A Bullshit Genius

On a friendly stroll somewhere in Colorado in the summer of 2004, Steve Jobs asked Walter Isaacson if he would consider writing his biography. Isaacson, a journalist, academic, and policymaker who was then CEO of the Aspen Institute, an influential think tank, had just published a six-hundred-odd-page study of Benjamin Franklin, and was at work on another about Albert Einstein. “My initial reaction was to wonder, half jokingly,” Isaacson later reflected, “whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.”

Isaacson did not take Jobs up on the offer until 2009, when he learned that the Apple boss was dying of pancreatic cancer. When Steve Jobs was published in 2011, just a couple of weeks after its subject passed away, it became clear that during his years of reporting the book, Isaacson had been convinced of what had first struck him only in jest. The front cover, designed with input from Jobs himself, featured a black-and-white photograph of the tech guru gazing knowingly at the camera, his thumb on his chin in contemplation: here is Jobs as world-historic genius, Silicon Valley successor to Franklin and Einstein. The narrative resonated with a public still enthralled by the misfit, college-dropout tech genius. That year was a kind of high-water mark for techno-optimism; the Arab Spring protests were still bringing democracy to the Middle East one tweet at a time; Google, with its ping-pong tables and massage rooms, was still widely considered the best place to work in the world. Isaacson’s portrait of Steve Jobs played to this market, selling around 380,000 copies in its first week.

A decade later, Isaacson was casting around for the next genius to include in his rarefied canon, which had grown to include Leonardo da Vinci, too, and was being sold as a “genius biographies” box set. What was kindred among these men, according to Isaacson, was not necessarily high I.Q. but an original spirit. They thought differently than others did — hit targets, as Schopenhauer put it, that no one else could see. This quality often put them out of step with the prevailing attitudes of their time, but these men did not acquiesce to ideological pressure or subscribe to social mores. The Isaacson genius was an avatar of intellectual freedom, a kind of liberal humanist hero who flourished in the West’s innovative meccas: Renaissance Florence, revolutionary America, prewar Western Europe, Silicon Valley.

As Isaacson surveyed the landscape in search of a new genius, one name kept coming up: Elon Musk. He was, without a doubt, a man with grand vision — electric cars, space travel, telepathy. He was unyielding in this vision, too, sometimes belligerently so. In Isaacson’s telling, he arranged a call in 2021 with the help of some mutual friends, and the two spoke for an hour and a half. (Musk has also taken credit for the idea.) Musk, unsurprisingly, was enthusiastic about the prospect of being written about. Isaacson, in turn, demanded full access to his subject, and the freedom to make up his own mind. “You have no control,” he reportedly told Musk. Over the next two years, the biographer followed the Tesla boss around, spoke to his family, friends, and colleagues, and received Red Bull-fueled text messages from Musk late into the night. During this period, Musk’s already bizarre life devolved into pandemonium. He bought Twitter at a massive loss, intervened in the war in Ukraine, spawned offspring with otherworldly names, and challenged Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. A Fox News segment compared the two men by height, weight, age, and I.Q.: Zuckerberg, 152; Musk, 155. A battle of the geniuses, and also one of the dumbest spectacles of all time.

Nevertheless, when Musk was published in September of last year, it was clear from the dust jacket alone that the book would situate Elon in the Isaacson lineage, painting him as the true heir to Jobs — a brilliant, if troubled, Silicon Valley genius. The cover features a head shot of Musk staring directly into the camera, fingers on his chin — like Jobs, in a thinking position — and the epigraph consists of two quotes, the first from Musk: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” Directly below it is one attributed to Jobs: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

This time, the pitch didn’t quite land. Mainstream liberal attitudes toward Silicon Valley culture had cooled since the Jobs era, in large part due to a perceived rightward lurch among its upper echelons during the Trump years. Musk had emerged as the poster boy for this shift; he shared a meme that compared Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to Hitler, and frequently posted about the “woke mind virus” and Covid vaccines. Isaacson’s book was panned by many; some critics accused the author of engaging in access journalism. In a combative interview, tech reporter Kara Swisher repeatedly asked Isaacson if he had come to “like” Musk. You can hear her frustration and bewilderment. How could Isaacson, her old friend and fellow liberal stalwart, not see Musk for the “asshole” he is, and, in fact, try to rehabilitate his image and burnish his legacy? Jill Lepore posed a similar question in her New Yorker review. Isaacson, she wrote, is “a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer.” Why did he write this apologia for a “supervillain”?

But within the context of Isaacson’s nine books, Musk is not an anomaly. In method and thesis, it is perfectly in line with a career built on promoting elite interests under the guise of biographical neutrality and insipid humanism. This time, though, his “genius” subject is idiotic enough to throw the bullshit at the heart of the project into stark relief. Musk is not just the natural successor to Isaacson’s genius canon; he may be its necessary conclusion.

by Oscar Schwartz, The Drift |  Read more:

Image: John Kazior