Simon Schuster Elon Musk

Walter Isaacson’s previous biographies—Steve Jobs, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin—set a standard for access-driven narrative biography. For Elon Musk, he spent two years with direct access to Musk himself, his family, former partners, and employees at Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter. The result is comprehensive to an unusual degree: Isaacson was present for some of the events he describes, including the chaotic Twitter acquisition. The portrait that emerges is neither hagiography nor hit piece. Musk comes across as genuinely visionary in his engineering instincts, genuinely reckless in his decisions about people, and shaped by a childhood of significant trauma that Isaacson documents in some detail. Readers who already have strong opinions about Musk will find material to support them. Readers approaching him fresh will find a more complicated figure than the culture-war version of him allows for.