Elon Musk: by Walter Isaacson

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As awesome as it was, Musk had a sobering realization. The Mercury program had accomplished similar feats fifty years earlier, before either he or Obama had been born. America was just catching up with its older self." 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.” At first these endeavors were rather independent, but eventually Musk would tie them all together, along with a new company he founded called xAI, to pursue the goal of artificial general intelligence.

Having written interesting and riveting biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, Steve Jobs and Jennifer Doudna to name a few, perhaps Walter Isaacson was the perfect person to attempt to write the compelling story of one of our most brilliant innovators and engineers that has transformed the world, particularly in the realm of space exploration, mass production of electric cars designed to combat adverse changes in our earth caused by climate change, and in the field of artificial intelligence. This brilliant man-child, prone to mood changes which would immediately But despite its flaws, there is much to enjoy in this dissection of Musks's conspicuously captivating life. Isaacson does a nice job reviewing Musk's troubled childhood, his turbulent relationship with his father (whose own list of foibles is remarkable) and his inability to foster healthy long-term relationships. And the list of people Isaacson managed to interview "on the record" is impressive. a b Tett, Gillian (September 11, 2023). " 'He is driven by demons': biographer Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk". Financial Times. Archived from the original on September 12, 2023 . Retrieved September 14, 2023. Isaacson, to write about one person, managed to interview 126 people. As someone who also writes books, I'm quite envious of Isaacson's firsthand resources. These kinds of lists characterize Elon well, and help us understand his mind better. Books that influenced him, such as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, also illuminate his preferences. I love the explanations of his worldview played out in-scene, throughout his companies and personal interactions, like multiplayer games of Polytopia against Grimes or Kimbal.No single individual in last 100 years, perhaps, did change things more for "humanity as a macro". "Elon Musk" is the best way to understand him and is a brilliant, captivating read. The grand theme of the book, to me, was as Elon was quoted - "This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers." Much of the info is also not new/more detailed if you’ve seen many interviews on YouTube, just more organized. But I guess that’s the value of the book, making already available information more accessible to those that weren’t interested in keeping up with Musk stuff. Still I wonder, where is the 2 years worth of insights? Book is too short for a man like Elon imo. As it's widely known, the past ten years have been incredibly significant for Elon Musk's business, with many remarkable stories unfolding during this decade. The New York Times critic Jennifer Szalai wrote, "Isaacson [...] is a patient chronicler of obsession; in the case of Musk, he can occasionally seem too patient." [10]

He admitted that he was starting off way behind OpenAI in creating a chatbot that could give natural-language -responses to questions. But Tesla’s work on self-driving cars and Optimus the robot put it way ahead in creating the type of AI needed to navigate in the physical world. This meant that his engineers were actually ahead of OpenAI in creating full-fledged artificial general intelligence, which requires both abilities. “Tesla’s real-world AI is underrated,” he said. “Imagine if Tesla and OpenAI had to swap tasks. They would have to make self-driving, and we would have to make large-language-model chatbots. Who wins? We do.” Humanlike robot "Optimus" is one of many AI-related projects launched by Musk. Costfoto/NurPhoto/ReutersMusk also has a sense of his own limitations, matter-of-factly describing his own Asperger’s syndrome – not officially diagnosed but presumed by him and his associates – and constantly sighing to Isaacson about his own propensity to shoot himself in the foot: “I should wear Kevlar boots.” Yet the most useful fact we learn here about Musk’s personality is that he’s a dark and relentless ironist. He often says things for effect, and no one around him can quite tell whether or not he’s joking. It’s pretty good. I really like Isaacson as a writer, he does a good job of keeping this reasonable. I think the limits of this book are due to the nature of the subject, and the sort of shifting sand on which it was written. Grady, Constance (September 13, 2023). "The big Elon Musk biography asks all the wrong questions". Vox . Retrieved October 1, 2023. Ukraine: Musk defends Starlink decision on Crimea strike". Deutsche Welle. September 9, 2023 . Retrieved October 1, 2023.

I know the cost chart down to the smallest part," Hughes said quietly. "I just don't know the cost of the raw materials of those parts." Combined Print & E-Book Nonfiction". The New York Times. October 1, 2023 . Retrieved September 23, 2023. We should ask each of them to see if they can get the cost of their part down by eighty percent," Musk suggested, "and if they can't, we should consider asking them to step aside if someone else might be able to do so." To me, it sounds like he had a regular childhood with bad times here and there mostly as a result of toxic masculinity than deprivation or abusiveness like you usually think of when you’re told someone has had a hard childhood. His father, however, was truly a piece of work, and Elon is more alike to him than anyone in his circle wants to admit.

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century, 2021 nonfiction book about Musk's management of Tesla

In March 2023, OpenAI released GPT-4 to the public. Google then released a rival chatbot named Bard. The stage was thus set for a competition between OpenAI-Microsoft and DeepMind-Google to create products that could chat with humans in a natural way and perform an endless array of text-based intellectual tasks. Lepore, Jill (September 11, 2023). "How Elon Musk Went from Superhero to Supervillain". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on September 13, 2023 . Retrieved September 14, 2023. After the burst of violence in the introduction, we move into more familiar territory, led on by Isaacson’s brisk, propulsive prose: Musk is a spacy, lonely outsider who is bright but has trouble making friends. He disappears into video games and science fiction and soon dreams of horizons far beyond his hometown, and sets out to North America with an entrepreneurial spirit in tow. He graduates with a dual degree in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, gets accepted into a PhD program at Stanford, but decides instead to set out into the buzzing startup scene of Silicon Valley. We start this book in his childhood in South Africa and follow him through his difficulties with his father, his move to the United States, and several tumultuous businesses and relationships. He certainly did not have his wealth and success handed to him, but earned it through a combination of being brilliant and being an asshole.We are looking at some of the techniques that automakers use to keep these costs down," Hughes continued. He also had a slide that showed how they were applying Musk's algorithm to each of the parts. There were columns that showed what requirements had been questioned, what parts had been deleted, and the name of the specific person in charge of each component. Is Elon a free speech champion as he claims? Mmm, let me copy Isaacson’s method for a bit and relay to you an incident between him and Bezos (bold is mine): Musk's personality is reflected in detail, without sugar-coating, without erecting him a monument; there are shining parts, but there are also gloomy shadows A: That’s an odd question. Considering the close proximity of Nolan's new movie release and the publication of Musk's book, both of which are biographies of prominent figures, we may take this opportunity to compare the writing styles of different authors. No biography can or should be totally comprehensive, but it’s pretty easy to conclude which sorts of topics and conversations Isaacson decided it would be best to avoid altogether. I started “Elon Musk” wondering if the world needed another book positioning Musk as a great man — Ashlee Vance’s book of the same title ably covered many of the same bases — and finished thinking it’s time to retire the entire genre of “great innovator” biographies, period.