Eric Jorgenson’s The Book of Elon: A Guide to Purpose and Success is not really a book in any conventional sense. It is an organised scrap-heap of things Elon Musk has said, written, or tweeted over the years, given a thin veneer of coherence by leading questions that defy any obvious chronology. In his opening note, the author admits to spending thousands of hours “collecting, curating, and editing” Musk’s most useful ideas. With that out of the way, let us get to the man whom the book labours to eulogise.
Musk is a peculiarly difficult figure to assess because he evokes two entirely contradictory sets of emotions. The first is the familiar loathing reserved for billionaires who have accumulated obscene fortunes while much of the world struggles with far more mundane problems. Musk adds to this response his own brusque, frequently rude, style and a seemingly cavalier disregard for the conventions of normal human behaviour. “I keep forgetting that you’re still alive,” he once tweeted at Bernie Sanders, the octogenarian US Senator and self-described democratic socialist who has been one of the fiercest political critics of billionaires. Musk’s vocal support for Donald Trump, his political interventions, and his extraordinary willingness to turn his enormous social-media following into a partisan weapon have only intensified the dislike.
Indeed, it would be easy to dismiss him as a man deluded by his enormous riches—his net worth has been estimated at nearly $800 billion—into believing that he has all the answers, and most of the questions too. But that would be too convenient and only partially the truth.
That’s because there is the other Musk: the entrepreneur who has repeatedly attempted things that established industries considered too difficult, too expensive, or simply not worth their while. If entrepreneurs were divided into the Steve Jobs and Thomas Edison categories, Musk is unmistakably an Edison. He is less interested in making technology elegant than in making it work, and that too at extraordinary scale.
The real Musk lies somewhere at the volatile intersection of genuine technological brilliance and unrestrained hubris. Unfortunately, Jorgenson’s book chooses to be blind to the latter. Instead, he announces early that “Elon’s purpose is to help humanity survive and thrive.” It is the sort of sentence disciples write when introducing their guru. A more discerning author might have added: survive him, perhaps, and thrive despite him.
The Book of Elon is also a book about America, about technological supremacy and, increasingly, about the right-wing Make America Great Again (MAGA) politics. One of Musk’s central arguments is that we should not avoid doing something merely because tragedy might occur; after all if the forefathers of the US had thought that way, America would not exist. That is a revealing philosophy. It makes historical progress a justification for extreme risk, but leaves unanswered the awkward question: who gets to decide which risks other people should bear?
The same problem arises with Musk’s obsession with Mars. In his scheme of things, getting humanity to another planet is more important than almost anything else in human history. The Soviet Union, the invasion of Iraq, the lives disrupted by wars and geopolitical adventures, all become mere footnotes in the grander story of us becoming a multiplanetary species.
Yet, it would be equally wrong to turn Musk into an arch-villain. Consider what he chooses to do with the money he earns. When PayPal, which he co-founded, was sold to eBay in 2002 for about $1.5 billion, Musk received roughly $175 million as his share. With it, he could have retired into the quiet, asset-accumulating comfort of a rentier billionaire. Instead, he put his chips back on the table to kickstart Tesla. Then again, in 2008, with both Tesla and another of his startups, SpaceX, on the brink of collapse, Musk faced a stark choice: put his remaining capital into one company and let the other die, or split it between them and risk losing everything. He chose the latter.
Both these decisions are consequential. Tesla unquestionably transformed the electric vehicle industry and accelerated the transition away from internal combustion engines. Musk identified dependence on fossil fuels as one of the great existential threats to humanity and then put an industrial empire behind the proposition. That is genuine value creation, whatever one thinks of Musk himself.
The same logic runs through his more futuristic ventures. Neuralink, the neurotechnology company he set up in 2016, is working on Blindsight, which is intended eventually to restore vision by directly stimulating neurons in the visual cortex. Whether the technology delivers remains to be seen, but the ambition is difficult to dismiss as the usual billionaire obsession with buying a larger yacht.
There is also something to be said for his insistence on first principles. “I’ve met many people who can break the laws of man, but I have never met anyone who could break the laws of physics” is a suitably Muskian formulation. It captures both his strength and his weakness: an almost pathological belief that sufficiently intelligent people can strip away convention and solve any problem. This is where Jorgenson’s book fits into what has become a booming publishing cottage industry chronicling the era of Muskology, a genre of corporate writing that treats the man not merely as an industrialist, but as a socioeconomic phenomenon.
Where Walter Isaacson’s 2023 biography attempted to parse the psychological factors driving Musk’s “demon mode,” and Ashlee Vance chronicled the gruelling operational mechanics of his early triumphs, Jorgenson leaves us with unadulterated adulation. Where Isaacson gave us a flawed, chaotic Shakespearean figure mired in a storm of his making, Jorgenson gives us a saint’s hagiography, stripped of any friction.
Contrast Jorgenson’s uncritical devotion with Sonke Iwersen and Michael Verfurden’s The Tesla Files. If Jorgenson accepts Musk’s pronouncements on trust, the Handelsblatt reporters scrutinise 100 gigabytes of leaked internal documents and whistleblower testimony to reveal the human and operational cost of that very same gospel, from workplace safety lapses and Autopilot glitches at Tesla to a corporate culture governed by fear.
That friction is precisely what is missing in Jorgenson’s book. When Musk asserts in an extraordinarily Trumpian boast, “At this point, I think I know more about manufacturing than anyone currently alive on Earth,” Jorgenson accepts it as gospel. When Musk says, “I think it is a real weakness to want to be liked. And I do not have that,” Jorgenson sees this as raw authenticity. But there is an obvious danger in confusing indifference to public approval with freedom from moral responsibility.
Musk’s irreverence has long been central to his mythos. But when that mythology ran into political reality through his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), its grand claims met a starker truth. The US Government Accountability Office found in August 2026 that substantial portions of DOGE’s claimed savings were inaccurate, unsupported or impossible to verify. Even Musk’s early career reflects this tension. Building Zip2, a company that provided and licensed online city guide software to media outlets, he expressed his contempt at legacy media trying to navigate internet technology, comparing it to “building F-22 fighter jets and selling them to people who roll them down the hill at each other.” The line is witty, and maybe even perceptive. But it also reveals a lifelong disdain for institutional process.
Indeed, the most useful way to read The Book of Elon may be not as a biography, and certainly not as a manual for living. More reasonably, it is a carefully curated record of the operating philosophy of one of the most consequential entrepreneurs of our time. Some of that philosophy is brilliant, some banal, and some even dangerous. Ironically, in trying so hard to persuade us of Musk’s greatness, Jorgenseon occasionally proves the opposite.
For stripped of the worship, the man remains far more interesting: reckless and visionary, generous in his ambitions and ruthless in their pursuit, capable of genuine technological breakthroughs and astonishing intellectual overreach. What he needs is someone to question him, not, as Jorgenson does, join the echo chamber.
Sundeep Khanna is a regular Mint columnist and author of Made in India: The Story of Desh Bandhu Gupta, Lupin and Indian Pharma.