Editor: Liu Yudian

Editor's Note

In early 2022, a year after SpaceX successfully launched 31 satellites, Tesla sold nearly a million electric cars, and Elon became the richest man on earth, he reflected a little sentimentally on the motivations behind his repeated dramatic conflicts. "I need to change my mindset and stop being in a state of crisis readiness," he told me. "I've been in this state for about 14 years, or most of my life." It was more of a self-pitying assessment than a resolution to a new year. While making these reflections and assurances, he was secretly buying Twitter shares...

Some people think Musk is an innovator who changes the world, while others think he is a "madman", a "devil", or at least a domineering, paranoid, and difficult person to get along with. Musk once said bluntly on "Saturday Night Live": "To all those who are offended by me, I just want to say to you that I have reinvented the electric car and I will use rocket ships to send people to Mars. But if I were an easy-going, relaxed ordinary person, do you think I could still do these things?"

So what kind of person is Elon Musk? What kind of growth experience is hidden behind his courage to take risks and high tolerance for risks? The biography of Elon Musk, which was released globally on September 12, may give us some answers.

The following is the preface to this book.

Elon Musk: A Biography, published by CITIC Publishing Group

Prologue: Muse of Fire

Elon Musk spent his childhood in South Africa, where he experienced pain and learned how to survive in pain.

When he was 12, he took a bus to a wilderness survival camp called Veldskool. In his memory, "it was like a real-life version of the story of Lord of the Flies." Each child was only given a little food and water, and they were allowed and even encouraged to fight for survival supplies. His brother Kimball said: "Bullying is regarded as a virtue here." The older children soon began to hit the younger ones in the face and took their things. Elon was short and dull, and he was beaten twice. In the end, he lost 10 pounds.

Near the end of the first week of camp, the boys were divided into two groups and the counselors asked them to attack each other. Musk recalled: "It was crazy. Once you experience it, you will never forget it." Every few years, a child will die here. The counselors will use such cases as negative examples. They will say: "Don't be as stupid as the idiot who died last year, and don't be a cowardly little fool."

Elon went to field school for the second time when he was about to turn 16. He had grown to 6-foot-3 and was much stronger, built like a bear, and had learned a little judo. This time, field school was no longer his nightmare. "That's when I started to realize that if someone was bullying me, I could punch them in the nose and they would never bully me again," Elon said. "They might beat the shit out of me, but if I hit them in the nose hard, they wouldn't dare to come to me again."

South Africa in the 1980s was rife with violence, with machine gun fire and stabbings commonplace. Once, Elon and Kimball stepped off a train to attend an anti-apartheid concert, and walked over a pool of blood next to a body with a knife stuck in its head. The blood on the soles of their sneakers made a sticky sound with every step they took that night.

Musk's family has several German shepherds that are trained to attack anyone who runs past his house. When Elon was 6 years old, one of his favorite dogs attacked him while he was running in the driveway, biting him hard on the back. In the emergency room, doctors were about to stitch him up, but he refused treatment unless the adults promised that they would not punish the dog. "You're not going to kill it, are you?" Elon asked. The adults swore they wouldn't. In telling the story, Elon paused, staring blankly for a long time, and said, "They beat it to death anyway."

Elon's most painful experience happened in school. For a long time, he was the youngest and shortest student in the class, and it was difficult for him to figure out the ways of the world. For him, empathy is not something innate. He has no desire to please others, nor does he have such an instinct. As a result, bullies often target him and punch him in the face. He said: "If you have never been hit in the nose, you don't know what impact this kind of bullying will have on your life."

Early one morning at a campus assembly, a boy was playing with a group of friends when he bumped into Elon. Elon pushed him back, and an altercation ensued. The boy and his friends found Elon during break time and found him eating a sandwich. They approached him from behind, kicked him in the head and pushed him down the concrete steps. Kimball, who was sitting with Elon at the time, recalled: "They sat on top of him and kept beating him and kicking him in the head. After the beating, I couldn't even recognize his face. It was a swollen face. Meatballs, you could barely see his eyes." Elon was taken to the hospital and was unable to attend school for a week. Decades later, he is still undergoing corrective surgery to repair the tissue inside his nose.

But those pains pale in comparison to the emotional trauma inflicted on him by his father, Errol Musk, an engineer, a scoundrel, and a charismatic visionary, traits that still haunt Elon. After a school bullying incident, Errol sided with the bully, saying, "The kid's father just committed suicide, and Elon called him stupid. Elon always calls people stupid. How can I blame the kid?"

When Elon came home from the hospital, his father gave him a severe beating. Elon recalled: "I stood for an hour and he yelled at me, saying I was an idiot and that I was useless." Kimball had to watch this scene and said it was the worst memory of his life. Kimball said: "My father lost control of his emotions. It can be said that he was furious. We have seen too many similar scenes. He had no sympathy for us brothers."

Elon and Kimball no longer spoke to their father. They both said their father’s claim that Elon had instigated the whole thing was completely false and that the perpetrator was eventually sent to juvenile hall for it. They said their father’s lies were erratic, and he would often make up stories interspersed with fictional plots that were sometimes deliberately contrived and other times simply his own delusions. They both said he had a split personality, being affable one minute and launching into a relentless diatribe that could last for more than an hour the next. At the end of each tirade, his father would tell Elon how pathetic he was. Elon could only stand there and could not leave. “It was mental torture,” Elon said, pausing for a long time and choking up slightly. “He would always make the situation worse.”

When I called Errol, he and I talked for nearly three hours. Over the next two years, we spoke and texted regularly. He was always eager to describe the good things he brought to the children and send me photos of them - at least in his good times. He once owned a Rolls-Royce, built a hut with his children, and obtained natural emeralds from a mine owner in Zambia and sold them to jewelers until the business collapsed.

But Errol also admitted that he wanted his children to be strong both physically and morally. "They were with me to make them more adaptable to the field school," he said, adding that violence was just part of what they learned in South Africa, "Two people knocked you down, another person hit you in the face with a piece of wood, and so on. New students had to fight thugs in the school on the first day of school." Errol proudly admitted that he exercised "an extremely harsh dictatorship" over his children with a street gangster-like management style. He also added that "Elon later brought the same harsh dictatorship to his relationships with others."

"It's been said that every man spends his life trying to meet his father's expectations or make up for his father's mistakes," Barack Obama wrote in his memoirs. "I think this may explain where my weakness comes from." Take Elon Musk, for example. Despite his countless attempts to get rid of his father's shadow physically and psychologically, his father's spiritual influence on him will continue to exist. His emotions will cycle between sunny and dark, between passion and numbness, between indifference and true feelings, and occasionally fall into the kind of dual personality "demon mode" that scares people around him. But one thing he is not like Errol is that he takes care of children. But in other ways, there is a danger behind his behavior that he needs to constantly resist. As Mayer said, "He might become like his father." This is one of the most resonant classic lines in all myths. It is curious to what extent this "Star Wars" hero, in his epic quest for life, will have to wrestle with the dark side of the Force and exorcise the demons left behind by his father, Darth Vader?

“I think when you have a childhood like he did in South Africa, you have to kind of close yourself off to other people,” says Justine, Elon’s first wife and the mother of five of his 10 children. “If your dad is always calling you a fool and an idiot, maybe the only way you can respond is to close yourself off. Because even if you open up an emotional dimension, you don’t have the tools to harness it.” Doing so may have made him callous, but it also made him a risk-taking innovator. “He learned to eliminate fear,” Justine says. “If you block out fear, then maybe you have to block out other emotions, like joy or empathy.”

The bits and pieces of his childhood nightmare made him hate to be content with the present. "I just don't think he knows how to enjoy success and appreciate the birds and flowers." The mother of his other three children, artist Claire Boucher (stage name "Grimes"), said, "I think the most profound constraint he had from his childhood is that life is pain." Elon agreed, saying, "Adversity shaped me, and my pain threshold became very high."

In 2008, when Elon's SpaceX rockets exploded during their first three launches and Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy, it was a hellish, dark period in his life. Sometimes he would wake up in agony. Talulah Riley, who would become his second wife, recalled that Elon would tell her about the horrific things his father had said. "I heard him say the same things his father said, and it had a profound effect on his personality," Talulah said. When he recalled these things, he would be in a trance, and it was difficult to see through his steely eyes what he was thinking. "I don't think he realized the impact of this on him because he thought it was all childhood," Talulah said. "But he retained the childlike side of him, the immature side. Deep down, he was still a child—a child standing in front of his father."

If you step out of the melting pot of his family of origin, you will find that Elon has developed an aura that sometimes makes him look like an alien - his mission to Mars seems to be a desire to return home, and his desire to build a humanoid robot seems to express a psychological demand for intimate emotional relationships. If he pulls off his shirt and you find that he has no belly button, you should not be surprised, because he is not like an earthling. But his childhood is also saturated with humanity, a strong and fragile boy who resolutely embarks on an epic expedition.

There was a kind of enthusiasm that covered his clumsiness, and this clumsiness tightly wrapped his enthusiasm. Such a soul stuffed into such a body made him a little uncomfortable. He was a big athlete, walked like a big bear on a mission, and danced like a parody robot.

With prophetic conviction, he would preach about the need to shape human consciousness, explore the universe, and save the earth. At first, I thought this was mainly about shaping his persona, like a big boy who often reads "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and inspires the team with grand dreams in speeches and podcasts. But as I interacted with him more and more, I became more and more convinced that a sense of mission was one of the driving forces that pushed him forward. While other entrepreneurs are still trying to form a worldview, he has already formed a cosmic view.

His genes, upbringing and mentality make him sometimes cold and impulsive, which also gives him the ability to tolerate extremely high risks. He can calmly calculate risks or embrace them enthusiastically. "Elon takes risks for the sake of taking risks," said Peter Thiel, who became Elon's partner in the early days of PayPal. "He seems to enjoy it very much, and sometimes it is even addictive."

He is one of the most excited people when a hurricane is approaching. Andrew Jackson once said, "I was born for the storm, and the calm is not for me." So is Elon. Turbulence and intense conflict are attractive to him, and sometimes he craves them, both at work and in the relationships he has tried hard to maintain but has not lasted. He forges ahead in the face of major crises, deadlines, and career transitions. The tension of facing a difficult challenge often keeps him awake at night and makes him vomit. But these are the nutrients he needs to survive. "Theatricality is his best companion in life," Kimball said. "He can't live without it. He lives and dies for it."

In early 2022, a year after SpaceX successfully launched 31 satellites, Tesla sold nearly a million electric cars, and Elon became the richest man on earth, he reflected on his motivations behind his repeated dramatic conflicts with a touch of sentimentality. "I need to change my mindset and stop being in a state of crisis readiness," he told me. "I've been in this state for about 14 years, or most of my life."

It was more of a self-pitying assessment than a New Year’s resolution. As he made these reflections and assurances, he was secretly buying shares in Twitter, the world’s ultimate playground. In April of that year, he took a rare vacation to the Hawaiian home of his mentor, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, accompanied by his one-time lover, the actress Natasha Bassett. Twitter had offered him a seat on the board, but after that weekend, he decided that wasn’t enough, because it was in his nature to gain full control. So he decided that, despite the unwelcome, he would make an offer for 100% of Twitter. He then flew to Vancouver to meet with Grimes. There he played a new action role-playing game, Elden Ring, until 5 a.m. As soon as he finished the game, he immediately “pulled the trigger” and started his plan to acquire Twitter. “I made an offer,” he announced.

For years, whenever he was in a desperate situation or felt threatened, he would recall the horrors of being bullied on the playground. Now he had the chance to own the playground.

brief introduction

Elon Musk, today's world-renowned and controversial innovative entrepreneur, is good at breaking conventions and leading the world into the era of electric vehicles, private space exploration and artificial intelligence, and also owns Twitter.

For two years, Isaacson, a famous biographer, has been following Musk closely, attending his meetings, visiting factories with him, and interviewing him in depth, as well as his family, friends, colleagues, ex-wife, and opponents. With an extremely close observation perspective, he unveiled the mystery of Musk, a contradictory figure, including heart-wrenching victories and ups and downs. These stories answer the question: Is the demon that drives Musk in his heart also necessary to promote innovation and progress?

The author of "Elon Musk: A Biography" is the famous biographer Isaacson, who is also the author of "Steve Jobs". Isaacson has been following Musk for two years, and Musk has given Isaacson the maximum authority to follow him. It will be published globally on September 12, 2023, and the only simplified Chinese version will be published by CITIC Publishing Group.