Elon Musk

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue and charismatic fantasist. His father's impact on his psyche would linger.
He developed into 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. At the beginning of 2022 — after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth — Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up drama.
" I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life, " he said. It was a wistful comment, not a New Year's resolution. Even as he made the pledge, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world's ultimate playground. Over the years, whenever he felt threatened or in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground.
Now he had a chance to own the playground. For two years, Walter Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers and adversaries. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question : are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress ?

From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of the world's most fascinating and controversial innovator — a rule-breaking visionary who led us into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence. Oh, and he took over Twitter.