Book Review: Walter Isaacson (2023). Elon Musk. New York: Simon and Schuster. 665 Pages

Elon Musk has lived an extraordinarily fascinating life. He is the richest man in the world, and he is only fifty-two years old. He became a millionaire while still in his twenties. So, people want to understand how he did it and see if by understanding how he did it they, too, can become billionaires (he is currently said to have $248 billion). How did this man become so filthy rich?

Elon was born in South Africa in 1971. His father is a white South African engineer. His mother is a white Canadian woman.

Elon’s father, Errol Musk, is a blustery man given to telling tall tales about his doings. He is well-to-do; a man who drove a Rolls Royce and owned an amber mine in Zambia, by most people’s standards, is a wealthy man. He had three children, two boys and one daughter. Elon was the oldest child.

Elon reports that his father is abusive, both verbally and physically. Apparently, because of his abusiveness, his wife, Elon’s mother, Marye, divorced him.

The wife, Marye, graduated from college with a degree in nutrition. She worked both in nutrition counseling and modeling (she is a strikingly beautiful woman).

Upon divorce, Marye got custody of the three children, but Errol had visitation rights. He lived in Pretoria whereas Marye lived in Durban. On weekends the two boys took a train to go spend the weekend with their father (and when they came home, they reported his abuses).

The younger son, Kimball, stopped going on these visitations but Elon, the oldest son, still went, and, in his teenage years opted to go live with his father.

Why go live with a father he said abused him? Big Boys prefer to be with their fathers, not their mothers. Moreover, Elon has the same personality profile as his father, both are brutal, unemotional, and task-oriented people.

Elon began school at age three because his mother believed that he was a gifted kid. Because of his younger age, three years in the same class with six-year-old boys, he was always picked on and beaten by the older boys.

His father removed him from the public school system and placed him in a British-type private school. Even here, Elon reports that he was often beaten up by the other boys at school to the point where he had to spend time in hospitals.

Elon completed high school at age seventeen and decided that he wanted to go live in Canada. He brought up the subject and his father opposed it. Without seeking permission from him or his mother he simply went to the Canadian embassy in South Africa and filled out a request to go live in Canada, not only for himself but for his two siblings and his mother. He informed the embassy that his mother is Canadian.

A few weeks later four passports arrived in the mail. and he decided to go to Canada whereas his mother and two siblings were not yet ready to go (later, they joined him in Canada). His father and mother gave him several thousand dollars for the relocation. This was in 1989.

When he arrived in Montreal, he used the phone book to try locating his mother’s people’s addresses and managed to locate one living in Saskatchewan and took a Greyhound bus to go over there. The family were farmers and they immediately put him to work on their farm.

While doing that work, he decided that he was going to go to college (university). He took the SAT and scored high (about 1429 out of the 1600 possible points…1400 and above will get you into top universities in the USA and Canada). He was admitted by Queens College near Toronto and registered during the fall.

He registered to study physics and mathematics and had mostly A grades and found the school unchallenging. One of his friends had transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, an Ivy League University, and invited him to come on over; he was accepted by UPenn for his final two years. He graduated in engineering and business administration.

During his final year, he did an internship at a bank in Toronto and proposed to the president of the Bank a business deal, to produce the addresses of all the people living in his city in a program for him, making address search easy. The man showed him the hefty size of the phone book, White and Yellow Pages, as they were called, this was in the 1990s and he thought that Elon was proposing an impossible task.

He graduated and applied to graduate school at Stanford University, in California, and was admitted. When he got there, Palo Alto, aka Silicon Valley, he chose to take a deferment and work on the Zip2 venture he had shown a bank manager in Canada. He and a friend produced software to convert phone books into a computer-searchable program.

Later, his new program was bought by the big boys in the emerging Internet market for over $300 million and his share of the money was $22 million. He was just in his early twenties.

He and another friend worked on what they called Internet banking, a kind of one-stop banking where you can go to an Internet address and fill out your application to open an account with a bank, checking, saving, and the other services that banks provide. He worked diligently on this program but unbeknown to him other people were also working on it.

Another team had narrowed down their version to providing limited banking services, a method of making payments from your bank account, and called it PayPal. The venture capitalists that both teams approached to fund their ventures suggested that the two teams work together, and they did except that Elon had a kind of personality that had to be the boss or there was no go. Thus, he was always butting heads with the other team.

eBay bought their program, and Elon was bought out and given $250 million. This is cool for a kid still under thirty.

He looked around for other projects to engage in and, as an environmentalist, decided that he had to figure out a way to produce cars that used electricity and hence did not pollute the environment.

Again, someone else had embarked on such a project; the other team had registered their company as Tesla Motor Company. Both groups teamed up under the other party’s incorporated name, Tesla Motor Company.

In the meantime, he devoted most of his time and energy to trying to start a Space company that would compete with NASA. After several trials and failings, he succeeded with his SpaceX venture and got contracts with the US Defense Department in 2008 (we are talking billions of dollars) to take US astronauts and other payloads to the International Space Center in Orbit. He also got contracts to place satellites in space.

The book describes how he got the Tesla car business to work at a time when the big car companies had given up on electric vehicles (EVs) because they did not find them profitable.

In 2022 Elon Musk bought Twitter, a social media company, for $44 billion. Since then, he has tried to transform it to his understanding of what social media should be, free, rule-breaking, and available to all (he contemplates charging people to participate in it, well, Facebook, the Behemoth of social media, is free to non-advertisers, so how is Elon going to compete with that giant?).

Despite his verbal profession of libertarianism, there is no doubt that Elon is a Republican, in Cahoots with the likes of Donald Trump.

The Republican Party, the Party that fought to end slavery in the USA, is increasingly the Party of white people.

Elon is from Apartheid South Africa and ought to feel at home in a conservative party that sees itself as the white people's party of America.

The headache that Elon underwent to get to this level as the world’s richest man is the story; most people would not even have the courage to entertain the idea of starting a car company, much more a space travel company, and this young man from Africa did it.

Maybe, something good may come out of Africa.

The book describes what kind of person could accomplish these seemingly impossible tasks.

Elon was born with Asperger syndrome, a variety of Autism that made it difficult for him to have good social skills; so, he kept to himself and read. Some kids with autism tend to be what folks call idiot servants, very socially awkward but intellectually gifted, especially in physics and mathematics.

Many of the high-tech wonder boys have some sort of mental and or personality disorders (Steve Jobs had a paranoid personality, Bill Gates has a schizoid personality, you name any of them and any good psychiatrist will tell you what kind of personality disorder he has).

You know what they say, genius is akin to madness (I do not think that Elon is a genius; to be a genius your IQ must be over 140. I suspect that Elon’s IQ is in the mid-130s, that is, he is gifted).

In case you are interested in psychometry, 2% of the population tends to have intellectual disabilities (IQ under 70), and 2% percent of the population tends to have superior IQ, IQ above 132. 10% of the population tends to have above-average IQ, 118-130, and the rest of humanity has an average IQ, 85-115.

The book is about how a young man who has a kind of Autism, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, and bipolar affective disorder (his mood swings from highs to lows, mania, and depression) accomplished the near-impossible tasks he did.

The book throws some light on how he did it by working day and night; Elon was always working, engaged in many projects at the same time, not knowing what to do with himself when he was not working, and lacking a soft side to him (he has had several wives and several children; the wives complaining that he lacks empathy and does not have a warm, gentle, and loving side to him). His father had a similar personality structure.

What we gain from reading this book is how obsessive work ethic, persistence, perseverance and never giving up pay off in the end although a heavy price is paid: having very few friends.

Do you want to become a billionaire like Elon Musk? Then be born with a gifted IQ, attend the right schools, have the right contacts, and work as if you are possessed by the demon, take risks, and have no fear and sense of defeat; do not give up when you fail.

Elon Musk is the current capitalist poster boy; he is America’s self-image epitomized, a person who came from nowhere, worked hard, and achieved the highest financial position in the land. He is the quintessential iconic capitalist American.

However, one would be overdoing it by over-emphasizing the Rags to Riches, Horatio Alger aspect of him, the pulling your bootstraps mythology. As a boy growing up in South Africa, he was all over South Africa’s major cities (Cape Town, Pretoria, Johannesburg, Duban); his father took him and his siblings on vacations to all over North America, Canada, Boston, New York, Chicago, Disney World in Florida and Europe, England and France and probably to other neat places in the world). This is not the typical upbringing of a poor boy.

Walter Isaacson wrote a biography of Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, and informed the world what a mean-spirited and unforgiving man he was.

Unforgiving minds often project their hatred to their bodies and die from terrible diseases. Steve Jobs died from Cancer.

Let us hope that Elon Musk exorcises the demons driving him and lives a long and peaceful life. As of now, his life is anything but peaceful, it is at war against himself and all people.

Read the book and learn what is meant by someone having grits. If you want to develop a bulldog character trait, the hang-on, and never giving up traits needed to reach the pinnacle in a competitive capitalist world then work like Elon Musk. The innovative aspect of him is certainly admirable but the dark side of him is for clinical psychologists to worry about the correlation of illness and achievement.

Can a normal person accomplish what this man has? Can a non-narcissistic and delusional Donald Trump do what he is doing to become the darling of racists? Could a normal Adolf Hitler have conquered Europe? You decide.

Note

Elon Musk sets a mission and then looks for resources to actualize that mission. At present, he obsesses about what he calls multiplanetary travels and living. He believes that something might happen to our planet, say, an asteroid strikes it and wipes out all people or we kill ourselves with our nuclear weapons, or we pollute our earth and die from asphyxiation; therefore, we must discover habitable exoplanets and go live there.

For a starter, he wants a human settlement on Mars. Mars is about 143 million miles from planet Earth. Our best rockets travel at 17,000 miles per hour. At that speed, it will take us six months to get to Mars and six months to get back.

Are we going to have the technology to transport a lot of people to go settle on Mars? Elon says do not tell him that we do not have that technology yet but tell him that such technology can be devised. He is a visionary and can-do kind of person.

What some people see as aspirational he sees as doable and goes for it. We shall let the man be himself and not discourage him by telling him that his goal seems like a fantasy.