纽约时报中文网 - 中英对照版-中英七个人生关键词新传记带你读懂马斯克

A new biography of Elon Musk portrays the billionaire entrepreneur as a complex, tortured figure whose brilliance is often overshadowed by his inability to relate on a human level to the people around him — his wives, his children and those on whom he relied to help develop the space exploration and electric car businesses that made him the wealthiest man on Earth.

埃隆·马斯克的新传记将这位亿万富翁企业家描绘成一个饱受折磨的复杂人物，无法与身边的人————他的几任妻子、孩子们，以及那些帮助他发展太空探索和电动汽车业务、使他成为全球首富的人——建立良好的人际关系，这个问题时常给他的才华蒙上阴影。

Mr. Musk’s life so far — his difficult childhood in South Africa, his stormy romantic relationships, his success as a visionary who built SpaceX and Tesla, and his impetuous decision to buy Twitter — is detailed through scores of interviews with his family, friends, business associates and Mr. Musk himself.

这本书通过对马斯克的家人、朋友、商业伙伴以及马斯克本人的数十次采访，详细描述了马斯克迄今为止的生活——他在南非艰苦的童年，他充满着争吵和起伏的恋爱关系，他作为一个创想者成功创立SpaceX和特斯拉，以及收购Twitter的冲动决定。

The book, which will be released on Tuesday, is by Walter Isaacson, the journalist whose previous works have chronicled the lives of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin.

这本将于周二出版的书由记者沃尔特·艾萨克森撰写，他之前的作品曾经记录了史蒂夫·乔布斯、爱因斯坦、达·芬奇和本杰明·富兰克林的生平。

It opens with a quote from Mr. Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, who once said, “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

书的开头引用了苹果公司联合创始人乔布斯的一句话——“那些疯狂地认为自己可以改变世界的人，才是真正改变世界的人。”

The New York Times bought copies of the book at a retail store that was selling it in advance of its authorized release.

《纽约时报》在一家零售店购买了这本书，该店在授权发行之前已经开始销售。

Twitter, Now Known as X

Twitter，现称X

Mr. Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion, after a surprise bid for the company and then a seeming reluctance to follow through with the deal.

2022年10月，马斯克以440亿美元的价格收购了Twitter，在此之前，他曾出人意料地给出收购邀约，但后来似乎又不愿继续跟进交易。

• Days after Twitter’s board approved the deal, Mr. Musk told his four teenage sons that he had purchased the social network to sway the next U.S. presidential election. “How else are we going to get Trump elected in 2024?” he said. (It was a joke, Mr. Isaacson writes, but Mr. Musk’s sons still didn’t understand his rationale for buying Twitter, an app they rarely used.)

• 在Twitter董事会批准这笔交易几天后，马斯克告诉他的四个十几岁的儿子，他收购这家社交网络是为了影响下一届美国总统选举。“不然我们怎么能让特朗普在2024年当选？”他说。（这是一个玩笑，艾萨克森写道，但马斯克的儿子们仍然不理解他购买Twitter的理由，他们很少使用这个应用。）

• After acquiring Twitter, Mr. Musk and his lieutenants combed through its employees’ internal communications and social media posts, looking for signs of disloyalty, Mr. Isaacson writes. The “musketeers,” as Musk loyalists were known inside Twitter, searched Twitter’s Slack archives for keywords including “Elon,” and fired dozens of employees who had made snarky comments about Mr. Musk.

• 艾萨克森写道，收购Twitter后，马斯克和他的副手梳理了员工的内部通信和社交媒体帖子，寻找不忠诚的迹象。马斯克的忠实拥护者在Twitter内部被称为“火枪手”，他们在Twitter的Slack存档中搜索了包括“伊隆”在内的关键词，并解雇了数十名对马斯克冷嘲热讽的员工。

• Mr. Musk staged a surprise raid on a Twitter data facility in Sacramento, Calif., last winter, shortly after acquiring the company. Mr. Musk had decided to move servers housed in the facility to another Twitter data center to cut costs, but Twitter’s infrastructure leaders warned him that moving the expensive equipment safely could take months. In a fit of anger, Mr. Musk decided to move the servers himself, enlisting a small team and a flock of moving vans to haul them away on Christmas Eve. (He later said he regretted the decision, which led to service outages.)

• 去年冬天，收购Twitter后不久，马斯克对该公司位于加州萨克拉门托的一处数据设施进行了突袭。马斯克曾决定将位于该设施内的服务器转移到另一个Twitter数据中心，以削减成本，但Twitter的基础设施负责人警告他，安全转移昂贵的设备可能需要数月时间。一怒之下，马斯克决定自己搬走这些服务器，他召集了一小队人马和一群搬运车，在平安夜把服务器运走。（后来他说，他对这个导致服务中断的决定感到后悔。）

Personal Life

个人生活

Mr. Musk’s sprawling family has been a source of comfort amid the frequent turmoil of his industry-spanning business interests, Mr. Isaacson writes. But his relationship with his father, Errol, is a source of trauma that remains with him.

艾萨克森写道，在马斯克横跨整个产业的商业利益面临扰动之际，庞大的家族给他带来了安慰。但他与父亲埃罗尔的关系一直是他心灵创伤的根源。

• Mr. Musk’s father is described as emotionally and physically abusive and is quoted speaking disparagingly of Black people. When Mr. Musk agreed in 2016 to meet his father, from whom he has been largely estranged, a friend recalls to Mr. Isaacson, “It was the only time I had ever seen Elon’s hands shaking.” Mr. Isaacson writes, “There are certain people who occupy a demon’s corner of Musk’s head space. They trigger him, turn him dark, and rouse a cold anger. His father is number one.”

• 书中描述马斯克的父亲在情感上和身体上都有虐待倾向，还引用了他对黑人的轻蔑言论。2016年，马斯克同意与父亲见面时，一位朋友向艾萨克森回忆说，“那是我唯一一次看到伊隆的手在颤抖。”他的父亲和他一直很疏远。艾萨克森写道，“有些人占据了马斯克头脑中恶魔般的角落，会刺激到他，使他变得阴暗，激起他冰冷的愤怒。他的父亲在其中位居第一。”

• While the musician Grimes, also known as Claire Boucher, was giving birth to his son X in May 2020, Mr. Musk took a picture of the delivery and shared it with his friends and family, including her father and brothers. Grimes was understandably horrified and scrambled to get it deleted. “He was just clueless about why I’d be upset,” she told Mr. Isaacson.

• 2020年5月，音乐人格莱姆斯（又名克莱尔·布歇尔）生下马克斯的儿子X时，马斯克拍下她分娩的照片，并与朋友和家人分享，包括她的父亲和兄弟。格莱姆斯自然大惊失色，赶紧让他删掉照片。“他完全想不通我为什么会这么生气，”她对艾萨克森说。

Politics and Trump

政治与特朗普

Mr. Musk’s politics defy simple categorization. Despite his attacks on liberal critics, his rants against “woke” Democrats and his occasional promotion of far-right conspiracy theories, he is portrayed as more disillusioned with the leftward drift of the Democratic Party than he is a fan of Republicans.

马斯克的政治主张无法简单归类。尽管他攻击自由派批评者，怒斥“觉醒”的民主党人，偶尔宣扬极右翼阴谋论，但书中描绘他是对民主党的左倾倾向感到失望，而不是共和党的粉丝。

• Mr. Musk repeatedly professes not to be an admirer of former President Donald J. Trump, telling his biographer, “I’m not Trump’s fan. He’s disruptive.” Mr. Isaacson writes that Mr. Musk harbors a “deep disdain” for the former president “whom he considered a con man” and seemed, Mr. Musk says, “kind of nuts.”

• 马斯克一再声称自己不是前总统特朗普的崇拜者，他告诉自己的传记作者，“我不是特朗普的粉丝。他具有破坏性。”艾萨克森写道，马斯克对这位“他认为是个骗子”的前总统怀有“深深的蔑视”，马斯克说，前总统似乎“脑子有点不正常”。

• But neither is he a Biden supporter, though he tells Mr. Isaacson that he would have voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 had he cast a ballot. (He decided not to vote because he was registered in California and considered it a waste because the state was not competitive in the presidential election.) Mr. Musk describes an encounter with Mr. Biden several years ago in which he came away unimpressed. “When he was vice president, I went to a lunch with him in San Francisco where he droned on for an hour and was boring as hell, like one of those dolls where you pull the string and it just says the same mindless phrases over and over.”

• 但他也不是拜登的支持者，尽管他告诉艾萨克森，如果他在2020年投票，他会把票投给拜登。（当时他决定不投票，因为他在加州登记，并认为这是一种浪费，因为该州在总统选举中起不到什么作用。）马斯克描述了几年前与拜登的一次会面，给他留下的印象一般。“他还是副总统的时候，我和他在旧金山共进午餐，他絮絮叨叨地讲了一个小时，简直无聊透顶，就像那种玩偶，你拉一下绳子，它就会一遍又一遍说着那几句不过脑的话。”

Artificial Intelligence

人工智能

Mr. Musk has long been worried about artificial intelligence, which he considers a potential existential threat. He was a co-founder of OpenAI before breaking ties with the organization in 2018, and recently announced he was forming a rival A.I. company, X.AI.

长期以来，马斯克一直对人工智能感到担忧，他认为这是一种潜在的生存威胁。2018年与OpenAI决裂之前，他是该组织的联合创始人，最近他宣布自己正在组建一家与其竞争的人工智能公司X.AI。

• Mr. Musk “summoned” Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, to a meeting at Twitter’s headquarters in February 2023, shortly after the release of ChatGPT. Mr. Musk angrily asked Mr. Altman to “justify how he could legally transform a nonprofit funded by donations into a for-profit that could make millions.” The encounter, Mr. Isaacson writes, left Mr. Altman “pained.”

• 2023年2月，在ChatGPT发布后不久，马斯克在Twitter总部“召见”了OpenAI首席执行官萨姆·奥特曼。马斯克愤怒地要求奥特曼“对他怎么能够合法地将一家由捐赠资助的非营利组织转变为一家可以赚取成百上千万美元的营利性组织作出合理解释”。艾萨克森写道，那次遭遇让奥特曼感到“痛苦”。

• Mr. Musk’s decision to start X.AI came partly out of concerns about underpopulation. (He is the father of 10 children.) “The amount of human intelligence, he noted, was leveling off because people were not having enough children. Meanwhile, the amount of computer intelligence was going up exponentially,” Mr. Isaacson writes. Mr. Musk believed that “at some point, biological brainpower would be dwarfed by digital brainpower.”

• 马斯克决定创办X.AI，部分是出于对人口不足的担忧。（他有10个子女）“他指出，人类智能总量正进入平台期，因为人们没有足够的孩子。与此同时，计算机智能呈指数级增长，”艾萨克森写道。马斯克认为，“到了某个时候，生物智力将会在数字智力面前相形见绌。”

• Mr. Musk’s gave X.AI’s early employees three goals: Create an A.I. chatbot capable of writing code, an A.I. chatbot trained to be politically neutral and an artificial intelligence that could reason and pursue truth. “You should be able to give it big tasks, such as ‘Build a better rocket engine,’” Mr. Musk told Mr. Isaacson.

• 马斯克给X.AI的早期员工设定了三个目标：创造一个能够编写代码的人工智能聊天机器人，一个经过政治中立训练的人工智能聊天机器人，以及一个能够推理和追求真相的人工智能。“应该能够给它下达一些重大任务，比如‘制造更好的火箭发动机’，”马斯克对艾萨克森说。

Elon and the Media

埃隆和媒体

Mr. Musk’s relationship with the media, which was already strained before he bought Twitter, reached new levels of tension after the deal was announced.

马斯克与媒体的关系在他收购Twitter之前就已经很紧张，在交易宣布后又达到了新的高度。

• The “Seinfeld” co-creator Larry David confronted Elon Musk at the wedding in 2022 of Ari Emanuel, the chief executive of the media conglomerate Endeavor, who had seated them at the same table. “Do you just want to murder kids in schools?” Mr. David asked Mr. Musk, grilling him on his support of Republican candidates in the wake of the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 students dead. “No, no,” Mr. Musk replied, according to Mr. Isaacson. “I’m anti-kid murder.” Mr. Emanuel also seated the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, another Musk critic, at the same table. “It ended up being a microcosm of Twitter,” Mr. Isaacson wrote.

• 2022年媒体集团Endeavor首席执行官阿里·伊曼纽尔的婚礼上，《宋飞正传》(Seinfeld)联合编剧拉里·戴维与伊隆·马斯克发生了冲突，两人被安排坐在同一张桌子旁边。“你那么想谋杀学校里的孩子吗？”戴维问马斯克，质疑他在得克萨斯州乌瓦尔德校园枪击案后还支持共和党候选人，那场惨案导致19名学生死亡。“不，不，”艾萨克森写道，当时马斯克回答说，“我反对谋杀孩子。”伊曼纽尔还安排另一位马斯克的批评者、MSNBC主持人乔·斯卡伯勒坐在同一张桌子上。当时的场面“最终成了Twitter的一个缩影，”艾萨克森写道。

• As Mr. Musk’s erratic tweets damaged Twitter’s relationship with advertisers, he sought counsel from boldfaced names in the media industry on how to repair the rift. One was David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, the Warner Bros. movie studio and CNN. They spoke for more than an hour. “Zaslav told him that he was doing self-destructive things that made it harder to attract brands that were aspirational. He should focus on improving the product by adding longer video offerings and making ads more effective.”

• 随着马斯克反复无常的推文破坏了Twitter与广告商的关系，他向媒体行业的知名人士寻求如何修复裂痕的建议。其中一位是华纳兄弟探索频道的首席执行官戴维·扎斯拉夫，该公司拥有HBO、华纳兄弟电影制片厂和CNN。他们谈了一个多小时。“扎斯拉夫告诉他，他在做自我毁灭的事情，这让他更难吸引那些有抱负的品牌。他应该专注于改进产品，增加视频长度，让广告更有效果。”

Tesla

特斯拉

For years, Tesla has been the highest-profile business in Mr. Musk’s portfolio of companies, serving as a constant source of pride and stress.

多年来，特斯拉一直是马斯克投资组合中最引人注目的业务，也一直为他带来骄傲与压力。

• The company’s early struggles contributed to a long, difficult period for Mr. Musk, one that took a physical and mental toll, he told Mr. Isaacson in a 2021 interview. “You can’t be in a constant fight for survival, always in adrenaline mode, and not have it hurt you,” Mr. Musk said. But he also acknowledged that he had found purpose under pressure: “When you are no longer in a survive-or-die mode, it’s not that easy to get motivated every day.”

• 马斯克在2021年的一次采访中告诉艾萨克森，公司早期的困境让他经历了一段漫长而艰难的时期，身心都受到了伤害。“你不可能一直在为生存而战，总是处于肾上腺素分泌模式而不受伤害，”马斯克说。但他也承认，他在压力之下找到了目标：“当你不再处于生死攸关的模式时，每天都有动力就不那么容易了。”

• Even as the company found success, it attracted critics in the form of short-sellers who bet against Tesla’s stock. That practice reached a fever pitch in 2018 as Tesla struggled to meet production goals, infuriating Mr. Musk, who called short-sellers “leeches on the neck of business.” But he acknowledged that some of those traders had also collected an impressively accurate picture of the company from insiders and even drones flying over Tesla’s factory. “The degree of inside information they had was insane,” he said.

• 尽管取得了成功，公司还是惹来了一些批评者，他们采取的方式是做空特斯拉的股票。这种做法在2018年达到了高潮，当时特斯拉正苦于难以达到生产目标，愤怒的马斯克称做空者是“企业脖子上的水蛭”。但他同时也承认，这些人用内部人士提供的信息组织起的公司样貌还是相当准确的，甚至使用了无人机在特斯拉工厂上空拍摄。“他们掌握的内部信息之丰富实在是惊人，”他说。

• Production sprints and struggles at Tesla and the space exploration company SpaceX also sharpened Mr. Musk’s philosophy, which he distilled into a five-step approach that he called “the algorithm” and which he repeatedly invoked to employees. It involved, in order: questioning requirements, deleting parts or processes, simplifying and optimizing, accelerating processes, and, finally, automating. “I became a broken record on the algorithm,” Mr. Musk told Mr. Isaacson.

• 特斯拉和太空探索公司SpaceX的生产冲刺与困境同时也磨砺了马斯克的哲学，他提炼出了一个五步法，称之为“算法”，反复跟他的员工提及，五个步骤按顺序分别是：质疑需求、删除部件或过程、简化和优化、加速过程，最后是自动化。“我都成了算法的复读机了，”马斯克对艾萨克森说。

SpaceX

SpaceX

Mr. Musk created SpaceX to help humanity become a multi-planetary species. The company’s success so far is a credit to his willingness to accept risks, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

马克斯创办SpaceX是为了帮助人类成为一个跨星球物种。公司迄今为止取得的成功得益于他对风险的接纳，尽管不见得每次都成功。

• During the countdown to a pivotal launch in 2015, an unidentified liquid began dripping from a Falcon 9 rocket, frightening Mark Juncosa, a top SpaceX official. Mr. Musk deliberated briefly before deciding to proceed, resulting in a successful launch. At the time, Mr. Juncosa assumed that Mr. Musk had based that decision on a complicated risk assessment, but realized he was wrong after reviewing footage years later. “I thought he had done some complex quick calculations to decide what to do, but in fact he just shrugged his shoulders and gave the order,” Mr. Juncosa said of Mr. Musk. “He had an intuition of what the physics were.”

• 在2015年一次至关重要的发射开始倒数时，一枚猎鹰9号火箭开始漏出一种不明液体，这让SpaceX高层马克·姜科萨大为惊恐。马斯克考虑片刻，决定继续发射，最终成功了。当时姜科萨以为马斯克的决策是基于复杂的风险评估，但是几年后查看资料时意识到他错了。“我以为他是做了什么迅速而复杂的计算，以决定该怎么做，但实际上他就是耸了耸肩，下了命令，”姜科萨说。“他对物理有种直觉。”

• To achieve interplanetary flight in the future, SpaceX needed to find a way to make money in the present. So in 2015, Mr. Musk announced Starlink, seeking to tap into the lucrative market of providing internet service, in this case through a constellation of low-orbit satellites. The service has become a vital lifeline to people in war zones and helped the Ukrainian military defend against Russian invasion. But Mr. Musk has also been criticized for not allowing Ukraine to use the service to launch a drone attack on a Russian naval base last year, fearing that it would have provoked a major escalation in the war. “We did not want to be a part of that,” Mr. Musk said.

• 为了有朝一日实现跨星球飞行，SpaceX需要在眼下找到一种赚钱的方式。于是马斯克在2015年推出了星链(Starlink)，意在利用利润丰厚的互联网服务提供商市场，具体的办法是通过大量低轨道卫星。这项服务成了战场上不可或缺的生命线，帮助乌克兰军队击溃了俄罗斯的入侵。但是由于去年拒绝让乌克兰使用这项服务对俄罗斯海军基地发起无人机攻击，马斯克也遭到了指责，他的顾虑在于这可能会导致战争出现大幅升级。“这个我们可不想参与，”马斯克说。

• In 2021, SpaceX for the first time successfully sent a crew into orbit without a professional astronaut aboard. Afterward, Mr. Musk reflected on the role that he and his company had played in advancing space exploration. “Building mass-market electric cars was inevitable,” he said. “It would have happened without me. But becoming a space-faring civilization is not inevitable.” He added, “This flight was a great example of how progress requires human agency.”

• 2021年，SpaceX首次在没有专业宇航员担任船员的情况下将人员送入轨道。事后马斯克思考了他和他的公司在空间探索进步中起到的作用。“电动汽车走入大众市场是必然的，”他说。“没有我一样会发生。但成为一个太空旅行文明就不是必然的了。”他接着说，“进步需要人类的能动性，这次飞行就是一个极佳的例子。”