Electric dreams

New biography charts Elon Musk's road trip from brilliant but benign tech bro to right-wing political influencer.

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Faiz Siddiqui's new book on Elon Musk forms part of an expanding wave of critical appraisal of the tech entrepreneur, nominal richest person in the world and self-appointed "first buddy" of the re-elected Donald Trump. The snap reaction from a public that understood Musk as a brilliant and conventionally apolitical Silicon Valley figure has often been to ask: what happened to him? As Musk's behaviour has become more extreme, and his political leanings more explicit, those questions have deepened and reached further back: was he always like this, and what responsibility sits with those who fuel his myth? Hubris Maximus aims to document and analyse how Musk's empire at its greatest extent contained the seeds of his overreach and radicalisation. It takes a relatively recent timeframe with its narrative, beginning in 2017, when Musk first proposed the terms of his stratospheric compensation deal at Tesla motors - a deal that would reward him for continually boosting the electric car company's market capitalisation by handing him stock options worth hundreds of times above the nearest tech executive's pay packet.