What Isaacson Doesn’t Get About Elon Musk

Elon Musk
By Walter Isaacson
(Simon & Schuster, 688 pages, $35)

To give credit where due, I cannot imagine another journalist writing a biography of Elon Musk as smart, thorough, and forthright as Walter Isaacson’s recently released Elon Musk. To document Musk’s career so competently took an effort worthy of a Robert Caro and an intellect nearly comparable to Musk’s own. 

Given his talent, it is all the more unfortunate that Isaacson cannot follow Musk to the end of his journey. As Isaacson acknowledges, Musk took a “red pill” along the way, and Isaacson, a creature of the liberal establishment, is addicted to the blue. (READ MORE from Jack Cashill: Banned Books Week in the Age of Biden)

As Isaacson explains to those many readers unaware of the concept, the red pill is a plot device in the 1999 movie The Matrix. A hacker, Neo, learns from his mentor Morpheus that he has been living in a virtual, computer-generated world designed, says Morpheus, “to blind you from the truth.” 

Morpheus offers Neo a choice of two pills. “You take the blue pill,” he says, “and the story ends. You wake in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.” If Neo takes the red pill, Morpheus promises to show him “how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” He adds, “Remember — all I am offering is the truth, nothing more.” 

As Isaacson suggests, Musk took his red pill in May 2020 when a COVID-wary California tried to shut down production at Tesla’s Fremont plant just as it was about to gear up. Must was outraged. “Give people back their goddamn freedom,” Isaacson quotes him as saying.

For a journalist who has served as the CEO of the Aspen Institute, the editor of Time, and the chair of CNN, Musk’s rejection of establishment liberalism represented a breach from reality. Once red-pilled, Musk made a series of moves that left Isaacson befuddled. Most prominent was the purchase of Twitter, an acquisition that, he believes, played into the hands of right wing conspiracy theorists and promised no obvious return on investment. Isaacson was much more comfortable with Musk in his “fanboy and fundraiser for Barack Obama” phase. (READ MORE: Cancel Culture Trickles Down: An Up-Close Look)

For conservatives, the Twitter purchase was a heroic gesture. They believed, as Isaacson acknowledges, “there were liberal biases secretly baked into the algorithm.” He concedes, too, that “more than 98 percent of the donations made by people at the company went to Democrats.” And yet despite the fact that Twitter is admittedly the world’s most critical public forum, and that it had been openly captured by the left, Isaacson gives Musk no credit for liberating it.

Musk, writes Isaacson, believed Twitter “had suppressed certain viewpoints,” but Isaacson refuses to see the consequences of that suppression. For instance, he dedicates barely a page to the New York Post story “about what was purported to be” Hunter Biden’s laptop. Yes, the story proved to be correct and Twitter’s rationales for blocking the story were “flimsy.” And yes too, Twitter had become “a de facto collaborator with the FBI.” That said, “Joe Biden was not a government official at the time the laptop story broke, so the requests did not reveal direct government censorship nor a flagrant violation of the First Amendment.”

Were Isaacson’s liberal biases not so secretly baked into his reporting, he would have shared with his readers the consequences of that collaboration. As Isaacson’s readers may not know, in the weeks before the 2020 election Biden’s people rounded up 51 former high level national security officials to affirm that the laptop story had all the “hallmarks” of Russian disinformation. Although the FBI knew better, its brass refused to contradict the intel people. 

During the final debate with Trump, Biden countered Trump’s accusations about the lap top by citing the verdict of the 51 officials. Swing voters could not be faulted for trusting the officials. The story died, and its premature death corrupted everything. One poll showed that 17 percent of Democrats would have switched their vote had they known of the laptop. This number is too high, but 1 percent would have been enough to change the election’s outcome and the world’s future. The story of this unprecedented media-security state conspiracy deserves its own angry book, not a skeptical, half-hearted page. 

His eyes opened, Musk began to see the “antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman” effects of the “woke-mind virus” in ways that Isaacson cannot. Their diverging views are most evident in their respective takes on Anthony Fauci, the long time director of NIAID, the chief medical advisor to President Biden in 2021 and 2022, and, most notably, an icon of the liberal establishment. 

The normally dispassionate Isaacson loses his cool over Musk’s December 2022 tweet, “My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” For Isaacson, the tweet “made no sense” and “wasn’t funny.” It also managed to “mock transgender people” and “conjure up conspiracies about the eighty-one-year-old public health official Anthony Fauci.” 

Isaacson scolds Musk again for daring to retweet comments made by Robert Kennedy Jr., the presidential candidate Isaacson caricatures as “a fervent antivaxxer who alleged that the CIA had killed his uncle the president.” For the blue pill version of reality, Isaacson quotes Musk’s brother, Kimbal, who describes Fauci as “an old guy who was just trying to figure things out during COVID.”

The fact that Kennedy wrote the deeply researched book, The Real Anthony Fauci, does not impress Isaacson. He makes no mention of it. Dr. Rand Paul, a Republican senator from Kentucky, has written a book as well. Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up debuted this week. In it, Paul details Fauci’s “dangerous path of deceit, the scale of which has likely never before been undertaken.” Paul too believes Fauci should be prosecuted, and he’s not joking.

Paul’s book, like Kennedy’s, is a red pill. Having written a few red pill books of my own — most recently, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities — I know well how the Walter Isaacsons of the world will respond to Paul’s revelations. They will pretend not to see, choose not to know. They will wake up in their bed tomorrow and believe what they want to believe, their credibility as journalists be damned. (READ MORE: Why White Ethnics Left Newark)

In Isaacson’s case, that’s a shame. He’s a really smart guy.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, is available in all formats.

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