“Elon Musk”

By Walter Isaacson ($35)

“Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of the New Tycoon”

By Michael Lewis ($30)

These are well-written, remarkably probing and instructive biographies of complicated and fascinating individuals who are much in the news. Each raises questions.

On Musk: how did a much bullied, quirky, nerdy, sci-fi-inspired, somewhat-autistic loner wind up with 160 million followers on X (Twitter)? How did he, after so many dazzling entrepreneurial successes, appear to lose more than $20 billion in his takeover of Twitter? And will he be able to turn that around?

In Bankman-Fried’s case, what exactly happened to the nearly $10 billion his companies lost a year ago, and how could he possibly have been allowed to run two major companies with virtually no guard-rails or fiduciary controls?

Biographers often run the risk of becoming seduced by their subjects and, as readers will discern, this is at least partly the case in these biographies.

“Elon Musk”

Musk may be the most successful and controversial American entrepreneur. He has helped found or guide about a dozen companies, including PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink and X (Twitter). He has made major investments in AI as well as issued major warnings of how things might go wrong in this new field. He is widely recognized as an innovative genius. Yet he is also known for impulsive comments and behavior that even he often regards as mistaken or childish.

Musk invited prize-winning biographer and public intellectual Walter Isaacson to write this biography. Isaacson is a former Rhodes Scholar, editor of Time, CNN CEO and president of the Aspen Institute. He is also the author of best-selling biographies of Steve Jobs, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Leonardo da Vinci.

Isaacson is a talented writer who is fascinated with science and technology. Musk allowed Isaacson to shadow him for two years and interview family members, friends and former wives.

The resulting 615-page biography is superb – a highly readable, informative and uncommonly probing portrait of a driven, compulsive and extremely talented businessman. Talented business innovators may not always be quirky, yet many of them are: Henry Ford, Howard Hughes and Steve Jobs come to mind. Musk is as quirky – and maybe becoming more so – than these famous innovators.

Most of this biography explains how Musk helped launch companies and engaged in risk taking that normal people have avoided. Major auto companies, for example, had tried and failed to build effective electric vehicles. But Musk joined a few colleagues and revolutionized that industry.

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Musk also stepped in when NASA had largely given up on space launches. He has had remarkable success in space exploration, and he is obsessed with going to and “occupying” Mars.

Musk is now trying to remake Twitter, and this undertaking was just beginning as Isaacson’s book was going to press. Musk, at least initially, seems to be especially challenged by his efforts in this new area – and he is being criticized for his early missteps here.

Isaacson is amazed at Musk’s relentless, hard-ass, and seemingly demon-driven leadership style. He tries to explain this by noting, among other things, that as a child Musk was much bullied, both by his classmates and by his father.

Musk demands associates work as hard as he does, and regularly fires those who don’t. He has fired more than half of those who worked at Twitter. And he has made a crusade of reversing Twitter’s laid-back “wokish”and diversity priorities.

Musk says he supported Barack Obama and other Democrats, and that he dislikes Donald Trump. He calls himself a social liberal who is more libertarian on economic issues. He has quipped he likes the right part of the Democratic Party and the left part of the Republican Party.

But he is anti-union and emphasizes he favors meritocracy over most forms of political correctness. Friends say he has been much affected by one of his children who has transitioned genders, become a leftist and disowned him. Musk appeared a few months ago to be endorsing Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for president in 2024.

Musk, like many business tycoons, is critical of excessive governmental regulations. He’s fought back strenuously against – and sometimes ignored – business shutdowns during the COVID pandemic. But his SpaceX program has obviously flourished because of lucrative NASA contracts. And Tesla also benefited from a major government loan at a crucial point, and from government subsidies to buyers of EV cars. Yet he seems to favor more regulation of AI.

Isaacson mostly highlights the genius of Musk, but he also documents the quirky and jerky behavior of this complicated man. In the end, quoting Shakespeare, he notes all heroes have flaws, and those we cast as villains can be complex. Even the best people, Shakespeare wrote, are “molded out of flaws.”

Isaacson gives Musk the benefit of the doubt, concluding sometimes great innovators are “risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training. They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic.” Then, he adds, “they can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.”

We are left with a generally sympathetic view of Musk as a distinctly flawed genius. Isaacson asks the reader: “Would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound?”

Musk is still a “work in progress.”

“Going Infinite”

Michael Lewis is a prize-winning nonfiction writer of best-sellers such as “Moneyball,” “The Big Short” and “Liar’s Poker.” He met Bankman-Fried almost by accident, and they went climbing in the Berkeley, California foothills in 2021.  Bankman-Fried was a young MIT-educated physicist-turned-businessman. Lewis found him fascinating and began to interview and keep track of him.

A year or so later, “SBF,” as Bankman-Fried was called, became a multi-billionaire, one of the most noted new “crypto-moguls.”

Last week SBF was found guilty by a federal jury of misspending nearly $10 billion of his customers’ crypto investments.  There will doubtless be an appeal. But it is anticipated that, following in the footsteps of the Wolf of Wall Street, Bernie Madoff, and Elizabeth Holmes, SBF will be sent to prison.

Lewis finished this biography just as Bankman-Fried’s Bahama-based firms, (FTX Exchange and Alameda Research hedge fund) declared bankruptcy. In this story, Lewis concentrates on how SBF operated, rather than criticizing or judging Bankman-Fried. But this portrait of SBF’s managerial and interpersonal style raised multiple red flags about his companies and their integrity.

Bankman-Fried grew up on the Stanford University campus where his parents were both prominent professors at the Law School. He went to MIT and was bored by most of his courses there. He was a gamer.

One summer he won an internship at a small Wall Street firm that specialized in high-frequency trading. At Jane Street Capital, SBF was introduced to the increasingly automated financial world where people did not trade directly with people. Instead, traders programmed computers to trade with other computers. The goal was to enable financial transactions to happen faster and more frequently.

Young Bankman-Fried loved the fast-paced gamesmanship and culture. The firm hired him for a full-time job, even though they were concerned by his lack of empathy in his personal relationships. Exceptionally bright, Bankman-Fried understood he had limitations, but considered it a problem for others rather than for himself.  A restless risk-taker, he enjoyed great success as a high-frequency trader.

Bitten by the crypto-bug in 2017, Bankman-Fried founded a crypto-trading firm located first in Berkeley, then relocated to Hong Kong, and then to Nassau in the Bahamas.

His firm grew at an astonishing rate: it was worth $20 million in 2019, $100 million in 2020, more than $1 billion in 2021 and maybe more than $30 billion at its peak. SBF was estimated to be worth more than $22 billion in 2022. Forbes magazine described SBF as a youthful Jay Gatsby of the crypto universe. At least on paper SBF may have been the richest American under 30 years of age. Michael Lewis, who was granted complete access, regularly interviewed SBF throughout 2022.

Then Bankman-Fried’s firms crashed in November 2022. Lewis kept interviewing the bewildered and now arrested Bankman-Fried. The biography was published just before Bankman-Fried appeared in federal court. He was charged with seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering and just found guilty of all charges by a jury that deliberated for about four hours.

Many of SBF’s top employees, including an executive who had been his girlfriend, were witnesses for the prosecution, testifying that Bankman-Fired forced them to lie and commit financial crimes.

The value of the Lewis biography is it captures, often in vivid and sordid detail, the woefully inept, disorganized and unregulated world of these young traders. It also captures the unhappy, empathy-deficient and manic behavior of this youthful Bernie Madoff-type, who kept assuring his customers their investments were safe – when they were not.

Bankman-Fried scorned organizational charts and leadership books. He hired his own psychiatrist and put him on the company’s payroll. He bought a video game company that made his favorite games. He developed a penchant for using private jets even as he continued to dress as an unkempt teenager, wearing T-shirts and cargo shorts. He built a palatial mansion on the Bahama beaches, yet never went to the beach.

Lewis chronicles SBF’s workaholic eccentricities and includes, apparently with SBF’s permission, the “love letters” SBF exchanged with his girlfriend and notes from SBF’s psychiatrist.

SBF did not appear that interested in money. He gave huge sums to altruistic causes. He donated millions to anti-Trump candidates. He crusaded for regulations of his industry that would benefit his firms. And he splurged on paying influential sports figures and actors who would praise his exchange. He was irrationally self-confident but socially and emotionally challenged. He was driven, it seems, to beat out his rivals and become the most successful crypto trader. He also – at least he said – wanted to solve major world problems, like climate change. He at one point tried to become a major investor in Musk’s Twitter takeover. That did not work out. He was a big Twitter fan yet told people he thought Musk “was a strange dude.” One can easily imagine what Elon thinks of Sam.

Lewis’s portrait documents a young man on many missions, yet with character flaws and apparent greed that loomed large. There is a lot to be said for emotional intelligence. Lewis left it to the prosecutors and jury to render a final verdict, which they now have done.

But the questions Lewis raised are multiple: Why wasn’t there a functioning board of directors? Where were the grown-ups? Where were his parents? What explains the criminal behavior of this privileged MIT-educated and Wall Street-trained restless, risk-taking and reckless entrepreneur? This will be an enduring case study of high-flying hubris and mismanagement.

Tom Cronin and Bob Loevy are news columnists who regularly write about Colorado and national politics.