Two major books published in the last year—Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk, Simon & Schuster (2023), and Ben Mezrich’s Breaking Twitter: Elon Musk and the Most Controversial Corporate Takeover in History, Grand Central Publishing/Hachette (2023)—have covered the period of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. Isaacson, the former editor of Time Magazine and the author of biographies of icons like Ben Franklin and Steve Jobs, was embedded with Musk for two years prior to publication. His account reflects the fact that he was “in-the-room” during the key moments. Mezrich’s name may be less-well-known, but several of his books have been made into movies, including 2008’s 21 (about MIT students counting cards in Vegas and starring Kate Bosworth and Laurence Fishburne) and 2010’s The Social Network (about the founding of Facebook, directed by David Fincher).
Isaacson tells a more traditional life story. He starts with an extensive view of Musk’s childhood in South Africa, where he was bullied by both classmates and his own father. Isaacson’s account is balanced, pointing out the difficulties Musk had to overcome and the multiple times that he bet everything on himself with his early companies, including Zip2 and the original X.com.
Having also profiled Jobs, Isaacson was familiar with individuals who ran multiple companies (Jobs simultaneously ran Apple and Pixar); but even Isaacson seems impressed by Musk’s collection of CEO seats: Neuralink (developing brain-chip implants), the Boring Company (an aptly named tunneling enterprise), plus SpaceX, Tesla, and now X. Musk also found time, after a late-night interaction with Google’s Sergey Brin, to help start OpenAI. Initially envisioned as a nonprofit, the entity has been at the forefront of the Generative AI revolution.
Isaacson was embedded with his subject, and his reporting reflects that. But Isaacson’s access at times impacts the narrative. Seemingly minor details (like how Musk’s youngest son, X, reacted to Tesla’s Optimus robot in 2022) seem to take on outsized importance, perhaps simply because the author was there to witness the sequence. Isaacson also ventures into Musk’s personal life—or at least those instances that impacted his public persona—and his children (10 surviving children with four different mothers (one being a surrogate.)) Isaacson has his best insights when looking back at the whole of Musk’s career. The difficulties Musk had growing up—like being bullied—may contribute to his grit but also may be reflected in his lack of empathy for many of his employees. His ruthless ability to return to “First Principles”—to constantly question all requirements for a build-out and deleting all unnecessary parts—is a throughline for all of his professional career, especially when dealing with physical objects, like building rockets or cars.
In contrast, Mezrich’s account focuses almost exclusively on the Twitter transaction. Mezrich is concerned only with Twitter and not any of the other Musk-led companies, which means that he ignores much of Musk’s early successes (i.e., SpaceX/Telsa.) While he did not have the inside access that Isaacson did (but snarkily takes a shot at Isaacson, describing his book as a “glowing biography”), Mezrich has Twitter-employee sources who were present with Musk. He accordingly imputes reasoning and rationale to Musk himself.
In Mezrich’s telling, Musk is simply the “richest man in the world,” who then goes on to buy Twitter. But thanks to the loosening of speech restrictions that have been anathema to advertisers with global brands, Musk’s purchase has been a matter of concern. X is no longer a public company, but Fortune estimates that it may have lost 90% of its value since Musk’s purchase. And Musk’s reputation has suffered along with Twitter’s value, with users actually voting to remove him as CEO in December 2022, thanks to his own poll.
Isaacson, in contrast, spends the first two-thirds of his book pre-Twitter, with Musk as start-up founder and chief engineer of various companies. Isaacson concludes that Musk did not set out to become overtly rich—he was merely trying to solve certain defined problems (getting humans to Mars (hence SpaceX) and saving the planet (hence Tesla)) and becoming the richest man in the world is a by-product of that effort.
The two accounts intersect directly in one noteworthy instance—in the weeks after Musk agreed to purchase Twitter. Although Musk was prepared to pay the entire $44 billion purchase price for the app himself, he attempted to raise money from other high-profile partners, including Oracle’s Larry Ellison (who invested $1 billion on the grounds that it was “‘important for a democracy’”). But it was a Zoom call with another icon of the tech world, Sam Bankman-Fried, that stands out; at that moment, as CEO of cryptocurrency trader FTX, SBF was himself the richest man in the world under the age of 30.
According to Isaacson, Musk was reluctant to engage with the young tycoon, as he was aware that SBF was primarily interested in finding a way to incorporate Twitter into the blockchain (the core technology underlying crypto). Musk felt that such a transformation wouldn’t be prudent. While Musk took the call, he reported that within minutes “[m]y bulls**t detector went off like red alert on a Geiger counter.” The call ended, in Isaacson’s recounting, with both men thinking the other was “nuts.”
In Mezrich’s narrative of the call, SBF becomes a caricature. Mezrich describes him as an “awkward panda of a kid … rock[ing] back and forth … spouting phrases like ‘vision lock’ and ‘social blockchain integration.’” Mezrich concludes that Musk didn’t truly believe that SBF had the liquidity to make the investment, and hence the deal disappeared.
Ultimately, SBF did not invest. Within months, he was arrested over the FTX fraud. But the interaction between Musk and SBF is a watershed: Prior to the Twitter acquisition, Musk was seen as an avatar of the age of environmentalism. In the aftermath of the Twitter acquisition, Musk is now a symbol of the MAGA right-wing movement and a supporter of the Trump view of the world. Like a WWE wrestler flipping sides, Elon became a “heel” in a single month.
Both books effectively conclude on the same day: April 20, 2023. That morning, Musk oversaw the liftoff of SpaceX’s largest effort then-to-date: a 33-engine starship. The craft blasted off—and then exploded four minutes later (in Musk-speak, a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”). Coupled with the meltdown in Twitter’s value, it was a second disaster for Musk within six months. Both authors couldn’t resist the timing—or the metaphor writ large.
Isaacson’s book is the more complete story, beginning in South Africa; Mezrich’s book is more cinematic and is almost ready to be adapted to a screenplay. But both stories leave off without a final act. Musk bought Twitter as the world’s richest man, and a popular figure on both sides of the political spectrum; his Tesla EVs were popular among the elite on both coasts. But with his purchase of Twitter, and his seeming embrace of TrumpWorld/MAGA, his popularity has fallen. While he has undoubtedly lost billions of dollars in the Twitter experiment, the final chapter is far from written. Both books reflect a work-in-progress, not a complete story.
Matthew Henshon is a partner at Henshon Klein in Boston. He is currently writing a book on AI.