Call it the 'Isaacson Accord': the agreement behind Walter Isaacson biographies, including 'Elon Musk,' to leave the assumption of difficult genius untouched.
Elon Musk and Grimes have a third child named Techno Mechanicus, the tech mogul confirmed ahead of the release of Walter Isaacson’s forthcoming biography.This sort of framing may have made sense in the early aughts, when so many were dizzy with optimism that Amazon’s everything store and the iPhone would transform the world for the better.
That may be because there is a tacit pact between author and subject in the Isaacson “great man” biography: The author will unearthand share stories about the subject’s capacity to be cruel. In exchange, the subject’s greatness will be treated as an assumption, the raison d’etre for the book itself. In honor of Isaacson’s habit of using pithy, memorable phrases to describe a phenomenon, we might call it “the Isaacson Accord.
Walter Isaacson’s other biographical subjects have included Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger and Benjamin Franklin. And so it is in “Elon Musk,” whose subject is described as “a visionary” and a “risk-taking innovator” and, most pointedly, “the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future.” Musk’s many fans will surely take those descriptors as a given. But that seems all the more reason tothe assumptions. Because the Isaacson Accord turns out to be a devil’s bargain.
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