MixedThe Washington PostThe breezy memoir of a highflying journalist who, at 61, is still on top of her game ... While she gets off satisfying shots at familiar targets, there aren’t quite enough incendiary new anecdotes to justify the book’s tantalizing title ... A more substantial oversight is that her preoccupation with the personalities of the few at the top risks obscuring the incentive systems that keep elevating the unscrupulous to those positions ... A lively read from a sui generis figure, provided you don’t mind rolling your eyes now and then at how often the moral of a given encounter turns out to be that Swisher was right all along.
Walter Isaacson
PositiveThe Washington PostHow do you take the full measure of an increasingly troubled figure whose life’s work and legacy still hang in the balance? At stake is not just Musk’s place in history, but also his place in the present and future. If Isaacson fails to pin that down in a satisfying way, it might be because Musk is such a fast-moving target, and Isaacson prioritized revealing anecdotes and behind-the-scenes reportage over a sophisticated critical lens ... Fortunately, the juicy details are plentiful, especially in the book’s final third, which covers the two especially volatile years Isaacson spent shadowing Musk ... It’s clear Isaacson intends for Elon Musk to be more than a bunch of interesting stories about a controversial guy. He frames it as a character study, a quest to understand and perhaps reconcile the contradictions at Musk’s core. But the central question he sets out to answer in the book’s prologue feels a bit too easy ... Though the destination lacks suspense, the ride is entertaining enough, particularly for those who haven’t closely followed Musk’s high jinks. And despite the book’s length, it zips along thanks to Isaacson’s economical prose and short chapters.
