would go on to transform all three realms.

The internet was first. After Penn, he had planned to go to Stanford to study how to make a better battery for electric cars. But in 1995 the dot-com revolution was getting underway, and Mr. Musk switched to building internet companies. Zip2, which enabled print media to create online content, would be sold to Compaq for $300 million in 1999. Mr. Musk used the money to launch a venture in online payments called X.com; it would merge with a company that eventually became PayPal.

None of this happened in an easygoing way. “Musk was a demanding manager, contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance,” Mr. Isaacson writes. He enjoyed setting impossible deadlines and had a hair-trigger temper. He was also eager to run risks. During the X.com merger talks, Mr. Musk offered Peter Thiel (one of PayPal’s founders) a ride in his McLaren F1 sports car. “So, what can this car do?” Mr. Thiel asked. “Watch this,” Mr. Musk responded, flooring it. “The rear axle broke and the car spun around, hit an embankment, and flew in the air like a flying saucer,” Mr. Isaacson writes. Amazingly, both men emerged unscathed. “At least it showed Peter I was unafraid of risks,” Mr. Musk said later. Mr. Thiel would add: “Yeah, I realized he was a bit crazy.’

Crazy or not, the merger went ahead, but Mr. Thiel and the other PayPal founders decided that Mr. Musk wasn’t the leader they wanted and forced him out (a move Mr. Musk fiercely resisted). From the sale of PayPal to eBay a couple of years later, Mr. Musk took away roughly $250 million. When someone asked him what he planned to do next, he answered: “I’m going to colonize Mars.”

In fact, Mr. Musk was working on an idea that had haunted him since college: What if life on Earth faced extinction, from (say) an overheated climate or the impact of an asteroid? One answer—both obvious and improbable—was to find another habitable planet. If NASA was losing interest in manned space flight, then it would be up to a private company. In 2002 Mr. Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX.

The result was a five-year campaign to build the Falcon 1, a rocket vehicle named after the Millennium Falcon in “Star Wars.” (One of Mr. Musk’s summer jobs at Penn was at a videogame company called Rocket Science.) After three test-flight failures, Falcon 1 reached Earth orbit in September 2008. That success led to a NASA contract to transport goods to the International Space Station.

By then Mr. Musk had turned to the “sustainable energy” component of his vision. In 2004 he became chair of Tesla Motors, a fledgling electric-car company. He was determined that Tesla would make not just electric cars but the coolest cars around, but sales were too slow to keep the company away from the brink of bankruptcy. A $465 million investment loan from the Energy Department, and a deal with German automaker Daimler, put Tesla back into solvency.

The next decade would see Mr. Musk’s celebrity status grow, along with his wealth. His satellite network, Starlink, has played a crucial (if controversial) role in Ukraine’s fight against Russia, while his idea of sending people to Mars would lead to the building of Starship, standing 30 feet taller than the Saturn V of the Apollo program. That the first Starship blew up barely four minutes after launch did nothing to deter Mr. Musk. “We don’t want to design to eliminate risk,” Mr. Musk says. “Otherwise, we will never get anywhere.”

Mr. Isaacson sees Mr. Musk as a man, in Shakespeare’s phrase, “molded out of faults.” His zeal derives in part from an awareness that good things may not last. At a certain point, Mr. Isaacson writes, Mr. Musk “found it surprising—and frightening—that technological progress was not inevitable. It could stop. It could even backslide.” The backsliding had happened with space travel, when NASA gave up on manned flight; it could happen with other aspects of modern life—even free speech, which explains why Mr. Musk bought Twitter (now known as X) in 2022 and has waged a campaign to keep it free of government and woke control.

Mr. Isaacson sums up the Musk philosophy this way: “Take risks. Learn by blowing things up. Revise. Repeat.” It’s not a formula for everyone, but some version of that bold, iconoclastic spirit may be what we all need in our current time of trials.