Elon Musk (PB) - C-format

Shortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award, chosen as a Book of the Year by Apple, Amazon, The Times and Financial Times, a New York Times and Sunday Times non-fiction bestseller. From the author of Steve Jobs and other bestselling biographies, this is the astonishingly intimate story of Elon Musk, the most fascinating and controversial innovator of our era - a rule-breaking visionary who helped to lead the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration, and artificial intelligence. When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist, whose impact on his psyche would linger. He developed into a tough yet vulnerable man-child, prone to abrupt Jekyll-and-Hyde mood swings, with an exceedingly high tolerance for risk, a craving for drama, an epic sense of mission, and a maniacal intensity that was callous and at times destructive. At the beginning of 2022 - after a year marked by SpaceX launching thirty-one rockets into orbit, Tesla selling a million cars, and him becoming the richest man on earth - Musk spoke ruefully about his compulsion to stir up dramas. Even as he said it, he was secretly buying up shares of Twitter, the world's ultimate playground. Over the years, his mind went back to being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground. 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 the question: are the demons that drive Musk also what it takes to drive innovation and progress?