Book of the day: Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk by Faiz Siddiqui

Elon Musk: Just getting charged in 2006. Photo / Getty Images

Faiz Siddiqui’s new book on Elon Musk forms part of an expanding wave of critical appraisal of the tech entrepreneur, nominal richest person in the world and self-appointed “first buddy” of the re-elected Donald Trump.

The snap reaction from a public that understood Musk as a brilliant and conventionally
apolitical Silicon Valley figure has often been to ask: what happened to him? As Musk’s behaviour has become more extreme, and his political leanings more explicit, those questions have deepened and reached further back: was he always like this, and what responsibility sits with those who fuel his myth?

Hubris Maximus aims to document and analyse how Musk’s empire at its greatest extent contained the seeds of his overreach and radicalisation. It takes a relatively recent timeframe with its narrative, beginning in 2017, when Musk first proposed the terms of his stratospheric compensation deal at Tesla motors – a deal that would reward him for continually boosting the electric car company’s market capitalisation by handing him stock options worth hundreds of times above the nearest tech executive’s pay packet.

Siddiqui doesn’t mince words in criticising the stock deal as handcuffing Tesla’s future to one man (and vice versa), a leader who became incentivised to grow Tesla’s stock value at all costs, and grew his own myth in tandem, in an almost reality-distorting feedback loop.

The years following the deal, which saw Musk vault to become the richest person in the world on paper, also coincided with him hitting his straps in his use of Twitter. Siddiqui also credits how it demonstrated the power of a platform to shape the public narrative and effectively “write one’s own hagiography” in a way that saw Musk reinvent what it meant to be a CEO.

Siddiqui’s journalistic background, moving from a local transit beat to Silicon Valley, determines the core of his narrative, with almost two-thirds of the book being dedicated to Tesla’s rapid growth and its audacious, bordering on rogue, attitude to regulation and safety. Numerous crashes in cars equipped with Tesla’s semi-autonomous driver aids, marketed as “full self-driving”, lead into chronicles of the company’s public-record tanglings with US road safety regulators. It’s complicated by Musk’s documented tendency to disdain conflicting expert opinions that might tie his hands.

This focus on Tesla as fundamental to Musk’s power, shared by other writers and analysts and by a burgeoning activist movement, means Hubris Maximus isn’t vulnerable to a common recent rejoinder to criticism of Musk – that he didn’t merit sustained scrutiny until he started to mess with Twitter, journalists’ established social media platform of choice. The book hints at Twitter’s increasing prominence in Musk’s life, and eventually shifts to a predominant focus on his purchase of the platform and the related legal wrangles. But it doesn’t indulge the reductive but popular online criticism that Musk was essentially driven off the rails by his social media use alone.

I found myself sympathising with the slightly jangly quality of Hubris Maximus, which seems to capture the daily reality of living on your nerves attempting to accurately report on an erratic and now notoriously touchy near-trillionaire. The introduction sets out an eloquent and devastating portrait of Musk as a phenomenon, but the book’s loosely (but not reliably) chronological structure doesn’t fully support a meticulous examination of Musk’s psychology as revealed through his business dealings. There’s some repetition of content, occasionally flagged as a recap, but which more often feel like the product of reporting collated into chapters that are self-contained and overlapping rather than firmly sequential and reinforcing.

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The book is studded with a protective array of quotes and endnotes, locking in references to Siddiqui’s reporting, those of other journalists on the Musk beat, and many, many posts on what has since become the social media platform X. You’ll need a logged-in X account to verify any of those references yourself, but it’s hard to fault Siddiqui’s diligence and sense of legal self-preservation.

Given the role of media in growing the Musk phenomenon, readers of the book might well be keen for direct insight into the author’s professional experiences – what exactly it was like to report on Musk and to negotiate the ecosystem of handlers and influencers clustered around Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter. Siddiqui gets into these first-person recollections occasionally, and they’re refreshing, but tantalisingly few and far between.

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The question of which medium is best placed to meet Musk on his own terms was often in my mind as I read the book. A brief afterword brings the narrative up to the early days of the second Trump administration, a few short months ago in publishing but a lifetime in post-truth politics. Nothing as thoughtful and considered as a printed book will ever keep up with the Elonverse, so the question becomes how the chosen framing will serve readers best.

Whatever else there is or isn’t in Hubris Maximus, it’s fired up with a sense of urgency to tell this particular story right now – and it brings enough journalistic backing and analytical firepower to shake a few persistent assumptions about the man who would be Technoking.

Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk, by Faiz Siddiqui (Blink, $39.99), is out now. Photo / SuppliedSave

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