Walter Isaacson, a best-selling Elon Musk biographer, recalled a past conversation he had with the tech mogul where he mused that President Donald Trump reminded him of his father, Errol Musk.
In an interview with Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC Monday, Isaacson, who spent two years shadowing Musk to write his eponymous 2023 biography, weighed in on why the Tesla CEO was drawn to Trump’s orbit and came to be one of its key players.
“I think he called Donald Trump in my book, a ‘Charlatan and a conman,’” Isaacson began while recalling what Musk’s viewpoint on the president was when he started shadowing him in 2021. “And then he said, ‘You know, but he reminds me of my father.’”
“Musk has a very complex relationship with his own father, they don’t speak really,” the best-selling author continued. “But his father has that same type of very, I would say, conspiracist and extreme views and is a fabulist.”
“So it’s an interesting tale. Ever since Musk was a kid being beaten up—psychologically abused by his father, beaten up by other kids—he fantasized being the X-Man. The person coming in to try to save humanity,” Isaacson added. “And now he’s bonded with Donald Trump especially on the pursuit of cutting back regulations, cutting federal spending and streamlining things.”
Musk has had a difficult, and at times, estranged relationship with his father whom he once described as a “terrible human being” in a 2017 profile with Rolling Stone.
“You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done,” the SpaceX founder said at the time. “Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done … It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.”
He also lamented his failed attempts at trying to repair a relationship with his dad, adding, “In my experience, there is nothing you can do.”
“Nothing, nothing. I wish. I’ve tried everything,” Musk continued. “I tried threats, rewards, intellectual arguments, emotional arguments, everything to try to change my father for the better, and he… no way, it just got worse.”
Musk had initially announced that Isaacson was shadowing him for a biography in August 2021. The journalist, who has also written biographies about Henry Kissinger and Steve Jobs, followed Musk for the next two years and compiled hours of interviews and visits to SpaceX and Tesla factories into a New York Times best-seller on the mogul.
