A Washington Post reporter, Faiz Siddiqui’s portrait of Musk lists the world’s richest man’s misdemeanours. This fable begins with his initial attempt to rescue the boys stuck inside a cave in Thailand. Trying to be helpful, he goes there with his ill-suited mini-submarine before they realise it will not be able to negotiate the narrow underwater passage which leads to where the boys are stranded inside. Soon after, a suit is filed against him by the Securities and Exchange Commission for fraud. The alleged violation was to announce that a funding deal had been secured when it had not, artificially increasing the value of his stock. He swims into another lawsuit, filed over his pay, which he claims is estimated to be ‘250 times larger than the contemporaneous median peer compensation package’.
Siddiqui finds little redeeming about the man except when he says that Musk is ‘a man with little regard for the consequences of his actions, for the minor after effects one might describe as a fallout.’ Of course, frontline creations like the self-driving Tesla are often flawed, and this means that much of it has to do with technology; in getting his vehicles to be autonomous, a project that saw collateral damage in the deaths of drivers and a pedestrian after the autopilot failed to detect obstacles. The rhetoric shifts to: ‘cars do require active, constant, and attentive driver supervision,’ but that in no way makes them ‘self-driving’, or ‘not autonomous’
To Musk, it is a matter of conviction that he’s saving the world with Tesla and saving the human species from extinction by using his SpaceX rockets (‘We need to be a multiplanetary species so the planet Earth survives a big meteorite hit to save mankind!’) that makes him something of an over-the-top character. The author finds Musk’s approach to the world also resulted in one noteworthy turnaround: he used to be a Democrat, who abandoned that camp and turned into an implacable foe of regulation of his businesses. The real danger is that he has the ear of the American President Donald Trump. An examination of Musk’s life, from the height of his power as the richest man in the world to what the author sees as the beginning of his downfall.
In just six years, Musk turned Tesla into the world’s most prized automobile manufacturer and cast himself as a saviour of humanity and an altruist whose fortune would stop climate change and colonise Mars.
Hubris Maximus is a detailed portrait of the world’s richest man’s quick rise, the chaos of his empire, and the spectacle of his implosion, which Siddiqui sees as happening now. He breaks up the making of the Techno King, arguing that the warning signs were always visible to anyone looking for them. Musk’s audacity and erratic behaviour powered his success from the early days, and he relished in his increasing power; at every turn, he spurned regulators and whistle-blowers. Those who dared to ask questions were foes to a man who needed the unblinking support of ‘yes men’. Musk is in a unique position to throw it all up. Who will save him from himself?
This remarkable case study of the pitfalls of unyielding loyalty to one man and a gridlocked government. This is a cautionary tale in a world that cannot turn, even momentarily, from its screens; competence is no match for the power of influence and sustained attention.
The book is a portrait of a man who is chaotic to the extreme. This, the author finds, is something that was bound to happen sooner rather than later. Perhaps the book’s cover, which has an Elon Musk crumbling mask, says it all superbly.