There was a time when Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, wanted to become the new Steve Jobs, at the helm of Apple. The American journalist Tim Higgins told it in his latest book “Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk and the bet of the century”. The reporter of the Wall Street Journal and Cnbc reveals that in 2016, in a telephone exchange with Apple CEO Tim Cook, he would have offered Tesla to Apple in exchange for the leadership of the Cupertino company. Cook, according to what Higgins writes, would have hung up furious and indignant for the narcissism of his interlocutor.
Musk denied it all on Twitter: not just the chair claim that once belonged to Jobs, but the entire call. “Cook and myself have never spoken or written to each other,” Musk tweeted. With Jobs, and therefore with Cupertino, Musk will still be able to boast a bond: the famous journalist and writer Walter Isaacson, in fact, is working on a biography of the 50-year-old administrator of Tesla, SpaceX and countless other companies.
Isaacson is the same to have signed the biography of Steve Jobs (published in Italy by Mondadori) which was published in 2011 and has sold over 3 million copies in the United States alone. Of course, the ferocious timing of the time supported its success: the book on Jobs arrived online and in bookstores on October 24, 2011, a few days after the death of the Apple co-founder (October 5, 2011, in fact). Now Isaacson, who is a famous biographer (he wrote the life of Henry Kissinger, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin), and among other positions he was president and CEO of CNN, would be working on the volume to be dedicated to Musk .
It was Musk himself who revealed it, with a tweet in which he seems to prepare the way for his beatification as a “national hero” (he is a South African naturalized Canadian and American): “If you are curious about Tesla, SpaceX and what concerns me in general, Walter Isaacson is writing a biography ”he wrote on the social network. It would not be the first, about his life: another biography was released in 2015 by Ashlee Vance and entitled “Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future”.
But in these six years things have happened that concern Elon Musk, his companies and his many business ventures. And then Isaacson is Isaacson. The same one that has crystallized Jobs in the memory of millions of readers with a kind of bible full of anecdotes. From the book about the visionary man who launched, among other things, the revolutionary iPods and iPhones, Danny Boyle left for his 2015 film with Michael Fassbender as the unforgettable genius of the Apple.
Six years, we said. Marked above all by the triumphs of the space programs of his SpaceX, as well as by the explosion in the prices of Tesla shares (and vehicle sales, of course). Above all Crew Dragon, which has restored autonomy to US astronauts with respect to the comings and goings from the International Space Station, the commitment on the Artemis lunar program, the construction of the Starship maxi-rocket, space tourism and so on. Successes that seem to bury any controversy every time: from those on his controversial statements (for example those on the pandemic, during 2020) to those on the manipulation of financial markets, especially those of cryptocurrencies, up to the factories that remained open in California during the last year’s lockdown or the stellar dividends that make him the highest paid CEO in the world (in 2020 alone he grossed $ 6.5 billion in stock options) and a thousand other excesses.
The book had already been talked about for a few months, when Fox Business had anticipated the ongoing negotiation between the two, explaining that Isaacson had reserved the right to reply by June. Another sign that evidently it was Musk who wanted it and not the other way around. In the umpteenth step that perhaps wants to bring him ever closer to that model that just six years ago he defined an “idiot”: “The time I met Steve Jobs he immediately seemed an unpleasant person – said Musk – I met him during a party, but he said he never heard my name. His behavior was unfriendly. I would call him an idiot for how he behaved that time ”.
Perhaps the most sensible thing was Bill Gates said in an interview with Bloomberg last year: “If you know people directly, these gross oversimplifications seem strange. Elon is more of a skilled engineer, while Steve was a genius in design, attracting people and marketing. You wouldn’t enter a room and run the risk of confusing them ”. We hope that the biography of Isaacson, on which there are no details regarding the release date, does not confuse the waters.
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