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Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk, and the Myth of the Tech Savior [1]

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Date: 2023-11-24  

Meet Walter Isaacson, if you haven’t already. Isaacson is media and literati royalty: Time magazine editor, past chair and CEO of CNN, president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, professor of history at Tulane University, and winner of the National Humanities Medal. He’s a frequent talking head on news programming ranging from “Amanpour and Company” to “Morning Joe” too, with a calm and urbane demeanor and a historian’s perspective.

Then there are the books, almost all of them biographies. The first was Henry Kissinger in 1992, but beginning with his acclaimed Benjamin Franklin in 2003, the focus of his work shifted toward people with at least some connection between the sciences and creativity. The subjects are, with the possible exception of Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna, household names: Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci. All well written, well researched, and not afraid to present the flaws in the subjects: Ben Franklin was a horrible family man, Einstein treated his first wife horribly, and Steve Jobs was given to being abrasive and had problematic family relationships. Steve Jobs was adapted into a notable, Oscar nominated film, and Einstein was made into an excellent streaming miniseries. An impressive, accessible body of work.

After his biography of Doudna, a genetics pioneer who comes off not only as a genius but also as a personally decent role model, Isaacson turned his focus to someone who, well, needs no introduction. After two years of “unprecedented access” much like that that was granted in preparing the Jobs biography, Elon Musk has arrived.

Ah, yes, Elon Musk. A lot has, and can, be said about Elon Musk, much of it downright abysmal. Isaacson doesn’t flinch from presenting how awful a man Musk can be: a management style that almost makes Simon Legree seem humane, his tendency to “shoot [himself] in the foot so often [he] need[s] Kevlar boots”, mood shifts from “silly” to what’s termed as “dark mode”, his tendency toward humor that makes fart jokes seem like conversation at the Algonquin Round Table, his slow and steady slide into a paranoid abyss filled with a funhouse mirror view of “free speech” plagued by “the woke-mind virus”… If you want more, there’s more, but you get the picture.

To Isaacson’s credit, Elon Musk isn’t hagiographic, and while there are details about engineering challenges at Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink (not to mention the clusterfuck of Musk’s involvement with Twitter), roughly half of the book is Musk either being abusive, childish, or gripped by some obsession formed either by the comic books and science fiction he read as a child, or the video games he played as a young adult. Pick a random page, and you’re as likely to read about Musk’s daddy issues as you are about the development of a Tesla Roadster chassis. Maybe the money quote, from Elon’s brother Kimbal talking about lessons Elon drew from the video game “Polytopia” and as quoted in the book:

“He said it would teach me how to be a CEO like he was,” Kimbal says. “We called them Polytopia Life Lessons.” Among them: Empathy is not an asset. “He knows that I have an empathy gene, unlike him, and it has hurt me in business,” Kimbal says. “Polytopia taught me how he thinks when you remove empathy. When you’re playing a video game, there is no empathy, right?

“Empathy is not an asset.” Who gives a shit about the feelings of others when you’re obsessed with “making humanity an interplanetary species” or ridding the world of “the woke-mind virus” (not unlike hyped up Tom Cruise dreaming of a world free of “suppressive persons”)?

Here’s the problem, though: as much as Walter Isaacson puts it all on the page, he is also ready to excuse the bad behavior and pawn it off on either a horrible childhood marked by an abusive father and bullying or by Musk’s alleged (though never professionally diagnosed) Aspergers syndrome or bipolar disorder. Bad enough, but here are the closing sentences of Elon Musk:

But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound? Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.

Translation: if you want to achieve interplanetary space travel, electric cars and rid the world of the “woke-mind virus”, you need a schmuck heading the effort. Want an omelet, you gotta break a few eggs, right? Tech saviors, like Musk’s hero Tony Stark, don’t need to be held down by little stuff like empathy! If nothing else, this is just an indulgence in one man’s messiah complex because it might get you to Mars.

The obvious parallel to Elon Musk is Henry Ford, and Ford’s name only pops up once in Elon Musk in passing. The book went to press a couple of months before Musk endorsed an antisemitic tweet and set off a firestorm, but you could see at least some parallels well before, and Isaacson either ignores them or is blind to them.

One name that doesn’t appear and might be an even better analogy to Elon Musk is Bobby Fischer, and there are implicit echoes of the chess legend and Tech Bro #1. Fischer showed signs of mental illness throughout his life, but as fame reached him after winning the world chess championship in 1972 and becoming a celebrity, Fischer became more and more paranoid and given to extremely ugly, often antisemitic outbursts, eventually cheering on the 9/11 attacks while appearing on radio in the Philippines. There seemed to be a feeling among some around Fischer that psychiatric treatment would possibly neutralize Fischer’s genius. You get the same vibe with Musk: in Isaacson’s telling, some family members at times have tried interventions, but the reaction is to either let “dark Elon” have his mood pass or maybe even to believe something along the lines that you don’t mess with genius.

Signs are clear that Elon is slowly becoming Errol, the father he detests, a conspiracy embracing bigot, but billionaire tech saviors “sit at the intersection of technology and creativity”, so it’s all good, right? That bright, shiny electric interplanetary future won’t happen without a hardass driving it, right?

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