Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk’s Boswell, Tells the “Tale of an Impulsive, Dark, but Also Risk-Taking Dude”

There are biographies that are biographies and there are biographies that are major news events in and of themselves. Walter Isaacson’s new book, Elon Musk, falls into the latter category. That’s not just because Isaacson, who formerly edited Time, ran CNN, and served as president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, is famous for tomes on titans like Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs. It also has a lot to do with the fact that Elon Musk, the Tesla/SpaceX CEO and Twitter—sorry, X—owner, is presently one of the world’s most polarizing and controversial figures, as well as the richest.

Accordingly, Isaacson has already made plenty of news with a steady cadence of excerpts that have trickled out over the past week. The most incendiary of these gained traction from a CNN story that reported, based on a passage from the book, that Musk “secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet.”

The revelation set off a whole series of fireworks and alarm bells. By Sunday, Jake Tapper was grilling Secretary of State Antony Blinken about whether he’s “concerned that Musk is apparently conducting his own diplomatic outreach to the Russian government.” Granted, the full section in the book about the Starlink episode (chapter 70, page 428, if you want to jump right there once it hits shelves Tuesday) is a bit more complex than what was in the initial CNN piece, which Musk pushed back on. “CNN missed the nuances, and Musk understands the story the way I have it in the book,” Isaacson told me when we spoke over Zoom this past Friday. The author further clarified the matter to New York’s Shawn McCreesh, whose great Isaacson profile is hot off the presses: “I realized that I misinterpreted him…when he told me he was not allowing Starlink to be used during the attack. I thought he had just made that decision. In fact, he was simply adhering to a policy he had previously implemented. So I posted a correction” on X. 

In any case, Isaacson and I had lots more to talk about than Elon and Ukraine. (Of course I wanted Isaacson’s thoughts about the future of CNN.) Read it all in the condensed and edited transcript below.

Vanity Fair: Let’s start with Elon going to war with the Anti-Defamation League. A lot of people think it’s over the top, dangerous, and of course hypocritical in terms of his free speech crusade. Why does he do things like this?

Walter Isaacson: Let me just agree with what you said: it’s over the top, it’s dangerous, and it’s hypocritical. In the book, you see an addiction to late-night tweets when his mind is in a very dark place. Whether it’s calling some cave explorer in Thailand a pedophile or retweeting something about Paul Pelosi, he does reckless and dangerous tweets. When one of his friends said, alright, you’re in a dark space, I’m going to take your phone and put it into a hotel-room safe, Musk, at three in the morning, calls security at the hotel and makes him open the safe. So there’s an addiction to tweeting, which is one reason he’s always been fascinated with the company.

He just can’t help himself is the short answer.

This past New Year’s Eve, he and his family are sitting around and saying, what do you regret most for the year? He says, I keep shooting myself in the foot, I need Kevlar boots. He’s somewhat self-aware, but the problem is, there’s not one Elon Musk. There are multiple Elon Musk personalities and demons dancing around in his head. There’ll be times when he’s very self-aware and has good intentions, and there’ll be times he gets in demon mode and he is very dark, and you get some of these tweets coming out. As Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, who’s one of his girlfriends, says, demon mode’s very dangerous to be around. It’s really awful. But sometimes, it’s demon mode that gets shit done. So the book tries to take you on this tale of an impulsive, dark, but also risk-taking dude.

How did the book come about?

We had crossed paths many times, including at a Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, and at one point, a mutual acquaintance, Antonio Gracias said, you really should do Musk. At the time, he had just become the richest person on the planet. He was “Person of the Year” of Time magazine. He had taken Tesla from the brink of bankruptcy to being more valuable than all other car companies combined. And he had gotten Americans into orbit. So I said, great idea. We had had a long talk where I said two things: I need to do this book not based on a bunch of interviews, but based on two full years of being by your side whenever I want to be, in every meeting and every meal and every walk in the factory, and just watching you so I can get stories and not just interview answers. And number two is, you have to agree that you have absolutely no control over the book. He agreed to both. And then he said, could I tell people? I said, well, I guess so. I hadn’t told my editor or my agent, and I was a guest at somebody’s house, where I was having the conversation [with him] upstairs. I went downstairs and after a few minutes everybody’s going, Hey, what, you’re doing Elon Musk? I said, what do you mean? They said, well, he just tweeted out, Walter Isaacson’s writing my biography.