104 TIME December 27, 2021/January 3, 2022
ENDNOTE
ELON MUSK MIGHT BE THE MOST INTEREST-
ing person on the planet. And given his passion-
ate quest (so far surprisingly on track) to make
humans into a multiplanetary species, he could
someday become the most interesting person in
the solar system.
O.K., those statements may be hyperbole. But
Musk’s ability to turn hyperbole into reality is one
of his superpowers. Through his intense focus on
driving every problem down to the level of basic
physics, he has already earned himself a spot in the
pantheon of history’s great innovators.
His endeavors are not merely digi-
tal concoctions conjured up in a dorm
room or garage. They involve devising
and manufacturing physical products,
such as cars and batteries and rocket
ships, like America used to be able to do:
Tesla (no, Mr. President, not General
Motors) is the primary driving force
transporting the world into the age of
electric cars. And self-driving ones.
Tesla Energy, with its solar roof tiles
and battery walls, is heralding an era of
decentralized, carbon-free electricity.
SpaceX has enabled the U.S. to launch
humans into orbit for the fi rst time since
NASA shut down the space-shuttle pro-
gram a decade ago.
Starlink has deployed more than
1,800 satellites and is quietly rebuild-
ing the Internet in space.
Neuralink is making the next great
leap in the storied history of human-
machine interfaces by creating implants
that can link to the neurons of a brain.
The Boring Co. is building tunnels de-
signed to conquer the scourge of traffi c.
And Starship, the biggest rocket ever
built, will someday take us to Mars.
Musk’s input-output mechanisms can
be unnerving. He displays a manic wacki-
ness and semicalculated craziness that
occasionally skitters, like a too early beta
version of Full Self-Driving, across the line
between wiliness and weirdness. With
ultracapacitor bursts of energy, he is ad-
dicted to sparking dramas that he can use
for strategic purposes. Having enduredpsychological and physical violence as a kid in South
Africa, he has a greater-than-normal mental ability
to calculate risk and emotional ability to tolerate it.
As a biographer who has covered the shapers of
technological revolutions, I see in Musk many of the
traits of earlier innovators. Like Thomas Edison, he
knows that vision without execution is hallucina-
tion, a weakness that sometimes hobbled the origi-
nal Tesla, as in Nikola. So he expends 90% of his
time on the nuts and bolts (literally) of his products.
Like Henry Ford, he understands the importance
not only of the products he devises but also the
factories that can churn them out. His
gigafactories for cars and batteries—in
the U.S., Germany and China—are show-
ing that innovative methods for manufac-
turing a product are even more important
than innovative products themselves.
Like Steve Jobs, he is reinventing
multiple industries with the strategic
use of reality- distortion fi elds. He ques-
tions every assumption in order to drill
down to the fi rst principles of physics.
Like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, he has
a hardcore intensity that can drive col-
leagues (and himself ) to near madness
but also drive them to do things they
thought were impossible.
And like Benjamin Franklin and
Leonardo da Vinci, he has an obsessive
but playful curiosity about all of the
wonders of nature that helps him see
patterns across disparate fi elds.
But more than most other great inno-
vators, Musk is driven by a larger sense
of mission. He has a fi erce urge to make
life on this planet sustainable, turn hu-
mans into a spacefaring species, and as-
sure that artifi cial intelligence will be
benefi cial rather than malign to us mor-
tals. These goals are audacious, and he
may fail. But at the moment, he has be-
come the most important single individ-
ual in designing and deploying the in-
novations that will bring us a few steps
closer to each of these aspirations.Isaacson, a former editor of TIME, is
writing a biography of MuskTomorrow’s Innovator
BY WALTER ISAACSON