Every day, news outlets feature Elon Musk and his activities with DOGE, (the Department of Government Efficiency). Musk has been leading a charge against wasteful government spending.
It has been a wild and disruptive ride and I wanted to know more about this strange man who has Donald Trump eating out of his hand.
President Donald Trump speaks as he is joined by Elon Musk, and his son X Æ A-Xii, in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington. (Photo via AP Photo/Alex Brandon.)
A friend loaned me a copy of “Elon Musk” written by distinguished author Walter Isaacson and published in 2023 with 600 plus pages of Musk’s fascinating and controversial life.
The book’s publisher described the project:
“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. The result is the revealing inside story, filled with amazing tales of triumphs and turmoil, that addresses a central question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?”
At the end of the book, on pages 614-15, Isaacson wrote the following about Musk:
“Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior, his callousness, his recklessness?
The times he’s an asshole? The answer is no, of course not. One can admire a person’s good traits and decry the bad ones.
But it’s also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth. As Shakespeare teaches us, all heroes have flaws, some tragic, some conquered, and those we cast as villains can be complex. Even the best people, he wrote, are ‘molded out of faults.’
During [a rocket] launch week, [Musk’s close friend] Antonio Gracias and some other friends talked to Musk about the need to restrain his impetuous and destructive instincts. If he was going to lead a new era of space exploration, they said, he needed to be more elevated, to be above the fray politically. They recalled the time when Gracias made him put his phone in a hotel safe overnight, with Gracias punching in the code so Musk couldn’t get it out to tweet during the wee hours; Musk woke up at 3:00 a.m. and summoned hotel security to open the safe. After the launch he displayed a touch of self-awareness. ‘I’ve shot myself in the foot so often I ought to buy some Kevlar boots,’ he joked. ‘Perhaps, he ruminated, Twitter should have an impulse-control delay button.’”
It was a pleasing concept: an impulse-control button that could diffuse Musk’s tweets as well as all of his dark impulsive actions and the demon-mode eruptions that leave rubble in his wake. But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound?
Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged? Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic.
They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.”
D.G. Martin, a lawyer, retired as UNC system vice president for public affairs in 1997. He hosted PBC-NC’s “North Carolina Bookwatch,” for more than 20 years.
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You went easier on him than I would. I read the book soon after it came out. I have a 2021 Model 3 which I have enjoyed immensely. I’ve struggled with what to think. But, Elon Musk contributed more that a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump back into the White House. For me, that is a moral failing of no return.