Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket
4.6/5
Critic Rating
The story of Elon Musk, the way it's often told, makes him sound like a fictional character, a comic-book superhero – or, especially lately, a supervillain. As the world's richest man, the US President’s right-hand man, and the owner of X, he’s possibly the world’s most powerful man. Musk wants to build robots and colonise Mars and appears to be dismantling sizable parts of the US government. His vision of the future seems to stem from the science fiction that has fueled his imagination since he was a boy. But what's the real story, the true history, behind Musk’s se...
Critic Reviews
Score: 5
Rufus Griscom • Fast Company • Mar 13, 2022
"Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore manages to see through Musk’s mystique, explain his worldview, and decipher his visions of the future by going back to the sci-fi stories he grew up on—stories, Lepore says, that Musk sometimes misread."
Score: 5
Erik Jones • Hurt Your Brain • Nov 21, 2021
"This series continues to be an excellent inspection of Musk style capitalism, and this specifically details his dramatic public facing persona shift over the past 15 years."
Score: 4.8
Nicholas Quah • Vulture • Nov 10, 2021
"Those who might have checked out The Last Archive will find some familiar touches in The Evening Rocket, among them Lepore’s affinity for the aesthetic of old-timey radio serials. I bounced off The Last Archive, finding it to be a little too unwieldy, but The Evening Rocket seemed to hit better for me, in large part due to its more specific focus. There’s a lot in Lepore’s analysis of Musk’s history that’s worth mulling over. Some things are bugs; other things are features of the design."
Score: 4
Chris Taylor • Mashable • Oct 31, 2021
"Personally, like Lepore's, my opinion of Musk has been on a downward trajectory for years...the podcast left me more sympathetic towards Musk when I finished it, which is quite an impressive feat. The scapegoating is strong with this one."
Score: 4.4
Miranda Sawyer • The Guardian • Jul 3, 2021
"...makes interesting links between Musk’s family’s move to apartheid South Africa when he was little and his (and others’) approach to where and how we should be living today. Musk is discussed in terms of his mind, rather than his body, automatically awarded more dignity than Spears (Britney)."
