The Many Lives Of Elon Musk

Walter Isaacson's Highly Anticipated Biography Of Elon Musk Successfully Deconstructs The Life Of The Tesla Founder, From His Violence-ridden Childhood In Apartheid-torn South Africa, To His Rise To Fame As One Of The World's Most Famous Tech Entrepreneurs

- ARNAV DAS SHARMA

ELON MUSK IS AN ENIGMA. One would not be wrong to construe this as a clichéd sentence. But then, one way to understand a cliché is to see it as a truth that is tired of repeating itself. Walter Isaacson’s bombshell biography of Musk is precisely this: a deeply reported book that lays bare the facts of Musk’s life. But it is also a work haunted by questions.

From the beginning, we are not shown a man we know today: the mercurial Co-founder of Tesla, or the man who, by a snap of his fingers, bought the microblogging behemoth Twitter and transformed it into X, and all that would come later. Instead, in the opening pages of Isaacson’s magnum opus, Musk is a frightened kid growing up in violence-ridden apartheid-torn South Africa, who from the very start, “knew pain”, but also knew how to survive it.

This cycle of pain and survival is a theme tattooed all over the book. But what kind of pain, one might curiously ask. Two kinds, actually. On the one hand, we see Musk as a boy trying desperately to fit in, but failing. “He was the youngest and smallest student in his class,” Isaacson writes, adding that Musk had difficulty picking up social cues. A boy who was bullied mercilessly in school, beaten up, bloodied. In fact, in a candid confession, Musk tells Isaacson, “If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you [for] the rest of your life.”