Walter Isaacson spent two years with unlimited, unedited access to Elon Musk, his friends, family, colleagues, and others. Musk did not read the final draft, and really held nothing back. As a result, this is as true a representation of this fascinating individual as you are likely to find anywhere. Isaacson assembles the facts and impressions into a coherent chronology, giving some conjecture and context, but actually, relatively little— just enough to make the story flow. The reader is left to absorb and process the information, and draw one’s own conclusions.

Musk is a fascinating person. Apart from his science and engineering education, love of science fiction and video gaming, one wonders how he developed his overriding mission of making humankind a multiplanetary species, preserving human consciousness, and preserving free speech. He drives toward these goals through his companies’ specific objectives: moving from fossil-fuel burning to solar power for both transportation (Tesla) and homes (Solar City); preserving free speech (Twitter, or X); restarting space exploration and future colonization on Mars through more economic, innovative, reusable rocket development (SpaceX, Starship); making connections between human beings and our technology, to keep humans in charge of Artificial Intelligence development (Tesla, Neuralink); and bringing the Internet to space for easier use (Starlink.) The development of any one of these would be tremendous for any innovator— to have started, and continue to manage all these endeavors by one person is utterly amazing.

Musk is clearly intellectually brilliant, but that alone does not account for this. He does appear to have Asperger’s Syndrome, which accounts for his lack of emotional understanding, difficulties with social interactions, lack of empathy, and intense obsession with particular subjects. His parents used a “free range” parenting style, giving he and his brother Kimbal a great deal of freedom early on. His father was abusive, both physically and especially verbally— while Elon has never been physically abusive, his intimates report that his language often comes directly from his father. His abruptness and impulsivity have led to his management style and methods of innovation. For example, “the algorithm”, his means of solving problems or developing new innovations:

Question every requirement: Musk needs to know who requires it, and why.
Delete any part or process you can: Musk believes that you can always add deletions back in. If you don’t add back in atleast 10%, you didn’t delete enough.
Simplify and optimize.
Accelerate cycle time. Musk is known for hearing how long something will take, then demanding ridiculously shorter deadlines. While rarely met, they create an ongoing sense of “maniacal urgency”, that gets things done.
Automate. Musk used to want to automate everything, but has since learned that humans do many things better and faster; hence, automate what you can last.

Other innovative corollaries include: avoid being friends with coworkers, technical managers must have hands-on experience, put designers and engineers’ workspaces right at the assembly line (so they can hear the problems first-hand), it’s okay to be wrong, just not confident and wrong, never ask anyone to do what you’re not willing to do, and the laws of physics are the only rules— all else is a recommendation.

His personal relationships, especially his opinions regarding fatherhood (he has fathered ten children to date, mostly through artificial insemination and invitro fertilization, sometimes using a surrogate) are very interesting and reflective of his character, personality, strengths and weaknesses. He is a captivating person, attempting to do very big things in his lifetime. I highly recommend this book, since he is obviously one of the most important people of our generation.