“‘He Is Driven by Demons’: Biographer Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk”, 2023-09-11 (; backlinks):
However, exploring the mind of Musk was “not quite like anything I have ever done before”, he says, as we sit down. “I told him at the beginning [of the project] that if I am going to do this I have to be at your side for two years and I want to talk to you almost every day—I want to be like Boswell doing Doctor Johnson.”
That delivered “a wild ride”, says Isaacson. But it also left him (and everyone else) grappling with big questions: do you have to be half-crazy to be truly innovative, or a genius? And how do you stop a brilliant mind from spinning out of control?
“He told me he thinks he is bipolar—but has never been diagnosed”, Isaacson shouts a few minutes later, as I push the microphone into a wine glass beneath his mouth to contend with the hubbub. “But I think it is more complicated.”…“Musk goes through manic mood swings and deep depressions and risk-seeking highs, and if he didn’t have that risk-seeking maniacal personality he would not be the person who launched EVs and got rockets into orbit.”…But could Musk’s “demons” overwhelm him? Isaacson hedges his bets. “I always think he is going to go off the edge with that maniacal intensity—he is spread far too thin”, he admits, noting that Musk is now in charge of 6 companies: the social media platform X, Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, the Boring Company—and his secretive AI group, xAI. “I thought he would blow Twitter up. But every morning I wake up and see it’s turning into X.com, which is what he always wanted”, Isaacson adds…So did he surprise you? “Yes.” He ticks off the shocks: the intensity of his moods; his obsessive addiction to, and focus on, engineering; the fact that “he became more intensely political, [since] he had not been when I started writing about him”.
…Musk fell into the habit of calling or texting him late at night to reflect on whatever dramas he was engaged in that day. “Elon is very mercurial, but he never told me not to put anything in the book.”…this robotic analysis was interspersed with wild mood swings. “In front of me he would go into multiple Elon Musk personalities. There are times he gets really dark and he goes into what Grimes [the Canadian singer who is Musk’s on-off girlfriend] calls ‘demon mode’.” He will become angry. “But then when he snaps out he will hardly remember what he did in demon mode and turns from Dr Jekyll into Mr Hyde.” Yikes.
Why? In a recent New Yorker profile of Musk, the writer Ronan Farrow suggested that excessive ketamine use might explain his volatility. But Isaacson disagrees: “I don’t think it’s a medication issue—he has been this way for a long, long time.” Instead, he cites the “pain of his childhood”: Musk grew up amid violence in apartheid-era South Africa, and had a difficult relationship with his father; he was left “feeling like an outsider” and haunted by a need to prove himself. “He is driven by demons”, Isaacson calmly notes—and then points out that this is not so unusual since many of the brilliant innovators he has previously studied were also haunted by feeling marginalized, whether it was the Jewish Einstein in early 20th-century Germany or the female Doudna operating in a male scientific world, or the illegitimate Leonardo. [both Einstein & Leonardo da Vinci have long been speculated to have been bipolar; Doudna has not, but is a far lesser figure (Isaacson’s choice of her to do a biography notwithstanding)]
…“In 2021, I was kicking around looking for my next book, and a lot of friends, including Mike Bloomberg, said I should do Elon”, Isaacson explains. “So someone set up a phone call with him and we talked for an hour and a half, and I told him that if I do this I need total access, and you have absolutely no control over the book. None.”
Did he accept that? Musk is (in)famously obsessive about controlling even the small details of his life. Isaacson nods. “He just said “OK!” Then he asked me if I minded if he told other people [about the book] and, of course, I said no.” Then, a few minutes later, Isaacson met up with friends who told him that Musk had dispatched a tweet—even during the phone call—announcing that Isaacson would be his biographer. Isaacson was shocked. “It was the first example [I saw] of him being totally impetuous.”
Why did Musk agree? “He loves history and he has a big enough ego that he thinks of himself as a historical figure—and he has a desire to surprise people with his openness and brutal honesty”, Isaacson says. Had Musk done his research before agreeing, by reading Isaacson’s searing biography of Jobs (which Jobs’ family disliked)? “No.”
…But then “everything was going so well that [Musk] became uncomfortable”, Isaacson says. “He doesn’t like things when they are going well. He is addicted to drama.” So, perhaps out of boredom, Musk hatched a plan to take over Twitter. “When I heard that, I knew I would have a rough ride [as his biographer]”, Isaacson notes. “I thought it was insane—Musk doesn’t have empathy and so Twitter was not a good fit for him.”