A later wife, the English actress Talulah Riley, has “flowing hair” as well.īut we learn a lot about Musk’s impressive brood of 11 children – he’s doing his bit to combat the fertility crisis – including a hitherto unannounced third baby with singer Grimes, catchily christened Tau Techno Mechanicus.
Of Musk’s first wife, Justine Wilson, he writes that “with flowing hair and a mysterious smile, she managed to be radiant and sultry at the same time”. Isaacson, best known for his 2011 biography of another controversial tech entrepreneur, Apple’s Steve Jobs, will win no prizes for his prose. This is also what Musk wanted to do when he co-founded PayPal in the early 2000s and pushed unsuccessfully for it to be branded as X.com (a domain he already owned, and now Twitter’s official name).Perhaps the most persuasive reason for Musk’s pursuit of Twitter, however, is the one offered by Isaacson: a deeply unhappy boy with an abusive father, regularly bullied at school in South Africa, had grown up and seen a chance to “own the playground”. Musk was also obsessed with turning Twitter into the equivalent of the Chinese “everything app” WeChat, making it a financial as well as a social hub. Musk himself tells Isaacson that that the world’s “online public square” was crucial to the survival of democracy, and thus in turn crucial to the Martian future, but Twitter had been infected by a “woke mind virus” – which it fell to him to root out. So why did he want to bother with Twitter, the digital equivalent of herding cats? In Isaacson’s deeply researched biography, based on two years of shadowing Musk and many interviews with the Tesla CEO and his associates, a few reasons are offered. Musk’s grandiose mission, often stated, is to save humanity by colonising Mars. Most people, by contrast, attribute that financial nosedive to Musk’s erratic tinkering with his new toy since he took it over last year.
For instance, Walter Isaacson’s approved biography of the tech billionaire is published today, yet only last week, Musk accused the Anti-Defamation League, the American non-governmental organisation that identifies and criticises anti-Semitism, of causing a fall in Twitter’s advertising revenue. The danger with writing about a person as mercurial as Elon Musk is that by the time your book comes out, they will have done something outrageous that you couldn’t include.
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