December 12, 2023 • 43 mins
Which of Musk’s efforts will mark his legacy? Will it be Starship and his work bringing Americans back into orbit, or will it be X and his amplifications of the worst of humanity? Isaacson wrestles with his time in Silicon Valley, and relays a comparison of Jobs and Musk that’s sure to stay with you.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Musk is probably the richest count ser forever. He didn't
have a home in Palo Alto, so he would stay
with Larry Page and they'd stay up all night, and
Musk would talk about how we have to be careful
of AI, it could destroy us, and Page was having
nothing of it. Page loved the notion of AI, and
(00:32):
Page would even say, it'd be great if we could
have robots that would be conscious, and then we could
upload our consciousness into it. It would be the next
phase of evolution. Why are you so worried about humans
being left behind by the robots? And once Page even
called him specist, meaning you're biased towards the human species,
(00:54):
and mus said, yeah, dude, I am species. I like
the human species and believe it or in these fights
cause them to quit speaking to each other. I mean,
they really still don't speak to each other because of
this philosophical fight. I think Must looks upon himself as
(01:16):
an epic figure on a grand quest, just like the
comic book characters wearing their underpants on the outside and
kind of knowing they're ridiculous, but also very insecure about it.
And I think it's true of a whole lot of people.
I think it's a human trait, but I think, like
every human trait in Elon Musk, it's at least two
(01:39):
orders of magnitude greater.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
In the week since the release of Walter Isaacson's store
stop biography of Elon Musk, some stories from the book
have jumped off the page, tabloidish fodder like the secret
birth of Musk's third child with Grimes or the secret
births of his twins with his colleague. Nonprocreative stories like
the fact checking drama around the role that Musk's Starlink
(02:08):
satellite network has and has not occupied in Ukraine. And
since Isaacson and I spoke, there's of course been the
unending drama emanating from Musk himself, from amplifying anti Semitic
tweets to publicly telling Disney CEO Bob Eiger to go
fuck himself. But after each tempest dies down, what should
(02:28):
we really take away from this six hundred page epic
retelling of the life of Musk and about the world
in which he operates. I'm Evan Ratliffe. This is On
Musk with Walter Isaacson, and today we're tangling with Isaacson
over questions around Musk the specist, I mean, whose side
is he on? Anyway? What does his growing geopolitical influence
(02:51):
tell us about the power that one man can hold
in the modern world? And finally, what are we meant
to learn from Isaacson's exhaustive account. How does he think
the book will age? As Musk seems to grow more
divisive and even self destructive by the day Episode four Legacy.
(03:21):
I mean, you spent so much time with Jobs in
the world of Silicon Valley, understanding that world, the whole
way that world operated at that time, jobs versus gates,
et cetera. And when you came to the end of that,
there's one way you could go where you would say,
I think I get it, I think I get what
(03:41):
Silicon Valley's all about. But then you go after Musk.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
We biographers have a dirty little secret. We sometimes distort
history by making it seem like one guy or one
gal goes into a garage and a garret, they have
a light bulb moment, and then history happened. And usually
it's done by groups of people and teams as a
collaborative nature to creativity. And so after doing Steve Jobs
(04:11):
in which I showed him as a motive force pushing
the digital revolution. I decided to do a book called
The Innovators. It was a collective biographical study with dozens
of people who help invent the concept of the personal
computer and the concept of the network and then the microchip,
(04:33):
and how they interwove and collaborated. I think, in some
ways that can be more true to history is to
show partnerships and teamwork that lead to things. I kind
of liked it, but it didn't really sell all that well.
I do think that people like following a main character.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
But from us, some of the minor characters are pretty
big personalities and sometimes controversial ones. As musks bluster about
buying Twitter turns into reality, a crew of his old
valley pals start to resurface in Isaacson's tail. Many of
them are from what Fortune magazine once called the PayPal
mafia ex PayPal exacts like David Sachs, Ken Howry Reid Hoffman,
(05:22):
and Peter Teel. Many of them seem to be Musk's whispers,
simultaneously steering Musk away from jagged financial shoals and toward
a frothing ocean of an anti woke free speech Maelstrom.
There is a whole world of how these Silicon Valley
moguls you would call many of them are executives sort
of like relate to each other. And a lot of
(05:44):
it goes back to PayPal and the PayPal mafia and
people who started PayPal then becoming these friends and Musk
being involved in it. I mean, you mentioned Antonio Grascia's
you already knew him. Is that a world that you
already had entry into and understood or you learned through
Musk the relationships between these people and how that actually
influences what happens in these.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
By writing about Steve Jobs and then doing the Innovators,
I certainly got to know that world very well of
tech bros, and even that world of the quasi libertarian
tech bro mentality that's say a Peter til at this center.
One of the things that helps understand Mosque today goes
(06:29):
back to those PayPal years. He had started a company
called x dot com, which he wanted to have be
a payments app, but also in everything app, an app
that would be social media and would be a publishing platform.
And it merges with a company that Peter Tiel is
(06:50):
and it becomes PayPal. Mosque wants to keep it named
x x dot com. He loves the mystery of that
letter X. He thinks it's hardcore, and they overrule them
and they use the name PayPal, which he thinks is
a sweet little name of pals. They want to pay
each other, but it's not an everything app that's going
to change the world, and they kick him out, and
(07:12):
for twenty years it's eating away at him, which is why,
of course he wants to buy Twitter and it becomes
the booster to create what he'd always wanted, which is
a payments platform connected to a publishing platform connected to
social media. But he does something that I found somewhat
(07:33):
surprising until I fully understood it is when he gets
kicked out of PayPal. In this coup by Peter Teel
and Read Hoffman, ken Howery, David Sachs and Max Levchin,
must decides instead of hating them forever and thinking their enemies,
(07:56):
he makes up with them, even though he says they
knife me in the forum, kick me out of my job,
and it comes back as good karma. They end up
investing in SpaceX dollars.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Basically, you write as an apology, almost.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
As a way after three rocket launches by SpaceX have
failed and they've run out of money, Teal says it's
a good way to try to make it up to him,
and it saves SpaceX. And this crowd remains relatively friendly,
and their political views and their technology views influence each other,
(08:37):
and it all feeds in to understanding why his politics
have become somewhat of this populist right libertarian streak.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
This book is gonna people are going to take lessons
from it, even if you don't explicitly prescribe what those
lessons are going to be. And especially in the business world,
people like to read these books for tips and for advice.
And let's take people in Silicon Valley, for example, what
do you think they are going to draw from the book?
(09:13):
And are you at all concerned that they might draw
the wrong lesson?
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Now with Steve Jobs, when that book came out, there
were a lot of stories of do you have to
be like Steve Jobs to be successful? A Wired magazine
cover story did it, And I was saying no, this
book was not a how to manual. Sometimes people come
up to me after I talked about Steve Jobs and
they'd say, I'm just like Steve.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Jobs like, I'm not a waz, I'm a job.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, I'm not was I'm not sweet, I'm not cuddly.
I'm like jobs. If people screw things up, I tell
them they've screwed up. I fire them, I tell them
they stink. I'll say on a podcast, and I'll look
at them and I say yeah. And have you ever
invented the iPod? Did you ever make the mac tash
the iPhone? You don't have the right to do this.
(10:03):
Probably Steve Jobs didn't have the right to do it.
But you're not supposed to try to be like this.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Do you worry at all? You mentioned the verson who
comes up to you and says, I'm like Steve Jobs,
that they are going to be musk accolytes who will
take those wrong lessons, and that some of those people
run Silicon Valley. They run very important aspects, if not
the most important aspects of our society right now. Does
it concern you that people might take a muski and
(10:31):
approach and lack the vision but have the persona and
that those people are making consequential decisions about the tools
we use.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, I mean one lesson a lot of Silicon Valley
executives seem to have taken from the book is, oh,
my workforce is probably too flabby. I can fire eighty
percent the way Elon Musk did at Twitter, and now
you can't just do that. Also, there's a larger issue
(11:03):
which the book wrestles with, which I call the Old
Twitter New Twitter issue, which is that life is about
a little bit more than simply having the leanest meanness
machine you can create. And some people may want to
do that, especially people doing startups. They may want to
be lean mean and hackathon all night long. But there
(11:25):
are other people who will keep in mind the larger
mission of having an enterprise or a company, and that
is there to create good for all of society, for
consumers for good products, but also the people who work
there and the communities where they're based. And I think
that's a good tension to have in our society. You know,
(11:48):
I used to work at Diamond Corporated, and boy, it
was nice and flabby. You know. We had a dozen
people working in the Nation section to produce maybe eight
pages every week. We had researchers, we had assistants and schedulers.
We even had the person who brought the food cart
(12:10):
and a drink cart around every evening. And then you know,
everybody from activist investors to Mackenzie consultants come in and say,
you can cut this, you can cut that, you can
make it leaner and meaner. And there are people who
are comfortable being all in in hardcore Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos,
(12:34):
Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, totally hardcore. And they are people
who are more comfortable finding a nurturing, good environment for people.
We have to find the right balances. I would disdain
somebody who is always tough as an Elon Musk. I'd
also kind of disdain people who lack a sense of
(12:57):
passion and mission. But the books aren't how to manual
saying you should do this at your company. These books,
especially when it comes to Elon Musk, are supposed to
do two things that people have a hard time keeping
both in their mind. Be inspirational and be cautionary. But
above all, it is a story of a real person
(13:21):
that is one of the most consequential of our day
in generation.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
And I mean I think a certain percentage of people
today have a hard time understanding the approach where you
could happily sit and listen to a Peter Thiel or
someone with those politics and not kind of challenge them,
be angry and just sort of sit with them in
(13:48):
a very reporter like way.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
I go back to the notion of I'm supposed to
tell you the story. Am I supposed to say I
totally disagree with Peter Teal's view on the Ukraine War. No,
that's I mean, do I disagree? Yeah? I don't share
his beliefs on that or many othering But if you
want the hot take on whether or not you agree
(14:13):
with Peter o'teal's politics, my book's not for you. I'm
telling you how this story happened.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
When we come back stacking Musk up against jobs and
answering Isaacson's critics, including those who keep quoting him, stay
with us. This is a very small detail, But because
(14:43):
you're a New Orleanian, I have to ask this. You
quote Musk talking about how if he could skip meals
and just get his nutrients from like, you know, soilent
or liquid beverage or whatever, he would just do that.
It's very valley thing. And what did you do for
food when you were alongside.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
One of the wonderful things about Bokatika Texas and this
rough little scrubland there's a canteen that's stocked with amazingly
good barbecue salads, and you can walk in twenty four
hours a day. I could walk from my airstream trailer
and remarkably it actually had good coffee too, or at
(15:25):
least good coffee for Texas. But must doesn't care about food.
He doesn't care about fine wines. He really doesn't drink
that much. Occasionally you go out to dinner with him
and a few people and they'll be craft cocktails. You know,
I don't know, cactus juice with tequila, and they'll always
try one and never quite finish it. He never cares
(15:48):
that much about the food he's ordering. But I know
that when I finally came off the trail, having traveled
with him and having been someone back even in April
to watch the Starship launch, or then to Austin for
him to launch Xai, I finally said, Okay, I'm gonna
(16:08):
have to start eating right again. And I remember eating
very carefully but also craving really good food. And so
i'd be down in New Orleans and my wife Kathy
and I we made a habit of once a week
eating at Gallatoise, once a week eating at Herbsane, and
once a week eating at Pesh and maybe once every
(16:30):
week or two eating at Moscow's, which is a great places. Yeah,
just so I could remember the taste of really good food,
having spent two years watching him grab sandwiches and hamburgers.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
On Isaacson's book tour for his Musk biography, he was
regularly quizzed about how Musk compares with Jobs, perhaps the
most obvious foil among Isaacson's subjects.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
At one of my events, a high school student came
up to the microphone and he actually had read the
whole book.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Impressive.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
He had a question that he said I hadn't answered.
I said, what's that? And he said, was elon Musk
nice to waiters and waitresses? And I realized that was
an insightful question, and I thought of Steve Jobs. I
remember one day at a Whole Foods in Palo Alto,
(17:23):
there's an older woman who was making the smoothie, and
Steve Jobs just chewed her out because she wasn't doing
it fast enough and wasn't doing it in the right way.
And I remember of all the things that made me
recoil it was being mean to a person making the
smoothie it or being a waiter like Jobs could be.
(17:47):
Musk was actually incredibly rough on people he worked with.
But all the times I saw him where there were
waiters or waitresses or some body at a shop or whatever,
he would get into sort of a jovial mood. And
so I don't think he had a meanness that would
(18:10):
have been reflected in the way he treated waiters. And
I thought, shoot, that was a really good question that
kid asked, and I probably get in trouble with Steve Jobs.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
But boy, well Jobs isn't around anymore, sadly, but Musk
could still. Is there something he could do that would
make you fundamentally rethink whether you should have written the
book about him?
Speaker 1 (18:34):
No, I think the book explains correctly who he is.
And his reputation will go way up and way down
as it has for the past twenty five years, and
he'll get starship into orbit someday and they'll be on
the front page of the paper. And also he will
(18:56):
do things be it with Twitter or with self job
that'll cause problems and be bad. So there will be
a rollercoaster on his reputation, and that will be the
case for the next twenty years.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
How does that feel to kind of be connected to
someone who, as you have amply captured, is extremely volatile
and is also maybe becoming a little more controversial every day.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Yeah, I mean it's not great. I would love it
if he would lie low for like a year, but
he ain't gonna do that. And that's what this book explains,
which is at one point, Antonio Grassius's friend takes his
phone away from him when they're traveling and puts it
in the hotel room safe so Musk won't get up it.
And in the middle of the night, Musk calls hotel
(19:42):
security and makes him open the safe so he can
start tweeting out where things. That's who Musk is.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
And you have this body of work when it comes
to biographies. You've got Ben Franklin, you've got Einstein, you've
got Da Vinci, and then you have the living ones
down in a now Musk, And I think it tends
to create an impression even sometimes I think they're packaged
together for marketing purposes, that all of these people are
(20:11):
of a kind. They're almost like a trajectory of human achievement.
Do you think of Musk as fitting in with Da
Vinci Einstein, these world legendary figures, or do you feel like, well,
the jury's still out on that, but he's the closest
I can get in modern times.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
I don't think that all the people I've written about
are of one kind. But the reason you write biographies
rather than sort of how to manuals for innovation is
that each is different and there's certain common threads, which
(20:50):
is a passion to push reality into a certain mission
that you have. But I don't. I tried to say
I'm writing about Elon Musk because he's like Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Do you think he's spoiled other subjects for you in
that it's difficult to find a subject who has those
different personalities, all of that contained in one person.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah. I mean it would be hard to find a
contemporary character who comes even close to being as head snapping, amazing,
gut wrenching, mercurial of a roller coaster and emotional and
professional subject. I can't think of anybody who's this fascinating
(21:45):
for good and for bad.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
So I want to talk about some of the criticism
that comes up around the book and getting you a
chance to respond to some of that stuff. There's must
being a difficult and demanding person, even an asshole, whether
that matters for how creative he is, how innovative he is.
And then there's these sort of larger societal accusations, let's say,
(22:09):
like allowing misinformation or encouraging misinformation, or the self driving
and people getting killed, or the sort of lawsuit against
Tesla when it comes to racial discrimination. Those seem to
be two separate ideas, and I'm wondering we've talked a
lot about the first one, and how you feel about
that second basket, that question of whether, aside from whether
(22:31):
he is or isn't a bad person to his employees,
there are things that he's doing in the world that
have negative implications.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Yeah, I think when you barrel ahead impulsively, you do
things that have negative implications. You know, bad workplace environments. Well,
it starts at the top because he's all in hardcore driven.
He's not been to what he thinks are touchy feely
HR guidelines, and that's bad. Likewise, he pushes a little
(23:04):
fast on full self driving. I mean, he feels that
humans will kill ten or one hundred times more people
than a self driving car will, So he doesn't get
the fact that a self driving just you know, one
time as it did this once hit a side of
a big white truck, you know, and that's been in
the news after three four years, it's still in the news.
(23:26):
He says, you know, people focus on that, not the
million of people got killed by humans. Was because he
doesn't have a real feel for human feelings and emotions.
He doesn't realize that a self driving car smashing somebody
into a truck is going to really shake people up
more than the fact that a bad driver, you know,
(23:46):
here on Clayborne Avenue in New Orleans got into an accident.
So these are the things that his engineering mindset doesn't
feel as well.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
And I feel like when people bring those things up,
they're often saying they want you to engage with those
things more. And we've talked about, you know, explaining what's
going on versus moralizing, But how do you feel about
how you engaged with sort of that aspect of musk.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Well. I like the fact that people who say I'm
not as tough on musk as I should be are
always using anecdotes for my book to show why we
should be tough on musk. And the couple people have
pointed that out. I mean, certainly, if you're looking at
the bad workplace environments that he may engender, either at
Tesla or at Twitter, that's in the book, you know,
(24:36):
in no uncertain terms. Likewise, the accidents on the self
driving cars are definitely in the book, starting with Autonomy
Day in twenty nineteen all the way to the present.
There's a lot of evidence that his obsession with this
might be moving things too fast. So I'm perfectly happy
(24:57):
people say I should have been tougher on Musk, but
also say, man, read the book if you want ammunition,
both of how amazing he can be at times and
getting things done, but also the rubble he leaves in
his wake.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
When it came to the Ukraine starlink situation. You've talked
about that, the thing that got corrected in the post
and Musk tweeting. But maybe you've talked about this, but
I haven't heard it yet. But I'm interested in what
it felt like for you. Like you strike me as
someone who's like relatively unbothered by some of the noise
that's around the way.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
I think you have to be unbothered by the noise,
and you have to keep the essence of the story
in mind. The essence of that story was fine, it
was correct, which was that night he was deciding whether
or not to allow starlink to be enabled or not
be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea, and
there was a fix that had to be made because
(25:51):
it had already been geofence. So his decision was not
to permit the movement of the geo fencing. I hadn't
gone into it enough. I just said he turned it off,
So that was oversimplifying, but I didn't want to get
distracted from the main thing, which is this private citizen
is suddenly deciding that night whether or not Ukraine gets
(26:12):
to do a sneak attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea.
The essence is a private citizen has that power to decide,
and neither he nor anybody else corrected that. And then
I talked to him, I said, well, have you talked
to the US government and he turns over power to
these satellites of the US government. Finally at a later point, Yeah,
(26:34):
at a later point after that night where we talk
about it. So you see all of these things happen,
and I try to have it shown in real time,
and the essence of the story being how does somebody
acquire this much power? Why is it that the rest
of government and other contractors have become so paralyzed and
(26:58):
sclerotic that they can't do some of these things? And
then how does he, with his megalomania, finally back down
and say, maybe I should give up some of this power.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
There's something chilling about Musk's power and influence growing beyond
his companies, beyond the rocket launch pad and the Tesla
factory floor, and in the case of Starlink satellites use
in Ukraine. Even Musk himself finds this a little unsettling,
from failing to understand how people might respond to self
driving car deaths to his outwardly blase approach to controlling
(27:29):
global geopolitics with a thumbs up or thumbs down like
a Roman emperor in the coliseum. People are not elon
Musk's forte by zone admission, but we are increasingly in
his hands. And depending on where you stand on Musk,
some of his ideas can see either sinister, logical or
simply baffling. Take for example, his stated concern about underpopulation
(27:53):
and declaration that people need to be having more children. Well,
more specifically, smart people need to be having more Chines children.
It's a Creed's lived with all ten of his surviving
children born by IVF. He's put his money behind it too,
funding a University of Texas at Austin research group called
the Population Well Being Initiative to the tune of ten
million dollars. What I wanted to know from Isaacson was
(28:16):
given his front row seat to Musk's unusual family dramas.
What are we supposed to make of this particular Musk obsession?
He tweets and talks about low birth rates, and he
seems very obsessed, maybe as too much, but I think
I wanted to know what does this add up to?
What is this about? I was sort of left. I
don't understand what this tells me about Elon Musk, which
(28:37):
is maybe my problem.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
But like a lot of things with Elon, Musk goes
back to the father a bit. It also goes to musk.
Theory of consciousness in the human species is a fragile thing,
and one of the threats is a low birth rate.
Now most of us probably don't think that way. We
think we're overpopulated, but there is a decline in earthright
(29:00):
in many, many countries, and Musk deeply feels that's a problem.
And you know, people can totally disagree with that and say, hey,
overpopulation is a big problem. They can also think he's
weird to fund ivf for other people or fun clinics.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
That's It's the kind of thing where people can look
at it and they can say he has this vision
for humanity and it involves like people having more children,
and then there are people who see it through a
lens of is this some kind of eugenics situation. I
feel like people bring these lenses to it, and I'm
wondering if that has happened in your past work, or
(29:42):
if this is a unique situation.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
I think it's somewhat unique that people have such extraordinarily
strong feelings for and against Musque. When I started working
on this book, he was one of the most popular
people on Earth. There's some people who didn't like him,
but his politics was generally a supporter of Obama. He
(30:07):
had done really bad dumb tweets in the past, like
saying he was going to take Tesla private or calling
some cave diver a pedophile, but generally he wasn't that controversial?
And then his politics shift and it reflected in his
tweets and he buys Twitter, and so I end up
(30:27):
with a book in which people either think he's an
absolute hero or an absolute villain. And if you come
at it from a frame of Musk is inherently an
evil person. Even having a lot of kids seems like
something evil, and pushing for self driving cars or robots
(30:50):
seems evil. Likewise, if you're one of these starry eyed fans,
even the weird dark thing he does on Twitter, people
will be slamming me for telling the stories of his behavior,
both at Twitter and at factories. So yeah, it's a
(31:11):
difficulty that people frame his every action, often based on
their own love or hatred for him.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Up next, I asked Isaacson, does Musk really believe his
own hype? Stay with us? There's a tension, it feels like,
between the way that Musk talks about that epic idea
(31:45):
getting to Mars, helping save humanity with interplanetary species, et cetera,
and the way he treats individual people like he doesn't
like people. Sometimes he can be very cruel, and I'm
wondering does he really care or is he just trying
to make himself an epic figure, or is he actually
trying to solve the energy problem send us to Mars
for humanity reasons.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
When Musk first started talking about his three grade missions,
you know, space travel and artificial intelligence and sustainable energy,
I thought it was a type of pontifications that you'd
do for a biographer, or do for a podcast, or
do for a PEP talk. And then I'd see him
(32:27):
over and over again just chant it to himself, like
walking around the factory for building starship, and things are
getting delayed, and he would keep saying to himself and
others around him, we have to have an urgency of
getting humanity to Mars. And I came to believe that.
(32:51):
I don't know if he always fully believed it, but
I know he believed he believed it. I know that
he sounds strange, but sometimes, and so Shakespeare teaches us,
we become the mask we wear. And he had internalized
and externalized this so much that he was driven by
(33:12):
a fierce urgency that we've got to get rockets that
can get us to Mars within the next few decades,
or that we have to sustain solar and battery and
electric vehicle energy on this planet. And I am totally
convinced that he is driven by his belief in those missions.
(33:36):
And then he backfills and figures out, well, how can
I make money on the way. But if you're driven
mainly by financial or selfish reasons, you're not going to
start a rocket company. That's not a good idea for
making money. You're not going to start an EV company
when every other car company is getting out of the business.
(33:57):
You're not going to worry about robots, and you're not
going to buy Twitter. So I don't think he was
motivated by money. He was motivated by this almost manchild
epic sense of him as a hero in a comic
book or a video game.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
M Well, the Twitter one is interesting because I felt
like the way you wrote that almost reverse the polls
there in which he decides to buy Twitter, He impulsively decides,
gets stuck with it, and then he almost seems to
be backfilling the mission where he says, actually.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
I ask him at one point, how does this fit
into your mission? Makes no sense? I mean, I'm thinking
it's aniotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a
fingertip feel for social emotional networks, and he admits he said, yes,
maybe it's a lark, maybe it doesn't really fit in.
And then later he says, well, maybe it will help
(34:53):
democracy so that civilization will survive long enough that we'll
be able to become all planetary. And that's why I
just didn't believe him. And I'm not even sure he
believed himself. That's just a bulk wrap explanation, but he
had to try to justify it to himself. But my
own opinion is he kind of stumbled into that impulsively
(35:16):
and had mixed feelings about it, and if he had
to do it all over again, I'm not sure he would.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
You've talked about how you think Twitter will just be
a blip of his legacy, but he certainly canon is
getting mired in it. And there's this quote in the book.
It's him saying, I probably spend too much time on Twitter.
It's a good place to dig your own grave. You
get your shoulder into it and you keep on digging.
(35:42):
Do you feel that he could be undoing some of
that magic, that vision that you captured when it comes
to space or electric cars.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah, I personally feel that the time he spends Twitter
and the mind share he devotes to it is not
as important. It's not as high value as him doing
something else. And I don't think he's particularly good if
the social interactions and human emotions that come in Twitter,
and he admits he's just addicted to it. I don't
(36:16):
think it's going to be an important part of his legacy.
It's not going to be a great part of his legacy.
I think it makes a book more interesting for this
guy to go down this rabbit hole, but also near
the end of the book to say, you know, this
isn't the best use of my time, even talking about Twitter,
he said, we probably could be talking about more important things.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
It's also it's made him disliked in a way that
I feel like he wasn't disliked before. I mean, if
you look at the category of things that people dislike
him for Twitter, and things he's said on Twitter and
done with Twitter occupy a large percentage of those things.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Absolutely when you look at the controversy's cause and for
that matter, of the end and hatred that he's engendered,
about ninety five percent of that comes either from what
he says on Twitter, or what he does on Twitter,
or what he does to Twitter.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Musk is polarizing, arguably one of the two most polarizing
figures of our time. I'll let you guess the other.
His fans can be slavishly adoring, his critics can be
blind with rage. But if there was one common thread
among the more critical takes on Isaacson's biography, it was
a demand for more judgment, or at least analysis from Isaacson.
(37:33):
What was the ultimate meaning in all these stories he gathered,
these hours at Musk's side. Were we supposed to believe
that he was some kind of tortured genius, or that
he was a cruel tyrant who'd muscled his way to
valley success and was now inflicting a dangerous outlook on
the world outside it? What did it all add up to?
For two days I played out different versions of this
(37:53):
question with Isaacson.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I'm here to be as straightforward as I can with
the reader, to tell you stories that I think are
very revealing, somewhat exciting, somewhat appalling, but always informative. And
in face of the criticism that well, maybe I didn't
render too much judgment, I tried pretty hard to pull
(38:17):
back a bit to say you can kind of tell
what I think by the way I'm telling this story,
but I'm not going to hammer that into you. You
should wrestle with each of these things and figure out
how it fits with your own vision of life.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
You never say to yourself, maybe I should put ten
percent more judgment in there.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
No, No, that's something I coppa plate to totally. I
certainly don't feel in any way bad that I didn't
impose more of my judgments in it.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
There's a lot of writing of the book about the
chaos that surrounds Musk. But then I wondered, you have
had many war reporters working for you that you're responsible
in some sense, and so do you feel like the
reporting and editing that you did prepared you for the
chaos of Musk or to say like this is not
real chaos compared to other types of reporting.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Every now and then when Musk is doing something incredibly
chaotic or has themselves worked up into a lather. I
do remember times where things were much worse, and I
remember being in Belfast in Northern Ireland when I worked
for the Sunday Times and all the explosions, and I
certainly remember the Gulf War when I was at CNN
(39:35):
and went out to one of America's aircraft carriers, which
is where CNN had some of its reporters embedded. And
I think, Okay, when we think things are going bad,
let's remember there's some really bad things happening in this world.
And I wish if I could do many things for Musk,
(39:56):
it would sometimes be calmed down a bit, you know,
don't be so apocalyptic about things, because he has an
apocalyptic mindset.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
You told a story about going to Northern Ireland when
you're a reporter and you were with another reporter and
you left the hotel in the hotel got bombed, and
then he actually later died reporting in El Saltimore. Yeah,
And the question I had was, what's the lesson from that?
Like leaving the hotel saved you in a way, but
(40:36):
he then was killed taking risks? Where do you triangulate
the lesson in that.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
One of the things you learned is that sometimes there
are no lessons. That sometimes things happen and they're random.
Sometimes a sniper bullet kills somebody. Sometimes risk taking can
get you killed. Times not taking enough risks makes you paralyzed.
(41:05):
So there's not always easy lessons and those stories happen
to be as valuable because they tell you that there's
a mosaic in life. Sometimes complex patterns are there, and
sometimes you can't see the pattern just with one or
two data points. Maybe you should restrain yourself. Maybe maybe
(41:30):
there's not a hot take to be had, Maybe there's
not even a lesson. It's just a part of this
beautiful complexity of humans and human life, and you appreciate
those patterns and eventually they lead to intuitions as opposed
(41:51):
to quick lessons.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
That's a great ending for this whole show. Perhaps I
I'll have that on tape.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Don't ask it again. I'll ever be able to well,
thank got it? I feel that way.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
On Musk with Walter Isaacson is a production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeart. This show is based on the writing and
reporting of Walter Isaacson. It's hosted by me Evan Ratliffe,
produced by Lizzie Jacobs, assistant production from Serena Chow, mixing
and sound design by Rick Kwan. Thomas Walsh did the
engineering from iHeart Podcasts. The executive producers are Katrina Norvel
(42:29):
and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by
Manges Hittikador with an assist from Oz Walishan Costaslinos and
Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson,
Nicki Etor, Kerry Lieberman, Nathan Otoski, Ali Gavin, and the
folks at WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio
(42:50):
in New Orleans. If you like stories about writers in
their process, check out my other show, The Long Form Podcast.
If you want a story about a different South African
programmer who became one of the world's biggest criminals, you
can check out my book, The Mastermind. And for more
shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC.
Thanks so much for listening.
Musk is probably the richest count ser forever. He didn't
have a home in Palo Alto, so he would stay
with Larry Page and they'd stay up all night, and
Musk would talk about how we have to be careful
of AI, it could destroy us, and Page was having
nothing of it. Page loved the notion of AI, and
(00:32):
Page would even say, it'd be great if we could
have robots that would be conscious, and then we could
upload our consciousness into it. It would be the next
phase of evolution. Why are you so worried about humans
being left behind by the robots? And once Page even
called him specist, meaning you're biased towards the human species,
(00:54):
and mus said, yeah, dude, I am species. I like
the human species and believe it or in these fights
cause them to quit speaking to each other. I mean,
they really still don't speak to each other because of
this philosophical fight. I think Must looks upon himself as
(01:16):
an epic figure on a grand quest, just like the
comic book characters wearing their underpants on the outside and
kind of knowing they're ridiculous, but also very insecure about it.
And I think it's true of a whole lot of people.
I think it's a human trait, but I think, like
every human trait in Elon Musk, it's at least two
(01:39):
orders of magnitude greater.
Speaker 2 (01:47):
In the week since the release of Walter Isaacson's store
stop biography of Elon Musk, some stories from the book
have jumped off the page, tabloidish fodder like the secret
birth of Musk's third child with Grimes or the secret
births of his twins with his colleague. Nonprocreative stories like
the fact checking drama around the role that Musk's Starlink
(02:08):
satellite network has and has not occupied in Ukraine. And
since Isaacson and I spoke, there's of course been the
unending drama emanating from Musk himself, from amplifying anti Semitic
tweets to publicly telling Disney CEO Bob Eiger to go
fuck himself. But after each tempest dies down, what should
(02:28):
we really take away from this six hundred page epic
retelling of the life of Musk and about the world
in which he operates. I'm Evan Ratliffe. This is On
Musk with Walter Isaacson, and today we're tangling with Isaacson
over questions around Musk the specist, I mean, whose side
is he on? Anyway? What does his growing geopolitical influence
(02:51):
tell us about the power that one man can hold
in the modern world? And finally, what are we meant
to learn from Isaacson's exhaustive account. How does he think
the book will age? As Musk seems to grow more
divisive and even self destructive by the day Episode four Legacy.
(03:21):
I mean, you spent so much time with Jobs in
the world of Silicon Valley, understanding that world, the whole
way that world operated at that time, jobs versus gates,
et cetera. And when you came to the end of that,
there's one way you could go where you would say,
I think I get it, I think I get what
(03:41):
Silicon Valley's all about. But then you go after Musk.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
We biographers have a dirty little secret. We sometimes distort
history by making it seem like one guy or one
gal goes into a garage and a garret, they have
a light bulb moment, and then history happened. And usually
it's done by groups of people and teams as a
collaborative nature to creativity. And so after doing Steve Jobs
(04:11):
in which I showed him as a motive force pushing
the digital revolution. I decided to do a book called
The Innovators. It was a collective biographical study with dozens
of people who help invent the concept of the personal
computer and the concept of the network and then the microchip,
(04:33):
and how they interwove and collaborated. I think, in some
ways that can be more true to history is to
show partnerships and teamwork that lead to things. I kind
of liked it, but it didn't really sell all that well.
I do think that people like following a main character.
Speaker 2 (04:59):
But from us, some of the minor characters are pretty
big personalities and sometimes controversial ones. As musks bluster about
buying Twitter turns into reality, a crew of his old
valley pals start to resurface in Isaacson's tail. Many of
them are from what Fortune magazine once called the PayPal
mafia ex PayPal exacts like David Sachs, Ken Howry Reid Hoffman,
(05:22):
and Peter Teel. Many of them seem to be Musk's whispers,
simultaneously steering Musk away from jagged financial shoals and toward
a frothing ocean of an anti woke free speech Maelstrom.
There is a whole world of how these Silicon Valley
moguls you would call many of them are executives sort
of like relate to each other. And a lot of
(05:44):
it goes back to PayPal and the PayPal mafia and
people who started PayPal then becoming these friends and Musk
being involved in it. I mean, you mentioned Antonio Grascia's
you already knew him. Is that a world that you
already had entry into and understood or you learned through
Musk the relationships between these people and how that actually
influences what happens in these.
Speaker 1 (06:05):
By writing about Steve Jobs and then doing the Innovators,
I certainly got to know that world very well of
tech bros, and even that world of the quasi libertarian
tech bro mentality that's say a Peter til at this center.
One of the things that helps understand Mosque today goes
(06:29):
back to those PayPal years. He had started a company
called x dot com, which he wanted to have be
a payments app, but also in everything app, an app
that would be social media and would be a publishing platform.
And it merges with a company that Peter Tiel is
(06:50):
and it becomes PayPal. Mosque wants to keep it named
x x dot com. He loves the mystery of that
letter X. He thinks it's hardcore, and they overrule them
and they use the name PayPal, which he thinks is
a sweet little name of pals. They want to pay
each other, but it's not an everything app that's going
to change the world, and they kick him out, and
(07:12):
for twenty years it's eating away at him, which is why,
of course he wants to buy Twitter and it becomes
the booster to create what he'd always wanted, which is
a payments platform connected to a publishing platform connected to
social media. But he does something that I found somewhat
(07:33):
surprising until I fully understood it is when he gets
kicked out of PayPal. In this coup by Peter Teel
and Read Hoffman, ken Howery, David Sachs and Max Levchin,
must decides instead of hating them forever and thinking their enemies,
(07:56):
he makes up with them, even though he says they
knife me in the forum, kick me out of my job,
and it comes back as good karma. They end up
investing in SpaceX dollars.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
Basically, you write as an apology, almost.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
As a way after three rocket launches by SpaceX have
failed and they've run out of money, Teal says it's
a good way to try to make it up to him,
and it saves SpaceX. And this crowd remains relatively friendly,
and their political views and their technology views influence each other,
(08:37):
and it all feeds in to understanding why his politics
have become somewhat of this populist right libertarian streak.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
This book is gonna people are going to take lessons
from it, even if you don't explicitly prescribe what those
lessons are going to be. And especially in the business world,
people like to read these books for tips and for advice.
And let's take people in Silicon Valley, for example, what
do you think they are going to draw from the book?
(09:13):
And are you at all concerned that they might draw
the wrong lesson?
Speaker 1 (09:17):
Now with Steve Jobs, when that book came out, there
were a lot of stories of do you have to
be like Steve Jobs to be successful? A Wired magazine
cover story did it, And I was saying no, this
book was not a how to manual. Sometimes people come
up to me after I talked about Steve Jobs and
they'd say, I'm just like Steve.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Jobs like, I'm not a waz, I'm a job.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, I'm not was I'm not sweet, I'm not cuddly.
I'm like jobs. If people screw things up, I tell
them they've screwed up. I fire them, I tell them
they stink. I'll say on a podcast, and I'll look
at them and I say yeah. And have you ever
invented the iPod? Did you ever make the mac tash
the iPhone? You don't have the right to do this.
(10:03):
Probably Steve Jobs didn't have the right to do it.
But you're not supposed to try to be like this.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
Do you worry at all? You mentioned the verson who
comes up to you and says, I'm like Steve Jobs,
that they are going to be musk accolytes who will
take those wrong lessons, and that some of those people
run Silicon Valley. They run very important aspects, if not
the most important aspects of our society right now. Does
it concern you that people might take a muski and
(10:31):
approach and lack the vision but have the persona and
that those people are making consequential decisions about the tools
we use.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Yeah, I mean one lesson a lot of Silicon Valley
executives seem to have taken from the book is, oh,
my workforce is probably too flabby. I can fire eighty
percent the way Elon Musk did at Twitter, and now
you can't just do that. Also, there's a larger issue
(11:03):
which the book wrestles with, which I call the Old
Twitter New Twitter issue, which is that life is about
a little bit more than simply having the leanest meanness
machine you can create. And some people may want to
do that, especially people doing startups. They may want to
be lean mean and hackathon all night long. But there
(11:25):
are other people who will keep in mind the larger
mission of having an enterprise or a company, and that
is there to create good for all of society, for
consumers for good products, but also the people who work
there and the communities where they're based. And I think
that's a good tension to have in our society. You know,
(11:48):
I used to work at Diamond Corporated, and boy, it
was nice and flabby. You know. We had a dozen
people working in the Nation section to produce maybe eight
pages every week. We had researchers, we had assistants and schedulers.
We even had the person who brought the food cart
(12:10):
and a drink cart around every evening. And then you know,
everybody from activist investors to Mackenzie consultants come in and say,
you can cut this, you can cut that, you can
make it leaner and meaner. And there are people who
are comfortable being all in in hardcore Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos,
(12:34):
Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, totally hardcore. And they are people
who are more comfortable finding a nurturing, good environment for people.
We have to find the right balances. I would disdain
somebody who is always tough as an Elon Musk. I'd
also kind of disdain people who lack a sense of
(12:57):
passion and mission. But the books aren't how to manual
saying you should do this at your company. These books,
especially when it comes to Elon Musk, are supposed to
do two things that people have a hard time keeping
both in their mind. Be inspirational and be cautionary. But
above all, it is a story of a real person
(13:21):
that is one of the most consequential of our day
in generation.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
And I mean I think a certain percentage of people
today have a hard time understanding the approach where you
could happily sit and listen to a Peter Thiel or
someone with those politics and not kind of challenge them,
be angry and just sort of sit with them in
(13:48):
a very reporter like way.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
I go back to the notion of I'm supposed to
tell you the story. Am I supposed to say I
totally disagree with Peter Teal's view on the Ukraine War. No,
that's I mean, do I disagree? Yeah? I don't share
his beliefs on that or many othering But if you
want the hot take on whether or not you agree
(14:13):
with Peter o'teal's politics, my book's not for you. I'm
telling you how this story happened.
Speaker 2 (14:20):
When we come back stacking Musk up against jobs and
answering Isaacson's critics, including those who keep quoting him, stay
with us. This is a very small detail, But because
(14:43):
you're a New Orleanian, I have to ask this. You
quote Musk talking about how if he could skip meals
and just get his nutrients from like, you know, soilent
or liquid beverage or whatever, he would just do that.
It's very valley thing. And what did you do for
food when you were alongside.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
One of the wonderful things about Bokatika Texas and this
rough little scrubland there's a canteen that's stocked with amazingly
good barbecue salads, and you can walk in twenty four
hours a day. I could walk from my airstream trailer
and remarkably it actually had good coffee too, or at
(15:25):
least good coffee for Texas. But must doesn't care about food.
He doesn't care about fine wines. He really doesn't drink
that much. Occasionally you go out to dinner with him
and a few people and they'll be craft cocktails. You know,
I don't know, cactus juice with tequila, and they'll always
try one and never quite finish it. He never cares
(15:48):
that much about the food he's ordering. But I know
that when I finally came off the trail, having traveled
with him and having been someone back even in April
to watch the Starship launch, or then to Austin for
him to launch Xai, I finally said, Okay, I'm gonna
(16:08):
have to start eating right again. And I remember eating
very carefully but also craving really good food. And so
i'd be down in New Orleans and my wife Kathy
and I we made a habit of once a week
eating at Gallatoise, once a week eating at Herbsane, and
once a week eating at Pesh and maybe once every
(16:30):
week or two eating at Moscow's, which is a great places. Yeah,
just so I could remember the taste of really good food,
having spent two years watching him grab sandwiches and hamburgers.
Speaker 2 (16:44):
On Isaacson's book tour for his Musk biography, he was
regularly quizzed about how Musk compares with Jobs, perhaps the
most obvious foil among Isaacson's subjects.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
At one of my events, a high school student came
up to the microphone and he actually had read the
whole book.
Speaker 2 (17:01):
Impressive.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
He had a question that he said I hadn't answered.
I said, what's that? And he said, was elon Musk
nice to waiters and waitresses? And I realized that was
an insightful question, and I thought of Steve Jobs. I
remember one day at a Whole Foods in Palo Alto,
(17:23):
there's an older woman who was making the smoothie, and
Steve Jobs just chewed her out because she wasn't doing
it fast enough and wasn't doing it in the right way.
And I remember of all the things that made me
recoil it was being mean to a person making the
smoothie it or being a waiter like Jobs could be.
(17:47):
Musk was actually incredibly rough on people he worked with.
But all the times I saw him where there were
waiters or waitresses or some body at a shop or whatever,
he would get into sort of a jovial mood. And
so I don't think he had a meanness that would
(18:10):
have been reflected in the way he treated waiters. And
I thought, shoot, that was a really good question that
kid asked, and I probably get in trouble with Steve Jobs.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
But boy, well Jobs isn't around anymore, sadly, but Musk
could still. Is there something he could do that would
make you fundamentally rethink whether you should have written the
book about him?
Speaker 1 (18:34):
No, I think the book explains correctly who he is.
And his reputation will go way up and way down
as it has for the past twenty five years, and
he'll get starship into orbit someday and they'll be on
the front page of the paper. And also he will
(18:56):
do things be it with Twitter or with self job
that'll cause problems and be bad. So there will be
a rollercoaster on his reputation, and that will be the
case for the next twenty years.
Speaker 2 (19:11):
How does that feel to kind of be connected to
someone who, as you have amply captured, is extremely volatile
and is also maybe becoming a little more controversial every day.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Yeah, I mean it's not great. I would love it
if he would lie low for like a year, but
he ain't gonna do that. And that's what this book explains,
which is at one point, Antonio Grassius's friend takes his
phone away from him when they're traveling and puts it
in the hotel room safe so Musk won't get up it.
And in the middle of the night, Musk calls hotel
(19:42):
security and makes him open the safe so he can
start tweeting out where things. That's who Musk is.
Speaker 2 (19:48):
And you have this body of work when it comes
to biographies. You've got Ben Franklin, you've got Einstein, you've
got Da Vinci, and then you have the living ones
down in a now Musk, And I think it tends
to create an impression even sometimes I think they're packaged
together for marketing purposes, that all of these people are
(20:11):
of a kind. They're almost like a trajectory of human achievement.
Do you think of Musk as fitting in with Da
Vinci Einstein, these world legendary figures, or do you feel like, well,
the jury's still out on that, but he's the closest
I can get in modern times.
Speaker 1 (20:30):
I don't think that all the people I've written about
are of one kind. But the reason you write biographies
rather than sort of how to manuals for innovation is
that each is different and there's certain common threads, which
(20:50):
is a passion to push reality into a certain mission
that you have. But I don't. I tried to say
I'm writing about Elon Musk because he's like Benjamin Franklin.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
Do you think he's spoiled other subjects for you in
that it's difficult to find a subject who has those
different personalities, all of that contained in one person.
Speaker 1 (21:16):
Yeah. I mean it would be hard to find a
contemporary character who comes even close to being as head snapping, amazing,
gut wrenching, mercurial of a roller coaster and emotional and
professional subject. I can't think of anybody who's this fascinating
(21:45):
for good and for bad.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
So I want to talk about some of the criticism
that comes up around the book and getting you a
chance to respond to some of that stuff. There's must
being a difficult and demanding person, even an asshole, whether
that matters for how creative he is, how innovative he is.
And then there's these sort of larger societal accusations, let's say,
(22:09):
like allowing misinformation or encouraging misinformation, or the self driving
and people getting killed, or the sort of lawsuit against
Tesla when it comes to racial discrimination. Those seem to
be two separate ideas, and I'm wondering we've talked a
lot about the first one, and how you feel about
that second basket, that question of whether, aside from whether
(22:31):
he is or isn't a bad person to his employees,
there are things that he's doing in the world that
have negative implications.
Speaker 1 (22:41):
Yeah, I think when you barrel ahead impulsively, you do
things that have negative implications. You know, bad workplace environments. Well,
it starts at the top because he's all in hardcore driven.
He's not been to what he thinks are touchy feely
HR guidelines, and that's bad. Likewise, he pushes a little
(23:04):
fast on full self driving. I mean, he feels that
humans will kill ten or one hundred times more people
than a self driving car will, So he doesn't get
the fact that a self driving just you know, one
time as it did this once hit a side of
a big white truck, you know, and that's been in
the news after three four years, it's still in the news.
(23:26):
He says, you know, people focus on that, not the
million of people got killed by humans. Was because he
doesn't have a real feel for human feelings and emotions.
He doesn't realize that a self driving car smashing somebody
into a truck is going to really shake people up
more than the fact that a bad driver, you know,
(23:46):
here on Clayborne Avenue in New Orleans got into an accident.
So these are the things that his engineering mindset doesn't
feel as well.
Speaker 2 (23:58):
And I feel like when people bring those things up,
they're often saying they want you to engage with those
things more. And we've talked about, you know, explaining what's
going on versus moralizing, But how do you feel about
how you engaged with sort of that aspect of musk.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Well. I like the fact that people who say I'm
not as tough on musk as I should be are
always using anecdotes for my book to show why we
should be tough on musk. And the couple people have
pointed that out. I mean, certainly, if you're looking at
the bad workplace environments that he may engender, either at
Tesla or at Twitter, that's in the book, you know,
(24:36):
in no uncertain terms. Likewise, the accidents on the self
driving cars are definitely in the book, starting with Autonomy
Day in twenty nineteen all the way to the present.
There's a lot of evidence that his obsession with this
might be moving things too fast. So I'm perfectly happy
(24:57):
people say I should have been tougher on Musk, but
also say, man, read the book if you want ammunition,
both of how amazing he can be at times and
getting things done, but also the rubble he leaves in
his wake.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
When it came to the Ukraine starlink situation. You've talked
about that, the thing that got corrected in the post
and Musk tweeting. But maybe you've talked about this, but
I haven't heard it yet. But I'm interested in what
it felt like for you. Like you strike me as
someone who's like relatively unbothered by some of the noise
that's around the way.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
I think you have to be unbothered by the noise,
and you have to keep the essence of the story
in mind. The essence of that story was fine, it
was correct, which was that night he was deciding whether
or not to allow starlink to be enabled or not
be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea, and
there was a fix that had to be made because
(25:51):
it had already been geofence. So his decision was not
to permit the movement of the geo fencing. I hadn't
gone into it enough. I just said he turned it off,
So that was oversimplifying, but I didn't want to get
distracted from the main thing, which is this private citizen
is suddenly deciding that night whether or not Ukraine gets
(26:12):
to do a sneak attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea.
The essence is a private citizen has that power to decide,
and neither he nor anybody else corrected that. And then
I talked to him, I said, well, have you talked
to the US government and he turns over power to
these satellites of the US government. Finally at a later point, Yeah,
(26:34):
at a later point after that night where we talk
about it. So you see all of these things happen,
and I try to have it shown in real time,
and the essence of the story being how does somebody
acquire this much power? Why is it that the rest
of government and other contractors have become so paralyzed and
(26:58):
sclerotic that they can't do some of these things? And
then how does he, with his megalomania, finally back down
and say, maybe I should give up some of this power.
Speaker 2 (27:09):
There's something chilling about Musk's power and influence growing beyond
his companies, beyond the rocket launch pad and the Tesla
factory floor, and in the case of Starlink satellites use
in Ukraine. Even Musk himself finds this a little unsettling,
from failing to understand how people might respond to self
driving car deaths to his outwardly blase approach to controlling
(27:29):
global geopolitics with a thumbs up or thumbs down like
a Roman emperor in the coliseum. People are not elon
Musk's forte by zone admission, but we are increasingly in
his hands. And depending on where you stand on Musk,
some of his ideas can see either sinister, logical or
simply baffling. Take for example, his stated concern about underpopulation
(27:53):
and declaration that people need to be having more children. Well,
more specifically, smart people need to be having more Chines children.
It's a Creed's lived with all ten of his surviving
children born by IVF. He's put his money behind it too,
funding a University of Texas at Austin research group called
the Population Well Being Initiative to the tune of ten
million dollars. What I wanted to know from Isaacson was
(28:16):
given his front row seat to Musk's unusual family dramas.
What are we supposed to make of this particular Musk obsession?
He tweets and talks about low birth rates, and he
seems very obsessed, maybe as too much, but I think
I wanted to know what does this add up to?
What is this about? I was sort of left. I
don't understand what this tells me about Elon Musk, which
(28:37):
is maybe my problem.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
But like a lot of things with Elon, Musk goes
back to the father a bit. It also goes to musk.
Theory of consciousness in the human species is a fragile thing,
and one of the threats is a low birth rate.
Now most of us probably don't think that way. We
think we're overpopulated, but there is a decline in earthright
(29:00):
in many, many countries, and Musk deeply feels that's a problem.
And you know, people can totally disagree with that and say, hey,
overpopulation is a big problem. They can also think he's
weird to fund ivf for other people or fun clinics.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
That's It's the kind of thing where people can look
at it and they can say he has this vision
for humanity and it involves like people having more children,
and then there are people who see it through a
lens of is this some kind of eugenics situation. I
feel like people bring these lenses to it, and I'm
wondering if that has happened in your past work, or
(29:42):
if this is a unique situation.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
I think it's somewhat unique that people have such extraordinarily
strong feelings for and against Musque. When I started working
on this book, he was one of the most popular
people on Earth. There's some people who didn't like him,
but his politics was generally a supporter of Obama. He
(30:07):
had done really bad dumb tweets in the past, like
saying he was going to take Tesla private or calling
some cave diver a pedophile, but generally he wasn't that controversial?
And then his politics shift and it reflected in his
tweets and he buys Twitter, and so I end up
(30:27):
with a book in which people either think he's an
absolute hero or an absolute villain. And if you come
at it from a frame of Musk is inherently an
evil person. Even having a lot of kids seems like
something evil, and pushing for self driving cars or robots
(30:50):
seems evil. Likewise, if you're one of these starry eyed fans,
even the weird dark thing he does on Twitter, people
will be slamming me for telling the stories of his behavior,
both at Twitter and at factories. So yeah, it's a
(31:11):
difficulty that people frame his every action, often based on
their own love or hatred for him.
Speaker 2 (31:23):
Up next, I asked Isaacson, does Musk really believe his
own hype? Stay with us? There's a tension, it feels like,
between the way that Musk talks about that epic idea
(31:45):
getting to Mars, helping save humanity with interplanetary species, et cetera,
and the way he treats individual people like he doesn't
like people. Sometimes he can be very cruel, and I'm
wondering does he really care or is he just trying
to make himself an epic figure, or is he actually
trying to solve the energy problem send us to Mars
for humanity reasons.
Speaker 1 (32:07):
When Musk first started talking about his three grade missions,
you know, space travel and artificial intelligence and sustainable energy,
I thought it was a type of pontifications that you'd
do for a biographer, or do for a podcast, or
do for a PEP talk. And then I'd see him
(32:27):
over and over again just chant it to himself, like
walking around the factory for building starship, and things are
getting delayed, and he would keep saying to himself and
others around him, we have to have an urgency of
getting humanity to Mars. And I came to believe that.
(32:51):
I don't know if he always fully believed it, but
I know he believed he believed it. I know that
he sounds strange, but sometimes, and so Shakespeare teaches us,
we become the mask we wear. And he had internalized
and externalized this so much that he was driven by
(33:12):
a fierce urgency that we've got to get rockets that
can get us to Mars within the next few decades,
or that we have to sustain solar and battery and
electric vehicle energy on this planet. And I am totally
convinced that he is driven by his belief in those missions.
(33:36):
And then he backfills and figures out, well, how can
I make money on the way. But if you're driven
mainly by financial or selfish reasons, you're not going to
start a rocket company. That's not a good idea for
making money. You're not going to start an EV company
when every other car company is getting out of the business.
(33:57):
You're not going to worry about robots, and you're not
going to buy Twitter. So I don't think he was
motivated by money. He was motivated by this almost manchild
epic sense of him as a hero in a comic
book or a video game.
Speaker 2 (34:15):
M Well, the Twitter one is interesting because I felt
like the way you wrote that almost reverse the polls
there in which he decides to buy Twitter, He impulsively decides,
gets stuck with it, and then he almost seems to
be backfilling the mission where he says, actually.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
I ask him at one point, how does this fit
into your mission? Makes no sense? I mean, I'm thinking
it's aniotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a
fingertip feel for social emotional networks, and he admits he said, yes,
maybe it's a lark, maybe it doesn't really fit in.
And then later he says, well, maybe it will help
(34:53):
democracy so that civilization will survive long enough that we'll
be able to become all planetary. And that's why I
just didn't believe him. And I'm not even sure he
believed himself. That's just a bulk wrap explanation, but he
had to try to justify it to himself. But my
own opinion is he kind of stumbled into that impulsively
(35:16):
and had mixed feelings about it, and if he had
to do it all over again, I'm not sure he would.
Speaker 2 (35:22):
You've talked about how you think Twitter will just be
a blip of his legacy, but he certainly canon is
getting mired in it. And there's this quote in the book.
It's him saying, I probably spend too much time on Twitter.
It's a good place to dig your own grave. You
get your shoulder into it and you keep on digging.
(35:42):
Do you feel that he could be undoing some of
that magic, that vision that you captured when it comes
to space or electric cars.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
Yeah, I personally feel that the time he spends Twitter
and the mind share he devotes to it is not
as important. It's not as high value as him doing
something else. And I don't think he's particularly good if
the social interactions and human emotions that come in Twitter,
and he admits he's just addicted to it. I don't
(36:16):
think it's going to be an important part of his legacy.
It's not going to be a great part of his legacy.
I think it makes a book more interesting for this
guy to go down this rabbit hole, but also near
the end of the book to say, you know, this
isn't the best use of my time, even talking about Twitter,
he said, we probably could be talking about more important things.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
It's also it's made him disliked in a way that
I feel like he wasn't disliked before. I mean, if
you look at the category of things that people dislike
him for Twitter, and things he's said on Twitter and
done with Twitter occupy a large percentage of those things.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Absolutely when you look at the controversy's cause and for
that matter, of the end and hatred that he's engendered,
about ninety five percent of that comes either from what
he says on Twitter, or what he does on Twitter,
or what he does to Twitter.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
Musk is polarizing, arguably one of the two most polarizing
figures of our time. I'll let you guess the other.
His fans can be slavishly adoring, his critics can be
blind with rage. But if there was one common thread
among the more critical takes on Isaacson's biography, it was
a demand for more judgment, or at least analysis from Isaacson.
(37:33):
What was the ultimate meaning in all these stories he gathered,
these hours at Musk's side. Were we supposed to believe
that he was some kind of tortured genius, or that
he was a cruel tyrant who'd muscled his way to
valley success and was now inflicting a dangerous outlook on
the world outside it? What did it all add up to?
For two days I played out different versions of this
(37:53):
question with Isaacson.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
I'm here to be as straightforward as I can with
the reader, to tell you stories that I think are
very revealing, somewhat exciting, somewhat appalling, but always informative. And
in face of the criticism that well, maybe I didn't
render too much judgment, I tried pretty hard to pull
(38:17):
back a bit to say you can kind of tell
what I think by the way I'm telling this story,
but I'm not going to hammer that into you. You
should wrestle with each of these things and figure out
how it fits with your own vision of life.
Speaker 2 (38:34):
You never say to yourself, maybe I should put ten
percent more judgment in there.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
No, No, that's something I coppa plate to totally. I
certainly don't feel in any way bad that I didn't
impose more of my judgments in it.
Speaker 2 (38:50):
There's a lot of writing of the book about the
chaos that surrounds Musk. But then I wondered, you have
had many war reporters working for you that you're responsible
in some sense, and so do you feel like the
reporting and editing that you did prepared you for the
chaos of Musk or to say like this is not
real chaos compared to other types of reporting.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Every now and then when Musk is doing something incredibly
chaotic or has themselves worked up into a lather. I
do remember times where things were much worse, and I
remember being in Belfast in Northern Ireland when I worked
for the Sunday Times and all the explosions, and I
certainly remember the Gulf War when I was at CNN
(39:35):
and went out to one of America's aircraft carriers, which
is where CNN had some of its reporters embedded. And
I think, Okay, when we think things are going bad,
let's remember there's some really bad things happening in this world.
And I wish if I could do many things for Musk,
(39:56):
it would sometimes be calmed down a bit, you know,
don't be so apocalyptic about things, because he has an
apocalyptic mindset.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
You told a story about going to Northern Ireland when
you're a reporter and you were with another reporter and
you left the hotel in the hotel got bombed, and
then he actually later died reporting in El Saltimore. Yeah,
And the question I had was, what's the lesson from that?
Like leaving the hotel saved you in a way, but
(40:36):
he then was killed taking risks? Where do you triangulate
the lesson in that.
Speaker 1 (40:43):
One of the things you learned is that sometimes there
are no lessons. That sometimes things happen and they're random.
Sometimes a sniper bullet kills somebody. Sometimes risk taking can
get you killed. Times not taking enough risks makes you paralyzed.
(41:05):
So there's not always easy lessons and those stories happen
to be as valuable because they tell you that there's
a mosaic in life. Sometimes complex patterns are there, and
sometimes you can't see the pattern just with one or
two data points. Maybe you should restrain yourself. Maybe maybe
(41:30):
there's not a hot take to be had, Maybe there's
not even a lesson. It's just a part of this
beautiful complexity of humans and human life, and you appreciate
those patterns and eventually they lead to intuitions as opposed
(41:51):
to quick lessons.
Speaker 2 (41:53):
That's a great ending for this whole show. Perhaps I
I'll have that on tape.
Speaker 1 (41:57):
Don't ask it again. I'll ever be able to well,
thank got it? I feel that way.
Speaker 2 (42:07):
On Musk with Walter Isaacson is a production of Kaleidoscope
and iHeart. This show is based on the writing and
reporting of Walter Isaacson. It's hosted by me Evan Ratliffe,
produced by Lizzie Jacobs, assistant production from Serena Chow, mixing
and sound design by Rick Kwan. Thomas Walsh did the
engineering from iHeart Podcasts. The executive producers are Katrina Norvel
(42:29):
and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by
Manges Hittikador with an assist from Oz Walishan Costaslinos and
Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson,
Nicki Etor, Kerry Lieberman, Nathan Otoski, Ali Gavin, and the
folks at WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio
(42:50):
in New Orleans. If you like stories about writers in
their process, check out my other show, The Long Form Podcast.
If you want a story about a different South African
programmer who became one of the world's biggest criminals, you
can check out my book, The Mastermind. And for more
shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC.
Thanks so much for listening.
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