On Thursday, a new biography of Elon Musk, written by Walter Isaacson, a prestigious 71-year-old American journalist who has become one of the greatest specialists in the genre, goes on sale in Spanish. The former president of CNN and director of Time magazine spent two years with the businessman and his associates, accompanying them in key moments, such as the entire process of acquiring Twitter or the launch of his SpaceX ships, which Musk would never have allowed before.
The result is a book of more than 600 pages that traces the career of one of the most relevant people of our time, from his rich childhood but victim of bullying in Pretoria (South Africa) to the present day. Its title is simply Elon Musk, and it is published in Spain by Debate. It contains numerous conversations with the tycoon about his star motives (he claims that turning the human race into an “interplanetary species” is one of them), as well as hundreds of examples of his unpredictable personality or unforgiving lack of empathy for his subjects. .
Isaacson, professor of history at Tulane University (New Orleans, USA), describes Musk’s life with encyclopedic zeal. He barely makes notes about his own impressions beyond what the context requires. This is the most in-depth look at Musk’s life story, a life story that is also well-known to the general public because it concerns one of the people most widely analyzed by the media throughout history.
However, Isaacson was able to reach a part of Musk that the tycoon would not allow anyone outside of his environment, his personal life. A part that the biographer says has had a huge impact on his business decisions over the past two years. His fight against what he calls the “awakening virus”, a pejorative term used by the radical right in the US to imply that certain ideas or attitudes related to social justice, equality and social conscience are “contagious”.
“Unless the awakening virus, which is fundamentally anti-science, anti-merit, and generally anti-human, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary,” he told a biographer when asked how the social network fits into the master plan. as a star race. In exchange for ending the “awakened virus,” Musk has given up billions of dollars to start a crusade to overhaul Twitter, a space typically populated by about 300 million people.
The fight was largely motivated by his daughter Jenna’s ideology, feelings for her, and her decision to change sex. “Breakdown [de la relación con ella] It hurt him more than he had in his life since the death of his first born, Nevada.
Jenna was named Xavier Musk in 2004 after X-Men Doctor Xavier. He read his father from early on. “Xavier was strong-willed and developed a deep distaste for capitalism and wealth. They had long, bitter conversations, in person and through text messages, in which Xavier repeatedly told him, ‘I hate you and everything you stand for.'” That was one factor. , which made Musk decide to sell his houses and live in less luxury, but it had little effect on their relationship,” Isakson says.
“By 2020, the divide between them has become incomprehensible,” he continues. Jenna was 16 years old then. Along with his twin brother, he is the third of Musk’s 11 children (the first died at birth). At this time, the eighth X AE A-XII mask was born, which Jenna refused to meet. This was also the moment when he decided to move. He told his elder brothers but asked not to tell his father.
“Musk eventually learned this from a member of his security team,” says the biographer. “He blames, in part, what he calls the progressive and enlightened indoctrination that prevailed at the Los Angeles private school he attended on Crossroads,” Isaacson continues, quoting Musk’s daughter-in-law as expressing that he “has no prejudice against gays or trans people. His breakup with Jenna, he says, had more to do with his radical Marxism than his gender identity.
It was then that the elimination of the “awakening virus” became part of Musk’s life goals: “He continued to speak more and more about this issue, and in 2023 he led a conservative backlash against the possibility of minors who wanted to change their gender. They could get medical help. Twitter, which he Being considered “infected” by the virus is a key step towards this goal.
Before 2020, Musk claimed to almost always vote Democrat. From that year on, his radicalization towards the positions of what is called the alt-right in the US and simply the extreme right in Europe was evident. A scroll through his Twitter posts (now called X) means endless memes and ironic commentary against social progressivism.
Before taking over the entire social network, Musk bought only 10% of it. For several days, he wondered if this was enough for the company to take the direction he wanted, since he was already the majority shareholder. He finally decided that the changes he wanted were too big. “For the survival of democracy, he believed it was important to clean up Twitter’s woke culture and eliminate its bias,” Isaacson reveals.
After he offered to buy Twitter for $44 billion, Musk relented and tried to cancel the deal. He then used the incredible excuse that there were too many bots. The bio suggests he was only trying to lower the price because tech companies were suffering a major stock market crash and Tesla, whose stock Musk planned to use to finance the acquisition, and Twitter were worth much less than a few. Months before..
Musk had the ability to get that cut. In negotiations, the company’s management offered to agree to a 4% discount (equivalent to $1.76 billion). He was looking for at least 10%. “At certain points it looked like there might be ways to bring the two sides together,” the book says, “but that posed an additional problem.
The agreement on the new price meant a restructuring of the offer. This gave the banks that financed Musk the opportunity to renegotiate their terms, as well as Twitter management to include new clauses. And a new one was put on the table: the tycoon, who had warned for months that he wanted to bring about “vigilant censorship” of the former management, had to undertake not to take legal action against the previous directors.
“We’ll never give them legal release. We’ll hunt them down one by one until they’re dead,” Isaacson said Musk responded when informed of the request.
After taking over the company, the new owner leaked copious documents about the practices of the social network’s previous board to several journalists close to the American alt-right. The leak allegedly showed how Twitter was leaning toward “wokeness.” He called it the “Twitter Archives” and they had a limited run. Musk blames the rest of the media for keeping the revelations quiet.
“The revelations showed the troubling, if surprising, fact that Twitter moderators were biased in favor of suppressing stories that helped Trump,” Isaacson quoted them as saying. He then recalls that “98% of the donations made by people at the company went to Democrats.” Not to mention, however, that Trump has already been indicted in four criminal cases for various crimes, including inciting the attack on the Capitol. The former president used Twitter as a major mouthpiece to spread misinformation about these events, as well as about the coronavirus.
Source: El Diario
