[2] Isaacson followed Musk for the next two years, visiting his SpaceX and Tesla factories and attending board meetings.

[8] Isaacson later retracted his claim as a mistake, as Crimea had no Starlink coverage prior to the attack similarly to other Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine.

[9][10][11] The Washington Post, which had published Isaacson's opinion piece, corrected that "after the publication of this adaptation, the author learned that his book mischaracterized the attempted attack by Ukrainian drones on the Russian fleet in Crimea.

[9][14] Ukrainian general Kyrylo Budanov declared being "not sure that Elon Musk operated some mythical buttons and stopped the movement of some devices.

"[19] Brian Merchant of the Los Angeles Times criticized Isaacson's "great man" biography format as extremely dated and took issue with his persistent framing of Musk as a "moody but brilliant world-mover", writing, "The author will unearth unflattering personal anecdotes and share stories about the subject's capacity to be cruel.

"[20] In The Guardian, Gary Shteyngart called the book a "dull, insight-free doorstop", and criticized the author, writing, "I held Isaacson's judgment in low regard.

[22] Jill Lepore of The New Yorker wrote that "Isaacson's new biography depicts a man who wields more power than almost any other person on the planet but seems estranged from humanity itself".

The reviewer found the book's ending a "disconcerting thing to read":[23] "Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training," Isaacson concludes in the last lines of his life of Musk.

[25] In a series of posts on threads in August, Wilson said that Isaacson never reached out to her, and described the book as "genuinely defamatory", saying that it deliberately avoided including any testimony by her; in favor of trivializing her trans identity and misconstruing her reasons for separation to make her appear as being "naive", "stupid", and "an irredeemable human being" in order to frame her existence as "a villain-origin backstory" for her father's rightwards political shift.