Tim Higgins, “Power Games”, from English: Ofer Kober, meter, 348 p.
“It is impossible not to wonder: among the controversial figures that have emerged in Silicon Valley in recent years, is Elon Musk an underdog, an anti-hero, a rogue, or some kind of combination of the three?”.
Tim Higgins gets straight to the point in his fascinating epic about the incarnation of the Tesla car company. He articulates for us the initial and constant doubts about Musk, who allegedly created the company in his image, and here it becomes clear that he actually stole quite a bit of credit from others, ruined the lives of his partners and rewrote history in his own favor. This is not a biography of Musk, and he is only one of the actors in the plot, but those who are interested, like me, in eccentric billionaires and pioneers who are on some undiagnosed spectrum of their own, more than in electric cars and dealing in stocks for example (slumping stocks and soaring stocks, this is how it was and always will be, So what else can be said about them?), would be happy to focus on Musk, a friend from another planet, who is indeed a character that, if it didn’t exist, someone would have to invent it.
It is easy to imagine the movie that will be made based on the book. Musk, as a child of divorced parents in South Africa, chose to move to live with his father because he had an Encyclopedia Britannica and a computer at home, and at the beginning of his business career, he slept on the floor of his office and on the couches of friends (some of whom were practically strangers) and showered in a community sports center, and appeared at an important conference in a “black shirt With buttons open, like in a night club in Europe”, may be the most coveted role in Hollywood. Sleeping on the floor, by the way (and he doesn’t sleep often in general, perhaps because when you sleep, according to his method, you can’t change the world), is probably his favorite, because that’s what he did, for example – for hours, in the dark, in a meeting room – even before a crucial conference call with Wall Street.
And the film’s dialogue just writes itself, courtesy of Higgins. “How hot is hell right now?”, Musk was asked in the same conversation, after getting up from the floor. “Let’s say that level nine is the worst, okay?”, Musk answers him and continues. “We were in ninth grade. Now we’re at level eight.” And there’s the wonderful scene, in which Musk is seen playing a dystopian computer game based on the ideology of Ayn Rand (what? Where do you get it and how do you play?) or collapsing on a pool table during a Christmas party, in a room that his brother blocked the entrance to (Because when you block the door in front of Musk, he will of course enter through the window).
The film, like the book, will be a resounding success thanks to the small details. The young Musk invites Justin Wilson, who will be his wife and the mother of his first five children (out of ten), to ice cream, who will arrive in the format of twins plus triplets (after their eldest son will die crib death at the age of ten weeks). She storms off, but he finds her on campus and hands her a melting ice cream cone. He is not a person who is willing or able to accept the answer “no”, she later wrote. And he will also fire more or less any of his employees who will not give him the answers he wants to hear, or tell him the “unadorned truth”. “Cleaning stables” is a phrase that appears in the book only once, but as an action repeated over and over again. Later Musk will also say to Wilson, “If you were my employee I would fire you”, and their divorce will not be pleasant.
The man who insisted on lighting a fire on the roof of a building full of flammable batteries, and who was sometimes “drunk with enthusiasm” for his achievements, has always loved women, and the more blondes the better. When he dated the actress Tallulah Riley (who, among other things, was cast as a sexy robot in the series “Westworld”), his employees It was believed that his mood improved “the closer her hair color was to platinum”. Another star on his romantic resume is Amber Heard, infamous for the Johnny Depp affair and the mutual abuse that apparently prevailed in their marriage, murky laundry that was washed without conditioner for the whole world to see. Heard was still married to Depp at the time whose name is associated with the name of Musk.
He also likes glamor and publicity, and demanded to be interviewed on Stephen Colbert’s talk show for example, but Higgins also quotes him as complaining about his excessive media coverage. “Don’t they have other things to write about?”, he asks his PR consultant. “It’s so exhausting to see myself in the news!”. the heart is Broken.
And in a moment of seriousness, the heart truly goes out to his employees and associates, each of whom has fallen victim at some point, according to Higgins, to his whims, lies, craziness, revenge, and basic personality structure. “Managers exchanged stories about friction with Musk as they exchange war stories, for example about the time he got angry with a manager and told him that he would open his skull and stamp the letter F on his brain as a disgrace to his failures (…) when the company reached such large dimensions, He no longer knew exactly who to blame, as if now he was just screaming into the darkness.”
When someone explains to him that one of his decisions could harm millions of customers, he finds it difficult to hide his indifference. “So what interests you is only you?”, someone asks him in astonishment, when it is clear to him and to us that this is a rhetorical question. Like that questioning of Higgins at the beginning of things, all the answers are correct.
The small details are also big of course, like the sentence “On August 7, Musk woke up in one of his five luxury homes in Los Angeles…”, that is, in Los Angeles alone the man who “always sold a vision of the future” has five homes Parr. It boggles the mind to think (rebellion!) of all the other cities in the United States and the world where his other assets are scattered.
And let’s not forget the supporting actors, who are also expected to have beautiful moments in the film and maybe some Oscar nominations. One of the first founders of Tesla forgets to pay the electricity bill at his house because of the workload at the company, returns to a dark house with the contents of the refrigerator rotten, sits on the floor in the dark and opens a can of tuna. It turns out that quite a bit of the film will take place on the floor, in one constellation or another. And another partner falls and the retinas in his eyes separate. Rehabilitative surgery is required to restore his sight, and when it returns to him he sees presence and understands that life without Tesla and Musk will be much better and calmer.
On the other hand, when you chop down trees, chips fly, and when you work with Musk there is never a dull moment. But at the end of reading this book, a poor moment suddenly seems like the peak of happiness in its own right.