(New York) The highly anticipated new biography of Elon Musk, to be released in the United States on Tuesday, portrays a complex individual, obsessed with conquering space, with brutal management methods and lacking in empathy.
Walter Isaacson, known for a series of best-selling biographies, including that of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (2011), enjoyed unprecedented access to the whimsical entrepreneur, whom he interviewed on numerous occasions.
According to excerpts from the eponymous book quoted by several American media, which had access to the book, the author describes an Elon Musk devoured by the desire to make the human species a “multi-planet” population, thanks to his aerospace company SpaceX.
For him, the “woke virus”, in reference to the militancy which aims to promote and defend all minorities, presents the risk of derailing the colonization of other planets, Mars in the first place, because it is “anti-human in general and must be “stopped”.
According to Walter Isaacson, the richest man in the world is a “big kid”, who remains marked by a youth during which he was regularly bullied at school.
Elon Musk opened up to his biographer about Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism for which he was diagnosed, which explains, by his own admission, why he is “bad at decoding relational signals” in his relationships with others.
The native South African is described as “drawn to storm and drama,” prone to “unpredictable emotional oscillations,” which manifest themselves in the way he runs the companies he heads.
The book mentions in particular several examples of Elon Musk’s anger, furious when his employees do not meet his expectations or ready to humiliate them if they resist him.
For singer Grimes, a former partner of the entrepreneur, the latter goes into “demon mode” when he expresses his irritation, a state that “generates a lot of chaos”, she confided to the biographer.
Walter Isaacson reveals, about the Canadian artist, that she had a third child with Elon Musk, via gestational surrogacy (GPA) and a surrogate mother, while the former couple had not spoken so far only two babies.
This brings the number of known living children of Elon Musk to ten, including two with an executive at one of his companies, Neuralink, to whom he donated sperm.
“He wants people to have children,” Shivon Zilis, mother of twins born in 2021, told the author.