Kimbal Musk, Elon’s brother and sometimes business partner, is quoted as saying, “This is the wrong person for you. Musk's humour – he took the 'w' out of the Twitter sign in San Francisco because 'tit' is so inherently funny – has 'many levels'. The problem is the man is Elon Musk, a guy who in 2011 promised to get us to space in just three years. For two years, Isaacson shadowed Musk, attended his meetings, walked his factories with him, and spent hours interviewing him, his family, friends, coworkers, and adversaries. It debuted at number one on The New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for the week ending September 16, 2023.

One of the greatest biographers in America has written a massive book about the richest man in the world. With Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson offers both an engaging chronicle of his subject’s busy life so far and some compelling answers.Over the years, whenever he was in a dark place, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. The biography teems with mentions of Musk firing people on the spot, demanding to have things his own way even when it is stupid and expensive, and being unable to tolerate even the slightest dissent. There is a Financial Times story that confirms some Starlink outages during a Ukrainian push against the Russians, but it says nothing about drone subs or washing ashore harmlessly. I need to shift my mindset away from being in crisis mode, which it has been for about fourteen years now, or arguably most of my life,” he said. Similarly, Amber Heard is described by Kimbal as “so toxic,” by Grimes as “chaotic evil,” and by Musk’s chief of staff as “the Joker in Batman… She thrives on destabilizing everything.

Jill Lepore of The New Yorker wrote that "Isaacson's new biography depicts a man who wields more power than almost any other person on the planet but seems estranged from humanity itself".

Musk’s word was good enough for him — and so, when Musk contested the characterization, Isaacson rolled over. A New York Times article confirms Musk doesn’t want Starlink running drones but says nothing about drone subs. The portrait that emerges is one that resembles a hard-charging, frequently alienating Gilded Age-style captain of industry, with a particular fixation on AI that ties everything together. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. But it’s undeniable that he’s spent decades palling around with libertarian-to-far-right types (most famously Peter Thiel and David Sacks, who is inexplicably described as “not rigidly partisan” despite coauthoring a noxious book with Thiel that, among other things, suggested date rape wasn’t real).