Elon Musk
American Oligarch
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
An unvarnished, critical graphic biography of the tech innovator and former presidential confidant by the author/illustrator of Putin’s Russia: The Rise of a Dictator and Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful.
Darryl Cunningham’s new graphic biography of Elon Musk is a riveting deep-dive into the audacious mind and tumultuous journey of the world’s richest man. Using his signature pictographic style—clean lines, vivid colors, and lean panel compositions—Cunningham peels back the layers of myth around Musk to deliver a timely portrait that is provocative and informative.
Spanning several generations, the book traces Musk’s journey from his family roots in South Africa and his grandfather’s role in the Technocracy Movement to his current position at the apex of tech power and far-right politics. From Musk’s early education and influences, the creation of PayPal, and the meteoric rise of Tesla and SpaceX thanks to millions in government handouts, to his ascension as a “dark MAGA” influencer and kingmaker, Elon Musk: American Oligarch captures the tension, tumult, and chaos in which oligarchs thrive today.
Cunningham’s award-winning clarity and style sparkle as he presents freewheeling financial and engineering concepts used by startups and tech companies. This fast-paced biography reveals the complex interactions of visionary ideas, relentless drive, and unyielding ambition. Elon Musk: American Oligarch offers a fresh, unvarnished look at Musk’s rise, aggressive leadership style, and appetite for risk-taking that have propelled him into a unique position as an unelected private business owner with unprecedented access to political power.
Praise for Billionaires by Darryl Cunningham:
"Extensively researched. . . a good choice for students interested in economics and public policy." ―School Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
