Introducing Critics at Large: The Myth-Making of Elon Musk
12:35 Share

Listener supported. WNYC Studios. 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 Frye, and Alexandra Schwartz on the radio hour before. They're 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 enjoy it, I hope you'll consider following 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 Frye. 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. His satellites 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. Turtleneck was my word. Damn. Psychopath. Too much? Yeah. No, no, no. Too far. Like fake hippie. Dr. Strangelove.

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, I – 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 her 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,

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 to 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. Yeah.

Why? It's like reading porn in public or something. Yeah, I just want people – well, because I think it's – for me – Reading porn. I mean, Vincent, like for you, I guess your daughter was just 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, the Musk girl. Famously loves Elon Musk. 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 in, you know, 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. Yes. Yeah. And bought not as a hate read of a person who it's embarrassing to

Yeah.

In relation to this divisiveness, how close is Isaacson to Musk and how far is he from Musk, you know, in telling his life story? Yeah. Let's start with the text then. Let's just like go straight into the book. Yeah. So what did you think? What are your initial impressions of the book?

Well, OK. 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 who 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 um you know a vulgar image the back back is a picture of a rocket it's just i mean i'm sorry gary steingart called it a penis and as guardian yeah it's just like basically i mean it's the expectations set up by the cover of this book are of a hagiography that's what we're getting um

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 here.

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. Like, it's—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 by

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. I'm sorry to say. No shade to Walter Isaacson. I think you could do it. No, no. Thank you. But it's just – it's a large project that is executed. I just want to give –

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 large. No, but. You have executed it. 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.

It's a large 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 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 off the –

Marshall Island at all. 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 almost said Kendall because succession is ever close to a story like this. It's so ever close, yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of facts that are in there.

A lot of things 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? Yeah. It's like, okay, we do these things faster than Boeing and we do these things faster than 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's politics around this. The other thing he never really shows us is

OK, 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 to. So totally true. 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 Jill Lepore made this point in her review for The New Yorker podcast.

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. Apartheid 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 Jill Lepore has also published a really fascinating piece on the website about the deep anti-Semitism and fascistic beliefs of the grandfather. Which Isaacson calls quirky. 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.

NYC Now delivers the most up-to-date local news from WNYC and Gothamist every morning, midday, and evening. With three updates a day, listeners get breaking news, top headlines, and in-depth coverage from across New York City. By sponsoring programming like NYC Now, you'll reach our community of dedicated listeners with premium messaging and an uncluttered audio experience. Visit sponsorship.wnyc.org to get in touch and find out more.