The thing you learn after a while on the Musk beat is that his most self-aggrandizing statements usually bear the least resemblance to reality. The problem is the man is Elon Musk, a guy who in 2011 promised to get us to space in just three years.

This reporting did not pass the smell test to me, and I said so at the time; I wondered about the sourcing. One of the things that anyone covering Elon Musk for long enough has to reckon with is that he loves to tell hilarious lies.Similarly, Isaacson falls flat on racial issues — the existence of apartheid in Musk’s youth is barely mentioned. For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries.

Isaacson followed Musk for the next two years, visiting his SpaceX and Tesla factories and attending board meetings. The Washington Post followed it up, publishing the excerpt where Isaacson claimed Musk had essentially shut down a military offensive on a personal whim. Jill Lepore of The New Yorker wrote that "Isaacson's new biography depicts a man who wields more power than almost any other person on the planet but seems estranged from humanity itself". He really said he’d replace the rear seats with thrusters, and journalists spent time trying to figure out what the fuck that meant.There is one person we do know is under an NDA: a flight attendant who says Musk propositioned her in 2016. A New York Times article confirms Musk doesn’t want Starlink running drones but says nothing about drone subs. Some of his lieutenants insist that he will eventually listen to reason, but Isaacson sees firsthand Musk’s habit of deriding as a saboteur or an idiot anyone who resists him. When Elon gets upset, he lashes out, often at junior people,” Jon McNeill, the former president of Tesla, says.

Isaacson later said in an interview that "Elon is very mercurial, but he never told me not to put anything in the book. What Isaacson’s biography reveals through its personalized lens on Musk’s work with Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, and more is not only what Musk wants, but how and why he plans to do it.Remember when Musk said, “ I might pump but I don’t dump,” and then Tesla sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin? So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. The biography teems with mentions of Musk firing people on the spot, demanding to have things his own way even when it is stupid and expensive, and being unable to tolerate even the slightest dissent.

Maybe so, but there’s actual science fact: brain-machine interfaces had been implanted in humans as early as 2006, something Isaacson doesn’t mention.The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress? You definitely realize you’re a tool being used to achieve this larger objective and that’s great,” says Lucas Hughes, who worked as a financial analyst at SpaceX and was one of the junior people Musk lashed out at. I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said.