When someone is very different, we struggle to place them. We venerate them, we revile them, or we 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—borne of existential anxiety, nurtured by an extreme rationality, and unleashed in the building of multiple companies over three decades. If you prefer to imagine Musk as a savior of humanity or as a fabulist with a penchant for the far right, then that is what you will see. But if you care to look deeper into what makes Musk different, the curiouser and curiouser he becomes.