The trouble began days before the biography was even published.
CNN had a story summarizing an excerpt of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk that claimed Musk had shut down SpaceX’s satellite network, Starlink, to prevent a “Ukrainian sneak attack” on the Russian navy. The Washington Post followed it up, publishing the excerpt where Isaacson claimed Musk had essentially shut down a military offensive on a personal whim.
This reporting did not pass the smell test to me, and I said so at the time; I wondered about the sourcing. One of the things that anyone covering Elon Musk for long enough has to reckon with is that he loves to tell hilarious lies. For instance:
- “Funding secured.” Remember when Elon Musk pretended he was going to take Tesla private and had everything in order, and then whoopsie, that was not at all true?
- Tesla share sales. Of course, there’s the time in April 2022 when he sold Tesla shares and said he had no further sales planned, followed by him selling more Tesla shares in August 2022, when he said he was done selling Tesla shares. He sold more shares in November 2022.
- Tesla and Bitcoin. Remember when Musk said, “I might pump but I don’t dump,” and then Tesla sold 75 percent of its Bitcoin?
- The staged 2016 Autopilot demo video. In the demo video, which features the title card “The car is driving by itself,” the car was not driving by itself, Tesla’s director of Autopilot software said in a deposition. Musk himself asked for that copy.
- The batteries in Teslas will be exchangeable. Refueling your EV will just be a battery swap that will happen faster than pumping gas.
- The time he said Teslas might fly. I am not making this up. He really said he’d replace the rear seats with thrusters, and journalists spent time trying to figure out what the fuck that meant.
The thing you learn after a while on the Musk beat is that his most self-aggrandizing statements usually bear the least resemblance to reality. Musk says a lot of stuff! Some of it is exaggeration, and some isn’t true at all.
Isaacson’s sweeping 670-page biography has an intense amount of access to the man at its center. The problem is the man is Elon Musk, a guy who in 2011 promised to get us to space in just three years. In reality, the first SpaceX crew launched into orbit almost a decade later. Sure, access is the appeal of the biography — but access gives Musk lots of chances to sell his own mythology.
I wanted to know if Isaacson had done his homework
So when I opened the Musk biography, I wanted to know if Isaacson had done his homework. The first thing I did was flip to the back, where the author lists his sources for the Ukraine thing. They are: interviews with Musk, Gwynne Shotwell, and Jared Birchall (Musk’s body man); emails from Lauren Dreyer; and text messages from Mykhailo Fedorov, “provided by Elon Musk.” Other sources are news articles, one of which was about SpaceX curbing Ukraine’s use of drones. Crucially, though, this article says nothing about Ukrainian submarines — instead, it’s primarily about aerial vehicles.
In his book, Isaacson writes:
Throughout the evening and into the night, he [Musk] personally took charge of the situation. Allowing the use of Starlink for the attack, he concluded, could be a disaster for the world. So he secretly told his engineers to turn off coverage within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast. As a result, when the Ukrainian drone subs got near the Russian fleet in Sevastopol, they lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly.
That final sentence is arresting, isn’t it? I could find no support for it in any of the news articles that Isaacson listed as sources for this chapter. There is a Financial Times story that confirms some Starlink outages during a Ukrainian push against the Russians, but it says nothing about drone subs or washing ashore harmlessly. A New York Times article confirms Musk doesn’t want Starlink running drones but says nothing about drone subs.
What could the possible source for this sentence be? In the following paragraph, Isaacson quotes text messages from Fedorov, who had “secretly shared with him [Musk] the details of how the drone subs were crucial” to the Ukrainians. Not very secret now, I suppose.
Musk disputed Isaacson’s account on Twitter: “SpaceX did not deactivate anything,” he said. “There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol,” he went on, though he did not specify which government’s authorities. “If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation.”
Isaacson caved immediately:
To clarify on the Starlink issue: the Ukrainians THOUGHT coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea, but it was not. They asked Musk to enable it for their drone sub attack on the Russian fleet. Musk did not enable it, because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war.
Tremendous statement. “To clarify” obfuscates what’s going on: is Isaacson saying his book is wrong? Surely that is what this means since “future editions will be updated” to correct it. The Post corrected its excerpt, anyway. “The Ukrainians thought” — which Ukrainians, and how did Isaacson know their thinking? In his listed sources, we have only the text messages of one Ukrainian, who, for diplomatic purposes, may be obscuring what he knows. “They asked Musk to enable it for their drone attack” is an entirely different account than the one given in the book, which says Musk shut off existing coverage rather than approving extended coverage; what could possibly be the source here? And of course, the last sentence — “Musk did not enable it because he thought, probably correctly, that would cause a major war” — is simple boot-licking.
Isaacson “clarified” further in another tweet. ”Based on my conversations with Musk, I mistakenly thought the policy to not allow Starlink to be used for an attack on Crimea had been first decided on the night of the Ukrainian attempted sneak attack that night,” he wrote on Twitter. “He now says that the policy had been implemented earlier, but the Ukrainians did not know it, and that night he simply reaffirmed the policy.”
There was a way to find out what’s true here, and it would have been to interview more sources, both Ukrainian and US military ones. Isaacson chose not to. Musk’s word was good enough for him — and so, when Musk contested the characterization, Isaacson rolled over.
I am lingering here because it highlights a major problem with Isaacson’s biography. We are dealing with not one but two unreliable narrators: Musk and Isaacson himself. After all, just before issuing his clarification, Isaacson had been touting a walk through the SpaceX factory with CBS’s David Pogue to promote his book.
Isaacson writes a specific kind of biography. There is even a “genius” boxed set of his biographies that includes Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and — somewhat incongruously — Steve Jobs.