What Elon Musk's New Biographer Walter Isaacson Has Said About the Tesla and SpaceX CEO

In a tweet posted on Wednesday night, SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk confirmed that renowned author Walter Isaacson would be penning a biography about him. Isaacson, a distinguished journalist, former editor of TIME magazine and professor of history at Tulane University, is the author of a number of other biographies on the lives of high profile figures including the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin. Confirmation of Isaacson's upcoming Musk book follows rumors that the two had been in preliminary talks on the matter, as reported by Fox Business. On Twitter, Musk noted the biographer had been shadowing him for several days as of Wednesday.

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Musk is an influential figure due to his wealth and success in building up Tesla and SpaceX. The two companies are known to have very nearly collapsed in their early days but have both enjoyed significant growth, making Musk one of the richest people on the planet. Isaacson has indicated an interest in Musk before. The biographer has in the past compared the billionaire to Jobs, another tech entrepreneur who built up a vast business empire. Isaacson made this comparison in an op-ed for The New York Times published on July 23, writing: "Musk is in some ways the current incarnation of Jobs… Musk can drive people hard. He can drive them to distraction. But he can also drive them to do things they never dreamed were possible. "Like Jobs, Musk has a reality distortion field… But unlike Jobs, Musk has an understanding of physics and thermodynamics that has helped him know what boundaries could be successfully pushed." Isaacson has also remarked about the future of SpaceX and Tesla, noting that Musk's story is still ongoing. SpaceX, for example, is currently gearing up for the first orbital flight of its Starship spacecraft that it hopes will one day take humans to the moon and Mars. In a March 11 interview with Yahoo! Finance this year, Isaacson said of Musk's business efforts: "I think we're still, as they said in Latin school, in medias res, which means we're in the middle of the story. "I think he's doing really well and I love the fact that he's a man of passion and obsession." In recent days Isaacson, via his own Twitter account, has been retweeting the construction of SpaceX's first orbital Starship prototype, which was in the process of being moved onto its outdoor launch pad on Wednesday. If successful, the mission will mark a crucial milestone for SpaceX, perhaps Musk's most high-profile venture.