December 12, 2023 • 31 mins
Space travel, electric vehicles, future-powering batteries—the ability to push technology forward and to bring it into the world in a real way is without a doubt the best of Elon Musk. In his 600 page biography, Walter Isaacson chronicles a man with superlative engineering skills, but who “doesn’t have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks.” On this first of four episodes, Isaacson shares the aspects of Musk that gave meaning and muscle to … the rest of Musk.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
How many rocket launches did you see.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Yeah, we can talk about visiting some of the launches. Bokachika, Texas,
is at the very southern tip of the state, just
beyond Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico and right on
the street where Musk's house was. I had this little
airstream trailer, which was a little tough on the laundry
(00:32):
and it's kind of hard to shower. But after a
while it made me feel part of this weird scene
that here on Earth, in this parched scrubland with a
few swamps filled with mosquitoes and these old, abandoned tracked
houses is the base from which people on planet Earth
(00:56):
are going to get to Mars. And I knew that
Musk was going to do the launch of Starship, by
far the biggest rocket ever made, and he was waiting
to launch it in Bokachka, And I'm in the airstream
trailer at five am. He's in the house nearby, and
(01:17):
the security guards wake us up and they take us
to the control room for the countdown, and the countdown
goes ten nine eight, and he nods and they launch
it and it goes up for a minute two minutes
he's watching it. He runs outside onto the deck because
(01:41):
you can see it in the distance, and then runs
back inside. And finally, after about two and a half minutes,
you start noticing that two of the raptors and maybe
three now there's a problem, and they realize it's going
to go off course and they have to send a
signal to blow it up over the water, otherwise it
(02:03):
might do something really bad. So they all look at
Musk and he gives them the signal to blow it up,
and at the end he says, Okay, here's a few
things we've learned. Let's see how fast we can try
it again.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
My name's Evan Ratliffe and this is on Musk with
Walter Isaacson. I'm a journalist and author and recently I
met up with Isaacson over a few days in New Orleans,
tough assignment. I know Isaacson lives there. It's his hometown
and the place he returned to after decades. Is a
big time reporter and editor on the East Coast. Nowadays,
(02:48):
he's a biographer of the kind of people who alter
the world through the force of their intellect. He's written
about Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, the pioneering biologist,
Jennifer DOWDNA, and maybe most famously, Steve Jobs. When we
sat down near Lake Pontchatrain, his six hundred page biography
of Musk had been out for about a month. It
was a book that launched a thousand hot takes, not
(03:10):
least because Elon Musk is himself a hot take launching machine.
But talking to Isaacson, I wanted to try to get
past the noise, if we could, to understand why and
how this gargantuan work came about, and to see with
his eyes what wowed him, what shocked him, and how
he reckoned with the subject who became one of the
richest and most polarizing men on the planet, and who,
(03:32):
since the book's release, at times seems determined to scorch
his own legacy by encouraging and even embracing the online
hate machine, you know, anti Semitism, conspiracy memes, or whatever
he happens to post about this week, this is our
first episode of four, and for this one, for a moment,
(03:52):
let's try and forget everything you've learned about Elon Musk
over the last say three years. Yet who he is
on Twitter. Forget his role in Ukraine or whatever you
know about his personal life, and think about the musk
who helped build the first real online payments company, PayPal,
the first true mass market electric car in Tesla, and
(04:13):
the first private space company to put humans into orbit
with SpaceX. Let's look at his better angels so that
when we talk with Isaacson about his demons, and we will,
we'll have some ballast, some understanding of why he made
such an intriguing subject in the first place, Episode one Genius. So, gentlemen,
(04:49):
I have a coffee going, water ready, bathrooms down the hall.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
I'm rolling.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
All right, you're good, Okay, all right, Walter. It's great
to you. As you can see. I have my copy
of the book here, so I put little flags in
it for things I want to talk about. I don't
think we're going to get to all of these.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Item't read the book better than I had, just to say, well,
it's good talking one writer to another.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
This'll be fun.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Well, let's talk for a second about how you got
on this roller coaster. Could you tell me the story
of how this book first came about, the first seed
that this book could be possible.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
A mutual friend of mine in Elon Musk gave me
a call Antonio Gracias. He said, you all ought to talk,
and Mouska and I talked for about hour and a
half or so on the phone, and I said a
couple of things to him. I said, I want to
do a book unlike almost any other books since Boswell
did Doctor Johnson, which is, I want to be by
(05:48):
your side at all times, when you're eating, when you're thinking,
when you're in a meeting, when you're with your family,
and I want for two years to have nothing off limits.
In a very low mono, Tony goes, oh, and then
I go all right, well here's the other thing. I
don't want you to have any control over this book.
I'm not even going to show it to you before
it's published. He goes, okay. So I'm pretty surprised. And
(06:13):
I was with a group of people. I'd gone off
to take the phone call. When I get back, I
was talking and all of a sudden people say, oh
my god, I didn't know you were doing I said,
what do you mean, said, well, Elon Musch just tweeted
out Walter is writing my biography, and I thought, oh, dear,
I guess, I guess I'm committed now.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And how did the rhythm of that evolve? Like, how
did you figure out when you were going to go,
how many conversations you were going to have?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Every couple of weeks, I'd say, all right, I'd like
to come out and I'll spend the next ten days.
He doesn't have a scheduler because he wanted to keep
control of his own time, so you never know where
he's going. We would sometimes do two or three places
a day, and so I learned pack everything in one
(07:02):
overnight bag. Bring lots of T shirts, black T shirts.
Everybody wears black T shirts.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
So you also got into the black T shirt.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah, And so I was like, all right, So I'd
get four or five black T shirts, a couple of
pairs of khakis, and that would be it. It would
have to be really light. There have to be something
I'd be carrying with me on the factory line. Because
he'd inspect the factory in Fremont, and then he'd turned
to the security guard, who was the one person who
(07:30):
kind of kept things on track. It's okay, now let's
go to Cape Canaveral. We'd get in his plane be
at Cape Canaveral, then be in Boca Chica or in
Austin where he's building the great gigafactory for Tasla. So
you got a whole lot of T shirts and a
whole lot of underwear, and you're ready to go for
the ride. And usually after about ten days of traveling
(07:53):
with them, I'd run out of toothpaste and maybe underwear,
and I'd say, Okay, I'm gonna take a break.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Was absolutely everything on the record, or were there times
when some executive from some other part of the company
or someone tried to say this is off the record.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Musk gave out the word that I could be anywhere
at any time. There were a couple of exceptions that
were both national security classified briefings she was talking to
either General Millie or the CIA, in which he said,
I had to leave the room. But there were times
(08:30):
when they would do a meeting and I would know
that some of the Teesla executives would ask, you know,
can Walter step out. For example, when they were deciding
whether or not to create the twenty five thousand dollars
car that's going to try to go after the Toyota Corolla,
and he wanted not to do it. He wanted to
go leap ahead to the Robotaxi, a car with no
(08:53):
steering wheels that would be self driving, and they were
trying to convince them. No, no, no. He let me
stay in the meeting.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
By the time Isaacson started sitting in on meetings and
everything else, Musk was the chairman, CEO, or chief technology
officer of four companies. Later he'd add two more. You've
probably heard parts of Musk's history, but here's the short version.
Born in South Africa, he'd started in Silicon Valley back
in nineteen ninety five with a company called Zip two,
kind of an early map quest. He founded with his
(09:22):
brother Kimball, financed on his mom's credit cards and fueled
by endless meals at Jack in the Box. After selling
zip too and buying himself a McLaren, he invested much
of the money into x dot com, a financial payments
platform that eventually combined with another company and became PayPal.
Musk's new PayPal partners ousted him from the company, but
he still emerged fabulously wealthy and endlessly connected in the Valley.
(09:45):
He then turned that wealth onto more grandiose goals. First,
with SpaceX, a rocket company created around Musk's dream of
getting humans to Mars. Then Tesla built on the dream
of electrifying not just cars, but all aspects of our lives.
He added a couple of other companies, Neuralink and the
Boring Company. Or recently he's launched an AI company first
(10:07):
called Xai, and of course stuck his head into the
Pandora's box that is Twitter. Now he's combined both of
those under one banner X. It's a staggering amount of
companies to own and operate simultaneously, and as his plane
hopping shows, it's not just board meetings. Musk likes to
be on factory floors and to take an active role
in the engineering.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Musk is also a playful side, an inspirational side, and
he often jokes about toys or things he loves. And
at one point he's sitting at his desk at Tesla
and he's looking at a small car. You know, it's
made of metal, and he looks at the underside of it,
and of course the whole bottom of the car, including
(10:49):
the axles and the chassis, is just one piece. It's
made of cast metal. And so he keeps showing it
to the designers at Tesla and say, why can't we
just cast the entire underside of the car in one piece?
And it's taking ninety one hundred and fifty sometimes components
(11:10):
that have to be welded together. And they said, well,
there's no press big enough to do that. He said,
let's start calling around. And they call around and all
these companies that make presses that can make components or
chassis say, no, that would be impossible. But one I
think in Italy says, okay, we can try it, and
(11:30):
they make this huge press that can do a half
of the chassis and then another and you just have
to pull them together. And then eventually when he builds
this huge autofactory gigatexas, he says, now we're going to
do it in one piece, and they build this giga press,
(11:52):
and so the chassis of the car of a Tesla
is now done in one piece. And he did it
in a funny way. He didn't push people to total distraction.
He just kept saying, think about it. The laws of
physics don't say this is impossible, and they keep looking
at him like he's crazy. But then you go to
(12:14):
the Austin factory and you look at these giga presses
and you say, I get it. That's why other companies
gm getting out of making big evs. Other companies can't
do it. But that sense of the physical properties, the
physics and sort of thinking out of the box, that
(12:37):
was one of the great breakthroughs.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
The other thing that's so interesting about the factory is
you would think that Musk is just automating, automating, automating,
and then he had this incident where he kind of discovers, oh,
we've over automated.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
In twenty seventeen, when he's having trouble with the battery
factory that they've built in Nevada, he moves there, he
sleeps on the floor that he spends months there, and
they realize at some point that something that they're doing
that a robot is trying to do is taking too long.
And he figures out, wait, a human could do this
(13:13):
much faster. We could just get a big wooden table
and hire six people and they could do this three
times as fast. So they run around the factory figure
out what machines are really slowing things down rather than
speeding things up. Musk and this cadre around him and
they have Kansas spray paint, and they're just putting big
(13:34):
xes on machines that they're going to have to take out,
and it's almost like kids playing on the playground marking things.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
And they cut a.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Hole in the wall of the factory and drag out
some of this excess robotics. He still believes in automation.
He's going to build one of the most automated factories
in the world, both in Austin, Texas and assembly line
for the twenty five thousand dollars car, and then replicate
it in Mexico. But he says that was one of
(14:04):
his big mistakes. He said, we automated at the very
beginning of the process. That should be the last thing
you should do. You should only automate after you've simplified
the process, questioned every requirement, figured out how fast it
could be done. Then you do the automation.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
That story sort of illustrates both the playfulness you describe,
but also the sense that he doesn't seem to care
about sunk costs, like a lot of people would not
do that because they've put so much money into those machines.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
You know. Yeah, there was a.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Lot of resistance at first because They put a lot
of money, in sweat and effort into making these robots,
but then suddenly they realize that they should go along.
This is going to be interesting. They're going to learn something.
And even though people sometimes feel burned out or attacked
(14:59):
by Musk, those moments where he turns out to be
inspirational and write keep them going.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
After the break, we contemplate the journey to Mars.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Stay with us.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Isaac, since he's firsthand and is reporting that working for
Elon Musk is not a picnic. To put it mildly,
words like demanding or mercurial don't even really capture the
way Musk approaches his employees. We'll get to that in
episode two. But another thing Walter discovers is that incredibly
smart people are happy, even eager, to endure a little
(15:49):
hardship to work for a visionary. For them, Musk is
an epic adventurer, reconnecting us with a lost sense of
new frontiers, whether that's a sustainable energy future or deep
space travel. There is a kind of romantic view of
space travel and do you feel like we have lost
that in general?
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Musk talks about three or four reasons he wants to
get to Mars. But the most inspiring is the notion
that it's adventure. And he said, space is the ultimate adventure.
I mean, there's a girl who read a lot of
comic books when he was a kid, and so he's
Captain Space. And he says that America somehow lost a
(16:37):
sense of adventure and got mired in its day to
day problems. Now we have all sorts of day to
day problems. Who can't get a speaker of the house,
Sometimes we can't get budgets. Sometimes we get involved in
wars we don't know how to get out of sometimes,
but he says, you put that in perspective by having
a grander vision the thing that makes you want to
(16:59):
get up in the morning, because it's a type of
thing that makes us inspired as a species rather than
mired in the everyday noss And he says, and if
we keep our eye on the need to explore space
and become space faring, it inspires us not only to
do things, but also to do risky things. To know
(17:23):
that people are going to die on the way to Mars.
And it's not that he's cavalier about it, but he
believes you got to take risks and have adventure. He
believes it to a fault too much so, But sometimes
I think the fault with us, the rest of us,
(17:43):
might be we've lost a little bit of that taste.
And do you buy into the vision that that connect
with you? I must admit I don't connect with his
obsession that the planet Earth may get destroyed in the
next fifty years, and AI may just so we have
to keep consciousness alive by having colonies on Mars. I'm like,
(18:05):
all right, the things I'll wake up and worry about,
that's not it. But I do believe we have to
try to go to Mars because I believe in the
inventor of it. When I was a young kid, like
anybody of my generation, I held my breath. As Walter
Cronkite said ten nine eight, it was Pad thirty nine
(18:27):
A at Cape Canaveral. I remember visiting it and then
going back there because Masks now has paid thirty nine A.
And those of us who watched John Glenn get into orbit,
who knew that countdown and held our breath, we do
buy into the notion that traveling through space may not
(18:49):
have a whole lot of utility.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
It may not.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Be the best use of our resources if you're doing
a cost benefit analysis, but we ought to be doing it,
And so there's an inspiring side to him as well.
The only person who can get astronauts from the US
into orbit and then reland the rocket. No other company,
no other country, has been able to take rockets, get
(19:15):
things and then land them upright and reuse them, which
is necessary if you're going to get to Mars. And likewise,
no other company was ever coming close to getting us
to electric vehicles, and he does it. So I wouldn't
write about somebody who didn't have both an inspiring side
and also a mercurial, sometimes dark side.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Even in the midst of a launch, standing with his
highest ranking engineer, with all the pressure of whether the
rocket will make it into orbit or explode over the ocean,
Musk can't stop obsessing about his ultimate goal, a colony
on Mars.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
I remember, before that launch of Starship, standing on top
of what's called a high bay. It's about twenty stories high,
and it's where the rock it can be assembled upright,
and on a balcony with Mark and Cusa and a
few others. He's talking about the distant future. He's talking
(20:11):
about How can we make a hundred of these a year?
How many houses are we going to need to build
between here and Brownsville in order to have a workforce.
I can build one hundred a year. And they're even
talking about how they're going to colonize Mores And I'm
thinking this is insane. These people are standing there overlooking
(20:34):
the Gulf of Mexico in this god forsaken place, and
all they can focus on is how are we going
to get a colony to Mars. I mean, clearly, this
is the most interesting person around today. Now. Interesting is
a word that has many nuances to it.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Isaacson catalogs how Musk's engineering approach, particularly when it comes
to both space and Tesla, involves a kind of first
principles algorithm, examining each individual piece that makes up a
rocket or a car down to the smallest ones, and
asking whether it's necessary, and if it's necessary, whether it
can be made more cheaply. Delete delete, delete, Musk and tones,
(21:18):
and you know you've deleted enough when you discover that
you need to add ten percent back in and looking
at the rockets. Musk is sent to the Space station
while NASA struggles to get Americans into orbit, or at
the over a million electric cars on the road while
the auto industry races to catch up. Well, the algorithm works.
No matter what you think of Musk, This, as Isaacson
(21:39):
portrays it, is a big part of Musk's genius, his
ability to realize large scale engineering marvels by focusing his
attention on the smallest details. But Musk applies the same
algorithm to safety rules and standard regulations in a way
that critics find alarming. So is Musk just a penny
pinching capitalist who flouts sensible go guardrails? Where's hee maverick
(22:02):
genius who blows through other people's cowardice masking as caution,
or maybe Isaacson discovers it can be both. Like in
SpaceX's third attempt to launch the Falcon one, their first rocket,
they're sort of going over the checks and there's this
issue about fuel slashing, and I'm wondering if you can
describe that, because then at the end it has an
(22:24):
incredible kicker to that chapter.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
The Falcon one was the very first rocket that SpaceX built,
and they shot it off from an island in the Pacific,
so it was really hard to get to and the
first one blows up, the second one blows up, and
they make a checklist of all the things you have
to get right. Then they list fifteen to twenty of them.
(22:48):
But Musk is willing to take risks, and he said,
we're only going to worry about the top ten. And
one of them is that if the rocket gets high
enough and the fuel starts to deplete, it'll slash around
in the chamber. So you gotta put little baffles in
the chamber that'll prevent it from slashing around. Wellma says,
(23:08):
that's an extra part. It adds weight. It's something we
should delete, and he deletes it. Well, the rocket goes up,
the fuel slashes, the rocket crashes. They had made that
number eleven on the list of things to worry about,
and he said, from now on, we're including eleven things
on the list.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
And when he says next time, we're going to do
eleven things, not ten, the rocket has just blown up.
What's his level of humor around that statement. Is he
kind of saying very seriously, we've got to do eleven,
not ten, or is he sort of like, hmm, eleven
not ten.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Next time when something really bad happens, he actually becomes
the calmest and sometimes funny, sometimes making a joke about it,
but also more determined. When the first three rocket launches
of SpaceX blow up, they're out of money.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
That could have been it for the company.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
That's what they thought. Tesla at the end of two
thousand and eight had totally run out of money. SpaceX
had totally run out of money. Both were about to
shut down, and everybody's waiting to see what's going to happen.
And then he says, we're gonna do this. I'm gonna
push all my chips back and roll the dice one
more time, and he ends up writing his own personal
(24:22):
checks finding more money to try to do a fourth launch.
The fourth launch is particularly interesting because they take the
rocket from Los Angeles, where it's built in the factory,
out to this tiny spit of an island in the
middle of the Pacific, and he's in a hurry to
(24:43):
get it done, so he allows him to charter a
cargo plane, and something happens. When the plane starts to descend,
the pressure gets up and the air inside the rocket
starts to collapse, and when they get it down to
the island, they see that one of the tanks is crumpled.
(25:05):
They say to Musk, we're gonna have to bring it
back to Los Angeles. Is going to take another six months,
and he said, no, fix it here. Now that was
an enormous risk. That's a worse rise than not having
Slash baffles. And yet on that sandy hot little island
(25:26):
they work for three weeks pushing out the little dance,
and then they think, okay, this may never work, but
they shoot off the fourth attempt and boom, he gets
to orbit.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Stay with us, because the portrait of Musk's genius is
about to get complicated. Did you develop a kind of
philosophy of biography I've heard you talk about, or people
(26:01):
have used around you a kind of camera metaphor in
terms of being a biographer and being a camera with
subjects who are alive.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
My goal is always to understand the roots of creativity.
And it's not just about being smart. Because Steve Jobs
probably wasn't as conventionally smart as they Bill Gates, but
he was more creative. The same with Leonardo even Einstein,
who was damn smart. What made them different from Poncaret
(26:30):
and Max Planck and others was that he was creative.
So I try to observe people very carefully and how
their mind works and say, what is it that makes them,
in Steve Jobs's words, think different? And that helped show
how they fit into history, because by being creative, history
(26:55):
is slightly different.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
And that doesn't necessary to require that you like them
or that you think they're a hero, but it does
require at least a belief that if they weren't there,
someone wouldn't just slot into their place. I remember reading
this thing about Warren Buffett, and it was that if
there wasn't a Warren Buffett, there would be a Warren
(27:18):
Buffett because statistically, someone would make all the right bets
and they'd become Warren Buffett. It just happens in the market.
And you could apply a similar notion to these revolutions,
that the revolution was going to happen, there would be
a person. It might not be this person.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Does that matter the people I write about I believe
mattered that. Yes, at some point people may have figured
out special relativity, maybe in fifty years they would have
tied it together with general relativity and the coverture of gravity.
But because Einstein's there and he does both those things
(27:57):
as well as equals MC squared and many other things.
It really does change the course of physics. Ford in general,
motors in the early two thousands get out of the
electric vehicle business. They crushed the Chevy Bolt or whatever
because they just think it's not there. Musk goes bankrupt
(28:20):
twice almost with Tesla, but he keeps persevering. And now
we have moved into the air of electric vehicles. And
it will look odd if you know somebody ten years
from now who's buying a car that uses internal combustion
engines with extracted fossil fuels. And then he's brought us
(28:41):
back into the era of space adventure. It's the only
person can get astronauts from the US into orbit and
then reland the rocket. No other company, no other country,
has been able to take rockets, get things and then
land them upright and reuse them, which is necessary if
you're going to get to Mars.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
In the story of Musk, the mercurial genius pushing us
to Mars, ushering in the electrified future. When Isaacson first
hit the ground running back in twenty twenty one, that's
more or less where the story was.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
In subways deep inside I of course wish he hadn't
bought Twitter, because I'm not somebody who loves conflicting controversy.
I like creativity, and I'm not somebody who liked writing
about people who people really really hate because it makes
(29:33):
them more difficult. However, it certainly makes for a better story.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
On the next episode of On Musk, we descend into
Musk's impulsive side, his preference for drama, his pension for
lashing out its staff, his personal demons, and of course,
the faithful decision to jump into Twitter now x.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Musk turns to his security guard, said, you got a
pocket mine. It's like rocket engines were simpler to him
than human emotions, and that's the type of toughness that
I don't find easy to stomach. It really really turned
me off.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Did he ever turn his anger on you? Did you
experience demon mode directed at you?
Speaker 2 (30:24):
That doesn't excuse all of musk behavior, and sometimes we
confuse explaining something with excusing it.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
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's 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
(30:58):
and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by
Manges Htikador with an assist from Oz Walishan Kostaslinos and
Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson,
Nicki Etor, Kerrie Lieberman, Nathan Otowski, Ali Gavin, and the
folks at WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio
(31:20):
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
could check out my book, The Mastermind. And for more
shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit Kaleidoscope dot NYC.
Thanks so much for listening.
How many rocket launches did you see.
Speaker 2 (00:12):
Yeah, we can talk about visiting some of the launches. Bokachika, Texas,
is at the very southern tip of the state, just
beyond Brownsville on the Gulf of Mexico and right on
the street where Musk's house was. I had this little
airstream trailer, which was a little tough on the laundry
(00:32):
and it's kind of hard to shower. But after a
while it made me feel part of this weird scene
that here on Earth, in this parched scrubland with a
few swamps filled with mosquitoes and these old, abandoned tracked
houses is the base from which people on planet Earth
(00:56):
are going to get to Mars. And I knew that
Musk was going to do the launch of Starship, by
far the biggest rocket ever made, and he was waiting
to launch it in Bokachka, And I'm in the airstream
trailer at five am. He's in the house nearby, and
(01:17):
the security guards wake us up and they take us
to the control room for the countdown, and the countdown
goes ten nine eight, and he nods and they launch
it and it goes up for a minute two minutes
he's watching it. He runs outside onto the deck because
(01:41):
you can see it in the distance, and then runs
back inside. And finally, after about two and a half minutes,
you start noticing that two of the raptors and maybe
three now there's a problem, and they realize it's going
to go off course and they have to send a
signal to blow it up over the water, otherwise it
(02:03):
might do something really bad. So they all look at
Musk and he gives them the signal to blow it up,
and at the end he says, Okay, here's a few
things we've learned. Let's see how fast we can try
it again.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
My name's Evan Ratliffe and this is on Musk with
Walter Isaacson. I'm a journalist and author and recently I
met up with Isaacson over a few days in New Orleans,
tough assignment. I know Isaacson lives there. It's his hometown
and the place he returned to after decades. Is a
big time reporter and editor on the East Coast. Nowadays,
(02:48):
he's a biographer of the kind of people who alter
the world through the force of their intellect. He's written
about Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, the pioneering biologist,
Jennifer DOWDNA, and maybe most famously, Steve Jobs. When we
sat down near Lake Pontchatrain, his six hundred page biography
of Musk had been out for about a month. It
was a book that launched a thousand hot takes, not
(03:10):
least because Elon Musk is himself a hot take launching machine.
But talking to Isaacson, I wanted to try to get
past the noise, if we could, to understand why and
how this gargantuan work came about, and to see with
his eyes what wowed him, what shocked him, and how
he reckoned with the subject who became one of the
richest and most polarizing men on the planet, and who,
(03:32):
since the book's release, at times seems determined to scorch
his own legacy by encouraging and even embracing the online
hate machine, you know, anti Semitism, conspiracy memes, or whatever
he happens to post about this week, this is our
first episode of four, and for this one, for a moment,
(03:52):
let's try and forget everything you've learned about Elon Musk
over the last say three years. Yet who he is
on Twitter. Forget his role in Ukraine or whatever you
know about his personal life, and think about the musk
who helped build the first real online payments company, PayPal,
the first true mass market electric car in Tesla, and
(04:13):
the first private space company to put humans into orbit
with SpaceX. Let's look at his better angels so that
when we talk with Isaacson about his demons, and we will,
we'll have some ballast, some understanding of why he made
such an intriguing subject in the first place, Episode one Genius. So, gentlemen,
(04:49):
I have a coffee going, water ready, bathrooms down the hall.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
I'm rolling.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
All right, you're good, Okay, all right, Walter. It's great
to you. As you can see. I have my copy
of the book here, so I put little flags in
it for things I want to talk about. I don't
think we're going to get to all of these.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
Item't read the book better than I had, just to say, well,
it's good talking one writer to another.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
This'll be fun.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
Well, let's talk for a second about how you got
on this roller coaster. Could you tell me the story
of how this book first came about, the first seed
that this book could be possible.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
A mutual friend of mine in Elon Musk gave me
a call Antonio Gracias. He said, you all ought to talk,
and Mouska and I talked for about hour and a
half or so on the phone, and I said a
couple of things to him. I said, I want to
do a book unlike almost any other books since Boswell
did Doctor Johnson, which is, I want to be by
(05:48):
your side at all times, when you're eating, when you're thinking,
when you're in a meeting, when you're with your family,
and I want for two years to have nothing off limits.
In a very low mono, Tony goes, oh, and then
I go all right, well here's the other thing. I
don't want you to have any control over this book.
I'm not even going to show it to you before
it's published. He goes, okay. So I'm pretty surprised. And
(06:13):
I was with a group of people. I'd gone off
to take the phone call. When I get back, I
was talking and all of a sudden people say, oh
my god, I didn't know you were doing I said,
what do you mean, said, well, Elon Musch just tweeted
out Walter is writing my biography, and I thought, oh, dear,
I guess, I guess I'm committed now.
Speaker 1 (06:31):
And how did the rhythm of that evolve? Like, how
did you figure out when you were going to go,
how many conversations you were going to have?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Every couple of weeks, I'd say, all right, I'd like
to come out and I'll spend the next ten days.
He doesn't have a scheduler because he wanted to keep
control of his own time, so you never know where
he's going. We would sometimes do two or three places
a day, and so I learned pack everything in one
(07:02):
overnight bag. Bring lots of T shirts, black T shirts.
Everybody wears black T shirts.
Speaker 1 (07:07):
So you also got into the black T shirt.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah, And so I was like, all right, So I'd
get four or five black T shirts, a couple of
pairs of khakis, and that would be it. It would
have to be really light. There have to be something
I'd be carrying with me on the factory line. Because
he'd inspect the factory in Fremont, and then he'd turned
to the security guard, who was the one person who
(07:30):
kind of kept things on track. It's okay, now let's
go to Cape Canaveral. We'd get in his plane be
at Cape Canaveral, then be in Boca Chica or in
Austin where he's building the great gigafactory for Tasla. So
you got a whole lot of T shirts and a
whole lot of underwear, and you're ready to go for
the ride. And usually after about ten days of traveling
(07:53):
with them, I'd run out of toothpaste and maybe underwear,
and I'd say, Okay, I'm gonna take a break.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Was absolutely everything on the record, or were there times
when some executive from some other part of the company
or someone tried to say this is off the record.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Musk gave out the word that I could be anywhere
at any time. There were a couple of exceptions that
were both national security classified briefings she was talking to
either General Millie or the CIA, in which he said,
I had to leave the room. But there were times
(08:30):
when they would do a meeting and I would know
that some of the Teesla executives would ask, you know,
can Walter step out. For example, when they were deciding
whether or not to create the twenty five thousand dollars
car that's going to try to go after the Toyota Corolla,
and he wanted not to do it. He wanted to
go leap ahead to the Robotaxi, a car with no
(08:53):
steering wheels that would be self driving, and they were
trying to convince them. No, no, no. He let me
stay in the meeting.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
By the time Isaacson started sitting in on meetings and
everything else, Musk was the chairman, CEO, or chief technology
officer of four companies. Later he'd add two more. You've
probably heard parts of Musk's history, but here's the short version.
Born in South Africa, he'd started in Silicon Valley back
in nineteen ninety five with a company called Zip two,
kind of an early map quest. He founded with his
(09:22):
brother Kimball, financed on his mom's credit cards and fueled
by endless meals at Jack in the Box. After selling
zip too and buying himself a McLaren, he invested much
of the money into x dot com, a financial payments
platform that eventually combined with another company and became PayPal.
Musk's new PayPal partners ousted him from the company, but
he still emerged fabulously wealthy and endlessly connected in the Valley.
(09:45):
He then turned that wealth onto more grandiose goals. First,
with SpaceX, a rocket company created around Musk's dream of
getting humans to Mars. Then Tesla built on the dream
of electrifying not just cars, but all aspects of our lives.
He added a couple of other companies, Neuralink and the
Boring Company. Or recently he's launched an AI company first
(10:07):
called Xai, and of course stuck his head into the
Pandora's box that is Twitter. Now he's combined both of
those under one banner X. It's a staggering amount of
companies to own and operate simultaneously, and as his plane
hopping shows, it's not just board meetings. Musk likes to
be on factory floors and to take an active role
in the engineering.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Musk is also a playful side, an inspirational side, and
he often jokes about toys or things he loves. And
at one point he's sitting at his desk at Tesla
and he's looking at a small car. You know, it's
made of metal, and he looks at the underside of it,
and of course the whole bottom of the car, including
(10:49):
the axles and the chassis, is just one piece. It's
made of cast metal. And so he keeps showing it
to the designers at Tesla and say, why can't we
just cast the entire underside of the car in one piece?
And it's taking ninety one hundred and fifty sometimes components
(11:10):
that have to be welded together. And they said, well,
there's no press big enough to do that. He said,
let's start calling around. And they call around and all
these companies that make presses that can make components or
chassis say, no, that would be impossible. But one I
think in Italy says, okay, we can try it, and
(11:30):
they make this huge press that can do a half
of the chassis and then another and you just have
to pull them together. And then eventually when he builds
this huge autofactory gigatexas, he says, now we're going to
do it in one piece, and they build this giga press,
(11:52):
and so the chassis of the car of a Tesla
is now done in one piece. And he did it
in a funny way. He didn't push people to total distraction.
He just kept saying, think about it. The laws of
physics don't say this is impossible, and they keep looking
at him like he's crazy. But then you go to
(12:14):
the Austin factory and you look at these giga presses
and you say, I get it. That's why other companies
gm getting out of making big evs. Other companies can't
do it. But that sense of the physical properties, the
physics and sort of thinking out of the box, that
(12:37):
was one of the great breakthroughs.
Speaker 1 (12:39):
The other thing that's so interesting about the factory is
you would think that Musk is just automating, automating, automating,
and then he had this incident where he kind of discovers, oh,
we've over automated.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
In twenty seventeen, when he's having trouble with the battery
factory that they've built in Nevada, he moves there, he
sleeps on the floor that he spends months there, and
they realize at some point that something that they're doing
that a robot is trying to do is taking too long.
And he figures out, wait, a human could do this
(13:13):
much faster. We could just get a big wooden table
and hire six people and they could do this three
times as fast. So they run around the factory figure
out what machines are really slowing things down rather than
speeding things up. Musk and this cadre around him and
they have Kansas spray paint, and they're just putting big
(13:34):
xes on machines that they're going to have to take out,
and it's almost like kids playing on the playground marking things.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
And they cut a.
Speaker 2 (13:43):
Hole in the wall of the factory and drag out
some of this excess robotics. He still believes in automation.
He's going to build one of the most automated factories
in the world, both in Austin, Texas and assembly line
for the twenty five thousand dollars car, and then replicate
it in Mexico. But he says that was one of
(14:04):
his big mistakes. He said, we automated at the very
beginning of the process. That should be the last thing
you should do. You should only automate after you've simplified
the process, questioned every requirement, figured out how fast it
could be done. Then you do the automation.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
That story sort of illustrates both the playfulness you describe,
but also the sense that he doesn't seem to care
about sunk costs, like a lot of people would not
do that because they've put so much money into those machines.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
You know. Yeah, there was a.
Speaker 2 (14:37):
Lot of resistance at first because They put a lot
of money, in sweat and effort into making these robots,
but then suddenly they realize that they should go along.
This is going to be interesting. They're going to learn something.
And even though people sometimes feel burned out or attacked
(14:59):
by Musk, those moments where he turns out to be
inspirational and write keep them going.
Speaker 1 (15:08):
After the break, we contemplate the journey to Mars.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Stay with us.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Isaac, since he's firsthand and is reporting that working for
Elon Musk is not a picnic. To put it mildly,
words like demanding or mercurial don't even really capture the
way Musk approaches his employees. We'll get to that in
episode two. But another thing Walter discovers is that incredibly
smart people are happy, even eager, to endure a little
(15:49):
hardship to work for a visionary. For them, Musk is
an epic adventurer, reconnecting us with a lost sense of
new frontiers, whether that's a sustainable energy future or deep
space travel. There is a kind of romantic view of
space travel and do you feel like we have lost
that in general?
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
Musk talks about three or four reasons he wants to
get to Mars. But the most inspiring is the notion
that it's adventure. And he said, space is the ultimate adventure.
I mean, there's a girl who read a lot of
comic books when he was a kid, and so he's
Captain Space. And he says that America somehow lost a
(16:37):
sense of adventure and got mired in its day to
day problems. Now we have all sorts of day to
day problems. Who can't get a speaker of the house,
Sometimes we can't get budgets. Sometimes we get involved in
wars we don't know how to get out of sometimes,
but he says, you put that in perspective by having
a grander vision the thing that makes you want to
(16:59):
get up in the morning, because it's a type of
thing that makes us inspired as a species rather than
mired in the everyday noss And he says, and if
we keep our eye on the need to explore space
and become space faring, it inspires us not only to
do things, but also to do risky things. To know
(17:23):
that people are going to die on the way to Mars.
And it's not that he's cavalier about it, but he
believes you got to take risks and have adventure. He
believes it to a fault too much so, But sometimes
I think the fault with us, the rest of us,
(17:43):
might be we've lost a little bit of that taste.
And do you buy into the vision that that connect
with you? I must admit I don't connect with his
obsession that the planet Earth may get destroyed in the
next fifty years, and AI may just so we have
to keep consciousness alive by having colonies on Mars. I'm like,
(18:05):
all right, the things I'll wake up and worry about,
that's not it. But I do believe we have to
try to go to Mars because I believe in the
inventor of it. When I was a young kid, like
anybody of my generation, I held my breath. As Walter
Cronkite said ten nine eight, it was Pad thirty nine
(18:27):
A at Cape Canaveral. I remember visiting it and then
going back there because Masks now has paid thirty nine A.
And those of us who watched John Glenn get into orbit,
who knew that countdown and held our breath, we do
buy into the notion that traveling through space may not
(18:49):
have a whole lot of utility.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
It may not.
Speaker 2 (18:53):
Be the best use of our resources if you're doing
a cost benefit analysis, but we ought to be doing it,
And so there's an inspiring side to him as well.
The only person who can get astronauts from the US
into orbit and then reland the rocket. No other company,
no other country, has been able to take rockets, get
(19:15):
things and then land them upright and reuse them, which
is necessary if you're going to get to Mars. And likewise,
no other company was ever coming close to getting us
to electric vehicles, and he does it. So I wouldn't
write about somebody who didn't have both an inspiring side
and also a mercurial, sometimes dark side.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
Even in the midst of a launch, standing with his
highest ranking engineer, with all the pressure of whether the
rocket will make it into orbit or explode over the ocean,
Musk can't stop obsessing about his ultimate goal, a colony
on Mars.
Speaker 2 (19:50):
I remember, before that launch of Starship, standing on top
of what's called a high bay. It's about twenty stories high,
and it's where the rock it can be assembled upright,
and on a balcony with Mark and Cusa and a
few others. He's talking about the distant future. He's talking
(20:11):
about How can we make a hundred of these a year?
How many houses are we going to need to build
between here and Brownsville in order to have a workforce.
I can build one hundred a year. And they're even
talking about how they're going to colonize Mores And I'm
thinking this is insane. These people are standing there overlooking
(20:34):
the Gulf of Mexico in this god forsaken place, and
all they can focus on is how are we going
to get a colony to Mars. I mean, clearly, this
is the most interesting person around today. Now. Interesting is
a word that has many nuances to it.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
Isaacson catalogs how Musk's engineering approach, particularly when it comes
to both space and Tesla, involves a kind of first
principles algorithm, examining each individual piece that makes up a
rocket or a car down to the smallest ones, and
asking whether it's necessary, and if it's necessary, whether it
can be made more cheaply. Delete delete, delete, Musk and tones,
(21:18):
and you know you've deleted enough when you discover that
you need to add ten percent back in and looking
at the rockets. Musk is sent to the Space station
while NASA struggles to get Americans into orbit, or at
the over a million electric cars on the road while
the auto industry races to catch up. Well, the algorithm works.
No matter what you think of Musk, This, as Isaacson
(21:39):
portrays it, is a big part of Musk's genius, his
ability to realize large scale engineering marvels by focusing his
attention on the smallest details. But Musk applies the same
algorithm to safety rules and standard regulations in a way
that critics find alarming. So is Musk just a penny
pinching capitalist who flouts sensible go guardrails? Where's hee maverick
(22:02):
genius who blows through other people's cowardice masking as caution,
or maybe Isaacson discovers it can be both. Like in
SpaceX's third attempt to launch the Falcon one, their first rocket,
they're sort of going over the checks and there's this
issue about fuel slashing, and I'm wondering if you can
describe that, because then at the end it has an
(22:24):
incredible kicker to that chapter.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
The Falcon one was the very first rocket that SpaceX built,
and they shot it off from an island in the Pacific,
so it was really hard to get to and the
first one blows up, the second one blows up, and
they make a checklist of all the things you have
to get right. Then they list fifteen to twenty of them.
(22:48):
But Musk is willing to take risks, and he said,
we're only going to worry about the top ten. And
one of them is that if the rocket gets high
enough and the fuel starts to deplete, it'll slash around
in the chamber. So you gotta put little baffles in
the chamber that'll prevent it from slashing around. Wellma says,
(23:08):
that's an extra part. It adds weight. It's something we
should delete, and he deletes it. Well, the rocket goes up,
the fuel slashes, the rocket crashes. They had made that
number eleven on the list of things to worry about,
and he said, from now on, we're including eleven things
on the list.
Speaker 1 (23:26):
And when he says next time, we're going to do
eleven things, not ten, the rocket has just blown up.
What's his level of humor around that statement. Is he
kind of saying very seriously, we've got to do eleven,
not ten, or is he sort of like, hmm, eleven
not ten.
Speaker 2 (23:42):
Next time when something really bad happens, he actually becomes
the calmest and sometimes funny, sometimes making a joke about it,
but also more determined. When the first three rocket launches
of SpaceX blow up, they're out of money.
Speaker 1 (23:58):
That could have been it for the company.
Speaker 2 (23:59):
That's what they thought. Tesla at the end of two
thousand and eight had totally run out of money. SpaceX
had totally run out of money. Both were about to
shut down, and everybody's waiting to see what's going to happen.
And then he says, we're gonna do this. I'm gonna
push all my chips back and roll the dice one
more time, and he ends up writing his own personal
(24:22):
checks finding more money to try to do a fourth launch.
The fourth launch is particularly interesting because they take the
rocket from Los Angeles, where it's built in the factory,
out to this tiny spit of an island in the
middle of the Pacific, and he's in a hurry to
(24:43):
get it done, so he allows him to charter a
cargo plane, and something happens. When the plane starts to descend,
the pressure gets up and the air inside the rocket
starts to collapse, and when they get it down to
the island, they see that one of the tanks is crumpled.
(25:05):
They say to Musk, we're gonna have to bring it
back to Los Angeles. Is going to take another six months,
and he said, no, fix it here. Now that was
an enormous risk. That's a worse rise than not having
Slash baffles. And yet on that sandy hot little island
(25:26):
they work for three weeks pushing out the little dance,
and then they think, okay, this may never work, but
they shoot off the fourth attempt and boom, he gets
to orbit.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
Stay with us, because the portrait of Musk's genius is
about to get complicated. Did you develop a kind of
philosophy of biography I've heard you talk about, or people
(26:01):
have used around you a kind of camera metaphor in
terms of being a biographer and being a camera with
subjects who are alive.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
My goal is always to understand the roots of creativity.
And it's not just about being smart. Because Steve Jobs
probably wasn't as conventionally smart as they Bill Gates, but
he was more creative. The same with Leonardo even Einstein,
who was damn smart. What made them different from Poncaret
(26:30):
and Max Planck and others was that he was creative.
So I try to observe people very carefully and how
their mind works and say, what is it that makes them,
in Steve Jobs's words, think different? And that helped show
how they fit into history, because by being creative, history
(26:55):
is slightly different.
Speaker 1 (26:58):
And that doesn't necessary to require that you like them
or that you think they're a hero, but it does
require at least a belief that if they weren't there,
someone wouldn't just slot into their place. I remember reading
this thing about Warren Buffett, and it was that if
there wasn't a Warren Buffett, there would be a Warren
(27:18):
Buffett because statistically, someone would make all the right bets
and they'd become Warren Buffett. It just happens in the market.
And you could apply a similar notion to these revolutions,
that the revolution was going to happen, there would be
a person. It might not be this person.
Speaker 2 (27:34):
Does that matter the people I write about I believe
mattered that. Yes, at some point people may have figured
out special relativity, maybe in fifty years they would have
tied it together with general relativity and the coverture of gravity.
But because Einstein's there and he does both those things
(27:57):
as well as equals MC squared and many other things.
It really does change the course of physics. Ford in general,
motors in the early two thousands get out of the
electric vehicle business. They crushed the Chevy Bolt or whatever
because they just think it's not there. Musk goes bankrupt
(28:20):
twice almost with Tesla, but he keeps persevering. And now
we have moved into the air of electric vehicles. And
it will look odd if you know somebody ten years
from now who's buying a car that uses internal combustion
engines with extracted fossil fuels. And then he's brought us
(28:41):
back into the era of space adventure. It's the only
person can get astronauts from the US into orbit and
then reland the rocket. No other company, no other country,
has been able to take rockets, get things and then
land them upright and reuse them, which is necessary if
you're going to get to Mars.
Speaker 1 (29:00):
In the story of Musk, the mercurial genius pushing us
to Mars, ushering in the electrified future. When Isaacson first
hit the ground running back in twenty twenty one, that's
more or less where the story was.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
In subways deep inside I of course wish he hadn't
bought Twitter, because I'm not somebody who loves conflicting controversy.
I like creativity, and I'm not somebody who liked writing
about people who people really really hate because it makes
(29:33):
them more difficult. However, it certainly makes for a better story.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
On the next episode of On Musk, we descend into
Musk's impulsive side, his preference for drama, his pension for
lashing out its staff, his personal demons, and of course,
the faithful decision to jump into Twitter now x.
Speaker 2 (29:57):
Musk turns to his security guard, said, you got a
pocket mine. It's like rocket engines were simpler to him
than human emotions, and that's the type of toughness that
I don't find easy to stomach. It really really turned
me off.
Speaker 1 (30:16):
Did he ever turn his anger on you? Did you
experience demon mode directed at you?
Speaker 2 (30:24):
That doesn't excuse all of musk behavior, and sometimes we
confuse explaining something with excusing it.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
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's 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
(30:58):
and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by
Manges Htikador with an assist from Oz Walishan Kostaslinos and
Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson,
Nicki Etor, Kerrie Lieberman, Nathan Otowski, Ali Gavin, and the
folks at WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio
(31:20):
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
could 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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