The Journalist and the Billionaire

Walter Isaacson is a man with a golden rolodex, impeccable Establishment credentials, and world-class schmoozing skills. Now he has written a biography of Elon Musk, who despises all those things.

- By Shawn McCreesh. Photograph by Dan Winters

IT'S A SATURDAY NIGHT in August, and Walter Isaacson is sitting in the back of Lilette, a restaurant on Magazine Street in his hometown of New Orleans, swizzling a Sazerac. "The question for a biographer," he tells me, holding forth a little, "is to show how the demons of a person are totally connected to the drive that gets their rockets to orbit. People who are driven by demons get shit done."

Isaacson was the editor of Time magazine in the 1990s, a decade or so before the internet wrecked the print party. He was running CNN when 9/11 happened and then landed in 2003 at the Aspen Institute, where, for 14 years, he was the impresario of its thought-leader confabs. But he's long had a side hustle writing biographies of Great Men: Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci-as well as one Great Woman, biochemist Jennifer Doudna.

On September 12, Isaacson's latest will be published, about Elon Musk, a man many take to be something of a demon himself-erratic, vindictive, and exhibiting little impulse control. His moods can have far-reaching implications for, say, the Ukrainian army, which depends on his Starlink satellites to fight Russia. Many others hail him as a demigod trying to get humanity to Mars while battling evil AI and dating many hot babes in the process. But if you're somewhere in between, trying to figure out if he is becoming a Bond villain or still that Tony Stark-like figure many people assume him to be, Isaacson's book is not designed to help you sort it out.