Elon Musk: American Oligarch

Cunningham follows Billionaires with an edifying graphic biography of Elon Musk. The simply drawn, linear narrative opens with Musk, born in 1971, in his youth in South Africa during apartheid. He was a precocious child, and when his parents separated, he chose to live with his wealthy but abusive father. Through a pattern of scientific and entrepreneurial inspiration, coupled with recklessness and poor interpersonal skills, he builds his fortune during the Wild West of the internet. Encounters with hardship—crashing a car with Peter Thiel in the passenger seat; almost dying from malaria; and losing his first child to SIDS—fail to foster his empathy. He takes Tesla from financial chaos to profitability (benefitting from government Zero Emissions Vehicle credits) and accepts massive government loans. Musk’s courtship of Trump emerges as part of his bumpy Twitter takeover—and leads to him declaring himself “Dark Gothic Maga.” As Cunningham points out, Musk’s grandfather, Joshua Norman Haldeman, was a leader in the mid-century technocracy movement, which had “more than a whiff of fascism.” In flat colors, Musk himself is portrayed as a space race–obsessed “longtermist... a logic that inevitably leads to an indifference to current global issues.” It’s a disturbing allegation that Musk has forsaken his own humanity as he’s chased power in the guise of innovation. (Sept.)