One of the enduring mysteries of the literary world is how Walter Isaacson has become one of its most successful and versatile biographers while holding down jobs that would consume anyone else’s days (and nights!). He has run Time magazine, CNN, and the Aspen Institute, and he is now the Leonard Lauder Professor of American History and Values at Tulane. At the same time, he has written best-selling biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci. Not to mention the books The Innovators, The Code Breaker (about Jennifer Doudna, the biochemist who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020), and The Wise Men, which he co-authored with his good friend and fellow historian Evan Thomas. His secret is surely due in part to his wonderful wife and daughter, who in ways large and small have helped and inspired him.
His latest book, on Elon Musk, is a remarkably vivid and revealing biography of a man who is undoubtedly a genius and is arguably nuts. The headline-grabbing scoop was that Musk had turned off Starlink, the satellite Internet system run by his company SpaceX, to Crimea so as not to allow Ukraine to attack the Russian fleet there. But as Isaacson clarified this week, Musk had only declined Kiev’s request to extend coverage to Crimea. There was nothing to disable, since Starlink had never been enabled to reach there in the first place.
