HUBRIS MAXIMUS

A timely look at the mercurial billionaire now as well known in politics as in business.

A leitmotif in Washington Post reporter Siddiqui’s portrait of Musk is a suit brought against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud, the alleged violation having been to announce that a funding deal had been secured when it had not, artificially increasing the value of his stock. Another lawsuit enters into the picture, this one filed by a shareholder over Musk’s pay, estimated to be “250 times larger than the contemporaneous median peer compensation package.” By Siddiqui’s account, such things seem to be minor irritations; Musk is “a man with little regard for the consequences of his actions, for the minor aftereffects one might describe as fallout.” There’s fallout aplenty in this account, much connected to the technology involved in getting his Tesla vehicles to be autonomous, a project that had collateral damage in the deaths of drivers and a pedestrian after the autopilot failed to detect obstacles in the way and that occasioned a shift in rhetoric: “The cars…required ‘active, constant, and attentive driver supervision,’” making them “self-driving, but not autonomous.” Musk’s apparent conviction that he’s saving the world with the Tesla and saving the human species with his SpaceX rockets (“We need to be a multiplanetary species, so mankind survives a big meteorite hitting the Earth”) makes him something of a character out of Ayn Rand, Siddiqui observes. Musk's solipsistic approach to the world also resulted in one noteworthy turnaround: Formerly a Democrat, he has become an implacable foe of regulation—especially of his own businesses—who of course now has the ear of Donald Trump. It’s in this regard that Siddiqui’s study makes a useful adjunct to Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography, which is overall the better book.

A revealing portrait of a man whom, though chaotic in the extreme, the author considers to be “inevitable.”