Walter Isaacson's 2007 biography of Albert Einstein, built on access to the Einstein archives and decades of correspondence. Isaacson traces Einstein's path from a German patent office clerk whose 1905 papers — on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and E=mc² — rewrote physics in a single year, through the general relativity breakthrough of 1915, his Nobel Prize, and his later, less productive decades as a public figure opposing quantum mechanics and nuclear weapons.
Musk named this biography alongside the Benjamin Franklin biography when asked what shaped him. The shelf entry records it as an influence in his Foundation interview, though no verbatim quote about the book survives in a fetchable source.
For a founder, the resonance is not Einstein's science but his method of working: the thought experiments (riding a light beam, chasing a moving mirror) were a deliberate technique for reasoning from first principles before touching a single equation — the same cognitive move Musk describes when he priced rocket commodities instead of accepting a billion-dollar industry estimate. Isaacson's Einstein is a case study in what it costs to ignore the existing literature and rebuild a field from its foundations: isolation from the academy, years of no results, and then a chain of insights that the established thinkers had been too close to see.