Musk biography describes troubled tycoon driven by demons

WASHINGTON: A hotly anticipated biography of Elon Musk describes the turbulent tycoon as a man driven by childhood demons, obsessed with bringing human life to Mars and who demands that staff be “hardcore.”

“Elon Musk” is written by star biographer Walter Isaacson, a former editor in chief of Time Magazine who is best known for his best-selling portrayal of Apple founder Steve Jobs as well as his looks into the lives of science focused men such as Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci.

Some US media outlets got early access to the more-than-600-page book ahead of its official global release Tuesday, and several excerpts were also published in recent days.

Hours before its release on Amazon, advance orders had made “Elon Musk” the second best-selling book in the United States, behind a self-help title co-written by Oprah Winfrey.

Much of Musk´s early life is already publicly well known, with attention focused on his abusive father Errol Musk, who Musk despises.

Many of the account´s previously unknown nuggets come from a more recent period, when Isaacson shadowed his subject with fly-on-the-wall access into his everyday life.

A widely reported passage recounts how Musk personally scuttled a plan by the Ukrainian military to carry out a major operation in Crimea by denying Starlink internet access, drawing a furious response from Kyiv.