Isaacson: Buying Twitter did not mean Musk had given up on building things himself

Walter Isaacson sees Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter as more of an impulsive decision than a sign of a change in business philosophy. Musk had “money burning a hole in his pocket,” Isaacson said: he had recently become the world’s richest person and Time’s Person of the Year, but said he disliked looking successful and wanted to move to the next level. Isaacson linked the Twitter purchase impulse to Musk’s anger about the “woke mind virus” and his attachment to the platform.

Isaacson called the Cursor acquisition a smart move given how difficult it is to keep up in frontier AI models, but said Musk still wants end-to-end control and to build things himself. He pointed to Musk’s plan to build TeraFab to make his own microchips.