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By Jill Lepore

In 2021, Elon Musk became the world’s richest man (no woman came close), and Time named him Person of the Year: “This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen ’s Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars.” Right about when Time was preparing that giddy announcement, three women whose ovaries and uteruses were involved in passing down the madcap man-god’s genes were in the maternity ward of a hospital in Austin. Musk believes a declining birth rate is a threat to civilization and, with his trademark tirelessness, is doing his visionary edgelord best to ward off that threat. Shivon Zilis, a thirty-five-year-old venture capitalist and executive at Musk’s company Neuralink, was pregnant with twins, conceived with Musk by in-vitro fertilization, and was experiencing complications. “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” Zilis said. In a nearby room, a woman serving as a surrogate for Musk and his thirty-three-year-old ex-wife, Claire Boucher, a musician better known as Grimes, was suffering from pregnancy complications, too, and Grimes was staying with her.

“I really wanted him to have a daughter so bad,” Grimes said. At the time, Musk had had seven sons, including, with Grimes, a child named X. Grimes did not know that Zilis, a friend of hers, was down the hall, or that Zilis was pregnant by Musk. Zilis’s twins were born seven weeks premature; the surrogate delivered safely a few weeks later. In mid-December, Grimes’s new baby came home and met her brother X. An hour later, Musk took X to New York and dandled him on his knee while being photographed for Time .

“He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable,” the magazine’s Person of the Year announcement read. Musk and Grimes called the baby, Musk’s tenth, Y, or sometimes “Why?,” or just “?”—a reference to Musk’s favorite book, Douglas Adams’s “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ,” because, Grimes explained, it’s a book about how knowing the question is more important than knowing the answer.

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Elon Musk is currently at or near the helm of six companies: Tesla, SpaceX (which includes Starlink), the Boring Company, Neuralink, X (formerly known as Twitter), and X.AI, an artificial-intelligence company that he founded, earlier this year, because he believes that human intelligence isn’t reproducing fast enough, while artificial intelligence is getting more artificially intelligent exponentially. Call it Musk’s Law: the answer to killer robots is more Musk babies. Plus, more Musk companies. “I can’t just sit around and do nothing,” Musk says, fretting about A.I., in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “ Elon Musk ” (Simon & Schuster), a book that can scarcely contain its subject, in that it raises infinitely more questions than it answers.

“Are you sincerely trying to save the world?” Stephen Colbert once asked Musk on “The Late Show.” “Well, I’m trying to do good things, yeah, saving the world is not, I mean . . . ,” Musk said, mumbling. “But you’re trying to do good things, and you’re a billionaire,” Colbert interrupted. “Yeah,” Musk said, nodding. Colbert said, “That seems a little like superhero or supervillain. You have to choose one.” Musk paused, his face blank. That was eight years, several companies, and as many children ago. Things have got a lot weirder since. More Lex Luthor, less Tony Stark.

Musk controls the very tiniest things, and the very biggest. He oversees companies, valued at more than a trillion dollars, whose engineers have built or are building, among other things, reusable rocket ships, a humanoid robot, hyperloops for rapid transit, and a man-machine interface to be implanted in human brains. He is an entrepreneur, a media mogul, a political provocateur, and, not least, a defense contractor: SpaceX has received not only billions of dollars in government contracts for space missions but also more than a hundred million dollars in military contracts for missile-tracking satellites, and Starlink’s network of four thousand satellites— which provides Pentagon-funded services to Ukraine —now offers a military service called Starshield. Day by day, Musk’s companies control more of the Internet, the power grid, the transportation system, objects in orbit, the nation’s security infrastructure, and its energy supply.

And yet. At a jury trial earlier this year, Musk’s lawyer repeatedly referred to his client, a middle-aged man, as a “kid.” The Wall Street Journal has described him as suffering from “tantrums.” The Independent has alleged that selling Twitter to Musk was “like handing a toddler a loaded gun.”

“I’m not evil,” Musk said on “Saturday Night Live” a couple of years ago, playing the dastardly Nintendo villain Wario, on trial for murdering Mario. “I’m just misunderstood.” How does a biographer begin to write about such a man? Some years back, after Isaacson had published a biography of Benjamin Franklin and was known to be writing one of Albert Einstein, the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs called him up and asked him to write his biography; Isaacson says he wondered, half jokingly, whether Jobs “saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence.” I don’t think Musk sees himself as a natural successor to anyone. As I read it, Isaacson found much to like and admire in Jobs but is decidedly uncomfortable with Musk. (He calls him, at one point, “an asshole.”) Still, Isaacson’s descriptions of Jobs and Musk are often interchangeable. “His passions, perfectionism, demons, desires, artistry, devilry, and obsession for control were integrally connected to his approach to business and the products that resulted.” (That’s Jobs.) “It was in his nature to want total control.” (Musk.) “He didn’t have the emotional receptors that produce everyday kindness and warmth and a desire to be liked.” (Musk.) “He was not a model boss or human being.” (Jobs.) “This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries.” I ask you: Which?

“Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training,” Isaacson concludes in the last lines of his life of Musk. “They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic. They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world.” It’s a disconcerting thing to read on page 615 of a biography of a fifty-two-year-old man about whom a case could be made that he wields more power than any other person on the planet who isn’t in charge of a nuclear arsenal. Not potty-trained? Boys will be . . . toddlers?

Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1971. His grandfather J. N. Haldeman was a staunch anti-Communist from Canada who in the nineteen-thirties and forties had been a leader of the anti-democratic and quasi-fascist Technocracy movement. (Technocrats believed that scientists and engineers should rule.) “In 1950, he decided to move to South Africa,” Isaacson writes, “which was still ruled by a white apartheid regime.” In fact, apartheid had been declared only in 1948, and the regime was soon recruiting white settlers from North America, promising restless men such as Haldeman that they could live like princes. Isaacson calls Haldeman’s politics “quirky.” In 1960, Haldeman self-published a tract, “The International Conspiracy to Establish a World Dictatorship & the Menace to South Africa,” that blamed the two World Wars on the machinations of Jewish financiers.

Musk’s mother, Maye Haldeman, was a finalist for Miss South Africa during her tumultuous courtship with his father, Errol Musk, an engineer and an aviator. In 2019, she published a memoir titled “A Woman Makes a Plan: Advice for a Lifetime of Adventure, Beauty, and Success.” For all that she writes about growing up in South Africa in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, she never once mentions apartheid.

Isaacson, in his account of Elon Musk’s childhood, barely mentions apartheid himself. He writes at length and with compassion about the indignities heaped upon young Elon by schoolmates. Elon, an awkward, lonely boy, was bored in school and had a tendency to call other kids “stupid”; he was also very often beaten up, and his father frequently berated him, but when he was ten, a few years after his parents divorced, he chose to live with him. (Musk is now estranged from his father, a conspiracist who has called Joe Biden a “pedophile President,” and who has two children by his own stepdaughter; he has said that “the only thing we are here for is to reproduce.” Recently, he warned Elon, in an e-mail, that “with no Whites here, the Blacks will go back to the trees.”)

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Musk’s childhood sounds bad, but Isaacson’s telling leaves out rather a lot about the world in which Musk grew up. In the South Africa of “Elon Musk,” there are Musks and Haldemans—Elon and his younger brother and sister and his many cousins—and there are animals, including the elephants and monkeys who prove to be a nuisance at a construction project of Errol’s. There are no other people, and there are certainly no Black people, the nannies, cooks, gardeners, cleaners, and construction workers who built, for white South Africans, a fantasy world. And so, for instance, we don’t learn that in 1976, when Elon was four, some twenty thousand Black schoolchildren in Soweto staged a protest and heavily armed police killed as many as seven hundred. Instead, we’re told, “As a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk knew pain and learned how to survive it.”

Musk, the boy, loved video games and computers and Dungeons & Dragons and “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” and he still does. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe,” Musk tells Isaacson. Isaacson doesn’t raise an eyebrow, and you can wonder whether he has read “Hitchhiker’s Guide,” or listened to the BBC 4 radio play on which it is based, first broadcast in 1978. It sounds like this:

Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former galactic empire, life was wild, rich, and, on the whole, tax free. . . . Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural because no one was really poor, at least, no one worth speaking of.

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is not a book about how “we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe.” It is, among other things, a razor-sharp satiric indictment of imperialism:

And for these extremely rich merchants life eventually became rather dull, and it seemed that none of the worlds they settled on was entirely satisfactory. Either the climate wasn’t quite right in the later part of the afternoon or the day was half an hour too long or the sea was just the wrong shade of pink. And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of industry: custom-made, luxury planet-building.

Douglas Adams wrote “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” on a typewriter that had on its side a sticker that read “End Apartheid.” He wasn’t crafting an instruction manual for mega-rich luxury planet builders.

Biographers don’t generally have a will to power. Robert Caro is not Robert Moses and would seem to have very little in common with Lyndon the “B” is for “bastard” Johnson. Walter Isaacson is a gracious, generous, public-spirited man and a principled biographer. This year, he was presented with the National Humanities Medal. But, as a former editor of Time and a former C.E.O. of CNN and of the Aspen Institute, Isaacson also has an executive’s affinity for the C-suite, which would seem to make it a challenge to keep a certain distance from the world view of his subject. Isaacson shadowed Musk for two years and interviewed dozens of people, but they tend to have titles like C.E.O., C.F.O., president, V.P., and founder. The book upholds a core conviction of many executives: sometimes to get shit done you have to be a dick. He dreams of Mars as he bestrides Earth, square-jawed and indomitable . For the rest of us, Musk’s pettiness, arrogance, and swaggering viciousness are harder to take, and their necessity less clear.

Isaacson is interested in how innovation happens. In addition to biographies of Franklin, Einstein, Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci , he has also written about figures in the digital revolution and in gene editing. Isaacson puts innovation first: This man might be a monster, but look at what he built! Whereas Mary Shelley, for instance, put innovation second: The man who built this is a monster! The political theorist Judith Shklar once wrote an essay called “ Putting Cruelty First .” Montaigne put cruelty first, identifying it as the worst thing people do; Machiavelli did not. As for “the usual excuse for our most unspeakable public acts,” the excuse “that they are necessary,” Shklar knew this to be nonsense. “Much of what passed under these names was merely princely wilfulness,” as Shklar put it. This is always the problem with princes.

Elon Musk started college at the University of Pretoria but left South Africa in 1989, at seventeen. He went first to Canada and, after two years at Queen’s University in Ontario, transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied physics and economics, and wrote a senior paper titled “The Importance of Being Solar.” He had done internships in Silicon Valley and, after graduating, enrolled in a Ph.D. program in materials science at Stanford, but he deferred admission and never went. It was 1995, the year the Internet opened to commercial traffic. All around him, frogs were turning into princes. He wanted to start a startup. Musk and his brother Kimball, with money from their parents, launched Zip2, an early online Yellow Pages that sold its services to newspaper publishers. In 1999, during the dot-com boom, they sold it to Compaq for more than three hundred million dollars. Musk, with his share of the money, launched one of the earliest online banking companies. He called it X.com. “I think X.com could absolutely be a multibillion-dollar bonanza,” he told CNN, but, meanwhile, “I’d like to be on the cover of Rolling Stone .” That would have to wait for a few years, but in 1999 Salon announced, “Elon Musk Is Poised to Become Silicon Valley’s Next Big Thing,” in a profile that advanced what was already a hackneyed set of journalistic conventions about the man-boy man-gods of Northern California: “The showiness, the chutzpah, the streak of self-promotion and the urge to create a dramatic public persona are major elements of what makes up the Silicon Valley entrepreneur. . . . Musk’s ego has gotten him in trouble before, and it may get him in trouble again, yet it is also part and parcel of what it means to be a hotshot entrepreneur.” Five months later, Musk married his college girlfriend, Justine Wilson. During their first dance at their wedding, he whispered in her ear, “I am the alpha in this relationship.”

“ Big Ego of Hotshot Entrepreneur Gets Him Into Trouble ” is more or less the running headline of Musk’s life. In 2000, Peter Thiel’s company Confinity merged with X.com, and Musk regretted that the new company was called PayPal, instead of X . (He later bought the domain x.com, and for years he kept it as a kind of shrine, a blank white page with nothing but a tiny letter “x” on the screen.) In 2002, eBay paid $1.5 billion for the company, and Musk drew on his share of the sale to start SpaceX. Two years later, he invested around $6.5 million in Tesla; he became both its largest shareholder and its chairman. Around then, in his Marvel Iron Man phase, Musk left Northern California for Los Angeles, to swan with starlets. Courted by Ted Cruz during COVID , he moved to Texas, because he dislikes regulation, and because he objected to California’s lockdowns and mask mandates.

Musk’s accomplishments as the head of a series of pioneering engineering firms are unrivalled. Isaacson takes on each of Musk’s ventures, venture by venture, chapter by chapter, emphasizing the ferocity and the velocity and the effectiveness of Musk’s management style—“A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principles” is a workplace rule. “How the fuck can it take so long?” Musk asked an engineer working on SpaceX’s Merlin engines. “This is stupid. Cut it in half.” He pushed SpaceX through years of failures, crash after crash, with the confidence that success would come. “Until today, all electric cars sucked,” Musk said, launching Tesla’s Roadster, leaving every other electric car and most gas cars in the dust. No automotive company had broken into that industry in something like a century. Like SpaceX, Tesla went through very hard times. Musk steered it to triumph, a miracle amid fossil fuel’s stranglehold. “Fuck oil,” he said.

“Comradery is dangerous” is another of Musk’s workplace maxims. He was ousted as PayPal’s C.E.O. and ousted as Tesla’s chairman. He’s opposed to unions, pushed workers back to the Tesla plants at the height of the Covid pandemic—some four hundred and fifty reportedly got infected—and has thwarted workers’ rights at every turn.

Musk has run through companies and he has run through wives. In some families, domestic relations are just another kind of labor relations. He pushed his first wife, Justine, to dye her hair blonder. After they lost their firstborn son, Nevada, in infancy, Justine gave birth to twins (one of whom they named Xavier, in part for Professor Xavier, from “X-Men”) and then to triplets. When the couple fought, he told her, “If you were my employee, I would fire you.” He divorced her and soon proposed to Talulah Riley, a twenty-two-year-old British actress who had only just moved out of her parents’ house. She said her job was to stop Musk from going “king-crazy”: “People become king, and then they go crazy.” They married, divorced, married, and divorced. But “you’re my Mr. Rochester,” she told him. “And if Thornfield Hall burns down and you are blind, I’ll come and take care of you.” He dated Amber Heard, after her separation from Johnny Depp. Then he met Grimes. “I’m just a fool for love,” Musk tells Isaacson. “I am often a fool, but especially for love.”

He is also a fool for Twitter. His Twitter account first got him into real trouble in 2018, when he baselessly called a British diver, who helped rescue Thai children trapped in a flooded cave, a “pedo” and was sued for defamation. That same year, he tweeted, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420,” making a pot joke. “Funding secured.” (“I kill me,” he says about his sense of humor.) The S.E.C. charged him with fraud, and Tesla stock fell more than thirteen per cent. Tesla shareholders sued him, alleging that his tweets had caused their stock to lose value. On Joe Rogan’s podcast, he went king-crazy, lighting up a joint. He looked at his phone. “You getting text messages from chicks?” Rogan asked. “I’m getting text messages from friends saying, ‘What the hell are you doing smoking weed?’ ”

“Musk’s goofy mode is the flip side of his demon mode,” Isaacson writes. Musk likes this kind of cover. “I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship,” he said in his “S.N.L.” monologue, in 2021. “Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” In that monologue, he also said that he has Asperger’s. A writer in Newsweek applauded this announcement as a “milestone in the history of neurodiversity.” But, in Slate, Sara Luterman, who is autistic, was less impressed; she denounced Musk’s “coming out” as “self-serving and hollow, a poor attempt at laundering his image as a heartless billionaire more concerned with cryptocurrency and rocket ships than the lives of others.” She put cruelty first.

Musk’s interest in acquiring Twitter dates to 2022. That year, he and Grimes had another child. His name is Techno Mechanicus Musk, but his parents call him Tau, for the irrational number. But Musk also lost a child. His twins with Justine turned eighteen in 2022 and one of them, who had apparently become a Marxist, told Musk, “I hate you and everything you stand for.” It was, to some degree, in an anguished attempt to heal this developing rift that, in 2020, Musk tweeted, “I am selling almost all physical possessions. Will own no house.” That didn’t work. In 2022, his disaffected child petitioned a California court for a name change, to Vivian Jenna Wilson, citing, as the reason for the petition, “Gender Identity and the fact that I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” She refuses to see him. Musk told Isaacson he puts some of the blame for this on her progressive Los Angeles high school. Lamenting the “woke-mind virus,” he decided to buy Twitter. I just can’t sit around and do nothing .

Musk’s estrangement from his daughter is sad, but of far greater consequence is his seeming estrangement from humanity itself. When Musk decided to buy Twitter, he wrote a letter to its board. “I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” he explained, but “I now realize the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.” This is flimflam. Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold. Twitter does not operate on the principle of representation, which is the cornerstone of democratic governance. It has no concept of the “civil” in “civil society.” Nor has Elon Musk, at any point in his career, displayed any commitment to either democratic governance or the freedom of expression.

Musk gave Isaacson a different explanation for buying the company: “Unless the woke-mind virus, which is fundamentally antiscience, antimerit, and antihuman in general, is stopped, civilization will never become multiplanetary.” It’s as if Musk had come to believe the sorts of mission statements that the man-boy gods of Silicon Valley had long been peddling. “At first, I thought it didn’t fit into my primary large missions,” he told Isaacson, about Twitter. “But I’ve come to believe it can be part of the mission of preserving civilization, buying our society more time to become multiplanetary.”

Elon Musk plans to make the world safe for democracy, save civilization from itself, and bring the light of human consciousness to the stars in a ship he will call the Heart of Gold, for a spaceship fuelled by an Improbability Drive in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” In case you’ve never read it, what actually happens in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide” is that the Heart of Gold is stolen by Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is the President of the Galaxy, has two heads and three arms, is the inventor of the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, has been named, by “the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6,” the “Biggest Bang Since the Big One,” and, according to his private brain-care specialist, Gag Halfrunt, “has personality problems beyond the dreams of analysts.” Person of the Year material, for sure. All the same, as a Vogon Fleet prepares to shoot down the Heart of Gold with Beeblebrox on board, Halfrunt muses that “it will be a pity to lose him,” but, “well, Zaphod’s just this guy, you know?” ♦

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Let’s put a stake in the ‘great man’ biography — starting with Isaacson’s ‘Elon Musk’

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By Walter Isaacon Simon & Schuster: 688 pages, $35 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

The opening pages of “Elon Musk,” the new doorstop biography from Walter Isaacson , the bestselling chronicler of the great innovative men of modern history, are jarring, especially to anyone expecting to be greeted with plucky tales of unlikely genius.

On the first page, we’re told that Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, owner of X (formerly Twitter), and currently the world’s richest man, was born into a land of incredible violence in South Africa , “with machine gun attacks and knife killings common,” where boys have to “wade through pools of blood” on the way to concerts and are sent to wilderness camps that resemble “a paramilitary Lord of the Flies,” per Musk. Young Elon is bullied relentlessly — by his classmates but also by his abusive father — until he grows big enough to fight back.

Introducing the 688-page biography this way seems designed to address Musk’s recent turn toward combativeness and cruelty — if not justifying it, then offering a skeleton key to understanding where it’s rooted. But as we learn throughout the book, the Musks are persistent fabulists, prone to embellishment and fabrication, and this becomes the first of many narrative sequences that the reader must consider with an eye to truth versus narrative convenience.

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And Isaacson’s truth is, above all, selective. Given Musk’s recent coziness with white nationalists and peddlers of junk race science and his ongoing tirade against the Anti-Defamation League , whom he blames (rather than himself) for chasing advertisers from Twitter, it seems startling that nothing in those opening pages touches on his experiences with apartheid . Much of that horrendous violence unfolding in 1980s South Africa was precipitated by a brutally racist government; we discover only that it taught Musk to survive adversity. “My pain threshold is very high,” he tells Isaacson.

We do learn that Musk’s Canadian grandfather was involved in a fringe political party with antisemitic views and relocated his family to South Africa because he liked the government better — he is described as harboring “quirky conservative views” — and that Musk’s father is now outspokenly racist. But in a book that goes to great lengths to dissect the transmission of habits and ideas from father and son, Elon is allowed to stay mum.

Silences like that come to haunt the capacious hull of “Elon Musk” — to the point that they risk drowning out the project altogether.

After the burst of violence in the introduction, we move into more familiar territory, led on by Isaacson’s brisk, propulsive prose: Musk is a spacy, lonely outsider who is bright but has trouble making friends. He disappears into video games and science fiction and soon dreams of horizons far beyond his hometown, and sets out to North America with an entrepreneurial spirit in tow. He graduates with a dual degree in physics and economics from the University of Pennsylvania, gets accepted into a PhD program at Stanford, but decides instead to set out into the buzzing startup scene of Silicon Valley.

He founds Zip2 with his brother Kimbal , sells it , and makes a lot of money. He founds the first iteration of X.com, merges with PayPal, and makes even more. Initially the CEO of both companies, he’s pushed out of each — in a bit of foreshadowing, Musk is booted from PayPal because of his monomaniacal dedication to the porn-adjacent letter X, as well as the idea that PayPal should try to “take over the world’s financial system.” His dismissal, brought about in a coup led by Peter Thiel and other members of the so-called PayPal mafia, leaves him with a large pool of cash, an ax or two to grind and an aspiration to take on loftier goals.

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Here the limitations of Isaacson’s project are revealed: Musk had pushed some of the worst ideas of his young career. From a business perspective, it seemed his colleagues were correct to oust him, preserve their product and make them all fabulously wealthy in an IPO and later sale to EBay . But here’s Isaacson’s diagnosis: “He was a visionary who didn’t play well with others.” The word “visionary,” in this application, is doing a lot of work.

The narrative is filled with moments of similar dissonance, with Isaacson quick to praise Musk’s incessant risk-taking after a disaster, or to excuse his rude behavior to underlings as necessary to get things done, or to nod along in prose while Musk announces his latest idea that will transform the world. He does occasionally push back, as when Musk claims the Hyperloop will change everything (“It did not change everything”), but Isaacson mostly accepts Musk’s confident prognostications as gospel.

Isaacson — biographer of Steve Jobs , Albert Einstein , Henry Kissinger , Benjamin Franklin — is concerned with the study of world-moving men (and occasionally a woman ). What makes innovators tick? What makes them so successful? (In the case of Musk, the prognosis can be summarized as: a large appetite for risk, a willingness to alienate colleagues, a detailed knowledge of industry and science, an ability to process work tasks like an algorithm and a predilection for drawing lessons from video games and “ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . ”)

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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. It makes less sense 12 years after “ Steve Jobs ” — now that we’ve seen the toll the tech giants have levied on society: labor exploitation at Amazon, Uber and, yes, Tesla; misinformation and harassment on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and, yes, Twitter. These costs are almost entirely omitted from the equation of “Elon Musk.”

That may be because there is a tacit pact between author and subject in the Isaacson “great man” biography: The author will unearth unflattering personal anecdotes and 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.”

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 to challenge the assumptions. Because the Isaacson Accord turns out to be a devil’s bargain. We get a lot of palace intrigue, well-told anecdotes and some genuine insight into Musk’s familial psychology; but the good stuff almost comes in spite of Isaacson’s constant framing of Musk as a moody but brilliant world-mover.

Worse, in exchange for unprecedented access, the Isaacson Accord demands that a lot of the most difficult and pressing questions go unasked and, therefore, unanswered.

Isaacson repeatedly says one of Musk’s unparalleled strengths as a manager is his intimate knowledge of the factory floors where his products are made. Yet there is not a single mention of the sweeping allegations of racial discrimination at Tesla’s flagship Fremont factory that resulted in juries finding Tesla liable for millions in damages. Workers of color say they were called the N-word and saw swastikas painted on the bathroom. In 2021, Tesla was ordered to pay $137 million to one employee who suffered racist abuse, though that amount was later reduced.

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Likewise, there is no examination of the union drives at Tesla plants, or the wrongful termination case Tesla lost after firing a worker involved in organizing. In all the discussion of Tesla’s self-driving Autopilot program, there is no mention of the blockbuster revelation from a former engineer that one of the first key promotions of Autopilot was staged , contributing to the false sense of security buyers had in the program.

And while a major focus of the book is the impact of Musk’s abusive father and the traits that might have been passed down, Isaacson speeds past any explanation of the falling out with Musk’s trans daughter, Jenna , allowing Musk to file it away as her political views simply having grown too radical. Isaacson does not list her as a source in the book, as her twin brother, and does not say whether he tried to reach out. Musk’s story, about Jenna having succumbed to the “woke mind virus,” stands.

No biography can or should be totally comprehensive, but it’s pretty easy to conclude which sorts of topics and conversations Isaacson decided it would be best to avoid altogether. I started “Elon Musk” wondering if the world needed another book positioning Musk as a great man — Ashlee Vance’s book of the same title ably covered many of the same bases — and finished thinking it’s time to retire the entire genre of “great innovator” biographies, period.

The idea that the future is created by flawed geniuses who happen to accumulate great wealth is outmoded and simplistic, and it encourages a flattened view of how technology is developed and whom it impacts. Just scan the list of sources Isaacson includes in the book: executives, venture capitalists, founders and high-ranking engineers. Yes, Isaacson spoke to “adversaries” like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, but not (at least per the list) to line workers, not to Jenna, not to anyone whose family member died in an Autopilot crash, nor anyone who tried to organize a Tesla plant.

The bottom line: This is the story Musk himself wants told. Sure, he might have excluded a handful of the details that proved personally embarrassing, but nothing here challenges the idea that Elon Musk is an all-too-human hero valiantly trying to save humanity from the threats he sees cascading down upon us. It’s the book Musk would have written himself.

More to Read

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Dec. 21, 2023

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Brian Merchant is the Los Angeles Times’ technology columnist. He’s the author of “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone” and the forthcoming “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech.” Merchant is the co-founder of Terraform, Vice Media’s speculative fiction website, and the co-editor of the anthology “Terraform: Watch/Worlds/Burn.” Previously, he was a senior editor at Motherboard, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, WIRED, the Atlantic, Fast Company, and Slate, among others.

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Elon Musk has his demons. Walter Isaacson does his best to dissect them.

Isaacson’s new biography, ‘elon musk,’ attempts to reconcile the tech billionaire’s flaws with his achievements.

If you were trying to reverse-engineer from Elon Musk’s life a blueprint for creating the sort of tech icon who, at 52 years old, merits a 688-page biography by Walter Isaacson, the resulting plans would be fairly straightforward — just rather hard to execute.

Take a bright, exceedingly headstrong, socially maladjusted young boy and forge his character in an abusive, friendless childhood. For solace, give him only science fiction novels, superhero comics, and a cadre of younger siblings and cousins to boss around, imbuing him with delusions of grandeur and a taste for unchecked power.

If he survives that, send him to Silicon Valley during the dot-com boom. Give him a relentless work ethic, an addiction to risk and a moral compass that puts his own interests at its magnetic north pole. Add a keen eye for brilliant engineering minds he can mine for ideas and push to achieve the seemingly impossible, while he hogs the profits and credit. And then hope that he gets very lucky at pivotal moments along the way, so that his compulsive risk-taking doesn’t blow up in his face, even when his rockets do.

The traits that conspired to make Musk the world’s richest man were all in evidence when Isaacson decided in 2021 to make him the subject of his next biography. “ Elon Musk ,” being published Tuesday, must have seemed a natural extension of Isaacson’s “great man” canon, which includes biographies of Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs . (Isaacson’s subjects are almost all men.)

But Einstein, Franklin and Jobs were dead by the time Isaacson’s biographies hit bookstores (albeit by just weeks in Jobs’s case), whereas Musk — chief executive of Tesla and SpaceX and owner of X (formerly Twitter) — remains very alive. In the past two years, Musk’s public image has morphed from that of the hard-charging high-tech visionary who inspired Robert Downey Jr.’s portrayal of Tony Stark in “ Iron Man ” into something more disturbing and polarizing.

How 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 the 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 prioritizes 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. (There are wild capers and personal dramas worthy of a soap opera throughout, but most of the ones you’ll encounter earlier in the book have been well documented before, including in Ashlee Vance’s thorough 2015 Musk biography.)

New details include that Musk single-handedly scuttled a Ukrainian sneak attack on a Russian naval fleet in Crimea (more on that below). We learn that Musk’s girlfriend Grimes was in an Austin hospital visiting a surrogate pregnant with their then-secret second child in 2021 at the same time Musk’s employee Shivon Zilis was in the same hospital pregnant with then-secret twins fathered by Musk via IVF, unbeknownst to Grimes. (“Perhaps it is no surprise,” Isaacson deadpans, “that Musk decided to fly west that Thanksgiving weekend to deal with the simpler issues of rocket engineering.”) And we discover that Musk and Grimes have a third, previously unreported child, named Techno Mechanicus Musk, bringing Musk’s tally of known offspring to 11.

This being an Isaacson biography, though, it’s clear he 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. It’s the same one that lay at the heart of “ Steve Jobs ”: Are Musk’s personal demons and flaws also what make his spectacular achievements possible? Seven pages in, there are no prizes for guessing what Isaacson’s answer will be. 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.

Musk, who at age 5 traipsed solo across Pretoria to reach a cousin’s birthday party after his parents left him home as a punishment, has always had a little crazy in him. To help explain it, Isaacson introduces us early on to Elon’s brutal, “Jekyll-and-Hyde” father, Errol Musk. He’s a man Elon mostly despises but also, in his worst moments, resembles. When Musk’s first wife, Justine, reached her wit’s end with him, she would warn, “You’re turning into your father.”

Elon’s childhood in South Africa reads like the origin story for a superhero, or maybe a supervillain, at least as he and his family members tell it. That may be by design: Musk has a penchant for self-mythologizing, casting himself as the sole hero of complex origin stories like that of Tesla’s founding.

Already, one of the book’s critical passages has sparked geopolitical drama — and an embarrassing public walk-back by Isaacson. In an excerpt from the book published in The Washington Post on Friday , Isaacson recounts how Musk single-handedly foiled a Ukrainian sneak attack on a Russian naval fleet in Crimea by cutting off the Starlink satellite internet service Ukraine’s drones were relying on. Isaacson writes that Musk made the decision because he feared that the attack could lead to nuclear war, based on his conversation weeks earlier with a Russian ambassador.

But when CNN obtained the excerpt and reported on it, Musk tweeted a different account. He said he didn’t cut Ukraine’s Starlink service in Crimea; it was already deactivated there, and he refused the Ukrainians’ emergency request to activate it so they could carry out the attack. Isaacson tweeted Friday that Musk’s version of the story was accurate, meaning the passage in his book is misleading.

The larger concern is whether Isaacson’s heavy reliance on Musk as a primary source throughout his reporting kept him too close to his subject. Swaths of the book are told largely through Musk’s eyes and those of his confidants. And the majority of tales about his exploits cast him as the genius protagonist even as they expose his self-destructive tendencies or his capacity for cruelty.

To the author’s credit, the book boasts a large number of citations for sources and interviews. Isaacson also takes care to include corroborating or conflicting accounts of controversial episodes, such as Musk’s vicious grudge against Tesla’s original founders. (If you ever want to make an enemy for life, try standing between Musk and full credit for a project he was involved in.) And, contrary to some of his most adamant critics, Musk really does seem to possess a remarkable brain for physics, engineering and business — if perhaps not for running a social media firm. Isaacson persuasively dismisses the notion that Musk owes his success largely to inherited wealth, or that he’s a huckster profiting only from the inventions of others. Musk’s companies have thrived both because of and in spite of him.

Isaacson at times interjects his own, sometimes dryly funny, counterpoints to some of Musk’s more outlandish claims. After he quotes Musk enthusing about his far-fetched Hyperloop plan, “This is going to change everything,” Isaacson begins the next paragraph: “It didn’t change everything.” (What it did change, by some reckonings, were California’s plans to build a high-speed rail line, which Musk has acknowledged he sought to undermine.)

In one of his most entertaining and revealing bits of original reporting, Isaacson fills in the backstory behind a series of technical glitches that plagued Twitter in late 2022 and early 2023, and it does not disappoint.

Read an excerpt from “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson

Steamrolling past Twitter employees’ warnings, Musk insisted on immediately moving thousands of the company’s computer servers from a Sacramento data center to another facility to save money. When they balked, insisting it would take months to do safely, Musk dragooned a carful of friends and family into canceling their Christmas plans to drive to Sacramento, where he personally disconnected one of the servers with the help of a security guard’s pocket knife. He then called in a team of employees to start loading the rest onto a semi truck and some moving vans.

On many occasions over the years, Musk has horrified deputies with these sorts of stunts, only to be vindicated when they pay off handsomely. But in this case it turned out the employees, whom he had threatened to fire for their timidity, had been right. The move caused cascading glitches in Twitter’s software, including the ones that afflicted a highly anticipated live audio event with presidential candidate Ron DeSantis the following May.

The Musk we know today is different from the Musk Isaacson began following in 2021. Since then, he has lurched rightward politically, embracing conspiracy theories and railing that the “woke mind virus” could unravel civilization; staged a dramatic takeover of Twitter, restoring banned accounts including Donald Trump’s while alienating advertisers and the mainstream media; been accused of sexual misdeeds and revealed as the secret father of multiple additional children; founded a new AI company; and become a power broker in both the Ukraine war and Republican politics. And that’s leaving out a lot.

Isaacson pins the changes at least partly on the pandemic, which drew out Musk’s conspiratorial side, supercharged his Twitter addiction and amped up his natural mistrust of bureaucratic regulations as covid-19 restrictions hampered Tesla production in California and China. In some ways, as Isaacson points out, Musk is becoming more like his father, Errol, whom Isaacson has found in recent years to be descending into full-on paranoia, conspiracism and overt racism.

So what does Isaacson ultimately make of Elon? In a brief, final assessment, Isaacson takes us back to where he started. The tech tycoon’s “epic feats” don’t excuse his “bad behavior,” but “it’s important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly.”

A harder but more fruitful question than how to reconcile Musk’s idealism and remarkable achievements with his “demon mode,” as Grimes calls it, might have been: What does it say about our world today that so much depends on a man like Musk? That the fate of electric vehicles, self-driving cars, public infrastructure projects, global space exploration, the rules of online discourse, and military combatants can be altered at the whim of a notoriously whimsical man? And if he ever does go full Errol, will there be anything we can do about it?

By Walter Isaacson

Simon & Schuster. 688 pp. $35

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2023

New York Times Bestseller

by Walter Isaacson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2023

Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.

A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.

To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.

Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023

ISBN: 9781982181284

Page Count: 688

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | BUSINESS | POLITICS | ISSUES & CONTROVERSIES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Walter Isaacson with adapted by Sarah Durand

by Walter Isaacson

More About This Book

BOOK TO SCREEN

by Stephanie Johnson & Brandon Stanton illustrated by Henry Sene Yee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 12, 2022

A blissfully vicarious, heartfelt glimpse into the life of a Manhattan burlesque dancer.

A former New York City dancer reflects on her zesty heyday in the 1970s.

Discovered on a Manhattan street in 2020 and introduced on Stanton’s Humans of New York Instagram page, Johnson, then 76, shares her dynamic history as a “fiercely independent” Black burlesque dancer who used the stage name Tanqueray and became a celebrated fixture in midtown adult theaters. “I was the only black girl making white girl money,” she boasts, telling a vibrant story about sex and struggle in a bygone era. Frank and unapologetic, Johnson vividly captures aspects of her former life as a stage seductress shimmying to blues tracks during 18-minute sets or sewing lingerie for plus-sized dancers. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive. Her anecdotes are humorous, heartfelt, and supremely captivating, recounted with the passion of a true survivor and the acerbic wit of a weathered, street-wise New Yorker. She shares stories of growing up in an abusive household in Albany in the 1940s, a teenage pregnancy, and prison time for robbery as nonchalantly as she recalls selling rhinestone G-strings to prostitutes to make them sparkle in the headlights of passing cars. Complemented by an array of revealing personal photographs, the narrative alternates between heartfelt nostalgia about the seedier side of Manhattan’s go-go scene and funny quips about her unconventional stage performances. Encounters with a variety of hardworking dancers, drag queens, and pimps, plus an account of the complexities of a first love with a drug-addled hustler, fill out the memoir with personality and candor. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly. The book also includes Yee’s lush watercolor illustrations.

Pub Date: July 12, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-250-27827-2

Page Count: 192

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: July 27, 2022

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS & CELEBRITY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton

by Brandon Stanton ; photographed by Brandon Stanton

LOVE, PAMELA

by Pamela Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2023

A juicy story with some truly crazy moments, yet Anderson's good heart shines through.

The iconic model tells the story of her eventful life.

According to the acknowledgments, this memoir started as "a fifty-page poem and then grew into hundreds of pages of…more poetry." Readers will be glad that Anderson eventually turned to writing prose, since the well-told anecdotes and memorable character sketches are what make it a page-turner. The poetry (more accurately described as italicized notes-to-self with line breaks) remains strewn liberally through the pages, often summarizing the takeaway or the emotional impact of the events described: "I was / and still am / an exceptionally / easy target. / And, / I'm proud of that ." This way of expressing herself is part of who she is, formed partly by her passion for Anaïs Nin and other writers; she is a serious maven of literature and the arts. The narrative gets off to a good start with Anderson’s nostalgic memories of her childhood in coastal Vancouver, raised by very young, very wild, and not very competent parents. Here and throughout the book, the author displays a remarkable lack of anger. She has faced abuse and mistreatment of many kinds over the decades, but she touches on the most appalling passages lightly—though not so lightly you don't feel the torment of the media attention on the events leading up to her divorce from Tommy Lee. Her trip to the pages of Playboy , which involved an escape from a violent fiance and sneaking across the border, is one of many jaw-dropping stories. In one interesting passage, Julian Assange's mother counsels Anderson to desexualize her image in order to be taken more seriously as an activist. She decided that “it was too late to turn back now”—that sexy is an inalienable part of who she is. Throughout her account of this kooky, messed-up, enviable, and often thrilling life, her humility (her sons "are true miracles, considering the gene pool") never fails her.

Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2023

ISBN: 9780063226562

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023

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April 18, 2024

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Table of Contents

• Rave and Reviews

About The Book

About the author.

Walter Isaacson is the bestselling author of biographies of Jennifer Doudna, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. He is a professor of history at Tulane and was CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of  Time . He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2023. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

Product Details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (September 12, 2023)
• Length: 688 pages
• ISBN13: 9781982181284

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Raves and Reviews

Shortlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year "Whatever you think of Mr. Musk, he is a man worth understanding— which makes this a book worth reading." — The Economist "With Elon Musk , Walter Isaacson offers both an engaging chronicle of his subject’s busy life so far and some compelling answers..." — Wall Street Journal "Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Elon Musk , published Monday, delivers as promised — a comprehensive, deeply reported chronicle of the world-shaping tech mogul’s life, a twin to the author’s similarly thick 2011 biography of Steve Jobs . Details ranging from the personally salacious to the geopolitically volatile have already made the rounds — the rare example of a major book publication causing a news cycle in its own right...What Isaacson’s biography reveals through its personalized lens on Musk’s work with Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI, and more is not only what Musk wants, but how and why he plans to do it. The portrait that emerges is one that resembles a hard-charging, frequently alienating Gilded Age-style captain of industry, with a particular fixation on AI that ties everything together....Isaacson’s book is like a decoder ring, tying the mercurial Musk’s various obsessions into a coherent worldview with a startlingly concrete goal at its center." — Politico "[The book] has everything you'd expect from a book on Musk—stories of tragedy, triumph, and turmoil.... While the stories are fascinating and guaranteed to spark a mountain of coverage, founders and entrepreneurs will also unearth valuable lessons." — Inc. "Isaacson has gathered information from the man’s admirers and critics. He lays all of it out.... The book is bursting with stories....A deeply engrossing tale of a spectacular American innovator. " — New York Journal of Books "One of the greatest biographers in America has written a massive book about the richest man in the world. This fast-paced biography, based on more than a hundred interviews...[is] a head-spinning tale about a vain, brilliant, sometimes cruel figure whose ambitions are actively shaping the future of human life." —Ron Charles on CBS Sunday Morning "A painstakingly excavation of the tortured unquiet mind of the world’s richest man… Isaacson’s book is not a soaring portrait of a captain of industry, but rather an exhausting ride through the life of a man who seems incapable of happiness." — The Sunday Times "An experienced biographer’s comprehensive study." —The Observer "Walter Isaacson’s all-access biography… Its portrait of the tech maverick is fascinating." —The Telegraph "Isaacson boils Musk down to two men… the result is a beat-by-beat book that follows him insider important rooms and explores obscure regions of his mind." —The Times

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What Tesla’s Troubles Signal for the E.V. Revolution

The carmaker’s disappointing results point to slowing demand and a “sharp deterioration in growth” that extends beyond Elon Musk’s company.

By Andrew Ross Sorkin ,  Ravi Mattu ,  Bernhard Warner ,  Sarah Kessler ,  Michael J. de la Merced ,  Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni

Tesla’s woes prompt an E.V. reassessment

Wall Street has sounded the alarm for weeks that the transition to electric vehicles may be stalling, despite billions in government subsidies and huge investments by auto giants.

Tesla’s latest sales figures suggest that the pullback may be worse than thought — and beyond one company’s ability to fix.

Tesla’s numbers undershot forecasts. The car maker’s stock fell nearly 5 percent on Tuesday after it reported deliveries of 387,000 cars worldwide in the first quarter — the Evercore ISI estimate was 443,000 — in its first year-on-year quarterly decline since 2020.

That has contributed to a more than 30 percent decline in Tesla’s stock, which has made it one of the worst performers on the S&P 500 this year.

Tesla had warned of “ notably lower ” growth this year. The company has faced setbacks including a suspected arson attack on its German gigafactory and shipping delays tied to the turmoil in the Red Sea. Meanwhile, high interest rates and the rise of cheaper Chinese E.V.s are sapping global demand and eating into Tesla’s once dominant market share.

Some Elon Musk critics — including Ross Gerber, an outspoken Tesla investor — laid the blame squarely on the company’s C.E.O., saying that his “toxic behavior” had “ absolutely damaged the brand .” (Musk has said little about the Tesla numbers, except to call Gerber “ an idiot ,” and to note “it was a tough quarter” for all E.V. makers.)

Musk isn’t wrong on that front. China’s BYD, which briefly dethroned Tesla as the world’s biggest E.V. maker, on Tuesday reported sales of roughly 300,000 last quarter, a 13 percent gain from the same period earlier but a quarter-on-quarter dip. The Warren Buffett-backed carmaker has gained market share in Europe and Asia by appealing to more cost-conscious buyers, though it doesn’t sell cars in the U.S. because of tariffs.

Kia, Toyota and Volkswagen have reported better sales growth, though all are coming off smaller bases than Tesla or BYD.

Analysts are worried that E.V. demand may cool further . Government credits for car buyers in the U.S. and Europe have expired in recent months. And concerns about charging times and battery range are pushing some consumers to pick hybrid-engine vehicles or stick with less expensive gasoline-powered ones.

Is it a blip? Over all, E.V. sales were flat in the fourth quarter of 2023, despite being up 40 percent year on year, “suggesting a sharp deterioration in growth,” Tom Narayan, an auto analyst at RBC Capital Markets, wrote to investors on Tuesday.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

President Biden talks trade, TikTok and more with China’s Xi Jinping. In a call on Tuesday, the two leaders covered trade policies , the detainment of U.S. nationals and China’s support of Russia despite its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The conversation precedes Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s visit to Beijing this week , where she is expected to address China’s dominance over raw materials essential for E.V.s and solar panels.

Fed officials warn that they’re in no hurry to cut interest rates. Two voting members of the central bank’s rate-setting committee, Loretta Mester and Mary Daly, said that they saw three cuts as likely this year — but added that, with the economy growing, there’s no rush to do so. Investors on Wednesday penciled in a 66 percent chance of a June cut, down slightly from the prior week.

Taiwan is rocked by its worst earthquake in decades. The 7.4-magnitude tremor , which struck shortly before 8 a.m. local time, occurred in the country’s east coast but could be felt in the capital, Taipei; at least nine are dead and hundreds are wounded. TSMC , the world’s biggest maker of advanced semiconductors, briefly evacuated some factory workers, amid worries about potential harm to the country’s chip manufacturing sector.

Can going private fix Endeavor’s problems?

After years of complaining that public investors didn’t understand what they were building, Endeavor executives, led by the Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel, are finally getting their wish: a breakup with Wall Street.

But will taking Endeavor private — with the help of Silver Lake, its longtime financial partner — actually make help the company grow?

Endeavor was built on serial deal making. Emanuel and his team believed that their company could be not just be a talent agency, but an entertainment hub that supplied media companies with content (and the talent that created it) as well.

With the help of Silver Lake, which invested in Endeavor in 2012, Emanuel bought an array of assets: IMG, the sports- and fashion-focused talent agency, Professional Bull Riders; New York Fashion Week; and sports-betting technology.

The crowning achievement was buying Ultimate Fighting Championship and World Wrestling Entertainment, combining them into TKO Group, a publicly traded combat-sports company that Endeavor controls.

But investors were unimpressed, with Endeavor often trading below its I.P.O. stock price.

Going private means that Emanuel and Silver Lake are freer to pursue their vision: “We are all in on working with the Endeavor team and our trusted anchor investors to create value by accelerating growth at scale,” Egon Durban , Silver Lake’s co-C.E.O., said of the deal announced on Tuesday, which values the company at $13 billion, including debt.

The big question: Will Endeavor’s strategy make sense now? Profiting from content deals hasn’t always worked out. TKO’s stock tumbled after W.W.E. scored a better rights agreement for its SmackDown franchise.

But Endeavor and Silver Lake appear to be betting that they’ll benefit from giving their premium strategy more time to play out. They also believe that the sum of Endeavor’s parts are greater than yesterday’s deal valuation.

Silver Lake has gotten rich from this kind of deal before. It partnered with Michael Dell to buy out other investors in Dell, then a mostly unloved maker of personal computers. That deal was bitterly contested by the activist financier Carl Icahn, who accused the two of buying the computer maker on the cheap .

Dell Technologies eventually returned to the public markets — and Dell, Silver Lake and their partners are believed to have made a profit exceeding $40 billion .

The deal hurdles facing Paramount’s board

Merger talks between Paramount, the media company that’s the home of the “Top Gun” franchise and Nickelodeon, and the studio Skydance are heating up, with the two discussing entering into exclusive talks , DealBook’s Lauren Hirsch and The Times’s Benjamin Mullin report.

Such a move would be a big step forward in a process dogged by uncertainty for months. But many questions, and obstacles, remain.

The Paramount special board committee is under extra pressure to be fair. Shari Redstone controls Paramount via special shares held by National Amusements, her family’s holding company. Under the terms being discussed, Skydance would buy National Amusements and then combine with Paramount.

But virtually every time there’s a controlling shareholder, companies appoint a group of directors to ensure that any offer treats all investors fairly.

Given the shareholder litigation over the merger of Viacom and CBS that created Paramount, the special committee here has been especially cautious, DealBook hears. Some investors have expressed concern that a Skydance deal would benefit Redstone more than other shareholders.

Then there’s the question of cultural fit. Personality matches matter in any deal, but are especially pertinent when it comes to media companies that tend to have executives with outsize personas.

How will that play out in the potential union of an old-school company like Paramount and Skydance, a much-younger studio led by David Ellison , the son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison?

Don’t forget that there are others interested in Paramount. They include the investment firm Apollo, which has offered $11 billion to buy Paramount’s movie studio, and the media mogul Byron Allen.

“I wanted to have you on a podcast, and Apple asked us not to do it.”

— Jon Stewart , a host of “The Daily Show.” On his most recent episode, he told his guest, the F.T.C. chair and aggressive antitrust enforcer Lina Khan, that when he had an Apple TV+ show, the tech giant urged him not to interview her.

Behind Biden’s love-hate approach to corporate America

President Biden has taken aim at big companies in recent months on issues including rising prices, tax breaks and big mergers. But he has also introduced huge corporate subsidies via his climate and manufacturing laws, and presided over an enormous increase in oil production.

In short, he has sought to walk a fine line between challenging corporate America and courting it to help carry out his policy goals, The Times’s Jim Tankersley writes. His re-election chances may depend in part on how well he manages that balance.

Democratic pollsters have encouraged Biden to hit big companies for political gain, particularly by emphasizing his plans to raise corporate taxes and call out companies for so-called shrinkflation and junk fees.

The hope is that those attacks will expose a vulnerability for Donald Trump, whose policies as president largely benefited companies — and who is currently leading Biden in key battleground states , according to a new poll.

Biden has also sought counsel from C.E.O.s. He regularly asks their advice on issues including supply chains and worker training. Key initiatives like infrastructure improvements and increased domestic manufacturing rely on cooperation with the private sector.

Not all corporate leaders buy his approach. C.E.O.s including Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase and Ken Griffin of Citadel have criticized Biden’s economic policies, while oil and gas executives have denounced an administration pause on the permitting of new liquefied natural gas export terminals.

Some may favor the likely chaos of a potential Trump return. “You can look at a Trump administration with a lot more uncertainty, but directionally, the regulatory effort was moving to lighten the regulatory costs,” Neil Bradley, the chief policy officer at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told The Times.

While the Biden administration has been clear about what regulations will look like, they’ll still be onerous, Bradley added. “And so, interestingly, there’s a lot of people saying, ‘The chaos is better,’” he said.

THE SPEED READ

Shares in the power business GE Vernova began trading on Tuesday, completing the breakup of General Electric. (WSJ)

Hunterbrook Capital , a hedge fund that is funding a media operation to produce investigations it can trade on, has raised $100 million. (FT)

Yahoo is buying the technology behind Artifact , the artificial intelligence news start-up founded by co-founders of Instagram. (The Verge)

Meet Don Hankey, the California billionaire who is covering the $175 million bond in the civil fraud judgment against Donald Trump. (WaPo)

“The Supreme Court May Give Us Another 2008 Financial Crisis ” (The Lever)

Best of the rest

Office vacancies in the U.S. rose to a record 19.8 percent in the first quarter, according to Moody’s, as the commercial real estate sector remains under pressure. (Bloomberg)

Ratings for Monday night’s women’s college basketball matchup between the University of Iowa, featuring the phenom Caitlin Clark, and L.S.U. outperformed several of last year’s N.B.A. finals games . (ESPN)

Taylor Swift is now a billionaire , at least according to a new estimate. (Forbes)

We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected] .

Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist and the founder and editor at large of DealBook. He is a co-anchor of CNBC’s "Squawk Box" and the author of “Too Big to Fail.” He is also a co-creator of the Showtime drama series "Billions." More about Andrew Ross Sorkin

Ravi Mattu is the managing editor of DealBook, based in London. He joined The New York Times in 2022 from the Financial Times, where he held a number of senior roles in Hong Kong and London. More about Ravi Mattu

Bernhard Warner is a senior editor for DealBook, a newsletter from The Times, covering business trends, the economy and the markets. More about Bernhard Warner

Sarah Kessler is an editor for the DealBook newsletter and writes features on business and how workplaces are changing. More about Sarah Kessler

Michael de la Merced joined The Times as a reporter in 2006, covering Wall Street and finance. Among his main coverage areas are mergers and acquisitions, bankruptcies and the private equity industry. More about Michael J. de la Merced

Lauren Hirsch joined The Times from CNBC in 2020, covering deals and the biggest stories on Wall Street. More about Lauren Hirsch

Ephrat Livni reports from Washington on the intersection of business and policy for DealBook. Previously, she was a senior reporter at Quartz, covering law and politics, and has practiced law in the public and private sectors.   More about Ephrat Livni

Elon Musk predicts AI will overtake human intelligence next year

Tesla chief says infrastructure will need to keep up with technology’s demands as he seeks investment for own start-up.

Elon Musk has predicted that the capability of new AI models will surpass human intelligence by the end of next year. Photograph: Amir Hamja/The New York Times

The capability of new artificial intelligence models will surpass human intelligence by the end of next year, so long as the supply of electricity and hardware can satisfy the demands of the increasingly powerful technology, according to Elon Musk.

“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” said the billionaire entrepreneur, who runs Tesla, X and SpaceX. Within the next five years, the capabilities of AI will probably exceed that of all humans, Mr Musk predicted on Monday during an interview on X with Nicolai Tangen, the chief executive of Norges Bank Investment Management.

Mr Musk has been consistently bullish on the development of so-called artificial general intelligence, AI tools so powerful they can beat the most capable individuals in any domain. But Monday’s prediction is ahead of schedules he and others have previously forecast. Last year, he predicted “full” AGI would be achieved by 2029. Some of Mr Musk’s boldest predictions, such as rolling out self-driving Teslas and landing a rocket on Mars, have not yet been fulfilled.

A number of AI breakthroughs over the past 18 months, including the launch of video generation tools and more capable chatbots, have pushed the frontier of AI forward faster than expected. Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of Google’s DeepMind, predicted earlier this year that AGI could be achieved by 2030.

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The pace of development has been slowed by a bottleneck in the supply of microchips, particularly those produced by Nvidia, which are essential for training and running AI models. Those constraints were easing, Mr Musk said, but new models are now testing other data centre equipment and the electricity grid.

“Last year it was chip constrained ... people could not get enough Nvidia chips. This year it’s transitioning to a voltage transformer supply. In a year or two [the constraint is] just electricity supply,” he said.

Mr Musk’s eagerness to join the AI race runs counter to the high-profile stance he took last year calling for a pause in advanced AI development. He warned of the “profound risks to society and humanity” posed by super-powerful AI tools and called for an immediate pause on training any system more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-4, the market leading model.

On Monday, Mr Musk said his own AI start-up, xAI, was training a second version of its model Grok “which we think should be better than GPT-4″. That should be complete by May and would be followed by a new model orders of magnitude more powerful, he added.

Mr Musk has shifted more time and resources to xAI over the past year. He is attempting to raise billions of dollars from investors in the US, Middle East and Hong Kong in order to compete with OpenAI, in a funding round which would value the company at $18 billion, according to people with knowledge of that process.

Mr Musk has played a central, and often contentious, role in the development of new AI tools over the past decade.

He was a co-founder of OpenAI in 2015 but left the company in 2018 after falling out with chief executive and co-founder Sam Altman over the direction of research.

Mr Musk sued OpenAI and Altman for breach of contract in March, alleging they had compromised the start-up’s stated mission of building AI for the benefit of humanity – a claim OpenAI has strongly denied. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024

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IN THIS SECTION

Eu launches investigation into chinese wind turbine companies, high court refuses to grant injunctions restraining sale of dublin hotel, plan for ennis data centre gets green light, boeing first-quarter jet deliveries dip to lowest since mid-2021, shares tread water ahead of ecb meeting and us inflation data, ‘when my grandad arrived he was illiterate, and now his grandson is earning this country an oscar nomination’, home of the year winner revealed: restored 1920s redbrick ‘full of style and bold design’ lands the big prize, ireland will soon formally recognise state of palestine, tánaiste tells dáil, ‘dublin jimmy’ was friendly with and worked for sean quinn, brother tells court, who has new taoiseach simon harris appointed to his ministerial team, latest stories, martyn turner, coach scott bemand feels ‘now is the right time’ for moloney to return to the ireland squad, higher options: how can i choose the right course, ‘my blood is boiling’: vodafone’s contact methods irk readers, higher options career talks: applying to cambridge.

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How to Invest in OpenAI's ChatGPT (Updated 2024)

April 08, 2024 — 04:30 pm EDT

Written by Melissa Pistilli for Investing News Network  ->

OpenAI’s ChatGPT is one of the latest technological breakthroughs in the artificial intelligence (AI) space. But is there a good investment case for a technology that has become so controversial?

This emerging technology is representative of a niche subsector of the AI industry known as generative AI — systems that can generate text, images or sounds in response to prompts given by users.

Precedence Research expects the global AI market to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19 percent to reach US$2.57 trillion by 2032. Just how much of an impact OpenAI’s ChatGPT will have on this space is hard to predict, but S&P Global suggested in December 2023 that the total market revenue of generative AI as a whole will see a CAGR of 57.9 percent through 2028, increasing from US$3.7 billion last year to US$36.36 billion in 2028.

“The key trend last year was the rise of generative AI, and 2023 will go down as one of the most exciting years for AI yet! With the launch of ChatGPT late in 2022, the true scale of its disruptive potential was more realized across the world in 2023,” said Naseem Husain , senior vice president and exchange-traded fund (ETF) strategist at Horizons ETFs. “Its success has sparked a wave of generative and chat AI models, from Midjourney to Grok.”

Of course, OpenAi has also generated a lot of controversy, such as fears over job destruction and targeted disinformation campaigns . And let’s not forget the odd and abrupt, however brief, ousting of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman .

Many lawsuits have emerged as well. Multiple news outlets , including the the New York Times , have launched copyright lawsuits against OpenAI, and some of the plaintiffs are also seeking damages from the private tech firm’s very public partner Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT ). Additionally, the Authors Guild, which represents a group of prominent authors , launched a class-action lawsuit against OpenAI that is calling for a licensing system that would allow authors to opt out of having their books used to train AI, and would require AI companies to pay for the material they do use.

With all of that said, there's still a lot of excitement surrounding generative AI technology. Many investors are wondering if it's possible to invest in OpenAI's ChatGPT, and if there are other ways to invest in generative AI. Here the Investing News Network (INN) answers those questions and more, shedding light on this new landscape.

​What is OpenAI's ChatGPT?

Created by San Francisco-based tech lab OpenAI, ChatGPT is a generative AI software application that uses a machine learning technique called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to emulate human-written conversations based on a large range of user prompts. This kind of software is better known as an AI chatbot.

ChatGPT learns language by training on texts gleaned from across the internet, including online encyclopedias, books, academic journals, news sites and blogs. Based on this training, the AI chatbot generates text by making predictions about which words (or tokens) can be strung together to produce the most suitable response.

More than a million people engaged with ChatGPT within the first week of its launch for free public testing on November 30, 2022. Many were in awe of the chatbot’s seemingly natural language capabilities, not only in terms of understanding questions, but also because of its human-like responses. Users felt as if they were having a conversation with a human.

Besides being an excellent conversation partner, ChatGPT can write engaging short stories , develop catchy marketing materials, solve complicated math problems and even create code in various programming languages.

Based on this success, OpenAI has created a more powerful version of the ChatGPT system called GPT-4 , which was released in March 2023. It is currently only available to paid ChatGPT subscribers and Microsoft Copilot users .

This iteration of ChatGPT can accept visual inputs , is much more precise and can display a higher level of expertise in various subjects. Because of this, GPT-4 can describe images in vivid detail and ace standardized tests.

Unlike its predecessor, GPT-4 doesn't have any time limits on what information it can access; however, AI researcher and professor Dr. Oren Etzioni has said that the chatbot is still terrible at discussing the future and generating new ideas. It also hasn't lost its tendency to deliver incorrect information with too high a degree of confidence.

​What is Elon Musk's relationship to OpenAI?

DIA TV / Shutterstock

OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Altman, its current CEO, as well as Tesla's (NASDAQ: TSLA ) Elon Musk and other big-name investors, such as venture capitalist Peter Thiel and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman. Musk left his position on OpenAI's board of directors in 2018 to focus on Tesla and its pursuit of autonomous vehicle technology.

A few days after ChatGPT became available for public testing, Musk took to X , formerly known as Twitter, to say, “ChatGPT is scary good. We are not far from dangerously strong AI.” That same day, he announced that X had shut the door on OpenAI’s access to its database so it could no longer use it for RLHF training.

His reason: “OpenAI was started as open-source & non-profit. Neither are still true.”

Furthering his feud with OpenAI, Musk filed a lawsuit against the company in March 2024 for an alleged breach of contract. The crux of his complaint was that OpenAI has broken the "founding agreement" made between the founders (Altman, Greg Brockman and himself) that the company would remain a non-profit. Altman and OpenAI have denied there was such an agreement and that Musk was keen on an eventual for-profit structure.

​Is ChatGPT revolutionary or hype?

Is ChatGPT a revolutionary technology or just another hyped-up tech fad that will flop, much in the way of Google Glass or the Segway ? It may be too early to tell, but as with any new technology, there are plenty of wrinkles to iron out.

One of the most challenging bugs to fix before ChatGPT can be deployed more widely is the chatbot’s propensity to respond with “plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers," admits OpenAI .

Remember, its selection of which words to string together are actually predictions — not as fallible as mere guesses, but still fallible. Even the latest 4.0 version is “ still is not fully reliable (it “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors),” says the company, which emphasizes that users should exercise caution when employing the technology.

Indeed, ChatGPT's failings can have dangerous real-life consequences. Among other negative applications, the tech can be used to spread misinformation, carry out phishing email scams or write malicious code. What’s more, the AI-based technology is prone to racial and gender-based biases. Not only has this language learning model contributed to the human-like quality of its responses, but it has also picked up on some of humanity’s shortcomings.

“ChatGPT was trained on the collective writing of humans across the world, past and present. This means that the same biases that exist in the data, can also appear in the model,” explains Garling Wu , staff writer for online technology publication MUO, in a September 2023 article. “In fact, users have shown how ChatGPT can give produce some terrible answers, some, for example, that discriminate against women. But that's just the tip of the iceberg; it can produce answers that are extremely harmful to a range of minority groups.”

On the flip side, an August 2023 study by the University of East Anglia identified a left-wing bias in ChatGPT. Researchers at the school said their work shows that ChatGPT "favors Democrats in the U.S., the Labour Party in the U.K., and president Lula da Silva of the Workers’ Party in Brazil," according to Forbes.

There’s also the fear among teachers that the technology is leading to an unwelcome rise in academic dishonesty, with students using ChatGPT to write essays or complete their science homework.

“Teachers and school administrators have been scrambling to catch students using the tool to cheat, and they are fretting about the havoc ChatGPT could wreak on their lesson plans,” writes New York Times tech columnist Kevin Roose .

Despite these concerns, we’re likely to see new iterations of ChatGPT — hopefully without the aforementioned bugs — as OpenAI has the backing of tech giant Microsoft.

Why is Microsoft investing in OpenAI? ​

Ascannio / Shutterstock

Since 2019, Microsoft has invested at least US$3 billion in OpenAI to help the small tech firm create its ultra-powerful AI chatbot, as reported by New York Times technology correspondents Cade Metz and Karen Weise.

Microsoft announced in mid-January 2023 that as part of the third phase of its partnership with OpenAI, it will make "a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment." Although the company hasn't disclosed the total amount of its latest spend, reports at the time indicated that US$10 billion is on the table . According to a February article from Reuters , OpenAI was recently valued at US$80 billion, meaning Microsoft's US$10 billion move would be huge. However, as of late 2023 there were rumors that OpenAI has only received a fraction of that purported investment.

How could Microsoft benefit from its investment? It seems the tech giant is hopeful advancements in generative AI may increase revenues for its Azure cloud computing business, as OpenAI officially licensed its technologies to Microsoft in 2020. Indeed, Pitchbook has described the deal as an “ unprecedented milestone ” for generative AI technology.

The strength of Microsoft’s confidence in OpenAI’s Altman was definitely on display in late November, when it quickly moved him to the payroll of its advanced AI research team after he was fired from OpenAI . Barely a week passed before Altman was back at the helm of OpenAI with major board changes, including the addition of Dee Templeton , Microsoft's vice president of technology and research partnerships and operations, as a non-voting observer.

​What's the future of OpenAI and ChatGPT?

The ChatGPT 3.5 platform is free to use, and can be accessed via the web. Those with an iPhone or iPad can also use ChatGPT through an app , and an Android version launched in July 2023 . OpenAI also launched a paid subscription, ChatGPT Plus for business use , in August 2023. ChatGPT Plus gives users access to the newest iteration, GPT-4.

In addition to Microsoft's use of the ChatGPT technology as part of Copilot, other companies are working with OpenAI to incorporate the technology into their platforms, including Canva, Duolingo (NASDAQ: DUOL ), Intercom, Salesforce (NYSE: CRM ), Scale, Stripe, and Upwork (NASDAQ: UPWK ).

As uptake increases, generative AI technology is replacing humans in the workplace, and will likely continue doing so in a number of fields, from content creation and customer service to transcription and translation services, and even in graphic design and paralegal fields. However, humans are hitting back, as evidenced by recent lawsuits launched against OpenAI and Microsoft. As mentioned, a growing group of prominent authors is suing the creator of ChatGPT and its financial backer for infringing on their copyright by using their books without permission to train the language models behind ChatGPT and other AI-based software.

The New York Times has also taken a stand by taking OpenAI and Microsoft to Manhattan Federal Court.

"Defendants seek to free-ride on the Times's massive investment in its journalism by using it to build substitutive products without permission or payment," states the complaint . "There is nothing 'transformative' about using the Times's content without payment to create products that substitute for the Times and steal audiences away from it."

What about the long-term goals for OpenAI and ChatGPT? Metz of the New York Times believes the end game is “artificial general intelligence, or AGI — a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.”

In keeping with this end goal, OpenAI made a major move by acquiring an AI creative firm with a deep talent bench, Global Illumination , in mid-August 2023. "Global Illumination is a company that has been leveraging AI to build creative tools, infrastructure, and digital experiences," states OpenAI on its website .

"The team previously designed and built products early on at Instagram and Facebook and have also made significant contributions at YouTube, Google, Pixar, Riot Games, and other notable companies."

In November 2023, OpenAI decided to give customers without coding skills the ability to create customized versions of its chatbot and access to large data sets for training. “OpenAI wants people to start innovating using the chatbots and creating special chatbots,” Hod Lipson, an engineering and data science professor at Columbia University, told CNBC .

Chatbot creators will eventually have the ability to share their custom chatbots through OpenAI’s GPT Store. “They’re really trying to create a marketplace, which will allow companies and people to innovate and play around with this incredible form of AI that they’ve just unleashed,” Lipson added.

What is Google's Bard AI?

Carl DMaster / Shutterstock

While ChatGPT has been generating major buzz, it's definitely not the only chatbot out there.

Notably, Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL ) subsidiary Google launched its answer to ChatGPT in March 2023. Known as Bard AI , the chatbot is built on Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA). Google CEO Sundar Pichai has described Bard as an “experimental conversational AI service … (that) seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models.”

As with ChatGPT, users can key in a query, request or prompt and Bard will provide a human-like response. One way in which Bard may have had a leg up on the original ChatGPT is that the latter could only use data up to 2021, while the former can access up-to-date information online; this is less relevant now that GPT-4 no longer has this limitation.

However, Bard's ability to access current data hasn’t spared it from ChatGPT’s biggest folly: confidently stating misinformation as fact. The Verge reported that when asked about new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope, Google’s Bard “made a factual error in its very first demo.”

In early in 2024, Google launched the latest iteration of its Bard Advanced AI chatbot with a new name, Gemini AI. The new version is powered by Google's Gemini Ultra large language model.

​Which stocks will benefit the most from AI chatbot technology?

Other than companies directly tied to generative AI technology, which stocks are likely to get a boost from advances?

There are several verticals in the tech industry with indirect exposure to AI chatbot technology, such as semiconductors, network equipment providers, cloud providers, central processing unit manufacturers and internet of things.

Some of the publicly traded companies in these verticals include:

• Graphics processing unit leader Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA )
• The world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (NYSE: TSM )
• Computer memory and data storage producer Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU )
• Digital communications firm Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: CSCO )
• Networking products provider Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR )
• Semiconductor producer Marvell Technology Group (NASDAQ: MRVL )
• Cloud-computing Amazon Web Services' parent company Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN )
• Bluechip multinational technology company IBM (NYSE: IBM )
• Major semiconducter chip manufacturer Intel (NASDAQ: INTC )

While most companies specializing in generative AI remain in the venture capital stage, there are plenty of AI stocks for those interested in the space. INN's article 5 Canadian Artificial Intelligence Stocks , ASX AI Stocks: 5 Biggest Companies , and 12 Generative AI Stocks to Watch as ChatGPT Soars includes some examples.

Investors who don’t like to put all their eggs in one basket can check out these 5 Artificial Intelligence ETFs . And if you’re looking for a more general overview of the market, INN has you covered with How to Invest in Artificial Intelligence . You can also take a look back at the market in 2023 with our AI Market 2023 Year-End Review , or read projections for AI this year in our AI Market Forecast: 3 Top Trends that will Affect AI in 2024 .

​FAQs for investing in OpenAI and ChatGPT

When will openai go public.

So, can you invest in OpenAI itself? The company is not currently a publicly traded stock; however, if Microsoft does take a large position in the company, investors will be able to gain indirect exposure to OpenAI by purchasing Microsoft shares.

For those seeking direct exposure, be on the lookout for news of an initial public offering (IPO). As of late-March 2024, there are no plans for an OpenAI IPO on the horizon.

How is OpenAI funded?​

OpenAI raised US$11.3 billion over six funding rounds from 2016 to January 2024.

The three top investors are technology investment firm Thrive Capital, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and revolutionary technology investment firm Founders Fund.

​What is the market value of ChatGPT/OpenAI?

OpenAI has a market valuation of US$80 billion as of February 2024. The company’s 2023 revenue had reached US$2 billion mark in December 2023 to join the ranks of Google and Meta (NASDAQ: META ).

Does ChatGPT use Nvidia chips?

ChatGPT’s distributed computing infrastructure depends upon powerful servers with multiple graphics processing units (GPUs). High-performance Nvidia GPU chips are preferred for this application as they also provide excellent Compute Unified Device Architecture support.

​Will ChatGPT cause another GPU shortage?

Most likely not. The type of GPUs used for machine learning models like ChatGPT are different from other types of GPUs, including those used to power gaming systems or crypto mining.

​Can ChatGPT make stock predictions?

A University of Florida study recently highlighted the potential for advanced language models such as ChatGPT to accurately predict movements in the stock market using sentiment analysis. During the course of the study, ChatGPT outperformed traditional sentiment analysis methods, and the finance professors conducting the research concluded that “incorporating advanced language models into the investment decision-making process can yield more accurate predictions and enhance the performance of quantitative trading strategies.”

When to expect ChatGPT 5?

OpenAI filed a trademark application for ChatGPT-5 in mid-July 2023, which hinted that the next iteration of the generative AI technology is currently under development. There were rumours the company planned to complete training for ChatGPT-5 by the end of 2023, which did not materialize. Its anyone's guess when we may see its launch, but most likely not before Q3 2024 .

While PC Guide notes that OpenAI did release GPT-4V and GPT-4 Turbo in Q4 2023, there is little sign that ChatGPT-5 is close to market. However, the publication did share that, "In a March 2024 interview on the Lex Fridman podcast, Sam Altman teased an “ amazing new model this year ” but wouldn’t commit to it being called GPT 5 (or anything else)".

This is an updated version of an article first published by the Investing News Network in 2023.

Don't forget to follow us @INN_Technology for real-time news updates!

Securities Disclosure: I, Melissa Pistilli, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.

Editorial Disclosure: The Investing News Network does not guarantee the accuracy or thoroughness of the information reported in the interviews it conducts. The opinions expressed in these interviews do not reflect the opinions of the Investing News Network and do not constitute investment advice. All readers are encouraged to perform their own due diligence.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.

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NYC’s AI chatbot was caught telling businesses to break the law. The city isn’t taking it down

FILE - New York City Mayor Eric Adams speaks during a news conference at City Hall, Dec. 12, 2023, in New York. An artificial intelligence-powered chatbot meant to help small business owners in New York City has come under fire for dispensing bizarre advice that misstates local policies and advises companies to violate the law. But the chatbot remains online, even as Adams acknowledged Tuesday, April 2, 2024, that its answers were “wrong in some areas.” (AP Photo/Peter K. Afriyie, File)

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NEW YORK (AP) — An artificial intelligence-powered chatbot created by New York City to help small business owners is under criticism for dispensing bizarre advice that misstates local policies and advises companies to violate the law.

But days after the issues were first reported last week by tech news outlet The Markup, the city has opted to leave the tool on its official government website. Mayor Eric Adams defended the decision this week even as he acknowledged the chatbot’s answers were “wrong in some areas.”

Launched in October as a “one-stop shop” for business owners, the chatbot offers users algorithmically generated text responses to questions about navigating the city’s bureaucratic maze.

It includes a disclaimer that it may “occasionally produce incorrect, harmful or biased” information and the caveat, since-strengthened, that its answers are not legal advice.

It continues to dole out false guidance, troubling experts who say the buggy system highlights the dangers of governments embracing AI-powered systems without sufficient guardrails.

“They’re rolling out software that is unproven without oversight,” said Julia Stoyanovich, a computer science professor and director of the Center for Responsible AI at New York University. “It’s clear they have no intention of doing what’s responsible.”

In responses to questions posed Wednesday, the chatbot falsely suggested it is legal for an employer to fire a worker who complains about sexual harassment, doesn’t disclose a pregnancy or refuses to cut their dreadlocks. Contradicting two of the city’s signature waste initiatives, it claimed that businesses can put their trash in black garbage bags and are not required to compost.

At times, the bot’s answers veered into the absurd. Asked if a restaurant could serve cheese nibbled on by a rodent, it responded: “Yes, you can still serve the cheese to customers if it has rat bites,” before adding that it was important to assess the “the extent of the damage caused by the rat” and to “inform customers about the situation.”

A spokesperson for Microsoft, which powers the bot through its Azure AI services, said the company was working with city employees “to improve the service and ensure the outputs are accurate and grounded on the city’s official documentation.”

At a press conference Tuesday, Adams, a Democrat, suggested that allowing users to find issues is just part of ironing out kinks in new technology.

“Anyone that knows technology knows this is how it’s done,” he said. “Only those who are fearful sit down and say, ‘Oh, it is not working the way we want, now we have to run away from it all together.’ I don’t live that way.”

Stoyanovich called that approach “reckless and irresponsible.”

Scientists have long voiced concerns about the drawbacks of these kinds of large language models, which are trained on troves of text pulled from the internet and prone to spitting out answers that are inaccurate and illogical.

But as the success of ChatGPT and other chatbots have captured the public attention, private companies have rolled out their own products, with mixed results. Earlier this month, a court ordered Air Canada to refund a customer after a company chatbot misstated the airline’s refund policy. Both TurboTax and H&R Block have faced recent criticism for deploying chatbots that give out bad tax-prep advice.

Jevin West, a professor at the University of Washington and co-founder of the Center for an Informed Public, said the stakes are especially high when the models are promoted by the public sector.

“There’s a different level of trust that’s given to government,” West said. “Public officials need to consider what kind of damage they can do if someone was to follow this advice and get themselves in trouble.”

Experts say other cities that use chatbots have typically confined them to a more limited set of inputs, cutting down on misinformation.

Ted Ross, the chief information officer in Los Angeles, said the city closely curated the content used by its chatbots, which do not rely on large language models.

The pitfalls of New York’s chatbot should serve as a cautionary tale for other cities, said Suresh Venkatasubramanian, the director of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign at Brown University.

“It should make cities think about why they want to use chatbots, and what problem they are trying to solve,” he wrote in an email. “If the chatbots are used to replace a person, then you lose accountability while not getting anything in return.”