From my new book review in Taki’s Magazine:
‘Elon Musk:’ Purge and Surge
Steve SailerSeptember 27, 2023
Walter Isaacson’s biography Elon Musk is as strong as you’d expect from the author of the enormous 2011 bestseller Steve Jobs.
The subject of Isaacson’s last book The Code Breaker, Jennifer Doudna, the coinventor of the CRISPR gene-editing method, served as a reasonable representative of how much women have contributed to the life sciences in recent decades. But Isaacson’s strong suit is unreasonable men, such as Musk, Jobs, and Doudna’s mentor James D. Watson, who wound up dominating The Code Breaker from his supporting role.
Of these three big men, Musk might be the most exhaustingly energetic. …
As described by Isaacson after two years of following Musk around, the entrepreneur’s methods remind me of Stalin’s for growing the Soviet steel industry: purge and surge. Periodically, Musk somewhat randomly fires some employees to encourage the others, then leads the gung ho survivors on a Stakhanovite push for greater production for a couple of months. He then vanishes to one of his other enterprises, until he suddenly reappears with some crazy new self-imposed deadline.
Read the whole thing there.
