Elon Musk

by Walter Isaacson

Maye said. “He needs someone besides me to talk to. I really have this genius child.”

Reading remained Musk’s psychological retreat. Sometimes he would immerse himself in books all afternoon and most of the night, nine hours at a stretch.

When Errol came to pick him up at the end, he found Elon engaging with three of the professors. “This boy must get a new computer,” one of them declared.

“I never wanted to be a CEO,” he says, “but I learned that you could not truly be the chief technology or product officer unless you were the CEO.”

The president of the Toronto Star, who had thrown a Yellow Pages book at Kimbal, called him to apologize and ask if Zip2 would be its partner. Kimbal said yes.

or, as he put it, “fixing their fucking stupid code”—was not a path to endearment.

“It’s not your job to make people on your team love you,” he said at a SpaceX executive session years later. “In fact, that’s counterproductive.”