Walter Isaacson’s Weird Networks: The Establishment Strikes Back at Elon Musk
In December of last year, longtime Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan wrote about three people she called “psychos in the C-suite”—Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Elon Musk—in a column that could have been titled “Which of these does not belong?” After all, Holmes has been convicted and Bankman-Friend indicted for fraud, whereas Musk is the world’s richest person off inventing Tesla and recently bought Twitter. But for Noonan these distinctions weren’t relevant. She thought that, like the others, Musk might well be one of the “subtle psychopaths, the kind who don’t stab you” and “are often intelligent, charming and accomplished” but show “lack of conscience” for the “public weal”: they “don’t mind causing others harm” because “they’re not hemmed in by what limits you.” Her evidence for these suppositions were Musk’s legal wrangles over acquiring Twitter and the fact that “he tweets out photos of his bedside table” which “looked as if a school shooter lived there.”
In retrospect, Noonan’s column wasn’t a one-off. It was an early wave in the establishment reaction against Musk that’s reached saturation with her media colleague and “consummate media insider” Walter Isaacson’s new biography.
Isaacson’s great subjects are geniuses and innovators, breakers of the mold. He wrote biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Steve Jobs, the last of which was turned into a reassuringly sentimental movie by Aaron Sorkin. He founded the Aspen Ideas Festival, the nominal point of which is to gather great minds to break the mold. He specializes in judicious portraits of world-changers: books in which personal virtues and flaws are portrayed as the drivers of human progress while social and political contexts stay further in the background.
This is the main thrust of Isaacson’s analysis of Musk, though at a more critical pitch than some of his earlier works. It includes new and sometimes involving information, but its overall approach, a reliably personalized description of virtues and flaws, allows Musk to be a longer version of what Noonan said he was. As The New York Times’ summary puts it, he’s
a complex, tortured figure whose brilliance is often overshadowed by his inability to relate on a human level to the people around him — his wives, his children and those on whom he relied to help develop the space exploration and electric car businesses that made him the wealthiest man on Earth.
Others of Isaacson’s reviewers have expanded on this portrait. For historian Jill Lepore, writing in The New Yorker in a piece calling Musk a “supervillain,” he is “a man who wields more power than almost any other person on the planet but seems estranged from humanity itself.” The writer Gary Shteyngart says in The Guardian that Musk suffers from a case of “arrested development” and that “the richest man in the world has a lot of growing up to do.” Isaacson presents himself as more appreciative of aspects of Musk, but his basic diagnosis moves from the same construct: “in some ways,” he told AirMail, “the story is the epic quest of a man-child still standing in front of his father, trying to resist the dark side of the force.” This diagnosis is even adopted by reviewers who approvingly cite what Isaacson says is Musk’s “learn by blowing things up” approach and call it evidence of a “bold, iconoclastic spirit” for “our current time of trials.”
Assuming for a moment that this description washes, Musk is in good company. The correlation between inventiveness and eccentricity is well-documented: from Einstein to John Nash, people who have excelled in these fields tend to be out of step or even, for periods of time, estranged from reality. Even judged by these metrics, Musk seems like an innovator who has kept a modicum of balance in the face of unprecedented power. But there’s a bigger question at play: why does it matter? After all, Musk’s peccadillos, flaws, darkness, or any other part of his personality are of less interest than the unique way he’s using them in a period of global and national flux.
In the history of American democracy or capitalism, we’ve never had a figure quite like Musk: a billionaire in a time of systemic disempowerment whose actions arguably have the function of giving power back to ordinary people. For the people who support his moves, Musk is a practical, conserving figure: breaking an enclosing sphere of speech with his purchase of Twitter; fighting back against the regulation of life by Artificial Intelligence. In this read, Musk is holding elite ideologues and experts in check, most successfully by opening media to the jostling, rough, organic search for public consensus that characterized the earliest days of the American republic. Speaking historically, this is a very strange thing for a very rich American to be doing—protecting peoples’ power over their lives, not taking it away. And even for those people who see Musk’s moves as having a very different effect—empowering hate-speechifying mobs; spreading fear of Artificial Intelligence to those who feel left behind; advancing an “ideological project”—it’s his impact on today’s power structures that is driving their commentary. Whether Musk’s moves continue in this direction or not, right now they’re the single most unusual thing about him.
Still, this isn’t the way Musk is portrayed by Isaacson, who started his biography before Musk’s recent moves but had every opportunity to revise or refocus his book. Nor is Musk portrayed this way by Isaacson’s reviewers in establishment media. For these people, Musk’s moves reflect personal problems or dramas: he’s “anti-social” and outside the “norm.” All of this raises an implicit question which their portraits of Musk don’t answer: what “norm” is it that these people are judging Musk against?
It’s the order of Isaacson’s real brainchild: the Aspen Ideas Festival, held in Aspen, Colorado, a former mining town where the son and grandson of German immigrants founded the nonprofit Aspen Institute to celebrate German culture in the aftermath of the Second World War. Starting in 2005, Isaacson put Aspen on the map with the Festival, a typical session of which has twelve people, from MIT social theorists to Broadway directors to the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, come on stage for three minutes each to “pitch” their topics so that “it generally feels like something good is happening…serious problems being worked through, collectively, and with the best of intentions.”
Today Aspen is described by Isaacson’s successor as “a non-profit, non-partisan convener that gathers well-meaning citizens together to frame problems and find solutions.” One example of this convening is the Weave Project of David Brooks, who buys into a version of the dominant explanation of Musk: “‘retain[ing]a childlike, almost stunted side’…perhaps….because he is still inhabiting an adventure story.” Brooks is the New York Times columnist, former Bush White House backer, and self-described believer in a virtuous governing elite, and his Weave Project describes its mission as “to invite everyone to start living like a weaver and shift our culture from one that values achievement and individual success …to one that finds value in deep relationships and community success.” It has a core staff of 9, its backers include President Biden’s confidante, David Rubenstein, the co-chairman of the Carlyle Group and of the Kennedy Center’s Board of Directors and an avid pusher of 1619 Project-related history—and it has no hard metric for success.
In other words, these well-intentioned speakers and their allies have a specific loyalty. That loyalty is to nonspecific progress by elite consensus through the universities, corporations, administrative agencies, and nonprofits that have claimed power in the seventy-five years since America became a global empire. This is the apple cart Musk is upsetting, an approach that locates him closest to the new Republican Party of Moms for Liberty and active state legislatures, which are doing the same thing in different but intersecting ways. Neither Musk nor the new Republicans are “well-meaning citizens” interested in working through national institutions to “frame problems and find solutions.” They’re skeptics of these institutions who doubt their ability to solve any problems at all.
In response, the Aspen institutionalists and their allies, proud rationalists all, are resorting to tactics they would otherwise describe as irrational. The most common of these is to label institutional skeptics as immature, impaired, not committed to “discourse.” If Elon Musk is a “man-child,” then House Republicans are “the Toddler Caucus on Capitol Hill” which “not even a Biden impeachment can soothe…out of a Government shutdown” and which is “no more sophisticated than a preschool playground.” If Musk’s room looks like a school shooter’s, then Donald Trump “looks physically worse” but “will continue with his mad vigor.” If Musk has a “dark demon mode” where he shuts off rational objections to his projects, then the Supreme Court has entered its own dark demon mode where it turns away from “solidity and rational discourse.” Even the rare half-criticism of this approach from within the institutions adopts the basic framework: since Isaacson’s book makes us “distrust [Musk’s] ability to be calm and rational,” The Atlantic argues that “we need to…understand the [concrete] consequences of his influence” to “challenge him to do right by his power.” (Who “we” are in this analysis goes undefined, though it’s used ten times.)
These are not “rational” analyses of anything. They’re rhetorical shorthands, schoolyard labels, instructive pointers, clues to willing listeners that being part of the clique of “adults in the room” means defining their skeptics as dangerously deranged children. They’re also abuses of language by people whose connections to universities and the media give them unprecedented power over the way language is framed. These people are part of, and loyal to, the same institutions—the ones that for seventy-five years have tried to set the terms and the bounds for how Americans discuss their country.
Occasional superficial disagreements between these players don’t disrupt their fundamental alliance; instead, they function as opportunities to promote their purported objectivity. One example came last week, when former New York Times technology journalist and current Vox and New York Magazine contributor Kara Swisher took her “friend” Walter Isaacson to task on her podcast because, though she has “used the word adult toddler to describe Elon” she worries “this framing…absolves him of… accountability…as a 52-year-old man.” The “Walter Isaacson-Kara Swisher Showdown” doesn’t challenge the terms of Isaacson’s approach. It just injects superficial controversy into the mix, at the end of which both parties “agree to disagree” in a “civil but quite tough discussion,” having publicly given evidence of their independent thought. As Swisher puts it in her lead for the “Showdown,” “Walter Isaacson and Kara are friends — but that doesn’t mean she’s going to go easy on him as they discuss Isaacson’s new hit biography.”
A Washington Post Style section piece about a book party for Isaacson captured, with unwary appreciation, exactly this note of respectful bonhomie. Titled “They Love Walter but Fear Elon Musk” and leading off with the question “If you write a book but no one throws you a book party, does it even count?” the piece presents “an intimate group of 165 A-list friends and admirers” praising Isaacson for his work on Musk. For them, Isaacson is a “good old…boy” who has “this talent for disarming and charming people” and who has used these skills to write about Musk, “an iteration of a long line of innovation and creativity,” but they remain concerned over whether “a mercurial multibillionaire with daddy issues…will do the right thing.” Isaacson, in his remarks at the party, dutifully sounded out a strain of the personalized historicity that has carried him through multiple bestsellers, saying of Musk that “the dark and the light strands are interwoven and sometimes you can’t pull them out without destroying the whole fabric.” (“He would weather storms, literally and psychologically” and “encounter dark recesses of the earth and soul,” he wrote about Leonardo DaVinci a few years ago, a warm-up sentence for Musk, but “both his fascinations and his forebodings would be expressed in his art.”) This party was hosted by, among others, Patty Stonesifer, a former Microsoft executive turned nonprofit CEO and now interim CEO of The Washington Post, and David Rubenstein; the attendees included Nancy Pelosi, David Axelrod—and Kara Swisher.
Deeper disagreements also get sublimated underneath the same institutional consensus. When Isaacson wrote his book on Steve Jobs, he was at first encouraged and then privately pushed against by Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, then emerging as a known philanthropist through her vehicle Emerson Collective. Not long after, Emerson Collective bought the majority stake in The Atlantic, which was in partnership with the same Aspen Institute Isaacson spent more than a decade making into a nonprofit behemoth. As of 2021, Aspen has de-partnered with The Atlantic and moved to NBC, a corporation with wider reach, but Emerson and Aspen remain deeply linked by personnel, who make the parameters and the metrics that define Walter Isaacson’s world. If you’re like Musk, outside that world but influencing it, you’re one of these insiders’ enemies.