Walter Isaacson’s ‘Elon Musk’
The most problematic human on earth
Elon Musk’s official biography
A childhood filled with violence
Create a life of endless challenges
“A crazy man made of flaws
“A genius who turns imagination into reality.”
Enlarge photo Elon Musk. [사진 출처 = 연합뉴스]
The official biography of Elon Musk, the most problematic human being on Earth, has been released. The author is ‘genius collector’ Walter Isaacson, former editor-in-chief of ‘Time’. He once described Steve Jobs as a ‘dictator without blood or tears’. Just by being in his collection, you can be put on the same level as Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin. According to Isaacson, who followed Musk like a shadow for two years and met about 130 people, including Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, to complete his biography, Musk is “a genius who was cast with flaws, but who turns all his imagination into reality with his boldness and pride,” and “his “He is a crazy person who believes he can change the world.”
This 760-page book packs a heavy punch from the start. In the 1980s, where Musk grew up in South Africa, machine gun shootings and stabbing incidents were frequent. He had Asperger’s syndrome, was small and had poor empathy, and was beaten up every day at school, so he had to have nose correction surgery as an adult. The emotional abuse from his scoundrel father Errol was even worse. He went so far as to side with the student who cut his son’s face with ink. Musk, who grew up as the son of ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ who alternated between kindness and verbal abuse, was unable to shake off the ghost. Due to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) during his growing years, his mood regularly shifted between light and dark, intense and goofy, meticulous and indifferent, and sometimes he would fall into the ‘devil mode’ that people around him feared.
In 2008, a hellish time, when the first three launches of Space Her second wife, Tallulah Riley, says: “He still has a child inside him,” she said. He is a child standing before his father.”
Although Musk said, “It was adversity that raised me. “So the threshold of pain I could endure had to rise,” he confesses, but Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, says he is “a person addicted to risk.”
enlarge photo
At age 11, Musk saved up his money to buy a computer, and completed the 60-hour BASIC learning course in three days without sleep. At the age of 13, he created the video game ‘Blasta’ using self-taught coding. He sold the game to a magazine for $500 and became addicted to video games for the rest of his life. In high school, he was good at physics and math, and reading was his sanctuary.
I also devour comic books, and I especially liked superheroes who wear iron suits and try to save the world. He loved everything about the universe, although in church he asked blasphemous questions. Robert Heinlein’s ‘The Moon is the Merciless Queen of the Night’ was my favorite book, and it was a science fiction story about a colony established by sending criminals to the moon. When a rebellion breaks out in a colony managed by a supercomputer named Mike with a sense of humor, the computer sacrifices its own life. This book deals with important issues in his life. Will artificial intelligence (AI) truly protect and benefit humanity, or will it pose a threat to humans? His concern about AI harming humanity later becomes the reason he becomes obsessed with AI, alienating him from his friend Larry Page, and becoming enemies with Sam Altman.
Musk is a genius who learns through experience. After interning at a bank in college, he realized that he was not good at working for others and majored in business administration. After working at a game company, he chose the path of an entrepreneur to exert more influence. His repeated experiences of success led him to push his employees to unrealistic deadlines.
So Musk’s life is like a roller coaster filled with countless challenges, failures, and successes. In his life, which is so well known, this book seems worth discovering a few hidden puzzle pieces. Above all, the last few chapters, which focus on Twitter and artificial intelligence (AI), which he has recently been focusing on outside of his day job, are as exciting as looking into his brain.
Enlarge photo Elon Musk met with Bill Gates at the Qionghai Boao Forum in China.
The list of big names he has feuded with is endless. He has also interacted with Bill Gates. The two, who cannot tolerate idiots, clash. Gates, who visited the Austin plant to offer donations, argued that batteries and solar energy are not the solution to the climate problem, while Musk argued that migration to Mars should be done in preparation for nuclear war. Musk disparaged Gates’s proposal for philanthropy, calling it a “foolish trick.” He also thought Tesla could do more good on climate change. Gates had suffered a loss of more than $1.5 billion by shorting Tesla on a large scale, and upon hearing this, Musk, who wanted to send the short sellers to hell, could not hold back his anger. He thought Gates was a hypocrite and a fool for betting against electric car companies while saying he was for climate change.
The story behind Twitter’s acquisition also appears. In early 2022, he had received an offer to participate in the board of directors, but he wanted ‘complete control’ and decided on a hostile takeover. Isaacson explains the motivation for the acquisition as follows: “Over the years, whenever he felt trapped in the dark or threatened, Musk would relive his childhood nightmares of being bullied on the playground. “Now he has the opportunity to own a playground.”
Isaacson, who took a bird’s eye view of Musk’s ‘three-dimensional face’ without hiding his flaws and strengths, judges this man this way. “If he wasn’t so eccentric, could he really be the person who leads us to the future of electric vehicles and to Mars?”
#ttoo #world #eccentric #person #imagines #reality #Books #Maeil #Business #Newspaper
2023-09-15 09:36:15
