By Stuart Mitchner

On Election Day, I began reading Walter Isaacson’s biography of Elon Musk (Simon & Schuster 2023) along with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which Samuel Taylor Coleridge first conceived during a walk with William Wordsworth on November 13, 1797.

Early Reading

Coleridge’s tale came to mind while I was reading the chapter about Musk’s early reading habits. As a teenager pondering “the meaning of life and the universe,” Musk found nothing helpful in philosophers like Nietzche, Heidigger, and Schopenhauer (“I don’t recommend reading Nietzche as a teenager”). His salvation was science fiction, novels like Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Hard Mistress and Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series, about sending settlers to a distant region of the galaxy “to preserve human consciousness in the face of an impending dark age.” More than 30 years later Musk claimed that the Foundation Series was fundamental to the creation of SpaceX, whose stated goal is “to build the technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary.” Says SpaceX Chief Engineer Musk, “This is the first time in the four-billion-year history of Earth that it’s possible to realize that goal and protect the light of consciousness.”

The Ultimate Question

Another book that impacted Musk’s “wonder years” was Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The citizens of the galaxy, which is run by “a two-headed president who had turned unfathomability into an art form,” have built a super computer to determine the “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” After seven million years, the computer delivers its answer: “42.” When that answer provokes “a befuddled howl,” the computer declares that “you’ve never actually known what the question is.” Musk took this to mean “that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.”

Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner has two answers for his captive audience the Wedding Guest when he concludes his story: “He prayeth well, who loveth well, / Both man and bird and beast,” and “He prayeth best who loveth best / all things both great and small; For the dear God who loveth us / He made and loveth all.”

For Musk, the would-be interstellar mariner who was up till dawn playing a video game called The Battle of Polytopia the night he decided to buy Twitter, the first and foremost of “Polytopia Life Lessons” is that “empathy is not an asset.”

Empathy is what saves the Ancient Mariner. The moment he watched the “water-snakes” moving in “tracks of shining white” within the shadow of the ship (“happy living things! no tongue their beauty might declare”), a “spring of love gushed from my heart, / And I blessed them unaware,” and because he “blessed them unaware,” the Albatross fell off his neck and “sank like lead into the sea.”

A Joke?

On the night that Musk’s offer to buy Twitter was accepted, he explained to his four older boys why he was buying it: “I think it’s important to have a digital public square that’s inclusive and trusted.” After a pause, he added, “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?” Musk claimed it was a joke. His biographer admits that with Musk “it was sometimes hard to tell.”

Flash forward to early October 2024 and Musk’s appearance at a Trump rally on the site of the July 13 assassination attempt in Butler, Pa. According to Jacob Gallagher in the New York Times: “He hopped onstage. He bounced. He jumped like a Pixy Stix-enhanced toddler who was up well past his bedtime.” One feature of Musk’s antic performance was to pantomime Trump’s heroic moment, bloody but unbowed, raising his fist, mouthing the word “Fight!”

From all accounts, Musk’s involvement in Donald Trump’s triumphant 2024 presidential campaign was dead serious and, for Musk, highly profitable. The Times headlined it as a “major win for Musk and big-money politics” in which an “ultrawealthy donor took advantage of America’s evolving campaign-finance system to put his thumb on the scale like never before.”

Enter Errol Musk

November 13, 1850 is the birthdate of Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The fact that Walter Isaacson titled the first section of Chapter Five “Jekyll and Hyde” would have caught my attention even if today’s print date had not already been on my mind. The “strange case” of Elon’s father, Errol Musk, haunts the opening chapters of the book. At one point Isaacson himself admits “getting caught up in Errol’s tangled web.” Evidence of the father’s violent mood swings is provided by Elon, his sister Tosca, brother Kimbal, and various cousins who “became reluctant to visit” because “you never knew what you were in for.” Errol would be “jovial and fun” and then become “dark, verbally abusive, and possessed by fantasies and conspiracies.” One minute “he’d be super friendly” and the next “he’d be screaming at you”; he “changes reality around him”; he “will literally make things up, but he actually believes in his own false reality.”

Sometimes Errol would make “sweeping assertions to his kids that were unconnected to facts, such as insisting that in the United States the president is considered divine and cannot be criticized.” At other times he would “weave fanciful tales that cast himself as either the hero or the victim. All would be asserted with such conviction,” that his children would refer to it as “mental torture” that led them to question “their own view of reality.”

Even without that curious reference to the “divinity” of the American president, it’s hard not to hear echoes from the past decade in phrases like “he actually believes in his own false reality.” In addition to the other details in this “strange case,” Isaacson notes the fact that Elon and Errol have “the same harsh, bitter laugh, and that the words Elon uses, the way he stares, his sudden transitions from light to dark to light, remind his family members of the Errol simmering inside of him.” His first wife would sometimes dare to say “You’re turning into your father.” It became their code phrase to warn Elon that he was going “into the realm of darkness.”

The Beating

After being beaten so severely by a pack of playground bullies that his nose still needed corrective surgery decades later, Musk came home from the hospital to a verbal beating from his father: “I had to stand for an hour as he yelled at me and called me an idiot and told me that I was just worthless.” His brother Kimbal, who witnessed the scene, said it was the worst memory of his life. “My father just lost it, went ballistic, as he often did. He had zero compassion.” In his prologue, Issacson quotes Musk’s first wife Justine, “the mother of five of his surviving ten children,” who says Elon’s response to his father’s abuse was “an emotional shutoff valve” that “could make him callous, but that also made him a risk-seeking innovator”: “He learned to shut down fear … If you turn off fear, then maybe you have to turn off other things, like joy or empathy.”

Tosca’s Duenna

Musk’s younger sister Tosca makes a brief appearance in an early chapter of Isaacson’s biography. In 1989, fresh from South Africa, Musk, Tosca, and their mother Maye are living in a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto, where Elon sleeps on the couch. Money is scarce. Tosca has a job at a hamburger joint, Maye as a diet consultant, and Elon as an intern in Toronto’s Microsoft office. While Musk had “no friends or social life in Toronto” and “spent most of his time reading or working on the computer,” Tosca was “a saucy teenager, eager to go out.” When Musk declared that he would be coming with her, she said no, and when he insisted, she told him he had to stay ten feet away from her “at all times.” And so he did: “He would walk behind her and her friends, carrying a book to read whenever they went into a club and a party.”

Dancing and Fighting

It could be a scene out of a 19th-century novel, Musk as his sister’s studious duenna, sitting in a corner reading while nurturing his dream to protect “the light of consciousness.” In case you think he was a wallflower, there’s a snapshot on the same page that shows him dancing side by side with Kimbal, who looks relaxed next to Elon, both fists stiffly raised as if to do battle with something or someone in a real-life video game.

In fact, these are the sons of Errol Musk, raised in the violent environment of South Africa, ready to fight often and in public, “oblivious to their surroundings.” A few years later when they were in Silicon Valley working on a project called Zip2 (a name Musk hated), they had intense disagreements that often led to “rolling-on-the-office-floor fights,” in one of which Kimbal bit Elon’s hand “and tore off a hunk of flesh.”

As Issacson suggests in the prologue, the PTSD symptoms from Musk’s childhood “instilled in him an aversion to contentment.” Says Musk, who also grew up with Asperger’s syndrome: “Adversity shaped me…My pain threshold became very high.”

What Next?

Over and over again in the course of his career, Musk has fallen out with the people he works with, especially CEOs. Now that he may be working under an emboldened president, things could get interesting. On that note, I just discovered another literary classic associated with this date. On November 13, 1862, Lewis Carroll began writing Alice in Wonderland. The possibilities suggested by that coincidence are stunning. Do we go down the rabbit hole? A Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in the Oval Office? And who will be the Queen of Hearts?