What drives the most driven man on Earth?

When someone is very different, we struggle to place them. We venerate them, or revile them, or put them in a box labeled “flawed genius”—anything that spares us the effort of seeing the world as they do. No one embodies this more than Elon Musk, especially after his foray into politics. He lives in the spotlight, yet he remains an enigma.

The Curious Mind of Elon Musk is an ideas-driven biography that seeks to understand Musk in his own terms. Drawing on influences from science, engineering, and literature, Charles Steel traces Musk’s core beliefs across nine themes from the meaning of life to artificial intelligence. What emerges as Musk’s defining quality is his obsessive curiosity—born of existential anxiety, nurtured by an extreme rationality, and unleashed in the building of multiple companies over three decades.

Whatever you thought you knew about Musk, Steel shows that the deeper you look, the curiouser and curiouser he becomes.