Insight-free Doorstop
The Guardian’s Gary Shteyngart calls Walter Isaacson’s new book on Elon Musk an “Insight-free Doorstop”; this is disappointing but not surprising, seeing as that’s how I would have described his book on Steve Jobs.
Isaacson seems to have carved out a niche for himself writing overly-credulous hagiographies of troubling yet successful men. The Jobs book was deeply strange. It was technically clueless, credulous to the point of gullibility, and the good bits were all cribbed directly from Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org. Scene after scene he’d describe something Jobs had done, for pretty obvious reasons, and then Isaacson would throw up his hands as if to say “who can say why anyone does anything?” The second half is even worse, because once he doesn’t have Hertzfeld’s behind-the-scenes material to work from, he just fails to ask any follow up questions, and will either take Job’s word for it, or go get an alternate view from someone like Bill Gates, who is hardly an impartial bystander.
Theres a beat in the middle that’s stuck with me for years. Jobs has just returned to Apple as part of the NEXT acquisition, and is negotiating his return to the CEO role. The board wants to hand him a big pile of stock. Jobs doesn’t want any pay, salary or stock, because he says he doesn’t want to look like he’s just doing it for the money. But the board really wants to give him the stock, because they want him to look like he has some skin in the game. This goes back and forth for a few times, until Jobs says okay, but demands twice as much as they offered him. It’s a classic power move of the kind he makes constantly throughout the book, only doing something if he gets the last word. It’s not that complicated? But Isaacson seems stunned, doesn’t understand why such a thing would happen—and then moves on without even asking about it. This happens again and again. The book walks right up to having an actual insight, gets close enough you can almost do it yourself, but then fails to ask any obvious follow-up questions and then wanders away with a confused head-shake.
He had unprecedented access to a guy who went from being fired by his own company to being the guy who came back and turned it into the most successful company of all time, but doesn’t seem to care to dig in. The book’s analysis of Jobs ends up somewhere around that Dril tweet about drunk driving, effectively saying “well, he was an asshole to everyone, but he also made a lot of money, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not,”
The definitive takedown of the Jobs book is John Siracusa’s old Hypercritical podcast where he practically walks the book line by line correcting errors.
In short, it was the kind of book where it looks like he’s being really hard on his subject by writing down things that really happened, all while failing to do any digging or provide any insights that might cause the subject to withdraw their participation. A kind of reputational money-laundering, trying to take credit for being very open and growing, while doing nothing of the sort.
Still, walking back the claims in his own book is a new low.