The Craziest Things I Learned From The Gigantic Biography Of Elon Musk

I've been talking a lot lately about the Elon Musk biography I'm reading, "Elon Musk" by Walter Isaacson (same author who wrote the seminal biography of Steve Jobs). 

First, I haven't enjoyed a book this much in years. It's over 600 pages but the chapters are super short and it's incredibly easy to read. Mainly because Elon Musk, despite all the nonsense over the years, is the most fascinating person of our generation. And maybe the most important person on the planet. 

I highly recommend the book, even if you fucking hate Elon Musk. But if you want the sparknotes, these are the most unbelievable and enduring things I took away from the book: 

-Shutting down Starlink to avoid nuclear war  

In 2022, Elon donated a ton of Starlink receivers and satellites to the Ukrainian military for communications purposes. Russia had scuttled their systems through a malware attack, so they were fighting blind until Elon's futuristic internet bailed them out. But as the war progressed, Ukraine started using the systems less for defense and more for coordinated attacks. Namely, they planned to send a bunch of submarines into Crimea, where a major Russian fleet of ships was anchored. An attack on these ships was known to be a "red line" for the Russians, one that would possibly result in them retaliating with a nuclear weapon. 

Elon knew of the attack because he was communicating with the Ukrainian leaders. He decided to shut off the Starlink systems as the submarines were heading to blow up the Russian boats because he thought it posed too big of a threat to humanity. Basically, he single-handedly averted a modern-day Pearl Harbor that could have had gigantic and terrible consequences. 

Is he playing God? Sure, a bit. But he expressed regret that he was even in that position to his people, saying he never intended for his technology to be used for offensive purposes; only to help Ukraine defend itself. It appears he did not like having to be the one to make that call. 

-Allowing Twitter employees to choose their own fate 

In 2022, after Musk purchased and took over Twitter, he conducted a huge employee purge. In the process, he had a team of loyal troops scrub through the Slack communications of employees, searching for keywords that might lead them to conversations that were disloyal, or might pose a risk to the company from a disgruntled employee. They found one conversation where an employee wrote "Please let me go with severance and I will leave," which made them decide to create a company-wide poll. 

Elon sent an email to every single employee explaining that the culture was going to change to become "extremely hardcore." He asked employees to click yes on a button if they were SURE they wanted to remain, or they could simply say no and receive three-months severance. Out of 3,600 responders, 2,492 said they wanted to remain. About 30% of the entire workforce just… self-eliminated. 

This saved Elon and his team a ton of time, as they then didn't have to pore over the work outputs of employees, get managers to provide feedback on their teams, etc. 

-Not telling his girlfriend that he had donated his sperm to be the biological father to an employee's kids

Elon Musk hired a woman named Shivon Zilis to work on the autopilot engineering for Tesla. She then became a director at Neuralink, his company that builds microchips to connect the human brain to computers/AI. They were close friends and at one point, she told him she was planning to get pregnant using an anonymous sperm donor. He offered her his sperm, and she birthed twins through IVF. 

Now, at the EXACT SAME TIME, Elon and his girlfriend Grimes were expecting their second child, via surrogate. Elon did not tell Grimes he had provided the sperm for Zilis' twins. In an insane coincidence, Zilis' children were born seven weeks prematurely, and she was in the SAME HOSPITAL, at the SAME TIME, as Elon and Grimes' surrogate. Grimes and the surrogate were in a nearby room!!! 

It didn't come out until months later that Elon was the biological father of Shivon Zilis' two kids. Grimes apparently was not happy (understandably), but when she confronted Elon about it, he simply said "she can do what she wants." 

Asperger's, man. You can get away with the literal opposite of murder. 

-Three neck surgeries as a result of volunteering to wrestle a professional sumo wrestler on his birthday

Elon is a big birthday party guy. His birthdays are super elaborate, albeit usually planned by the imaginations of whichever woman he's currently seeing. For his 42nd birthday, he was dressed as a samurai and they hired a 350-pound sumo wrestler, whom he attempted to throw via a judo move. He succeeded, but destroyed his neck in the process, resulting in multiple surgeries for a crushed disc. He's had a ton of pain over the years which results in him often having to lie down on the floor of his various factories for periods of time. 

*All information in this blog is sourced from:

Isaacson, W. (2023). Elon Musk. New York, NY, Simon & Schuster.

Update: someone sent me an article mentioning that the Crimean submarine story needed some clarifying/retractions after the book was published. Apparently it went down slightly differently—the Ukrainians asked Musk to turn on the Starlink coverage for the submarines but he refused, for the reasons mentioned in the book. See this tweet: 

Fine, whatever. Birds of a feather, in my opinion. Elon is still a god.