A REVERSE ENGINEERED REVIEW OF ELON MUSK BY WALTER ISAACSON (2023)
In 1978 or so, when flying from London to Auckland, I had bought at Heathrow Airport a cheap little computer (I think it was an MK14) for my wife’s little brother. He wasn’t terribly interested so I assembled it for him and programmed it for text and some simple games. Coding was done by copying the code from the manual. It seemed a very laborious and boring process with endless lines of command code like GOTO. At the time it seemed to be a strange contradiction to instruct a machine minute step by step by step to do something very simple, like write text - coding the letters of the alphabet when a typewriter could do it with just one click per letter. What was the point? Obviously I missed the point. My own first computer was the Apple Macintosh. No coding required. Some poor software engineering bugger had done it already. Again, I missed the point and missed the bus altogether.
Elon Musk was fascinated by coding even as a teenager. I too know someone who loves coding. Good on them (choice of pronouns to be discussed later). Like connecting oceanographic satellite data with maps to show fishermen where the best chances are today for catching the big one. Musk had this idea long ago when he and his brother developed Zip2, i.e. connecting business directory data with maps. A revolutionary idea? Clicking on the business address and a map pops up with the location in question. Before you had to consult a map and locate the address yourself. Very labour intensive!
Walter Isaacson who describes the life of Elon Musk up until April 2023 in some 95 episodes does not really tell us how such an idea can come about, given that this idea launched Musk into the stratosphere of entrepreneurial stardom. Was it random selection? Fate? Karma? Genius? Isaacson goes mainly for the latter, attributing Musk’s stellar success to a complex character make-up that makes Musk a unique human being who is crazy enough to want to change the world (these are, more or less, the famous last words of his book on Elon Musk). Not that Isaacson doesn’t let rip with a few criticisms, like Elon being an unhinged asshole at times but, alas, Musk is a great innovator, so we just have to suck it up. Isaacson who has written biographies of luminaries such as Einstein, da Vinci, Jobs and Kissinger – what a strange collection is this – not that I have read any of them – is obviously well versed in his metier, and one can only assume that he has to say good things about them all, Kissinger included. Having written a biography on Noam Chomsky (2006) myself, I found it hard to give credence to any of his detractors (some more unhinged than others) but studiously trying to avoid being accused of writing a hagiography by keeping a critical stance when justified. Being obviously very sympathetic to Chomsky’s political and linguistic orientation on what I assume to be purely rational grounds, it would be inconceivable to do a nasty hatchet job. Those who do probably shouldn’t be called biographers. There are exceptions, of course, like all those who have written, deservedly, totally negative biographies of Hitler and Co.
I do not know what Isaacson’s political leaning are (he does attach labels like ‘left’ and ‘right’ to the various characters in the book but never to Musk himself when it seems quite evident that Musk is now on the far-right MAGA scale) but I assume that he himself is centre-right, being sympathetic to the anti-woke Musk ideology. Having been given Musk’s approval to shadow him for two years, Isaacson obviously had a great opportunity to get to know his subject in a way few others could have done.
Given Elon’s conflicted upbringing, there is the temptation to engage in some layman’s psychoanalysis, and Isaacson falls for it in a big way. Is Elon’s psychological make-up a consequence of his father Errol’s tendency towards a very nasty kind of behaviour towards his own children? Errol being a racist, sexist wannabe MAGA capitalist who in his native South-Africa leads a chaotic life of ups and downs, he has his moments of an engineer’s lucidity and recognises the entrepreneurial potentials of Elon and Kimbal, giving them some $28,000 for their Zip2 venture (their mother Maye gives them $10,000), even though they had escaped from his clutches to California. Errol having two children with his adopted daughter sounds like Woody Allen, raising the heckles of Elon and the rest of his family, and Elon finally cutting off his financial support for his father. Such moral outrage sounds a bit strange when considering Elon’s shenanigans with fathering children, like his sperm-donated twins with Shivon Zilis, one of his top managers. To Elon’s credit, he does like children in general (as guarantors of human consciousness) and his children in particular, even when one of them (Xavier) becomes Jenna and a hardcore communist on top, causing Elon much emotional pain as to choice of pronouns and becoming number one class enemy for his son/daughter/whatever. To repent, Elon even sells some of his luxury estates and moves into a little house in Austin, near his rocket launchpads. Still, as the world’s richest man he is unable to shake off his ability to spread largesse wherever he goes. Using his private jets like a busy urban salesman uses taxis might be considered a contradiction in his aim to end fossil fuels via his electric Tesla cars.
Getting back to how and possibly why it all started via Zip2, the breakthrough came via Mohr Davidow Ventures to invest $3 million. Bill Davidow apparently ‘loved’ the sales pitch by the Musk brothers. That’s all Isaacson tells us. It would have been interesting why he loved it, for this is the single most important stepping stone for the Musk success story. We learn from Davidow’s website that he is an electrical engineer and a venture capitalist who by now sits on every conceivable corporate board in the US – which doesn’t really explain either why he decided to invest in the Musks’ enterprise. As Kimbal explains, interactively linking addresses with maps is commonplace nowadays but in 1996 this was quite amazing. So, maybe Davidow must have thought the same. Or was it just an impulse? A kind of engineer-to-engineer brainwave? To trump up $3 million and $30,000 for a car each for Elon and Kimbal seems ludicrous. Elon promptly bought a 1967 Jaguar E-type. Quite a step up from the $500 car that his dad had bought him together with the $28,000 grant. I suppose venture capitalism is not a new thing – it is the very nature of capitalism – but the intensity of it in Silicon Valley broke all records. You are betting against the odds but when you strike the jackpot that guarantees you 40% or more of the stratospheric company stock, you are laughing all the way to the bank. When after only four years Zip2 was sold for a staggering $307 million, Davidow and his venture company (and partners) certainly laughed all the way, and so did Elon with his share of $22 million (and poor old Kimbal with only $15 million). Elon’s bank account went from $5,000 to $22,005,000.
If I win $22 million in Lotto tomorrow, what would I do? Like Elon, I would buy a nice condo, but would I buy a $1 million McLaren F1 sports car? Just for the hell of it? To show off to my poor friends or is this the way to make new rich friends (like Peter Thiel and discard the old poor ones)? How can you psychoanalyse such a process? Isaacson suggests that Elon would go on to have a conflicted relationship with wealth. What on earth is that supposed to mean? Apparently Elon as a new kind of celebrity was interviewed on CNN and said he wanted to be on the cover of Rolling Stone. Sounds like that song by Dr Hook … wanna show my picture to my mum! Elon more likely would want to show his picture to his dad (he did give $300,000 to his dad but gave a million to his mum).
Having won Lotto, would I become addicted to winning? Invest my remaining 19 million or so to buy more tickets? There is a saying that only the first million is hard to get but then the millions will multiply like rabbits. Once you are a high roller you are on a roll, so to speak, and you can only lose if you’re a complete idiot (and play Russian Roulette).
“What matters to me is winning … it’s probably rooted in some very disturbing psychoanalytical black hole or neural short circuit” says Elon when justifying his habit to fire people who might stand in his winning ways. Being addicted to winning is indeed a strange obsessive compulsion, as correctly self-diagnosed by Elon. Still, the winning goes on and on, what with Paypal and our friend Peter Thiel – I say this because I reside in New Zealand as a permanent resident while Peter Thiel bought his NZ citizenship and is forever in the local news for wanting to build a survivalist bunker disguised as a lodge in one of New Zealand’s most scenic spots, only to be thwarted by bloody-minded conservationists who get court injunctions on the grounds of such ugly buildings being incompatible with the local environment – and whatever business opportunities come along the way (Space X, Tesla, Boring Company, Neuralink, X.AI). It is quite tedious to read all the ins and outs (intermittent, weird family/lover sagas included), and the whole Twitter/X saga could have been written up as one episode instead of the 10 or so, detailing every sorry aspect of ‘let that sink in’.
One may at this juncture identify another enduring trait of Elon Musk, namely that he has a knack for correctly identifying the causes of any problem (mainly of the engineering sort though) but then arriving at the completely wrong solutions to the problem. In terms of wrong engineering solutions that tend to blow things up, like his rockets, the consequences are not that bad if he can learn from his mistakes and remedy them (e.g. too much automation in the Tesla factories is a problem and is eventually fixed by manual labour). In terms of his financial meltdowns, gambling too close to the edge, it is only good fortune (or call it luck) that saves him in last minute deals (e.g. the Twitter saga may yet cost him dearly). In terms of political and economic ideology (human engineering) he has correctly identified many a problem (e.g. the Biden/Harris inflated bureaucracies that back up incompetent corporations with lucrative government contracts, as in the space industry) but then arrives at the totally wrong solution, namely the Trump MAGA machinations that defy any rational solutions other than Musk’s favourite processes of ‘delete, delete, delete’ any regulation that is not immediately supported by the laws of physics. To put it in the starkest terms possible, Hitler and Co. correctly identified the problem that the struggling German capitalism at the time was to some degree managed by a cabal of Jewish entrepreneurs and bankers, but the ‘final solution’ was of course totally insane, namely the ‘deletion’ of the Jewish people in total. The extreme right-wing pronouncements in the USA and elsewhere today are forever echoing chambers of fascism. When Musk in a moment of such insanity shared a tweet that ‘Jews hate white people’ he revealed himself as the wolf in sheep’s clothing, and now that he successfully bankrolled the Trump campaign, he can and probably will influence the Trump administration by ‘deleting’ all and sundry regulations and laws that interfere with solutions that in engineering terms value the bare minimum, the most cost-effective, and to hell with the consequences. The blow-ups due to too much deletion will cause enormous suffering, e.g. as in the proposed mass deportations of illegal immigrants in the US. While Musk is, to his credit, always ready to reconsider and rectify too much deletion, the demons he is supporting will not. They will always go down the road to the final solution.
Elon Musk is also correct in identifying the ultimate problem humanity faces: the survival of human consciousness (as he calls it). Human life on earth seems to go down the gurgler, so what is the solution? Colonise Mars. Interplanetary travel for Musk is a reality, not science fiction. His obsession to get his Starships ready for take-off seems a very sad response to what is happening on planet earth, namely, to simply escape by ferrying a few thousand select humanoids to Mars, from where they can look back at the nuclear winter lasting for some 20,000 years. This is insane. Surely Elon Musk can do better than that. He must work on a solution for the survival of the human species on earth. Find a way to stop wars and climate destruction. Stop virtual hitchhiking in the galaxies, take a trip along Route 66 and find the ‘answer to everything’. I don’t mind if he becomes a benevolent two-headed CEO/president/dictator of Earth Ltd., if that’s what it takes.
Of course, Isaacson doesn’t quite see it this way, being satisfied that Elon Musk is ‘crazy’ enough to change the world for the better, even though most of the evidence presented in this hefty volume (and subsequent events since 2023) points to a disaster of sorts. Mechanical and electric/electronic engineering solutions have often been effective in the short term (and Musk is a master of it) but applying AI solutions to questions of ‘free speech’ (e.g. algorithmic moderation on X) are doomed to failure even in the short term. Software engineering is a different kettle of fish, and writing code is more fiction than fact. Elon himself spends endless hours rewriting ‘fucking stupid code’ written by his fucking stupid idiot coders.
Which brings me to both lingo and the question of stupidity. Elon’s ‘idiot index’ and ‘algorithm (sic)’ as mantras for correct thinking are already legendary. If the idiot index is high or you do not follow the ‘algorithm’ you’re a fucking idiot to be fired on the spot. Musk excels in what he calls ‘hardcore’ feedback, peppered with the f-word, sounding either like a working-class jock or like an aristocratic asshole. Empathy for him is a woke disease. The effects on polite middle-class jokers can be quite devastating. Sure, from a rational, engineering point of view, it can be frustrating if someone proposes a solution that is evidently wrong, or worse if someone talks patent nonsense, but to pronounce such human behaviour as ‘stupidity/idiocy’ to the face of the presumed idiot, is a very poor solution for the problem. As the famous saying goes, there is no law against stupidity, neither in natural nor human-made laws, although in the latter case, maybe, there should be one. Elon having been denigrated in this way by his father, in demeaning language, Isaacson suggests that Elon’s own choice of language is merely a trait of his upbringing, the son becoming his father, mitigated by the fact that Elon is anything but stupid in terms of engineering. When Elon makes an engineering mistake he will own it, and no doubt call himself a fucking idiot. When Elon makes a big (non-engineering) mistake that he doesn’t own up to (as in his choice of bankrolling Trump to accelerate the climate crisis) he will call his accusers fucking idiots, quickly disseminated on his X account. When even good people (as endorsed in the first place by Musk) quit his employment because they cannot stand the ruthless office politics, like Yoel Roth, Musk comes down on them like a ton of bricks, tweeting that Roth might condone paedophilia amongst other defamatory allegations, to the effect that Roth was viciously harassed, and since his address had been published, he had to sell his home and move to escape such unwarranted persecution.
The human cost of Musk’s ruthless application of his idiot index is incalculable since the victims are the people without a history, falling by the wayside as irrelevant sideshows. Deserved or undeserved, this is not the way to treat human beings. As Leonard Cohen’s song lyric painted a bleak picture with the line ‘… the homicidal bitchin' that goes down in every kitchen to determine who will serve and who will eat’, the few winners and many losers live in different worlds, and never the twain shall meet. Isaacson’s attempt to portray the greatest winner of them all is an essential failure in perspective, and I suppose it’s not really his fault that he can only look up and never down. As he says, almost as a badge of bookish honour, Elon didn’t read the draft and probably never will read the finished book, because Elon knows Elon much better than Isaacson ever will, so why waste time to read 95 episodes of his own life when he knows damn well that any episodic drama about his deluded life will only be of interest to himself when he finally reaches Mars.
Spending his billions on Starships and associated enterprises, Elon Musk will go down history as a man who wanted to be an immortal Martian, only to find out that immortality is like planting a seed in the desert of time (a line from Elsbeth Huxley’s The Flame Trees of Thika). Musk’s fellow travellers, well documented in Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk, may, too, ride the wave of contemporary history (check who else got posts in Trump’s administration), only to drift away as coded data, through the dusty, interstellar clouds of the universe.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/06/elon-musk-israel-trump-gaza-hostage-deal
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/dec/06/elon-musk-rbg-pac-abortion
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/07/campaign-spending-crypto-tech-influence
https://www.davidow.com/about/
