The New Yorker Radio Hour - Introducing Critics at Large: The Myth-Making of Elon Musk

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

In this bonus episode, the hosts of Critics at Large dissect Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk, asking how it reflects ideas about power, money, cults of personality—from “Batman” to “The Social Network.” The critics examine how, in recent years, the idea of the unimpeachable Silicon Valley founder has lost its sheen. Narratives, such as the 2022 series “WeCrashed,” tell the story of startup founders who make lofty promises, only to watch their empires crumble when those promises are shown to be empty. “It dovetails for me with the disillusionment of millennials,” Fry says, pointing to the dark mood that the 2007-08 financial crisis and the 2016 election brought to the country. “There’s no longer this blind belief that the tech founder is a genius who should be wholly admired with no reservations.” This is a preview of The New Yorker’s new Critics at Large podcast. Episodes drop every Thursday.  New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

Hi, this is David Remnick. I'm excited to introduce a new podcast from my colleagues here at the New Yorker, Critics at Large. You've almost certainly heard Vincent Cunningham, Nomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz on the radio hour before. There are three writers I always turn to when I want to understand what's happening in books and theater, TV, film, music, and pop culture. Their writing is incisive, and their takes always surprise me. Critics at Large is a show about picking apart big ideas, re-examining classic texts and understanding new cultural obsessions. So expect to hear about everything from Salman Rushdie to the Real Housewives, and maybe the connections between the two.

In an early episode, they tackle the new biography of Elon Musk, looking at ideas about power, money, cults of personality, and they ask why we collectively mythologize the tech founder to such a huge degree. Here's a preview, and if you enjoyed it, I hope you'll consider following And Critics at Large, wherever you're tuning in now. Welcome to Critics at Large, a new podcast from The New Yorker. I'm Vincent Cunningham. I'm Alex Schwartz, and I'm Nomi Fry.

Each week, the three of us come together to make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here. So today we're going to discuss a new biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson. It's an interesting read because it comes at a time where Musk is, like, everywhere. His cars are on our roads, the satellite. are in our skies, deciding war outcomes, by the way. His tweets are on our phones. But it also struck me as I read this book that it doubles as a study of the myth of the tech founder. That's so much with us these days.

Could we play a quick game? Please. Games. Well, you're welcome. I'll start first, too. What is one word that comes to your mind when you think of, like, the tech genius? Just a word. I'll start.

Turtleneck. Oh, my God. That was my word. Well, get another one. Quick. Arrogance. That's boring. Turtle neck was my word.

Damn. Psychopath. Too much? Yeah, yeah. No, no, no. Too much. Like fake hippie. Dr. Strange Love.

Awkward. These are all valid. And maybe they'll come up later. There are no wrong answers in this game. There's no wrong answers. Today we're going to look at Musk for as long as we can stand to, but then we'll go beyond him to think about this archetype, the lone founder somewhere near Silicon Valley,

who, against all odds, changes our lives and the history of our culture. Musk typifies this, but how much of that is just myth-making? Why do so many of us cling to this idea? So maybe let's just start with the book. Let's start with Isaacson's biography, which, by the way, just to tell a quick story, it caused a lot of trouble for me this week. I first, I accidentally, while moving my daughter into her dorm room, brought it into a dorm room, and it caused a big problem.

What was the problem? The problem was I hadn't taken off the dust jacket yet. The cover of this book is Musk with like his hands in like prayer hands, looking out at you, very like fake Steve Jobs looking sort of like trying to reach some sort of profundity. And my daughter was like, is this for me? And I was like, no, no, no, no. She's like, because she's like a computer science person. Because you don't think I like him, do you?

I was like, no, no, I'm sorry. And then when I got on the plane where I read the bulk of this book, I took off the dust jacket. It was a weird source of shame for me. See, it did not occur to me until I came into this recording room and saw your naked book that I could have done this because interesting. I, too, have had a great amount of shame merely walking around in public trying to find places to read it. I mean, yesterday, as I was finishing, I was camping next two. a bush at a local coffee shop and I was just felt very shaded by the presence of this bush from anyone who might be walking by. You know, why? It's like reading, it's like reading porn

in public or something. Yeah, I just want people, it felt, well, because I think it's for me, reading porn. I mean, Vincent, like for you, I guess your daughter was was just, you know, not wanting to be associated with Elon Musk at the beginning of her college career. She didn't want to be like the Musk girl. Yeah, yeah, the Musk girl. Famously loves Alan's Elon. Right. Right. Senior year, everyone's like, remember when your dad brought that biography? Exactly. That's interesting, though, because I think also, I mean, it's so context-based, right? So in these spaces where you guys, you know, Vincent in this dorm room and Alex, you and, you in Brooklyn, we're feeling also a little bit bashful about this.

But of course, we should remember that this biography is flying off the shelves. and bought not as a hate read of a person who it's embarrassing to be, you know, pursuing his life path, but as an ideal, a model by so many people. And hence here lies one of the tensions, right, that this is a person who is extremely divisive. And where does this biography stand in relation to this divisiveness? How close is Isaacson to Musk and how far. is Eiffra musk, you know, in telling his life story. Yeah.

Yeah. Let's start with the text then. Let's just go straight into the book. Yeah. So what did you think of? What were your initial impressions of the book? Well, okay. First of all, I just want to briefly not start with the text.

I'm going to go back to the text, but I just think people have not seen this book should know that the cover is exactly as Vincent described with this kind of cult-like portrait of Elon Musk with his hands in prayer position. But the back is to me, you know, of a vulgar. image. The back is a picture of a rocket. It's just, I mean, I'm sorry. Gary Steingart called it a penis and and as guardian of you, right? Yeah. It's just like basically, I mean, it's, the expectation set up by the cover of this book are of a hagiography. That's what we're getting. This approach to biography to me is like riding a mechanical bull. You can feel Walter Isaacson just trying to hang on to the details of the life. There are a lot of details. Elon Musk has done a lot of things. He's founded a lot of companies. He's launched a lot of rockets. He's created a lot of

products. He's caused a lot of turmoil. And the approach is very straightforwardly chronological. We're going to begin at the beginning. We're going to advance bit by bit up through every year. We're going to detail the relationships, the divorces. We're going to go to Tesla to Starlink to Twitter, now called X, whatever. And I felt at a certain point that the real thread and the plot was getting lost. I felt that this was almost like notes for a biography in a weird way. There's no perspective here. Yeah, the perspective, I think, I agree with you, Alex. As I was reading, I felt the perspective was getting lost as well. And there's no real questioning, again, not even in a negative way, but there's no questioning if the axioms that Musk is presenting and Isaacson is ventriloquizing,

in this book and their validity. So for instance, just one example, there's a constant return to Musk's devotion to the idea of interplanetary expansion, right? We have to do this because we have to save the human race. And it's just presented as fact, right? I mean, it's presented.

We have to be a multi-planetary species. We have to be a multi-planetary species. And I'll do, and this is worth everything else. It's like I'll do anything in order for us to get there. And it's just kind of accepted as gospel. I'm like, wait, is it, I get that Musk is saying it, but the book is just presenting it as truth, essentially, you know. I felt quite impressed, and certainly it's not something I would ever be able to do in the kind of like reporting and information and gathering and organizing of this book. I think you'd be able to do it.

Well, thank you of it. I'm sorry to say. Well, no, no, yeah. I'm not, no, yeah. I'm not, no, thank you. But it's just, it's, it's a large project that is executed. I just, I just want to give props. You know what I mean?

It's a large project that is executed. That sounds really bad. If my editor wrote that to me, I would crawl into a hole and die. It is, it is large. No, but you have executed. Guys, but you know what I mean. Well, this is what I mean about the mechanical bull a bit. Yeah.

I felt like there were moments when I did not, and I really don't. project that is executed. No, you're right. And I know what you mean. There's a ton of information to try to metabolize. Yes, exactly. However, I felt frequently, and I really don't mean this as shade to Isaacson. Actually, I kind of do.

I just didn't feel he'd metabolized it. I wasn't sure if he knew what a B-Nut was when he said that the B-Nut might be to blame for the failure of the second launch, you know, off the Marshall Island Atoll. Like, I don't know if he knows what that is. A lot of it felt to me you could hear Elon in the room quickly, explaining what this or that thing was. You know, and the sources, the main sources of the book are brother, you know, his brother. Kimball. Kimball.

Friends lovers. I always said Kendall because succession is ever close to a story like this. Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of facts. A lot of things that happen, but they are so many facts. But they're all unsynthesized. Like for one, for just one thing that like you can notice through this is like the total acceptance as like, sure, that makes sense of like giving over things that used to be public to the private sector, right?

Like, it's like, okay, we do these things faster than Boeing and we do these things faster, these other aerospace companies, sucking on the teat of government, I think, Elon says at one point, and SpaceX can do this better. And that is something that you notice throughout the book, but it's never tied together by Isaacson. It's something that is a theme of Elon's, but Isaacson never intervenes as a, to your point, Alex, critical presence to say, to show us, like, there was politics. around this. The other thing he never really shows us is, okay, your grandfather decided to move to apartheid South Africa and you grew up in that milieu. What does that mean about how you think about

other people? Like, we don't see him as a product of history. We only see him as like a maker of things, but we never see what currents he's subject. So totally, yeah. I mean, I would argue, not only does he not notice this or acknowledge it, I think Isaacson is actively obfuscating the history. I mean, I know Jalapur made this point in her review for the New Yorker's that she wrote of the book. But, you know, to pick up on that detail that you're mentioning, Vincent, about the history and the context for Elon's family. Yeah, his maternal grandparents moved to South Africa in 1950. And Isaacson says, and I noticed this the second I read it, you know, Isaacson says, apartheid was still the law of the land.

No, no, no. Apartite had just been instituted as the law of the land two years before. We're not talking about moving to South Africa in 1989. And Jillipur also published a really fascinating piece on the website about the deep anti-Semitism and fiscistic beliefs of the grandfather. Which Isakson calls quirky. His quirky political beliefs, yeah. He likes to fly planes. So we have a problem.

We have a problem. Big problem. This issue of Isaacson and his framing maybe helps us move to what is this archetype that we're dealing with? what kind of person is Musk supposed to be in his own eyes and in ours. We're going to take a quick break, and when we're back, what do Musk and Batman have in common? You're only going to find out here. Stick around.

If you enjoyed this preview, please make sure to follow critics at large from the New Yorker, wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of the show arrive every Thursday. Thanks for listening.