The first thing I did was flip to the back, where the author lists his sources for the Ukraine thing. Within the first three paragraphs of the book, Isaacson describes a wilderness survival camp Musk attended, where “every few years, one of the kids would die. The portrait that emerges is one that resembles a hard-charging, frequently alienating Gilded Age-style captain of industry, with a particular fixation on AI that ties everything together.

They asked Musk to enable it for their drone attack” is an entirely different account than the one given in the book, which says Musk shut off existing coverage rather than approving extended coverage; what could possibly be the source here? One of the things that anyone covering Elon Musk for long enough has to reckon with is that he loves to tell hilarious lies.

Here are some other ones: If Musk were more receptive to criticism, would his companies be in better shape? Isaacson begins describing the 2018 Fremont production push from Musk’s perspective: “Musk had come to realize that designing a good factory was like designing a good microchip. Musk found out from a member of his security detail — and it’s revealing to me that none of the people around Musk who knew, including Grimes, wanted to break the news. The Washington Post followed it up, publishing the excerpt where Isaacson claimed Musk had essentially shut down a military offensive on a personal whim. Crucially, though, this article says nothing about Ukrainian submarines — instead, it’s primarily about aerial vehicles.

In the demo video, which features the title card “The car is driving by itself,” the car was not driving by itself, Tesla’s director of Autopilot software said in a deposition. The book was written by Walter Isaacson, a former executive at CNN, TIME and the Aspen Institute who had previously written best-selling biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci.

Arguably the entire Musk family has an interest in presenting Elon Musk as preternaturally tough and also as using his tough childhood as an excuse for his continuing bad behavior. CNN had a story summarizing an excerpt of Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk that claimed Musk had shut down SpaceX’s satellite network, Starlink, to prevent a “Ukrainian sneak attack” on the Russian navy.