Journamalism: There was, potentially, a very good book to be written about a Chaos Monkey in a time of semi-permanent underemployment and zero interest rates—when there seems to be no way to get to full employment by boosting investment of real resources in projects that pass prudent and sober accounting tests in order to get it to match desired savings. Thus in order to get to full employment we need to, somehow convince people to invest real resources in projects that are imprudent, attractive only to the highly intoxicated, and flunk all accounting tests based on reasonable projections. And we did it. And Elon Musk was an essential—and very useful—intermediary in that project. And he was foresighted enough to cover himself with glue as the money flew by. But that was not the book that Walter Isaacson wanted to write. Thus I think Sam Kriss is right: There is very good reason to hate Walter Isaacson for his hideous waste of opportunity, as he multiplied maximum access by complete uninterest in what was really going on, and why, and came up with a big fat zero:

Sam Kriss: Very Ordinary Men: ‘Elon Musk and the court biographer: I know that I’m supposed to hate Elon Musk…. But despite everything, I find it very hard to hate the man. I can’t summon the energy…. I can tell you who I do hate, though. After nearly seven hundred pages of warm dribble, I started to really, really hate Elon Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson…. He appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible…. Isaacson’s whole project is weird. Isaacson had incredible access… spent two years following around like a very determined puppy…. An atmosphere of total incuriosity suffuses the entire book. Isaacson notes that Elon and Grimes started dating after a Twitter exchange about “a thought experiment known as Roko’s basilisk...”. The intellectual world Elon Musk inhabits… the ideas he imbibes… Walter Isaacson simply has no interest in ideas of any stripe. He dispenses with the basilisk in 28 words, so he can get back to telling us exactly who was in the room when various business decisions were made… <thepointmag.com/critici…>