Elon Musk's favourite movie quote, according to his biographer, is Gladiator's "Are you not entertained?" Some members of Musk's considerable global audience were also horrified as controversial statements and management decisions grabbed the headlines yet again this year. Musk's brother, Kimbal, told Walter Isaacson, author of the Elon Musk biography published in September, that his sibling was a "drama magnet". He added: "That's his compulsion, the theme of his life." That impulse was on full display in 2023.

A new biography of Elon Musk was published on Tuesday and contains colourful details of the life of the world's richest man. Musk afforded widespread access to his biographer, Walter Isaacson, the author of the bestselling biography of the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and the book contains a series of illuminating anecdotes about Musk. Here are eight things we learned from the book. Musk, 52, was born and raised in South Africa and endured a fraught relationship with his father, Errol, an engineer. Isaacson writes that Errol " bedevils Elon".

Elon Musk is "wired for war." At least, that's what Musk has told Walter Isaacson, whose thick biography of the mercurial mega-billionaire, Elon Musk, is out this week. When Musk says this, he's not talking about Ukraine, where his Starlink internet service has played a central role. Civilization, Warcraft: Orcs & Humans, The Battle of Polytopia, Elden Ring--Musk has spent much of his life in fantasy worlds. Isaacson's biography includes many astonishing details and relatively few pages focused on Musk's gaming obsession. But the video-game detail is telling. Musk doesn't seem to inhabit our reality, exactly, even as he profoundly shapes it.

In 2021, Elon Musk became the world's richest man (no woman came close), and Time named him Person of the Year: "This is the man who aspires to save our planet and get us a new one to inhabit: clown, genius, edgelord, visionary, industrialist, showman, cad; a madcap hybrid of Thomas Edison, P. T. Barnum, Andrew Carnegie and Watchmen's Doctor Manhattan, the brooding, blue-skinned man-god who invents electric cars and moves to Mars." Right about when Time was preparing that giddy announcement, three women whose ovaries and uteruses were involved in passing down the madcap man-god's genes were in the maternity ward of a hospital in Austin. Musk believes a declining birth rate is a threat to civilization and, with his trademark tirelessness, is doing his visionary edgelord best to ward off that threat. Shivon Zilis, a thirty-five-year-old venture capitalist and executive at Musk's company Neuralink, was pregnant with twins, conceived with Musk by in-vitro fertilization, and was experiencing complications. "He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to," Zilis said.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken twice declined to criticize Elon Musk after the SpaceX founder said he refused to help the Ukrainian government access his Starlink internet service in order to attack Russia. Blinken was pressed by CNN's Jake Tapper to comment on details in a new book confirmed by Musk, including that he refused the Ukrainian government's requests to activate Starlink, a satellite internet service run by SpaceX, in Crimea so it could launch a submarine drone attack against Russian naval forces. "There was an emergency request from government authorities to activate Starlink all the way to Sevastopol," Musk posted Thursday on X. "The obvious intent being to sink most of the Russian fleet at anchor. If I had agreed to their request, then SpaceX would be explicitly complicit in a major act of war and conflict escalation." Tapper asked Blinken whether Musk should face repercussions after he "effectively sabotaged a military operation by Ukraine, a U.S. ally, against Russia, an aggressor country that invaded a U.S. ally."

Excerpts from Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk biography are coming to light ahead of its release next week, revealing some new details about the billionaire's decision to provide Ukraine with Starlink access amid the country's war with Russia. According to an excerpt CNN reported on, Musk allegedly told SpaceX workers to shut down Starlink access close to the Crimea coast to prevent a Ukrainian drone attack on Russia's naval fleet. Musk, who has reportedly been in contact with Russian officials including President Vladimir Putin, is said to have been worried that the attack would lead to Russia retaliating with nuclear weapons. Ukrainian leaders seemingly begged Musk to reactivate Starlink access but drones that were approaching Russian warships "lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly," CNN cites Isaacson as stating. Musk's alleged actions have had significant consequences for Ukraine, according to Mykhailo Podolyak, an advisor to President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak has slammed Elon Musk for indirectly allowing Russian forces to attack Ukrainian cities after it was revealed his Starlink satellite communications interfered with a drone operation. Details of the incident are laid out in a biography of Musk by Walter Isaacson, due out on Tuesday. The book describes how the network turned off communications near the coast of the Russian-occupied Crimean peninsula as Ukrainian drones were approaching Russian warships, resulting in "lost connectivity". Musk allegedly ordered Starlink engineers to turn off the communications as he feared Russian President Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea, according to Isaacson's book. "I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation," Musk is quoted as saying.

Elon Musk ordered his Starlink satellite communications network to be turned off near the Crimean coast last year to hobble a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian warships, according to a new biography. CNN quoted an excerpt from the biography Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, which described how armed submarine drones were approaching their targets when they "lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly". The biography, due out on Tuesday, alleges Musk ordered Starlink engineers to turn off service in the area of the attack because of his concern that Vladimir Putin would respond with nuclear weapons to a Ukrainian attack on Russian-occupied Crimea. He is reported to have said that Ukraine was "going too far" in threatening to inflict a "strategic defeat" on the Kremlin. Musk's threats to withdraw Starlink communications at various stages of the conflict have been previously reported, but this is the first time it has been alleged he cut off Ukrainian forces in the middle of a specific operation.

We developed a fast and modular deep learning algorithm to search for lookalike signals of interest in radio spectrogram data. First, we trained an autoencoder on filtered data returned by an energy detection algorithm. We then adapted a positional embedding layer from classical Transformer architecture to a frequency-based embedding. Next we used the encoder component of the autoencoder to extract features from small ( 715 Hz with a resolution of 2.79 Hz per frequency bin) windows in the radio spectrogram. We used our algorithm to conduct a search for a given query (encoded signal of interest) on a set of signals (encoded features of searched items) to produce the top candidates with similar features. We successfully demonstrate that the algorithm retrieves signals with similar appearance, given only the original radio spectrogram data.

The first thing I ever bought on Amazon was an edutainment DVD for babies. I don't recall making the purchase, but the data is unequivocal on this point: on 14 November 2004, I bought Baby Einstein: Baby Noah – Animal Expedition for the sum of £7.85. My nearest guess is that I got it as a Christmas present for my nephew, who would at that point have been one year old, and at the very peak of his interest in finger-puppet animals who cavort to xylophone arrangements of Beethoven. This was swiftly followed by three more DVD purchases I have no memory of making. Strangely, I bought nothing at all from Amazon the following year, and then, in 2006, I embarked on a PhD and started ramping up my acquisition of the sort of books that were not easily to be found in brick-and-mortar establishments. Everything ever published by the American novelist Nicholson Baker. I know these things because I recently spent a desultory morning clicking through all 16 years of my Amazon purchase history. Seeing all those hundreds of items bought and delivered, many of them long since forgotten, was a vaguely melancholy experience. I experienced an estranged recognition, as if reading an avant-garde biography of myself, ghost-written by an algorithm. From the bare facts of the things I once bought, I began to reconstruct where I was in life, and what I was doing at the time, and what I was (or wanted to be) interested in. And yet an essential mystery endured.