The biggest ideas and pettiest rages in Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk biography
Walter Isaacson's newest book, "Elon Musk," about the temperamental corporate executive who runs Tesla, SpaceX and the company formerly known as Twitter, goes on sale this week.
Musk is already one of the most well known and extensively covered leaders in American corporate life (and one of its most unavoidable figures on the service he has renamed X). Isaacson's biography is a Musk agonistes: a portrait of a (largely) self-made, emotionally volatile entrepreneur from South Africa who has a tortured relationship with his father and an addiction to crises of the self-inflicted variety.
Musk is tormented, erratic and rude, over and over again
Musk's moods are variously described as cycling through "light and dark, intense and goofy, detached and emotional, with occasional plunges into what people around him call 'demon mode'"; he's "childlike, almost stunted," "a drama magnet," "not bred for domestic tranquility"; he has "a craving for storm and drama" and "erratic emotional oscillations." Multiple people describe him as having . At one point, Musk calls himself bipolar. His volatile emotional states are the biggest constant in a book that zigzags from cars to rockets, tunneling to
