I am always here for a takedown of Elon Musk. Increasingly however, because I’m always down for it and I follow news related to his steady stream of lies and false claims, I already know what these tell-all books are alleging. Now only is that the case in Hubris Maximus, but also this book occasionally feels like it was written with AI. What do I mean by that? I mean there are constant restatements of what was said a paragraph before; like, factual statements that list a series of things that happened, steadily repeating one after another. It’s like reading an essay by a kid who’s trying to juice his word count. On top of that, I came to this book because of a claim on Reddit about an early Zip2 claim of Elon’s, and I can’t find this claim anywhere in the actual book! Maybe I just read it too quickly, that happens often, but I posted on Reddit (it was a post by the author) asking where that passage is, and got ghosted. As somebody who merely hates Elon Musk like it’s my job, I wasn’t very enchanted by someone actually turning it into their job.
There are good bits in here for people with healthier brains than me. Passages detailing, for example, him trying to bullshit his way through a Twitter Space with an ex-Tweep who is challenging him on his claims about Twitter’s stack, are excellent. It’s just that I already knew about that because I found it on r/EnoughMuskSpam shortly after it happened. This book has value, is my point, so if you’re curious about how this cruel, cruel man got this far, you could do worse on primers.