‘Cool, Although It's Kind Of …’: Elon Musk On Bumper Sale Of His Biography

Billionaire Elon Musk’s recently launched biography by American author-journalist Walter Issacson saw a robust sale in the first week of its launch. It has sold around 92,560 copies. The bestseller is titled Elon Musk. According to the data collected by book tracker Circana BookScan, the total sales included print copies. The achievement made the biography the second-best-selling first-week book of Walter Isaacson. In 2011, he wrote the biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which went on to sell around 3,83,000 copies in its first week. After Elon Musk got to know about the feat, he tweeted, “Cool, although it’s kind of weird seeing so many close-up pics of my face.”

As per reports, Elon Musk’s biography has also topped The New York Times’ combined print and e-book nonfiction and hardcover bestseller lists. It is also on Amazon’s bestsellers list, with a price of USD 20.99. According to the book’s publishers, Simon and Schuster, Issacson had chased Musk for almost two years. He accompanied him to his meetings, walked with him in his factories, and spent hours interviewing him, his friends, family, and his adversaries. The biography also revealed that Elon Musk suffered emotional scars that were inflicted by his father during his childhood. The book also mentions the billionaire’s love life – from his girlfriends, ex-wives, ex-girlfriends, and his children.

It also mentioned that Elon Musk used to be lonely and sad as a child, as he struggled to make friends in school. He had difficulties understanding social cues and used to rely on books to gain knowledge about them.

The biography also revealed that Elon Musk and billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates got into a verbal spat after the Tesla CEO confronted the Microsoft founder over shorting the electric-car company’s shares last year.

Walter Issacson has been a popular novelist and biographer. Apart from writing a biography on the lives of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, he has also written the best-selling biographies of Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. Both of them were a huge hit around the world.

---------This article is partly excerpted from The Economic Times.