Elon Musk

Elon and Kimbal were upset that Burning Man, the festival in the Nevada desert, was canceled in 2020 due to COVID-19. They organized an unauthorized event called “Renegade Burn” at the same desert site.

Grimes and Elon broke up in 2021, but their relationship “became a roller coaster of companionship, co-parenting, loneliness avoidance, boundary setting, estrangement, blocking, ghosting, and re-embracing” (380). They attended the 2021 Met Gala together.

SpaceX scheduled its first civilian flight in 2021. Musk thought that, in contrast to Bezos and Branson, he should not be the one to go into space because the optics of another billionaire going to space would hurt the industry, and he felt that SpaceX’s mission was about humanity rather than himself. So, the company selected a jet pilot and entrepreneur named Jared Isaacman to take the first flight, and Isaacman invited other civilians to accompany him. Even though the SpaceX team identified space debris as a possible hazard during the flight, the passengers accepted the risk, and the flight was successful.

Musk declared that SpaceX would turn its attention to a new engine, one he named 1337. He ordered a surge, urging the team to organize around this new mission. Then, after a month, he forced their attention back to the current Raptor engine. Isaacson asks, “[w]as the 1337 surge and retreat a carefully considered strategy by Musk to get his team thinking more boldly, or was it an impulsive act that he later walked back?” (392). Isaacson argues that it was both.

In 2021, Musk pushed the Tesla team to focus on building a humanoid, artificially intelligent robot. He ordered them to announce their plans at an event called “AI Day” on August 19, 2021. Musk tore into one of the presenters before the event, criticizing his slides and calling them boring. The man almost quit but was persuaded to stay. The actual event turned out to be unimpressive. It featured an actress dressed up as a robot, who did a dance on stage.

Musk launched Neuralink, a project to implant chips in human brains that could interface with computers. One of the people he recruited was Shivon Zilis, a technology investor and someone who later grew to be “a close personal companion to Musk” (401).

Musk insisted that his Tesla engineers should remove the cars’ radar capabilities and rely on camera-only driving. His team pushed back, citing safety concerns, but Musk insisted that they adhere to his orders. This sparked a more public debate in the press about safety concerns. Eventually, Musk did allow his engineers to keep developing a better radar system.

On January 7, 2021, as Tesla’s stock price rose, Musk became the world’s richest person with $190 billion to his name.

In late 2021, Musk experienced emotional turmoil. Isaacson notes that, “when he was no in survival-or-die mode, he felt unsettled. What should have been the good times were unnerving for him” (410). So, during a Thanksgiving with his family, Musk abruptly announced that he had to fly back to Los Angeles to deal with a crisis at work.

Musk and Zilis, Musk’s employee at Neuralink, decided to have children via in vitro fertilization. Zilis did not tell anyone who the father was, and Musk did not tell Grimes, even though he and Grimes were having another child via a surrogate. Grimes considered Zilis to be a friend. Unknown to Grimes, Zilis and the surrogate gave birth just two weeks apart.

When California issued a stay-at-home order in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Musk became defiant. He ordered the Fremont factory to stay open. County officials threated to shut down the plant, but Musk sued and prevailed.

Musk became obsessed with something he called the “woke-mind virus” as his Twitter presence became more extremist, conspiratorial, and right-wing (418). Isaacson claims that this was spurred by Musk’s transgender daughter transitioning. Musk began to spend more time with wealthy libertarians.

Just before Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, it used a malware attack to disable internet in the country. Top Ukrainian officials implored Musk to help provide internet connectivity to Ukraine using his Starlink satellites. Musk agreed. According to Isaacson, though, by September 2022, Musk grew worried that Ukraine would use Starlink to mount an offense on the Russian fleet in Crimea—rather than just using the service for defense—and he believed that this move could initiate a nuclear war. According to Isaacson, Musk disabled the service before Ukraine launched the attack.

In 2022, Musk and Bill Gates met to discuss philanthropy and climate. Musk was angry that Gates had shorted Tesla stock and believed that this move ran counter to Gates’s professed concern for the climate. Meanwhile, Gates did not understand why Musk took issue with his short position.