Elon Musk: The confusing, bizarre life of a risk-seeking billionaire

The specifics of Elon Musk’s arrival on planet Earth are laid out in vivid detail on page 16 of this mammoth exploration of what reads like a wild but hollow 50 years of gambolling by the sun king of the tech revolution.

“At 7.30 on the morning of June 28, 1971,” Walter Isaacson tells us with the authority of someone who might have been in attendance, “Maye Musk gave birth to an eight-pound, eight-ounce boy with a very large head.”

As the world now knows, the Musk noggin was from the start fizzing with ideas and designs on shaping the future of humanity. Musk has dominated the richest earthling lists for most of the last decade though his disastrous purchase of Twitter (since rebranded X) has caused him to cede top spot to LVMH’s Bernard Arnault (and family). But nobody really cares about a French guy whose company makes high-end stuff. Musk’s brilliance has been to somehow transfer ideas that are wacky and boyish – rocket travel to Mars, beautiful electric cars, AI – into billion-dollar enterprises. Even after his disastrous purchase of Twitter, Forbes has Musk’s wealth at $180 billion (€170 billion).

So, who is he?

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“Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training,” reasons Isaacson in the last paragraph of his book, one of his few attempts to analyse his subject. Instead, he lines up a host of family members, former partners and associates who riff freely on Musk’s psyche. Here’s Michael Marks, the Tesla investor and one of the many, many people who fell out with Musk: “He’s somewhere on the spectrum so I honestly don’t think he has any connection with people at all.”

Issacson spent two years shadowing Musk and speaking to those closest to him, which is a trippy cast involving his dysfunctional parents, former partners and tech bros too numerous and indistinguishable to mention. Nobody can accuse Isaacson of not taking notes. For reasons unclear, he decided to make the 600 pages more digestible by dividing them into 90 very short chapters. It does make the pages fly but also serves to make the life progression blurry and needlessly busy. Most people can’t avoid knowing that Musk is responsible for PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and that he controversially bought Twitter last year.

His South African childhood, where he survived a violent father, Errol (still thriving) and hard-core schoolyard bullying, prompted him to flee to Canada before college in Penn State and then the creation of Zip2, a city guide software package designed for newspapers, which he sold for $22 million at the age of 27. He has 10 living children from three marriages and it’s hard to know how he combines his role as the world’s most famous nerd with such a madcap personal life.

He assures Tallulah Riley that he is useless at the dating game, but they are engaged two weeks after meeting. She’s a young actor, smart and imbued with Brit fearlessness. “What’s the worst that could happen to us?” she asks Elon, in the spirit of wildfire romance. “One of us could die,” her beau solemnly tells her.

And here’s a snapshot of his life with the musician Grimes: “Night after night, Musk sat upright on the edge of his bed next to Grimes, unable to sleep. Some nights he did not move until dawn,” are the opening lines of a chapter titled Autonomy Day. It’s an arresting image and reading it is hard to shake the nagging thought of Issacson located subtly in the shadows of the Musk boudoir, diligently shadowing his man.

Sleepless nights are least of it for Grimes. On page 381, it is 2021 and we are, courtesy of Isaacson, at a Met Gala after-party hosted by Musk and Grimes. Leo DiCaprio and other glamourama members are at hand. Musk prefers to watch the musician. But on page 414, it’s still 2021 and now he is – without warning – father to twins with Shivon Zilis – albeit as a sperm donor. Even by Musk’s standards, this seems like a lightning move.

Explains Isaacson: “When Zilis was in the Austrian hospital with complications from her pregnancy, so too was the surrogate mother carrying the baby girl that Musk and Grimes had secretly conceived in vitro. Because the surrogate mother was having a troubled pregnancy, Grimes was staying with her. She was unaware that Zilis was in a nearby room, or that she was pregnant by Musk. Perhaps it is no surprise that Musk decided to fly west that Thanksgiving to deal with the simpler issues of rocket engineering.”

Perhaps. The paragraph is like a synopsis of Musk’s life: unorthodox, confusing, bizarre, jet-lagged and a little saddening. Littered on the pages, too, are unexpected treats, like Musk’s first meeting with Trump; two savants circling.

“He seems kind of nuts, but he may turn out okay,” is Musk’s assessment while Trump cuts to the chase: “He likes rockets and he does good at rockets, too, by the way.”

This sort of incidental detail is much more fun than the endless crises and emergencies – he almost ran out of cash and investors during the rise of Tesla – and the endless rocket launches. We all know he is still rich as Croesus.

It is hard to believe that Musk is a 1970s kid. There is a curious and lonesome absence of joy running through his story. There’s no sense of a human being accumulating memories or favourite songs or moments. And at 52, Elon Musk potentially has decades left to leave his mark as the ultimate space oddity.