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Biographer Walter Isaacson reflects on the childhoods of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Einstein

March 17, 2025

Isaacson reflects on his biography of Elon Musk and Elon’s tough childhood of suffering from bullying in school and an emotionally abusive relationship with his father:

“I sometimes wonder whether having a lot of demons from childhood gives you a lot of drive… I look at every one of my characters: Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany — not happy. Leonardo Da Vinci grows up illegitimate; he’s gay, left-handed, distracted, and he goes from the village of Vinci to Florence…. even to his deathbed he’s still tormented. Steve Jobs was adopted. Actually he was rejected by the first adopted family, and feels abandoned but chosen.”

Isaacson recall’s Barack Obama’s quote in his memoir that “Someone once said that every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for their father’s mistakes.” In Elon’s case, Isaacson says, it’s both. He continues:

“[Elon] runs away at 17, like everybody. Ben Franklin runs away at 17. Einstein runs away at 17… And he escapes by leaving South Africa, which has been very violent, and comes to Canada at first with about $4,000. Eventually he goes to Silicon Valley after UPenn and starts a couple of companies. One is Zip2, which is like Google Maps, and the other is an interesting one: X dot com. It was a financial payments app that becomes PayPal.”

After Zip2 and PayPal, Elon’s net worth is around $100 million:

“Instead of buying an island or a yacht, he wants to keep putting his chips on the table. He decides he wants to send a rocket to Mars. His friends were like, ‘What are you talking about?’ And Elon says, ‘If we don’t become a spacefaring civilization, human consciousness may die out.’”

At this point everyone thought he was crazy. Walter spoke with Peter Thiel about this:

“Peter Thiel said that most great entrepreneurs know how to calculate risk. Musk is different. He’s addicted to risk… He wants to always up the game. And now he’s still doing it.”