Real People/Real Stories: “Elon Musk” (WL)

Real People/Real Stories meets the third Thursday of each month to explore the best in nonfiction history, biography, science, nature, and the arts. This month’s title is Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson.

Elon Musk is one of the most innovative and successful entrepreneurs working today, yet he remains a controversial figure. In this bestseller, renowned biographer Walter Isaacson explores the private and professional life of this unique and fascinating man.

“Isaacson has gathered information from the man’s admirers and critics. He lays all of it out…. The book is bursting with stories…. A deeply engrossing tale of a spectacular American innovator.” — New York Journal of Books “One of the greatest biographers in America has written a massive book about the richest man in the world. This fast-paced biography, based on more than a hundred interviews…[is] a head-spinning tale about a vain, brilliant, sometimes cruel figure whose ambitions are actively shaping the future of human life.”—Ron Charles on CBS Sunday Morning

“Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, published Monday, delivers as promised — a comprehensive, deeply reported chronicle of the world-shaping tech mogul’s life, a twin to the author’s similarly thick 2011 biography of Steve Jobs. Details ranging from the personally salacious to the geopolitically volatile have already made the rounds — the rare example of a major book publication causing a news cycle in its own right…What Isaacson’s biography reveals through its personalized lens on Musk’s work with Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, and more is not only what Musk wants, but how and why he plans to do it. The portrait that emerges is one that resembles a hard-charging, frequently alienating Gilded Age-style captain of industry, with a particular fixation on AI that ties everything together…. Isaacson’s book is like a decoder ring, tying the mercurial Musk’s various obsessions into a coherent worldview with a startlingly concrete goal at its center.” — Politico