Musk biography describes troubled tycoon driven by demons

AFP | Washington 

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

A hotly anticipated biography of Elon Musk describes the turbulent tycoon as a man driven by childhood demons, obsessed with bringing human life to Mars and who demands that staff be “hardcore.”.

“Elon Musk” is written by star biographer Walter Isaacson, a former editor in chief of Time magazine who is best known for his best-selling portrayal of Apple founder Steve Jobs as well as his looks into the lives of Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci.

Some US media outlets got early access to the more than 600-page book ahead of its official global release yesterday, and several excerpts were published in recent days. Hours before its release on Amazon, advance orders had made “Elon Musk” the site’s best-selling book in the United States.

Much of the billionaire’s early life is already well known, with attention focused on his abusive and manipulative father Errol, who Musk despises. The book proposes that Musk is driven by what his former partner Grimes calls the “demon mode”, which, according to Isaacson, makes him highly productive and is common among overachievers.

Many of the account’s unknown nuggets come from a more recent period, when Isaacson shadowed his subject with fly-on-the-wall access into his everyday life. A widely reported passage recounts how Musk personally scuttled a plan by the Ukrainian military to carry out a major operation in Crimea by denying Starlink internet access, drawing a furious response from Kyiv.

But Isaacson was forced to walk back his description of the episode after Musk tweeted that the Starlink access was not yet up and running in Crimea at the time of his decision.