(“This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit.”) Thanks to the success of Tesla and SpaceX, he was the richest person in the world, and Time magazine - now something of a hobby project owned by a software billionaire - picked him as its 2021 Person of the Year. Antonio Gracias, who sat on the boards of both Aspen and Tesla, had set it up.Īt the time, Musk was more an engineer with a halo than the controversialist he has since become. Isaacson was in Sag Harbor, staying at the home of his high-powered lawyer friends Joel Klein and Nicole Seligman, when Musk called. His courtship of Musk began in August 2021. If that compulsion counts as a demon driving him, well, perhaps that is how he has gotten so much shit done. Both as a journalist and “intellectual maître d’,” Isaacson has always made it his business to get to know, and win over, everyone worth knowing. Except that for Isaacson, Musk is irresistible. They may be the unlikeliest writer-subject pairing since Bob Woodward and John Belushi. As Isaacson writes in the book, sounding a little stodgy himself, Musk’s humor tends “to be filled with smirking references to 69, other sex acts, body fluids, pooping, farts, dope smoking, and topics that would crack up a dorm room of stoned freshmen.” And while he loves a party and hanging out with celebrities and his fellow billionaires, he can be a goofy social presence, like a too-smart kid not quite grown up. Richard Stengel, who is Isaacson’s friend and was one of his successors running Time, says that when Isaacson was at Aspen, he was “the most intellectual maître d’ in the history of the world.”Īnd Musk? He has total contempt for the stodgy elites and their status anxiety - he wouldn’t even let the media keep their little blue check marks after he took over Twitter. He has a golden Rolodex and is utterly at ease at a cocktail party. ![]() Isaacson, who at 71 still retains a touch of his genteel Louisiana drawl, is the ultimate Old Establishment man - Harvard, Rhodes scholar, approached to join the CIA (but declined) - so much so that his first book, The Wise Men, co-written with Evan Thomas in 1986, was literally about the old Establishment Isaacson had been groomed to join. Sometimes this was alarming, as when the richest man in the world tweeted, as he did in April, “Between Tesla, Starlink & Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in one head than anyone ever.” But unlike his previous subjects, Musk was tweeting the entire time Isaacson was reporting, making news constantly with his megalomaniacal maneuvering. Isaacson spent more than two years hanging around with the guy in his factories and at his rocket-launch sites, interviewing 128 people in his orbit and fielding many surreal late-night phone calls and text messages. Its author is just there to give you, the reader, the facts of Musk’s life as he was able to observe and report them. It is written in Time-magazine style - restrained, middlebrow, and without an obvious agenda. But if you’re somewhere in between, trying to figure out if he is becoming a Bond villain or still that Tony Stark–like figure many people assume him to be, Isaacson’s book is not designed to help you sort it out. Many others hail him as a hero trying to get humanity to Mars while battling evil AI and dating many hot babes in the process. His moods can have far-reaching implications for, say, the Ukrainian army, which depends on his Starlink satellites to fight Russia. On September 12, Isaacson’s latest will be published, about Elon Musk, a man many take to be something of a demon himself - erratic, vindictive, and exhibiting little impulse control. But he’s long had a side hustle writing biographies of Great Men: Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs - as well as one Great Woman, biochemist Jennifer Doudna. ![]() He was running CNN when 9/11 happened and then landed in 2003 at the Aspen Institute, where, for 14 years, he was the impresario of its thought-leader confabs. Isaacson was the editor of Time magazine in the 1990s, a decade or so before the internet wrecked the print party. People who are driven by demons get shit done.” “The question for a biographer,” he tells me, holding forth a little, “is to show how the demons of a person are totally connected to the drive that gets their rockets to orbit. It’s a Saturday night in August, and Walter Isaacson is sitting in the back of Lilette, a restaurant on Magazine Street in his hometown of New Orleans, swizzling a Sazerac.
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