Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk sheds new light on the outrageous and confusing actions of the world’s richest man.
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Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk was released on September 12. In the book, the author reveals that Musk and his ex-wife Claire Boucher, commonly known as Grimes, secretly welcomed their third child, Techno Mechanicus Musk, also known as Tau.
To date, Musk has a total of 11 known children. He once warned that human civilization would collapse if humans did not have more children.
According to the book’s introduction column in the New Yorker magazine, Isaacson said that of these 11 children, Shivon Zilis, the director of Neuralink, was born through in vitro fertilization at the same time Musk and Grimes hired a surrogate mother for their second child. Grimes did not know about this at the time. Years after the truth was revealed, “Grimes was furious.”
Cover of Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk. Photo: Simon & Schuster/AP/Forbes
A Los Angeles Times feature on the book recounts that in 2015, Musk wanted to use Tesla’s self-driving cars to get to SpaceX’s Southern California headquarters. But the lines on the 405 were too blurry.
So Musk’s team convinced a road worker to have them repainted. As a thank you, the company paid for a tour of SpaceX.
The book also details his argument with tech billionaire Bill Gates, according to CNBC and the LA Times. He called Gates “crazy” and “a party pooper” after he admitted he was shorting Tesla stock.
Musk mocked the move as “hypocritical” – at a time when Tesla was struggling, “why would you try to profit from a bet that a sustainable car company would go bankrupt,” he scoffed.
In the book, Musk also told Isaacson that he bought Twitter and then renamed it X because he wanted to create “a multi-planetary civilization.” This goal would never be achieved without stopping “anti-science and anti-human content that is trying to change people’s minds.”
According to the Guardian, although the book is about Musk, it also mentions another famous figure. That is Rudy Giuliani. During the time Musk founded the digital finance company PayPal, Musk and his team reached out to Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and later Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, to help them overcome difficulties related to government regulations that prevented the company from operating as a bank. But when they finally met him, they were disappointed.
Michael Moritz, an investor and member of Musk’s team, said Giuliani’s team “knew nothing about Silicon Valley” but appeared to be very knowledgeable. When Giuliani offered 10% of the company in exchange for advice, Musk and his team declined.
The book also gives readers a glimpse into Musk’s upbringing in South Africa. According to the New Yorker, Musk’s grandfather, J. N. Haldeman, moved to South Africa from Canada in 1950, shortly after apartheid was established and the country began attracting white settlers from North America with the promise of a comfortable life.
Isaacson’s book barely mentions apartheid, but describes Musk’s impoverished childhood. The book also addresses long-standing allegations that Musk used money from his father’s emerald mines during the Apartheid era to start his business.
According to the LA Times, Isaacson asserts that Musk’s father, Errol Musk, did not own any emerald mines, as critics often claim, but instead received and cut emeralds smuggled from three mines in Zambia.
He made $210,000 from those mines, but Isaacson says it is “absurd” that Elon Musk took all of that money to Canada in 1989 and then to California. In fact, Musk was given only $2,000 by his father when he moved.
