Biography Ilona Mask Book

Her author Walter Aisekson became famous for the books about Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein - but his new work not only creates a legend about his hero, but also exposes her. Egor Mikhailov tells what the problems of the book are - and why it is still worth reading. Elon Musk is a genius.

Not because he is an excellent engineer or a breakthrough thinker, and even more so because a good leader. No, he has one unconditional superpower: he knows how to make everyone talk about himself. It seems that the discussion of Ilona Mask is the very energy on which his exorbitantly bloated ego works, and if so, then this engine does not stop for a long time.

The subject of the conversation is every tweet of the mask, every its public statement, every idiotic joke. Moreover, this discussion does not happen: by a year more or less, anyone has a ready -made opinion about who the mask is - a genius and a visionary, thinking at a level inaccessible to a simple earthling, or a pea jester, lively embodiment of all the sins of capitalism. The release of Walter Aisekson’s book can hardly turn this paradigm: how many people who are ready to master the seven -sustainable biography in the world in order to change their opinion about Ilona Masculus?

However, Aisekson carried out a tremendous work, not only accompanying the mask for two years, communicating with his relatives, friends, employees and former partners that did not always preserve good memories of him. And, despite the fact that the book came out imperfect, it can tell us a lot - not only about the main character, but also about how we relate to charming billionaires who promise to change the world.

Compositionally, "Ilon Musk" is divided into two almost equal parts. Chapters from the first to forty -six tell the story of his take -off. And after some meetings, writes Aisekson, engineers experience a “postmatic stress disorder” - such a “friendly” atmosphere reigns on them. But all this is for the sake of a great goal: to create an unmanned car, start the perfect financial system, send a person to Mars!

Aisekson is fascinated by the figure of a mask, and the narrative in his book seems to be in the history of achieving goals that justify any means. He is a real inventor, but believes in his own lie, ”says the younger brother of the mask in the book. It is not about Ilon himself, but about his father, Abuzer, a conspiracyologist and a former co -owner of muddy emerald businesses.

But it is not for nothing that the interlocutors of Aisekson one by one say that they often see the features of his parent in the hero of the book: impulsivity, sharpness, inanimateness, aggressiveness, and a tendency to conspiracy theories. The plot about a person who is trying, but cannot break with a family spell, fascinates the author. He admits this on the first pages: “This is one of the most resonant motives in mythology.

But this disclosure of reception reveals the main problem of the book. Aisekson is trying to strongly, but still can hardly resist the crazy charm of his hero: the gravity of the mask is too powerful. Sometimes it seems that he does not write a biography, but carries a statue from a block of marble. The monument comes out to be impressive, but still Musk is not a monument, but a living person who is early to erect to the pedestal.

The guilty Musk immediately appointed one of the best engineers who soon left the company. When the fallen rocket was investigated, it turned out that the engineer had nothing to do with it: the connecting nut rusted and cracked. And between the matter reports a little later: Ilon Musk himself was responsible, according to the personal approval of which the same nut was made of cheaper aluminum.

In general, it is precisely on this that the legend of the mask is built: he gathers the best engineers and programmers around him again, inspires crazy ideas, exhausts unrealistic terms, takes praise for their merits - and, with rare exceptions, dumps responsibility for the failures. But dramatic laws say that the fall of the hero to the top should follow the fall. And the mask does not disappoint.

In the year, he suddenly enters the skirmish with the English speleologist and publicly calls him a pedophile - this led to the fall of Tesla shares and litigation. What was a trigger for such an act, impulsive even by the standards of the mask? Maybe a recent gap with Amber Herd. Aisekson has the guilt of the lack of feedback: when a person ceases to correlate his actions with the opinion of others, he begins to create strange things - and this is the most plausible version.

From this moment begins the story of the mask that is familiar to us now. A follower of all kinds of conspiracy theories. A supporter of freedom of speech in words, hypocritically bath journalists who dared to criticize him. Unfortunately, there were no people left next to him who will tell him about this. And if there is, he is unlikely to listen to them.

Such a gap from reality is characteristic of many super -rich people - it is enough to recall the same Joan Rowling or Kanye West - but Musk with his desire for space, flew much further than everyone. It is important that a person receives feedback, listens to criticism and corrected. ”Only, obviously, he himself underestimates how much criticism he needs.

And the inability to perceive it did not appear from nowhere, it is the root principle of Ilon Mask. It seems that such a strategy still allows employees of the mask to keep business on swimming, even when one breakdown follows it after another. Aisekson agrees: a kind of manner of conducting business motivates people "to achieve what seemed impossible to them. But as a result, those who were afraid to report bad news and cast doubt on the decisions.

” Musk surrounds itself with the best specialists, but quickly gets rid of those who will recall him - this self -confident strategy made him the richest person in the world, it turns him into a laughing stock. Musk is removed even from loved ones. The most discussed problem of the book was the plot with Vivian Jenn Wilson, the daughter of a mask - and one of the few in his life, with whom Isexon did not talk when working on the book: Vivian considered that he was afraid, as if her words would not spoil the “pretty image of an incorrect person”.

In the year, Musk learned about its transgenderness, soon he bought Twitter and after that he began to distribute transfobe statements. One of the first, whom Musk personally diluted on the social network was Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson: his account was blocked by Twitter for publishing transfob reports about actor Elliot Page. In a strange way, in the Russian translation of the book, this episode was distorted: supposedly Peterson refused to “call the famous transmuchy woman” - in reality and in the book of Aisekson, of course, everything was the other way around.

However, perhaps there is another reason why the last chapters of the book are much more critical of her hero. If Aisekson restored the history of the Mask to the top of Glory according to eyewitnesses and documents, then in recent years he watched with his own eyes. Is this the reason that the cheerful tricster-visioner from the first half of Tom by the end of the story seems increasingly with an ill-mannered bully in the body of an adult, whose successes are explained by a happy combination of circumstances not less than his merits-and even then not his merits, but people around?

When you accompany the “king of the world” for two years in a row, it can be seen that he is not always dressed. Be that as it may, Aisekson is fascinated by mosquito -like figures - and he completes the book on a shaky -cutting note: “Sometimes great innovators are the great -age children who stubbornly refuse to accustom to the pot. They are reckless, unpleasant and even destructive.

They are also crazy. Conscious to consider that they can change the whole world. ” All this, of course, is so. But, it seems, in the year it is time to stop building intravital monuments to great -age children and evaluate them on their affairs, and not according to the legend that they create about themselves. And then you can see: yes, such people really change the world. But if a person stubbornly refuses to “accustom to the pot”, then it is much more likely that he will simply crap.