December 12, 2023 • 44 mins
Be a storyteller, not a preacher. That was novelist Walker Percy’s legendary advice to a young Walter Isaacson. One he takes to heart in his work as a journalist at Time and CNN, and as a biographer of creative genius across the centuries—and in trying to capture someone as volatile as Elon Musk. He reflects on the challenges of holding the complexity of a character in his mind—and the minds of readers—in the modern age, when everyone just wants to know if the emerald mines were real.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
At some point, I'm in college and I didn't quite
know what I wanted to be when I grew up,
and a legendary but young editor. Back then, Harry Evans
had just moved to the Sunday Times of London and
he was the boy Wonder editor, and so he came
to my college and he's talking about a new form
(00:31):
of journalism, investigative journalism done in narrative fashion. I got
my clips and I sent it off to him by mail,
packet of these clips, and saying could I get a job.
A few months later, I get a telegram. Now I
don't think I'd ever gotten a telegram in life, and
(00:52):
I open it up and says, we'll hire on limited basis.
And it was Harry Evans, and I couldn't even figure
out what he was talking about. I'd almost forgotten i'd
sent off my clips. But in the end I went
off that summer and I worked in London for the
Sunday Times. And not only was Harry the most vibrant
(01:14):
editor you could imagine, but he'd send me off to
all sorts of places. I went to northern Morocco to
cover the Spanish Sahara fights. I remember being in Greece
because there were people that were busting the sanctions to
Rhodesia back then. And I had this mentor pal named
David Blundy who I went to Northern Ireland with and
(01:38):
he was fearless. I remember one night we were in
the restaurant at the europe Hotel in Belfas said no,
we got to go cover the riots. I'm like David,
and I learned a lesson because we went and covered
the riots. When we got back the hotel had been bombed.
And so he was this person who influenced me on
getting out there being a bit of a risk taker
(02:01):
as a journalist.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Walter Isakson is the author of eight biographies before Musk.
He started back in nineteen eighty six with one called
The Wise Men, co authored with journalist Evan Thomas, about
the architects of US foreign policy. He's written about lightning
rods like Henry Kissinger, technologists and scientists like Steve Jobs
and Jennifer DOWDNA, historical eminences like Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin
(02:26):
Franklin and Albert Einstein. But Isaacson's own roots are in
the golden age of magazine journalism, at time where he
rose to become editor of the magazine in a pre
and early Internet era when its influence was at its peak.
He jumped to the head of CNN right before nine
to eleven, then the Aspen Institute before returning to his
(02:47):
hometown of New Orleans to teach and write. And if
you've heard Isaacson talk about his approach to telling stories,
including ones like Musks, he often harkens back to growing
up here and what he learned as a kid in
New Orleans. I'm Evan Ratliffe and this is on Musk
with Walter Isaacson, Episode three, The Big Easy and Beyond.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Where are you Ordering from? Or where are you arning from?
All leaned almost anything but Paul Boy Sandwiches anywhere near
here that'd be fine or whatever.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Totally, I've consumed a lot of the interviews that you've
done since the book came out, and there's a lot
of talk of sort of the man in the Arena
and then the sort of Boswell character the biographer, And
so I would like to treat you like the man
in the Arena. So I want to start pretty far back.
(03:51):
Can you paint a picture for me what it was
like growing up here.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
In New Orleans. Storytelling was essential in New Orleans. It
was the only where you could be popular, whether you
were the lunch table, the dinner table, or on the playground.
And so there was in bread in all of us,
especially the kids. I grew up with the notion of
(04:15):
seeing if you could amuse people with good stories. You've
heard the Walker Percy. Yeah, right, yes, I want to
talk about that. Actually yet, I had a group of friends.
We used to go to the Boga Falaya above Link Pontitraine,
and we'd fish and ski and try to capture turtles,
and we'd all tell the stories about the rope swing
or the time that this happened. And one of the
(04:37):
people with us was a young woman named Anne whose
father was Walker Percy. And we never knew what Walker did.
I'd say, Anne, he just always sits on the dock
and drinks bourbon. And she said, well, he's a writer.
I didn't know you could be a writer. And so
one day I was about twelve or thirteen, I read
(04:58):
the Moviegoer No he had just published, and I said
to him, Man, this book's got a lot of lessons
in it. You're trying to teach things. Explain it to me.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
And this is the point where if you've heard Isaacson
on any number of podcasts or TV shows over the years,
or read interviews with him, you'll know that Walker Percy
gave him a singular piece of advice. He repeats it
all the time. For Heaven's sake, be a storyteller. The
world's got far too many preachers. It's advice that has
shaped his thinking ever since.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
And I learned that that's the way the Bible helps
move us along. We start with you know, the greatest
lead sentence ever, which is in the beginning, and we
learn lessons through stories.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
But of course he didn't follow Walker Percy into fiction writing,
although he says he's got a novel in a drawer
that he plans to leave there. Instead, he started as
a beat reporter at the legendary New Orleans Daily.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Remember my first day on the job at the I's picky.
My first day is a reporter, high school kid, police reporter.
Five am to noon. There's a murder happening on Carrollton Avenue.
It's early in the morning. I get sent there and
talk to the police. I get all the facts from
the police spokesman had to go to the payphone on
(06:18):
the quarter to phone it into the city editor. City
editor says, did you talk to the family. They go, no, Billy,
they just had somebody killed in their family. They said,
go back and knock on the door and say you're
from the Picky and you want to talk to them.
Take a deep breath, walk back. I was amazed. They
said come on in. They made me coffee, they brought
(06:39):
out pictures. They talked for more than an hour and
a half. I learned two things. One is people will
talk if you're really there just to listen. You don't
have an agenda, you're not trying to mess with them.
And secondly, back then you had this ability to say
I'm from the paper, let me talk.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Even after the Times pickyun though Isaacson's path wasn't set,
there were other options, ones that probably wouldn't have led
to Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
A year or two after college and university, I got
three job offers in one week. One of them was
to go into politics, congressional race. I was going to
help manage it. It was a guy named Rick Tonri
who ends up in jail, so that was not going
to be the right way to go. The second one
(07:31):
I got a call from Cordbyer. He said, we met
when you were studying in England. What I didn't know
is that he was CIA station chief for Europe and
he used to meet students and young Americans there and
keep track of them. And I was offered a job
with the CIA. HM But so we wouldn't, of course
(07:51):
want you to be undercover. We'd want you to be
in Langley as an analyst. And I'm thinking, wait a minute,
if I'm going to join the CIA, do I want
to just be an analy at headquarters? And the third
job offer I got was because I had covered the
mayor's race in New Orleans that year and twelve candidates
had run. It was a total zoo. But I went
(08:13):
around to every ward leader, in every assessor at every
bar in New Orleans and said, who's going to win
your precinct? And I toted it up and I did
a chart, Here's how it's going to turn out. Well,
it turns out that exact way. The twelve finish in
the order I said, within a half a percentage point
of what we said, and the paper is touting it.
(08:36):
Our City Hall reporter got it right. And it was
just when a guy from Time Magazine. I don't think
they knew what to do with him in the days
before they fired people, so they sent him around the
country to find new journalists. And he offered me a job,
and my mother said take the job at Time magazine.
And she was right, because this is I guess, the
(08:57):
late seventies. That's when news magazines were general interest news magazines.
And for me it was a godsend because I had
always been somebody who was interested in a wide variety
of things. And one week I might be in charge
of the medicine section. Next week can be music, then
(09:20):
foreign affairs, then business, And in some ways it was
like Huck Finn on the raft. You'd get off the raft,
you'd have a wonderful adventure for a week, and they
get back on the raft, and who knew where it
was going to lead? And so it meant I was
never the world's greatest expert on European foreign policy or
(09:41):
on astrophysics, but I knew a little bit about everything
and could see how there were patterns that rippled across
the universe. We can talk about all the downsides there,
which is we were gatekeepers. Walter Kronkit could say that's
the way it is, and Time Magazine could. There were
no citizen journalists. There were nobody challenging the mainstream narrative.
(10:07):
But let me just say selfishly, if you were a
twenty something year old and you got to ride on
the boat with the mainstream narrative people, it taught you
a lot. We didn't even have bylines at Time Magazine.
Then the stories were unsigned. And yet when I called
up Henry Kissinger's office and said, I'm at Time Magazine
(10:30):
and I want to write about you. Partly it was
the ego of Henry Kissinger, but partly it was the
good fortune I had to have an institution behind me.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
One of the reviews of your Kissinger book talked about
how you had gotten this access to him and that
he was probably going to regret it, or he probably
did now regret it. And that made me wonder, how
did you start to formulate an idea of what you
owe that person when you spend time with them.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Back then, in the nineteen eighties, there were two types
of journalists, one with the access journalists, sort of the
Husites and James Restent, who could always talk to people
in power. And then there were the Woodward and Bernstein
investigative journalist types, and I always tried to see if
you could combine both, and so in the case of
(11:26):
the Kissinger book, I think it's an honest story. And
in the end, Time Magazine was having a big celebration
of everybody had been on the cover, and I was
wondering if Kissinger would come back, because he wasn't speaking
to me. He was so angry about the book. And
he called up. He said, vel Volta, even the thirty
(11:47):
years War had to end. At some point, I will
come to the party for Time magazine. I said that's great,
and he said, but you know my wife, Nancy, she's
partial to the one hundred years War. We're going to
have to work on her. So I learned from that
that if you tried to be honest and straight and
tried to get it right, you know, you warnt slamming
them just for the sake of slamming them, But you're
(12:08):
making it clear that the secret bombing of Cambodia was
not a great idea. In the end, people would respect you.
After I dealt with Kissingers, like all right, I'm going
to go and do somebody who's been dead for two
hundred years, so I don't have to worry what they think.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
I think a thing that I was pondering reading about Musk,
and there's a lot about Musk's management philosophy, But you
were also a manager. Eventually you were the editor of
Time Magazine and then of course CNN, and it made
me wonder, what was your management style when you were
running a newsroom.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
I had a very collegial management style and that worked
well at Time Magazine. They're about four hundred people who
are the main core of the magazine, and I knew
them all. You know, been to their how they'd come
out to my house for your step laraties at my house.
And it was easy because it was the nineties and
the magazine was doing well.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Even in say there was a big event and it
was stress and you had to deliver its contents coverage.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
One of the things that Walker Percy taught us is
that people are never happier than when the hurricane's coming.
In other words, you know what you're supposed to do.
You don't have that little ankst and free floating anxiety.
So when big things happened, impeachments of Bill Clinton or
major disasters around the world. We all rallied together, we'd
(13:32):
stay up all night, we'd put out the magazine. When
I talked to Steve Jobs, he was a rougher manager.
He was the opposite. He was not collegial. He said,
you had a lot of empathy, and you thought you
were kind, but mainly it was because you wanted other
people to like you. And he said about himself, I
don't have that luxury. I'm just a middle class kid
(13:54):
trying to build a company. And when people do things
that sock, I've got to tell them it socks, and
then I've got to fire them. And if I'm too collegial,
we'll never get things done. That makes you mask back.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
At your own time, did you say, well, maybe you
were right about if when I ran the.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Baggins, And maybe you were right because soon after I
got there, nine to eleven happens, and we've got the
best team in the world. But then the war winds down.
Fox starts coming up, MSNBC starts coming up, and I'm
being too nice. I care that lou Dobbs and Grete
Ancestorn liked me, that Larry King thinks I'm a nice person,
(14:33):
and I needed to disrupt CNN at that point it
needed to be brought into a digital age to compete
with MSNBC and Fox. And I was terrible at that.
I was not a tough enough, disruptive enough manager, and
I didn't have it in my heart to want to be.
And so after my contract was up, I left and
(14:55):
went to the Asphon Institute, which is dedicated to finding consensus,
and it's the oracle at Delphi know thyself, and what
I learned about myself was I'm not gonna be a
disruptor like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I'm not gonna
be that tough of a manager.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
You've talked about how the heyday of Time, and there
was a heyday of CNN, and a lot of people
have sort of written that down and you kind of
ejected from that And as you watched it subsequently, did
you feel like you had escaped to another planet?
Speaker 1 (15:27):
And then the one that you left blew up. I
try to wake up every morning and be grateful. Boy,
my timing has been good. You know. I got out
of Time magazine just in time. I mean, after I left,
news magazines get decimated, likewise CNN. You know whether or
(15:48):
not it's still doing good journalism. It's certainly been decimated
as a business model. So yeah, I sometimes feel like
in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of Elon Musk books,
feel like I'm just making it off of each planet
just in the nick of time.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Stay with us after the break to learn how Isaacson
managed to capture Musk's manic lifetime across six hundred pages
and get to the truth about Musk's emerald mind, inheritance
and who really founded Tesla. I want to talk about
(16:34):
that preacher versus storyteller distinction a little bit, first of all,
because I also grew up in the South I Group
in Georgia, and oftentimes the best preachers are in fact storytellers.
So what did it mean to you the distinction? What's
the divide there?
Speaker 1 (16:51):
As I learned from reading The Moviegoer when I first
read it at age twelve, any story has a moral
behind it, but the moral should be behind it, not
in front of it. I'm leading with what I'm bringing
to the party because everybody on talk radio and cable
TV and every blog and podcast they have opinions about Mosque,
But I got the story of what happened that Friday night,
(17:13):
or that story of what's in the hospital in Austin
with his two girlfriend, or any of these stories. So
that's what I'm bringing to the party. I try to
give you the story as clear, honest, straight and un varnished.
And I have a card that's on my wall near
my computer, and I look at it whenever I get
(17:36):
stuck trying to convey, well, is Mosque rough on people?
Or is he got some political feelings in a certain way?
And the card simply says, let me tell you a story.
And so I stop, and I don't try to preach
or I don't try to pontificate. I say, what's the
(17:56):
best story in my notebook that illustrates this? Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
I want to shift gears slightly and find out a
little bit about the writing process because this book. First,
first of all, is there stuff that went to the
cutting room floor that you still think about or wish
you had included?
Speaker 1 (18:18):
First of all, nobody has ever accused this book of
being too short. People always begin with hits six hundred page.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
People love doorstop.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah, yeah, the word doorstop. When I was young and
Evan Thomas, my friend, and I were doing the Wise
Men about the Six Friends in Cold War Foreign policy.
Our editor looked at a whole section about the World
Bank and said, cut it out. Nobody is going to care,
and so we did. And then there was one review
(18:49):
that said there's not enough in it about the creation
of the World Bank, and I mentioned it to our
Editornecy said, yes, I think we're going to use that
as a blurb on a paperback to say not enough
about the creation of the World Back. That'll be a
selling feature of the book. You have to learn, you know,
some things are important but maybe not that interesting.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I love getting in the weeds on process myself, But
what's your literal organizational system? Do you have a paper
based system, do you have a use a software? How
do you keep all of this stuff?
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Early on, I was a fast adopter of computer technology,
so I was looking for all sorts of complex ways
to do note cards and organize them and stuff. And
I discovered that the best organizational structure is chronological. Whether
you're writing about Leonardo da Vinci or you're writing about
Elon Mosk, you put all your notes in chronological order.
(19:46):
And the simplest way to organize it, I discovered was
just a big word file. You know, if I it
would be word file. Yeah, maybe eight hundred thousand words
by the end, and I would just put things in
in order, little key words that I could search, like
asshole you with the asterisk. And then when you write
(20:10):
the book, you try to keep it as chronological as
you can, but you can't make it totally chronological, especially
with a mosque. If one morning he's obsessing about buying Twitter,
but then he has to worry about a valve leak
on a raptor engine happening in Texas, and then he's
on a meeting about full self driving. You don't want
the book to just be one damn thing after another.
(20:33):
You decide, all right, how am I going to cluster
these so that they have a certain coherence to them.
In the Muss Book, you'll notice something different from my
other books. The chapters are very short, and they're very
fast paced, because I want to show how he moves
(20:54):
bing bing bing really fast through things, not a whole
lot of pausing and reflecting. And that's consciously to make
you feel like you're going through this book the way
he goes through life.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
What does it look like when Walter Isaacson sits down
to write. How do you get to a six hundred
page or could have been twelve hundred page biography? What
does the daily process look like?
Speaker 1 (21:21):
I work at night. I tend to like to start
writing at eight pm. Happily married to somebody who's a
morning person, so we each have our quiet time while
the other's not awake, and I'll work till two three
in the morning. I now use a trick I learned
from Leonardo da Vinci, which is I'll sketch something out,
(21:45):
and then I'll add another layer of brushstrokes. Then I'll
add another layer of polish. Then I'll sort of refine
it a bit. So if I'm going to write about,
say the launch of Xai, the artificial intelligence company, I'll
have rough chronological notes of sitting there in the backyard
(22:07):
with him. Here's what happens when he calls Sam Altman
to Twitter headquarters, Here's what happens when they have a
showdown over how open Ai became closed. And it'll all
be chronological, and then I'll do a rough draft in
which I weave it into a story, making a point
not to use a transition sentences. This is something I
(22:29):
learned at Time magazine, which is transition sentences lock you
into a certain order of paragraphs, whereas if it got
an integrity to it, you don't need the transition sentence.
But it also allows you to move the paragraphs around,
and so I write in a rough way without transitions.
Then I reordered the paragraphs, and then, as if I
(22:51):
were Leonardo, although I'm not as good as Leonardo, I
put another layer of refinement of finishing of glass onto
it and then read it out loud, printed out on paper,
because it reads different on paper than on the screen.
Read it out loud on paper, Let my wife read it,
and then do them all round a polishing.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Walter Isacson interviewed about one hundred different people for the book,
Musk's friends, family, and colleagues, and a smattering of detractors
or frenemies. It was a massive undertaking, and it's those
interviews that inform everything until twenty twenty one, when Isaacson
set out to be Musk's ever present shadow.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
I did the first half of the book. First, wrote
it all the way through, getting me up to the
point where I'm riding alongside Musk. No that I'm not there.
In twenty seven, twenty eighteen, yeah, when he's smoking Dopa
and the Joe Roganshaw. I'm not in the studio. I'm
happily ensconced in Jennifer Dowdner's biotech lab or something. And
(23:53):
then I had the stuff that was unfolding at the
time and me being there as a happening, and I
kept that in this big chronological set of notes and
waited to start writing it until pretty much I had
done the most of the reporting. I was putting the
(24:14):
finishing touches, you know, six weeks before it got published
in September.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
When do you sort of know when you're done? I mean,
like in the middle of your story, he bought Twitter.
So how far do you need to see that through
before you feel like okay?
Speaker 1 (24:33):
I felt I needed to make sure that you understood
Musk fully so that whatever happens five years from now,
this book still explains who he is, because even though
there are multiple mask personalities, it's not like he changes
in essence. But there were moments as the book was finishing,
(24:56):
I'd get up in the morning and just turn on
my phone. Is it still there? Was it like a
rocket ship? Did it blow up? So yeah, I held
my breath a couple of times, but I began to
see that it had come to a good logical conclusion.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
There are some stories about Musk that have been repeated
so many times, often without supporting details, that they become
kind of slogans for his critics or his supporters. Musk
is the scion of an emerald mind, or no, Musk
came from nothing, Musk founded Tesla, or he just bought
it from some other guys who did. Part of Isaacson's
(25:35):
task was winding his way back through these layers of
Musk lore. There are people who have extremely strong views
of Musk, and they're often based on stories that get
told over and over again. Did you start the book
knowing those stories and wanting to delve into them. Did
you keep tabs on the perceptions that people have and
(25:57):
you were trying to play against those or you were
trying to block out that type.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Of Oh, I knew all the disputes, whether or not
he deserved to be called a co founder of Tesla's,
whether or not his father had an emerald mind. And
you know what, there's not an exact one sentence answer,
but there's a maybe two paragraph answer on the emerald
mind and the fact that his father didn't have an
ownership stake, but did for a while get a supply
(26:23):
of emeralds from a mine that was in Zambia, not
in South Africa, and then it went bankrupt, so he
had money for a while, but then the business collapses.
That's not as easy or as fun of a hot
take of he's an emerald mind heir or he didn't
own an emerald mind.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
But at the same time, he did invest in Musk's
first company, and his mom give him some money, Like
there was a kind of.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
There was a very I can't remember, but was like
ten THOLLI yeah, ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
He did support him, Like the part of the story
that's like he had a little leg up because his
family could give him some money to start a company.
There's a nugget there.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
That's a nugget, and I explained both the starting of
that company but also basically running away to Canada when
he's seventeen, and you know, he arrives with virtually no money.
He has a couple of thousand dollars of travelers check,
which he loses on a bus. He ends up you know,
a student loans. So it's not as if he gets
(27:18):
there and has, like Benjamin Franklin, only three coins in
his pocket, but he also doesn't have pockets full of emeralds,
and he's not a trust fund kid. So that just
shows that this knee jerk all or nothing, that he
had huge sums of money in his pockets when he came,
(27:38):
or he was totally put Now life is a bit
more complex, and I try to show just the truth,
the exact number he had and what that did and
what it didn't do.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
The Tesla origin story is that's something that I had
heard about, knew very little about, and it's it's very messy.
It takes a lot long time to go through actually
how they ended at the point of like who's a
founder and who's not a founder of Tesla.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
If something's a big success, all of a sudden, everybody remembers, Hey,
that was my idea, or hey they stole that idea
from me, And so the story is out a one
sentence answer, but it's a pretty fast moving, a hope chapter.
Martin Eberhart and Mark Tarpening having tried to start a company.
They had no money and no employees, but they had
the name Tesla that they had registered JB. Strabel, who
(28:30):
was also creating a battery company and trying to do
ac propulsion. And then Musk, who puts in the money,
puts all these groups together, becomes a chairman and funds it.
So in the end, who gets to be called the founder? Well, boy,
they fight over it. I mean, it's just so brutal.
They hate each other. I mean, if you mentioned Mark
(28:52):
Tarpening's name, he gets mad, and vice versa. And it
went to court, and in the end the court said,
here are five people who equally have the rights to
call themselves co founders of Tesla. Once again, I got
no dog in this hunt. I tell you the story,
and I try to do it step by step. Who
(29:12):
does what, and you demystify things, you debunk certain myths,
and you also don't fall into the vortex of all
these controversies.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
I love the detail that they actually did have a
non disparagement agreement as part of the court case, but they.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Themselves, I mean, yes, right, I mean, these are guys
even when they're talking to me, I've signed a non disparagement,
but he's an asshole. He's lying, you know.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
And one of the guys even says I don't understand
he's the richest.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Man in the world. Martin Neberhard.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Martin Nebhert says, he's the richest man in the world.
Why does he have to keep talking about it? He
has everything? Yeah, yeah, Why you know?
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Why are you so mad about Martin Eberhart? Why does
it eat away at you so much? And he would say,
this guy tried to take the credit. And in the end,
you don't understand Musk if you don't understand why Musk
is so obsessed by these things.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
After the break, Isaacson recounts how he maintains access even
as he's divulging embarrassing details his subjects don't want the
world to know.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Stay with us.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
It's one thing to be able to tell the story,
but to tell it, you have to have it. You
have to not only show up in the right places
at the right times, lingering long enough that people might
even forget while you're there, but you also need an
eye for the details and an ear for the dialogue
that combined to create the story. Something Isaacson learned decades
ago working at Time magazine.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
The very first story I wrote is a political reporter
for Time, involved the Ronald Reagan campaign, and I was
covering it, and I had gotten to know one of
his advisors on the airplane trips, a guy named Mike Deaver.
And one day Reagan is giving his stump speech and
(31:16):
he's spouting off all these things they're just untripped, that
trees cause pollution, that you know, typical Reagan things, welfare
queen stories or whatever. And I look at Mike Deaver,
who's standing next to me, and he's shaking his head
and he says, I don't know where did he get
those facts? You know, we always try to correct him.
(31:39):
He of course thought he was just talking to me,
But I'm a journalist. So the end of the week's
story comes out and it leads with Mike Deaver saying
to me, he's making all this up. It's so frustrating.
Where to get those facts? Well, I thought that was
going to be the end of all my access. Stunningly,
(31:59):
I get on the campaign plane for the next trip
and I got called to the front of the plane
and diver sits me next to Ronald Reagan. Suddenly they
knew who I was. They paid attention. It was as
if by swatting them. I mean, I just told the truth.
It's like, oh, okay, this is a guy to be
(32:20):
reckoned with. And it was another of those lessons that
if you have access, they respect you more, not less,
if you use it to try to tell the truth,
even in ways they may not like.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
With Musk, that access meant logging miles in the ground,
on the factory floor, and many more in the air.
Granted it was on Musk's private jet, not exactly the
nineteen eighty style reporting.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Isaacson came up on. I'm very good at sleeping on airplanes.
I learned that when I covered the nineteen eighty presidential campaign.
I was really young, just coming out of the Times
picking in New Orleans and joined Time magazine and they
put me on the Ted Kennedy campaign, which was a
relentless campaign and a small charter plane, and I learned
(33:08):
to fall asleep instantly because it was the only time
he gets sleep. But when I was traveling with Musk,
you'd get on the plane and of course you couldn't
sleep because it was the one time when he would
just be there free, associating, and so I never tried
to bother him when he was thinking. I'd just be
(33:30):
there alert during the entire plane ride three four hours,
and occasionally I'd just say one or two words, like cybertruck,
and he'd talk about his autistic son Saxon, saying the
future should look like the future, and so how he
had changed the design. But you just prompt him with
(33:50):
a word or two and let them free associate. So
I didn't do any truly formal interviews where you just
sitting across from somebody with a notebook. I would just
let him talk as we walked along an assembly line,
or let him talk during the airplane ride. And sometimes
(34:13):
he'd have fifteen minutes between meetings. They knew to schedule that,
where he'd be in an intense meeting, say about Optimist
the robot, and then in the same conference room they
might do another meeting about battery cells and what the
anode and cathoe should be made of. But there'd always
be ten or fifteen minutes between them. And at first
(34:35):
I thought maybe I should step out, because he used
that private time to do emails. Sometimes i'd sort of
fire up Twitter to see if he was tweeting or
I was sitting in the room with him. Sometimes he'd
play video games, but then he would look up at
some point, and I would do something we in New
Orleans always do at dinner, So I'd say, tell me
(34:58):
a story. Say tell me the story of the twenty
eighteen surge at the Fremont Factory. Tell me the story
of when you went on Joe Rogan, you know, tell
me the story of when you did that tweet about
calling a British cave diver a pedophile. And it wouldn't
(35:19):
be a pointed question. It was always prefaced with tell
me the story. And sometimes he'd be with people have
been working with him for a long time, so in
some ways my role was not to interview him, but
to extract stories and bide my time. And the great
luxury of having two years and almost indefinite amounts of
(35:45):
time with him is you could go back to it
later and say, tell me again about that story of
where you're looking at the toy at your desk. The
difficult thing with Mosque is that some he'd recount things,
but you know, his memory wasn't perfect. That's true of
(36:05):
all of us, but there's everything with Musk. It's more
so with him. He could embellish or whatever. So I
often would have to go to five or six people.
I'd have to go to Mark Junkosa and say, tell
me the story about when he fired everybody at Starlink,
put you in charge and you redesign the Starlink satellite
(36:25):
to make it simpler. And I'd have must tell the story,
and I'd have Musk assistant who was there, tell the story.
And sometimes you get Kimball to tell the story. And
so in the book, I'm very careful to say hear
all the sources. And I warned Musk. I said, you
know you're going to read the book and the stories
(36:47):
are not going to be exactly the way you remembered them,
because other people remember them differently. And he said, I
know that's the case. I know that the stories may
not be the way I remembered them even nowadays. I
talked to Kimball Musk after the book came out. He said,
you know, I think the book is really good. It's
not always the way I remember it. But then I
(37:08):
looked at your sources and I realized you were talking
to a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
You said it came off the trail on the set
of twenty twenty three, and I know you've described how
you did get called back by him. For some subsequent reporting.
But before that, what you thought was your last day.
Was that a day that you had designated where you said,
I'm going to close my notebook at the end of
this day, and that's it.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Early in twenty twenty three, I realized I had enough
material that you can understand Mosk. I had enough stories,
so whatever he did in the future, you'd get him.
And I looked for what should be the culmination of
the book, and I didn't really want it to be
Twitter and it pottering along and also messing up moderation,
(37:57):
because I think that's not a big deal for him.
The big deal was space travel. And I knew that
he was going to do the launch of Starship in
Boca Chica, and I'd been there for the surges over
the course of twenty twenty two where they stacked it
and unstacked it and tested its thirty three raptor engines
and fixed all the valves. And I said, I think
(38:20):
that will be the culminating scene in the book.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
And this takes us back to that opening scene from
our first episode where the Starship rocket makes liftoff but
then goes off course and they have to blow it
up over the ocean.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
And I remember talking to my editor and to my
wife a few hours later, and they had watched this
on television and they said, oh my god, what does
this do to the end of this book. I say,
it's a perfect metaphor. We know Starship's going to launch again,
we know at some point it's going to get to orbit.
But I wanted to have a scene that was somewhat pointed,
(39:00):
of him being determined, of him being visionary, of him
having taken too many risks and blown up a rocket,
and him being with people who had work with him
for twenty years, but also kind of being alone, no
matter who was hugging him, his girlfriend, his mother, his son,
and him just staring at that little red dot of Mars.
(39:23):
And I know it sounds like I'm embellishing a bit,
but it was rising in the sky and thinking, all right,
there's a lot of smoldering rubble, but if anybody's going
to get us to Mars is this guy. So it's
not as if I absolutely respect everything about Mosque, but
I do respect the fact that he's worth writing about
(39:44):
because he's having this enormous impact.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
And you're very comfortable holding that tension in your head.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Those of us who are biographers have to be able
to create characters that we hold many things in our
minds about them. So I'm very comfortable holding that tension
I head. I'm very uncomfortable to the fact that as
a society we've lost the ability to hold that in
our heads. We either canonize or demonize somebody in one
(40:15):
hundred and forty characters, and we used to be able
to understand, to go back to Shakespeare, that even the
best or molded out of their flaws, and that's true
of our historical figures, and it's true of an Eon Musk.
Speaker 2 (40:36):
There is also a question, though embedded in the WEI
there that goes back to this sort of Time Newsweek
Walter Cronkite, Is it possible that that approach, the dismissive
approach that always existed their voice, just wasn't included in
the WEI, that was sort of balancing out positive and negative.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Yes, I think you're right. There's often a mainstream concent
census that leaves a lot of people out of forming
that consensus, and so often the reputations of complex people
are not just about them, but they are a mirror
that's reflecting ourselves and It tells us a lot about
(41:17):
ourselves at any given time, and as you say, different
people will have different views of it. This is why
I can write a book about Ben Franklin, even though
maybe one hundred books have been written about Ben Franklin,
because every person in every period probably does well to
(41:38):
try to paint their own view of what he was like.
And I think history is painted in many layers. I
think I give you unvarnished what I saw, the good,
the bad, and the ugly. But I know that that's
not the final word. I know that a century from
now people will figure out the historic significance of an
(42:02):
Elon Musk. No, they'll probably be using some of the
stories of my book to prove whatever case for against
them they want to use. But each of us gets
to write a subsequent draft of our.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Time, or a sensient AI will just be writing it
like they're writing the history of the Dodo bird or
some extinct.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
We'll be interesting to know what a generative large language
model will do when they can read every biography of
Musk and you say, was Musk a good guy or
a bad guy? I think that simple question will flummix
even the most sophisticated AI.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
Coming up. On the final episode of On Musk with
Walter Isaacson, we weigh up Musk's legacy. What should we
take away from Isaacson On Musk? We ask Isaacson to
answer his critics, try to sess out how this portrait
will age and surface some stories from the book everyone
seems to have ignored.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
They kick him out, and for twenty years it's eating
away at which is why, of course he bunched by Twitter.
And in the middle of the night, Musk calls hotel
security and makes him open the safe so he can
start tweeting out where thinks. That's who Musk is, And
that's why I just didn't believe him, And I'm not
even sure he believed himself. People who say I'm not
(43:21):
as tough on Musk as I should be are always
using anecdotes from my book to show why we should
be tough on Musk. I would love it if he
would lie love for like a year, but he ain't
gonna do that.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
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
(43:56):
and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by
Monga Shatikador with an assist from Oz Walishan Kostaslinos and
Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson,
Nikki Etur, Kerrie Lieberman, Nathan Otowski, Ali Gavin and the
folks at WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio
(44:17):
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.
At some point, I'm in college and I didn't quite
know what I wanted to be when I grew up,
and a legendary but young editor. Back then, Harry Evans
had just moved to the Sunday Times of London and
he was the boy Wonder editor, and so he came
to my college and he's talking about a new form
(00:31):
of journalism, investigative journalism done in narrative fashion. I got
my clips and I sent it off to him by mail,
packet of these clips, and saying could I get a job.
A few months later, I get a telegram. Now I
don't think I'd ever gotten a telegram in life, and
(00:52):
I open it up and says, we'll hire on limited basis.
And it was Harry Evans, and I couldn't even figure
out what he was talking about. I'd almost forgotten i'd
sent off my clips. But in the end I went
off that summer and I worked in London for the
Sunday Times. And not only was Harry the most vibrant
(01:14):
editor you could imagine, but he'd send me off to
all sorts of places. I went to northern Morocco to
cover the Spanish Sahara fights. I remember being in Greece
because there were people that were busting the sanctions to
Rhodesia back then. And I had this mentor pal named
David Blundy who I went to Northern Ireland with and
(01:38):
he was fearless. I remember one night we were in
the restaurant at the europe Hotel in Belfas said no,
we got to go cover the riots. I'm like David,
and I learned a lesson because we went and covered
the riots. When we got back the hotel had been bombed.
And so he was this person who influenced me on
getting out there being a bit of a risk taker
(02:01):
as a journalist.
Speaker 2 (02:04):
Walter Isakson is the author of eight biographies before Musk.
He started back in nineteen eighty six with one called
The Wise Men, co authored with journalist Evan Thomas, about
the architects of US foreign policy. He's written about lightning
rods like Henry Kissinger, technologists and scientists like Steve Jobs
and Jennifer DOWDNA, historical eminences like Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin
(02:26):
Franklin and Albert Einstein. But Isaacson's own roots are in
the golden age of magazine journalism, at time where he
rose to become editor of the magazine in a pre
and early Internet era when its influence was at its peak.
He jumped to the head of CNN right before nine
to eleven, then the Aspen Institute before returning to his
(02:47):
hometown of New Orleans to teach and write. And if
you've heard Isaacson talk about his approach to telling stories,
including ones like Musks, he often harkens back to growing
up here and what he learned as a kid in
New Orleans. I'm Evan Ratliffe and this is on Musk
with Walter Isaacson, Episode three, The Big Easy and Beyond.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Where are you Ordering from? Or where are you arning from?
All leaned almost anything but Paul Boy Sandwiches anywhere near
here that'd be fine or whatever.
Speaker 2 (03:29):
Totally, I've consumed a lot of the interviews that you've
done since the book came out, and there's a lot
of talk of sort of the man in the Arena
and then the sort of Boswell character the biographer, And
so I would like to treat you like the man
in the Arena. So I want to start pretty far back.
(03:51):
Can you paint a picture for me what it was
like growing up here.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
In New Orleans. Storytelling was essential in New Orleans. It
was the only where you could be popular, whether you
were the lunch table, the dinner table, or on the playground.
And so there was in bread in all of us,
especially the kids. I grew up with the notion of
(04:15):
seeing if you could amuse people with good stories. You've
heard the Walker Percy. Yeah, right, yes, I want to
talk about that. Actually yet, I had a group of friends.
We used to go to the Boga Falaya above Link Pontitraine,
and we'd fish and ski and try to capture turtles,
and we'd all tell the stories about the rope swing
or the time that this happened. And one of the
(04:37):
people with us was a young woman named Anne whose
father was Walker Percy. And we never knew what Walker did.
I'd say, Anne, he just always sits on the dock
and drinks bourbon. And she said, well, he's a writer.
I didn't know you could be a writer. And so
one day I was about twelve or thirteen, I read
(04:58):
the Moviegoer No he had just published, and I said
to him, Man, this book's got a lot of lessons
in it. You're trying to teach things. Explain it to me.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
And this is the point where if you've heard Isaacson
on any number of podcasts or TV shows over the years,
or read interviews with him, you'll know that Walker Percy
gave him a singular piece of advice. He repeats it
all the time. For Heaven's sake, be a storyteller. The
world's got far too many preachers. It's advice that has
shaped his thinking ever since.
Speaker 1 (05:30):
And I learned that that's the way the Bible helps
move us along. We start with you know, the greatest
lead sentence ever, which is in the beginning, and we
learn lessons through stories.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
But of course he didn't follow Walker Percy into fiction writing,
although he says he's got a novel in a drawer
that he plans to leave there. Instead, he started as
a beat reporter at the legendary New Orleans Daily.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Remember my first day on the job at the I's picky.
My first day is a reporter, high school kid, police reporter.
Five am to noon. There's a murder happening on Carrollton Avenue.
It's early in the morning. I get sent there and
talk to the police. I get all the facts from
the police spokesman had to go to the payphone on
(06:18):
the quarter to phone it into the city editor. City
editor says, did you talk to the family. They go, no, Billy,
they just had somebody killed in their family. They said,
go back and knock on the door and say you're
from the Picky and you want to talk to them.
Take a deep breath, walk back. I was amazed. They
said come on in. They made me coffee, they brought
(06:39):
out pictures. They talked for more than an hour and
a half. I learned two things. One is people will
talk if you're really there just to listen. You don't
have an agenda, you're not trying to mess with them.
And secondly, back then you had this ability to say
I'm from the paper, let me talk.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Even after the Times pickyun though Isaacson's path wasn't set,
there were other options, ones that probably wouldn't have led
to Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
A year or two after college and university, I got
three job offers in one week. One of them was
to go into politics, congressional race. I was going to
help manage it. It was a guy named Rick Tonri
who ends up in jail, so that was not going
to be the right way to go. The second one
(07:31):
I got a call from Cordbyer. He said, we met
when you were studying in England. What I didn't know
is that he was CIA station chief for Europe and
he used to meet students and young Americans there and
keep track of them. And I was offered a job
with the CIA. HM But so we wouldn't, of course
(07:51):
want you to be undercover. We'd want you to be
in Langley as an analyst. And I'm thinking, wait a minute,
if I'm going to join the CIA, do I want
to just be an analy at headquarters? And the third
job offer I got was because I had covered the
mayor's race in New Orleans that year and twelve candidates
had run. It was a total zoo. But I went
(08:13):
around to every ward leader, in every assessor at every
bar in New Orleans and said, who's going to win
your precinct? And I toted it up and I did
a chart, Here's how it's going to turn out. Well,
it turns out that exact way. The twelve finish in
the order I said, within a half a percentage point
of what we said, and the paper is touting it.
(08:36):
Our City Hall reporter got it right. And it was
just when a guy from Time Magazine. I don't think
they knew what to do with him in the days
before they fired people, so they sent him around the
country to find new journalists. And he offered me a job,
and my mother said take the job at Time magazine.
And she was right, because this is I guess, the
(08:57):
late seventies. That's when news magazines were general interest news magazines.
And for me it was a godsend because I had
always been somebody who was interested in a wide variety
of things. And one week I might be in charge
of the medicine section. Next week can be music, then
(09:20):
foreign affairs, then business, And in some ways it was
like Huck Finn on the raft. You'd get off the raft,
you'd have a wonderful adventure for a week, and they
get back on the raft, and who knew where it
was going to lead? And so it meant I was
never the world's greatest expert on European foreign policy or
(09:41):
on astrophysics, but I knew a little bit about everything
and could see how there were patterns that rippled across
the universe. We can talk about all the downsides there,
which is we were gatekeepers. Walter Kronkit could say that's
the way it is, and Time Magazine could. There were
no citizen journalists. There were nobody challenging the mainstream narrative.
(10:07):
But let me just say selfishly, if you were a
twenty something year old and you got to ride on
the boat with the mainstream narrative people, it taught you
a lot. We didn't even have bylines at Time Magazine.
Then the stories were unsigned. And yet when I called
up Henry Kissinger's office and said, I'm at Time Magazine
(10:30):
and I want to write about you. Partly it was
the ego of Henry Kissinger, but partly it was the
good fortune I had to have an institution behind me.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
One of the reviews of your Kissinger book talked about
how you had gotten this access to him and that
he was probably going to regret it, or he probably
did now regret it. And that made me wonder, how
did you start to formulate an idea of what you
owe that person when you spend time with them.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
Back then, in the nineteen eighties, there were two types
of journalists, one with the access journalists, sort of the
Husites and James Restent, who could always talk to people
in power. And then there were the Woodward and Bernstein
investigative journalist types, and I always tried to see if
you could combine both, and so in the case of
(11:26):
the Kissinger book, I think it's an honest story. And
in the end, Time Magazine was having a big celebration
of everybody had been on the cover, and I was
wondering if Kissinger would come back, because he wasn't speaking
to me. He was so angry about the book. And
he called up. He said, vel Volta, even the thirty
(11:47):
years War had to end. At some point, I will
come to the party for Time magazine. I said that's great,
and he said, but you know my wife, Nancy, she's
partial to the one hundred years War. We're going to
have to work on her. So I learned from that
that if you tried to be honest and straight and
tried to get it right, you know, you warnt slamming
them just for the sake of slamming them, But you're
(12:08):
making it clear that the secret bombing of Cambodia was
not a great idea. In the end, people would respect you.
After I dealt with Kissingers, like all right, I'm going
to go and do somebody who's been dead for two
hundred years, so I don't have to worry what they think.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
I think a thing that I was pondering reading about Musk,
and there's a lot about Musk's management philosophy, But you
were also a manager. Eventually you were the editor of
Time Magazine and then of course CNN, and it made
me wonder, what was your management style when you were
running a newsroom.
Speaker 1 (12:45):
I had a very collegial management style and that worked
well at Time Magazine. They're about four hundred people who
are the main core of the magazine, and I knew
them all. You know, been to their how they'd come
out to my house for your step laraties at my house.
And it was easy because it was the nineties and
the magazine was doing well.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Even in say there was a big event and it
was stress and you had to deliver its contents coverage.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
One of the things that Walker Percy taught us is
that people are never happier than when the hurricane's coming.
In other words, you know what you're supposed to do.
You don't have that little ankst and free floating anxiety.
So when big things happened, impeachments of Bill Clinton or
major disasters around the world. We all rallied together, we'd
(13:32):
stay up all night, we'd put out the magazine. When
I talked to Steve Jobs, he was a rougher manager.
He was the opposite. He was not collegial. He said,
you had a lot of empathy, and you thought you
were kind, but mainly it was because you wanted other
people to like you. And he said about himself, I
don't have that luxury. I'm just a middle class kid
(13:54):
trying to build a company. And when people do things
that sock, I've got to tell them it socks, and
then I've got to fire them. And if I'm too collegial,
we'll never get things done. That makes you mask back.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
At your own time, did you say, well, maybe you
were right about if when I ran the.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
Baggins, And maybe you were right because soon after I
got there, nine to eleven happens, and we've got the
best team in the world. But then the war winds down.
Fox starts coming up, MSNBC starts coming up, and I'm
being too nice. I care that lou Dobbs and Grete
Ancestorn liked me, that Larry King thinks I'm a nice person,
(14:33):
and I needed to disrupt CNN at that point it
needed to be brought into a digital age to compete
with MSNBC and Fox. And I was terrible at that.
I was not a tough enough, disruptive enough manager, and
I didn't have it in my heart to want to be.
And so after my contract was up, I left and
(14:55):
went to the Asphon Institute, which is dedicated to finding consensus,
and it's the oracle at Delphi know thyself, and what
I learned about myself was I'm not gonna be a
disruptor like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I'm not gonna
be that tough of a manager.
Speaker 2 (15:12):
You've talked about how the heyday of Time, and there
was a heyday of CNN, and a lot of people
have sort of written that down and you kind of
ejected from that And as you watched it subsequently, did
you feel like you had escaped to another planet?
Speaker 1 (15:27):
And then the one that you left blew up. I
try to wake up every morning and be grateful. Boy,
my timing has been good. You know. I got out
of Time magazine just in time. I mean, after I left,
news magazines get decimated, likewise CNN. You know whether or
(15:48):
not it's still doing good journalism. It's certainly been decimated
as a business model. So yeah, I sometimes feel like
in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of Elon Musk books,
feel like I'm just making it off of each planet
just in the nick of time.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Stay with us after the break to learn how Isaacson
managed to capture Musk's manic lifetime across six hundred pages
and get to the truth about Musk's emerald mind, inheritance
and who really founded Tesla. I want to talk about
(16:34):
that preacher versus storyteller distinction a little bit, first of all,
because I also grew up in the South I Group
in Georgia, and oftentimes the best preachers are in fact storytellers.
So what did it mean to you the distinction? What's
the divide there?
Speaker 1 (16:51):
As I learned from reading The Moviegoer when I first
read it at age twelve, any story has a moral
behind it, but the moral should be behind it, not
in front of it. I'm leading with what I'm bringing
to the party because everybody on talk radio and cable
TV and every blog and podcast they have opinions about Mosque,
But I got the story of what happened that Friday night,
(17:13):
or that story of what's in the hospital in Austin
with his two girlfriend, or any of these stories. So
that's what I'm bringing to the party. I try to
give you the story as clear, honest, straight and un varnished.
And I have a card that's on my wall near
my computer, and I look at it whenever I get
(17:36):
stuck trying to convey, well, is Mosque rough on people?
Or is he got some political feelings in a certain way?
And the card simply says, let me tell you a story.
And so I stop, and I don't try to preach
or I don't try to pontificate. I say, what's the
(17:56):
best story in my notebook that illustrates this? Mm hmm.
Speaker 2 (18:01):
I want to shift gears slightly and find out a
little bit about the writing process because this book. First,
first of all, is there stuff that went to the
cutting room floor that you still think about or wish
you had included?
Speaker 1 (18:18):
First of all, nobody has ever accused this book of
being too short. People always begin with hits six hundred page.
Speaker 2 (18:26):
People love doorstop.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
Yeah, yeah, the word doorstop. When I was young and
Evan Thomas, my friend, and I were doing the Wise
Men about the Six Friends in Cold War Foreign policy.
Our editor looked at a whole section about the World
Bank and said, cut it out. Nobody is going to care,
and so we did. And then there was one review
(18:49):
that said there's not enough in it about the creation
of the World Bank, and I mentioned it to our
Editornecy said, yes, I think we're going to use that
as a blurb on a paperback to say not enough
about the creation of the World Back. That'll be a
selling feature of the book. You have to learn, you know,
some things are important but maybe not that interesting.
Speaker 2 (19:13):
I love getting in the weeds on process myself, But
what's your literal organizational system? Do you have a paper
based system, do you have a use a software? How
do you keep all of this stuff?
Speaker 1 (19:22):
Early on, I was a fast adopter of computer technology,
so I was looking for all sorts of complex ways
to do note cards and organize them and stuff. And
I discovered that the best organizational structure is chronological. Whether
you're writing about Leonardo da Vinci or you're writing about
Elon Mosk, you put all your notes in chronological order.
(19:46):
And the simplest way to organize it, I discovered was
just a big word file. You know, if I it
would be word file. Yeah, maybe eight hundred thousand words
by the end, and I would just put things in
in order, little key words that I could search, like
asshole you with the asterisk. And then when you write
(20:10):
the book, you try to keep it as chronological as
you can, but you can't make it totally chronological, especially
with a mosque. If one morning he's obsessing about buying Twitter,
but then he has to worry about a valve leak
on a raptor engine happening in Texas, and then he's
on a meeting about full self driving. You don't want
the book to just be one damn thing after another.
(20:33):
You decide, all right, how am I going to cluster
these so that they have a certain coherence to them.
In the Muss Book, you'll notice something different from my
other books. The chapters are very short, and they're very
fast paced, because I want to show how he moves
(20:54):
bing bing bing really fast through things, not a whole
lot of pausing and reflecting. And that's consciously to make
you feel like you're going through this book the way
he goes through life.
Speaker 2 (21:10):
What does it look like when Walter Isaacson sits down
to write. How do you get to a six hundred
page or could have been twelve hundred page biography? What
does the daily process look like?
Speaker 1 (21:21):
I work at night. I tend to like to start
writing at eight pm. Happily married to somebody who's a
morning person, so we each have our quiet time while
the other's not awake, and I'll work till two three
in the morning. I now use a trick I learned
from Leonardo da Vinci, which is I'll sketch something out,
(21:45):
and then I'll add another layer of brushstrokes. Then I'll
add another layer of polish. Then I'll sort of refine
it a bit. So if I'm going to write about,
say the launch of Xai, the artificial intelligence company, I'll
have rough chronological notes of sitting there in the backyard
(22:07):
with him. Here's what happens when he calls Sam Altman
to Twitter headquarters, Here's what happens when they have a
showdown over how open Ai became closed. And it'll all
be chronological, and then I'll do a rough draft in
which I weave it into a story, making a point
not to use a transition sentences. This is something I
(22:29):
learned at Time magazine, which is transition sentences lock you
into a certain order of paragraphs, whereas if it got
an integrity to it, you don't need the transition sentence.
But it also allows you to move the paragraphs around,
and so I write in a rough way without transitions.
Then I reordered the paragraphs, and then, as if I
(22:51):
were Leonardo, although I'm not as good as Leonardo, I
put another layer of refinement of finishing of glass onto
it and then read it out loud, printed out on paper,
because it reads different on paper than on the screen.
Read it out loud on paper, Let my wife read it,
and then do them all round a polishing.
Speaker 2 (23:12):
Walter Isacson interviewed about one hundred different people for the book,
Musk's friends, family, and colleagues, and a smattering of detractors
or frenemies. It was a massive undertaking, and it's those
interviews that inform everything until twenty twenty one, when Isaacson
set out to be Musk's ever present shadow.
Speaker 1 (23:29):
I did the first half of the book. First, wrote
it all the way through, getting me up to the
point where I'm riding alongside Musk. No that I'm not there.
In twenty seven, twenty eighteen, yeah, when he's smoking Dopa
and the Joe Roganshaw. I'm not in the studio. I'm
happily ensconced in Jennifer Dowdner's biotech lab or something. And
(23:53):
then I had the stuff that was unfolding at the
time and me being there as a happening, and I
kept that in this big chronological set of notes and
waited to start writing it until pretty much I had
done the most of the reporting. I was putting the
(24:14):
finishing touches, you know, six weeks before it got published
in September.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
When do you sort of know when you're done? I mean,
like in the middle of your story, he bought Twitter.
So how far do you need to see that through
before you feel like okay?
Speaker 1 (24:33):
I felt I needed to make sure that you understood
Musk fully so that whatever happens five years from now,
this book still explains who he is, because even though
there are multiple mask personalities, it's not like he changes
in essence. But there were moments as the book was finishing,
(24:56):
I'd get up in the morning and just turn on
my phone. Is it still there? Was it like a
rocket ship? Did it blow up? So yeah, I held
my breath a couple of times, but I began to
see that it had come to a good logical conclusion.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
There are some stories about Musk that have been repeated
so many times, often without supporting details, that they become
kind of slogans for his critics or his supporters. Musk
is the scion of an emerald mind, or no, Musk
came from nothing, Musk founded Tesla, or he just bought
it from some other guys who did. Part of Isaacson's
(25:35):
task was winding his way back through these layers of
Musk lore. There are people who have extremely strong views
of Musk, and they're often based on stories that get
told over and over again. Did you start the book
knowing those stories and wanting to delve into them. Did
you keep tabs on the perceptions that people have and
(25:57):
you were trying to play against those or you were
trying to block out that type.
Speaker 1 (26:01):
Of Oh, I knew all the disputes, whether or not
he deserved to be called a co founder of Tesla's,
whether or not his father had an emerald mind. And
you know what, there's not an exact one sentence answer,
but there's a maybe two paragraph answer on the emerald
mind and the fact that his father didn't have an
ownership stake, but did for a while get a supply
(26:23):
of emeralds from a mine that was in Zambia, not
in South Africa, and then it went bankrupt, so he
had money for a while, but then the business collapses.
That's not as easy or as fun of a hot
take of he's an emerald mind heir or he didn't
own an emerald mind.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
But at the same time, he did invest in Musk's
first company, and his mom give him some money, Like
there was a kind of.
Speaker 1 (26:44):
There was a very I can't remember, but was like
ten THOLLI yeah, ten thousand dollars.
Speaker 2 (26:49):
He did support him, Like the part of the story
that's like he had a little leg up because his
family could give him some money to start a company.
There's a nugget there.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
That's a nugget, and I explained both the starting of
that company but also basically running away to Canada when
he's seventeen, and you know, he arrives with virtually no money.
He has a couple of thousand dollars of travelers check,
which he loses on a bus. He ends up you know,
a student loans. So it's not as if he gets
(27:18):
there and has, like Benjamin Franklin, only three coins in
his pocket, but he also doesn't have pockets full of emeralds,
and he's not a trust fund kid. So that just
shows that this knee jerk all or nothing, that he
had huge sums of money in his pockets when he came,
(27:38):
or he was totally put Now life is a bit
more complex, and I try to show just the truth,
the exact number he had and what that did and
what it didn't do.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
The Tesla origin story is that's something that I had
heard about, knew very little about, and it's it's very messy.
It takes a lot long time to go through actually
how they ended at the point of like who's a
founder and who's not a founder of Tesla.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
If something's a big success, all of a sudden, everybody remembers, Hey,
that was my idea, or hey they stole that idea
from me, And so the story is out a one
sentence answer, but it's a pretty fast moving, a hope chapter.
Martin Eberhart and Mark Tarpening having tried to start a company.
They had no money and no employees, but they had
the name Tesla that they had registered JB. Strabel, who
(28:30):
was also creating a battery company and trying to do
ac propulsion. And then Musk, who puts in the money,
puts all these groups together, becomes a chairman and funds it.
So in the end, who gets to be called the founder? Well, boy,
they fight over it. I mean, it's just so brutal.
They hate each other. I mean, if you mentioned Mark
(28:52):
Tarpening's name, he gets mad, and vice versa. And it
went to court, and in the end the court said,
here are five people who equally have the rights to
call themselves co founders of Tesla. Once again, I got
no dog in this hunt. I tell you the story,
and I try to do it step by step. Who
(29:12):
does what, and you demystify things, you debunk certain myths,
and you also don't fall into the vortex of all
these controversies.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
I love the detail that they actually did have a
non disparagement agreement as part of the court case, but they.
Speaker 1 (29:29):
Themselves, I mean, yes, right, I mean, these are guys
even when they're talking to me, I've signed a non disparagement,
but he's an asshole. He's lying, you know.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
And one of the guys even says I don't understand
he's the richest.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
Man in the world. Martin Neberhard.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
Martin Nebhert says, he's the richest man in the world.
Why does he have to keep talking about it? He
has everything? Yeah, yeah, Why you know?
Speaker 1 (29:52):
Why are you so mad about Martin Eberhart? Why does
it eat away at you so much? And he would say,
this guy tried to take the credit. And in the end,
you don't understand Musk if you don't understand why Musk
is so obsessed by these things.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
After the break, Isaacson recounts how he maintains access even
as he's divulging embarrassing details his subjects don't want the
world to know.
Speaker 1 (30:20):
Stay with us.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
It's one thing to be able to tell the story,
but to tell it, you have to have it. You
have to not only show up in the right places
at the right times, lingering long enough that people might
even forget while you're there, but you also need an
eye for the details and an ear for the dialogue
that combined to create the story. Something Isaacson learned decades
ago working at Time magazine.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
The very first story I wrote is a political reporter
for Time, involved the Ronald Reagan campaign, and I was
covering it, and I had gotten to know one of
his advisors on the airplane trips, a guy named Mike Deaver.
And one day Reagan is giving his stump speech and
(31:16):
he's spouting off all these things they're just untripped, that
trees cause pollution, that you know, typical Reagan things, welfare
queen stories or whatever. And I look at Mike Deaver,
who's standing next to me, and he's shaking his head
and he says, I don't know where did he get
those facts? You know, we always try to correct him.
(31:39):
He of course thought he was just talking to me,
But I'm a journalist. So the end of the week's
story comes out and it leads with Mike Deaver saying
to me, he's making all this up. It's so frustrating.
Where to get those facts? Well, I thought that was
going to be the end of all my access. Stunningly,
(31:59):
I get on the campaign plane for the next trip
and I got called to the front of the plane
and diver sits me next to Ronald Reagan. Suddenly they
knew who I was. They paid attention. It was as
if by swatting them. I mean, I just told the truth.
It's like, oh, okay, this is a guy to be
(32:20):
reckoned with. And it was another of those lessons that
if you have access, they respect you more, not less,
if you use it to try to tell the truth,
even in ways they may not like.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
With Musk, that access meant logging miles in the ground,
on the factory floor, and many more in the air.
Granted it was on Musk's private jet, not exactly the
nineteen eighty style reporting.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Isaacson came up on. I'm very good at sleeping on airplanes.
I learned that when I covered the nineteen eighty presidential campaign.
I was really young, just coming out of the Times
picking in New Orleans and joined Time magazine and they
put me on the Ted Kennedy campaign, which was a
relentless campaign and a small charter plane, and I learned
(33:08):
to fall asleep instantly because it was the only time
he gets sleep. But when I was traveling with Musk,
you'd get on the plane and of course you couldn't
sleep because it was the one time when he would
just be there free, associating, and so I never tried
to bother him when he was thinking. I'd just be
(33:30):
there alert during the entire plane ride three four hours,
and occasionally I'd just say one or two words, like cybertruck,
and he'd talk about his autistic son Saxon, saying the
future should look like the future, and so how he
had changed the design. But you just prompt him with
(33:50):
a word or two and let them free associate. So
I didn't do any truly formal interviews where you just
sitting across from somebody with a notebook. I would just
let him talk as we walked along an assembly line,
or let him talk during the airplane ride. And sometimes
(34:13):
he'd have fifteen minutes between meetings. They knew to schedule that,
where he'd be in an intense meeting, say about Optimist
the robot, and then in the same conference room they
might do another meeting about battery cells and what the
anode and cathoe should be made of. But there'd always
be ten or fifteen minutes between them. And at first
(34:35):
I thought maybe I should step out, because he used
that private time to do emails. Sometimes i'd sort of
fire up Twitter to see if he was tweeting or
I was sitting in the room with him. Sometimes he'd
play video games, but then he would look up at
some point, and I would do something we in New
Orleans always do at dinner, So I'd say, tell me
(34:58):
a story. Say tell me the story of the twenty
eighteen surge at the Fremont Factory. Tell me the story
of when you went on Joe Rogan, you know, tell
me the story of when you did that tweet about
calling a British cave diver a pedophile. And it wouldn't
(35:19):
be a pointed question. It was always prefaced with tell
me the story. And sometimes he'd be with people have
been working with him for a long time, so in
some ways my role was not to interview him, but
to extract stories and bide my time. And the great
luxury of having two years and almost indefinite amounts of
(35:45):
time with him is you could go back to it
later and say, tell me again about that story of
where you're looking at the toy at your desk. The
difficult thing with Mosque is that some he'd recount things,
but you know, his memory wasn't perfect. That's true of
(36:05):
all of us, but there's everything with Musk. It's more
so with him. He could embellish or whatever. So I
often would have to go to five or six people.
I'd have to go to Mark Junkosa and say, tell
me the story about when he fired everybody at Starlink,
put you in charge and you redesign the Starlink satellite
(36:25):
to make it simpler. And I'd have must tell the story,
and I'd have Musk assistant who was there, tell the story.
And sometimes you get Kimball to tell the story. And
so in the book, I'm very careful to say hear
all the sources. And I warned Musk. I said, you
know you're going to read the book and the stories
(36:47):
are not going to be exactly the way you remembered them,
because other people remember them differently. And he said, I
know that's the case. I know that the stories may
not be the way I remembered them even nowadays. I
talked to Kimball Musk after the book came out. He said,
you know, I think the book is really good. It's
not always the way I remember it. But then I
(37:08):
looked at your sources and I realized you were talking
to a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (37:14):
You said it came off the trail on the set
of twenty twenty three, and I know you've described how
you did get called back by him. For some subsequent reporting.
But before that, what you thought was your last day.
Was that a day that you had designated where you said,
I'm going to close my notebook at the end of
this day, and that's it.
Speaker 1 (37:34):
Early in twenty twenty three, I realized I had enough
material that you can understand Mosk. I had enough stories,
so whatever he did in the future, you'd get him.
And I looked for what should be the culmination of
the book, and I didn't really want it to be
Twitter and it pottering along and also messing up moderation,
(37:57):
because I think that's not a big deal for him.
The big deal was space travel. And I knew that
he was going to do the launch of Starship in
Boca Chica, and I'd been there for the surges over
the course of twenty twenty two where they stacked it
and unstacked it and tested its thirty three raptor engines
and fixed all the valves. And I said, I think
(38:20):
that will be the culminating scene in the book.
Speaker 2 (38:25):
And this takes us back to that opening scene from
our first episode where the Starship rocket makes liftoff but
then goes off course and they have to blow it
up over the ocean.
Speaker 1 (38:35):
And I remember talking to my editor and to my
wife a few hours later, and they had watched this
on television and they said, oh my god, what does
this do to the end of this book. I say,
it's a perfect metaphor. We know Starship's going to launch again,
we know at some point it's going to get to orbit.
But I wanted to have a scene that was somewhat pointed,
(39:00):
of him being determined, of him being visionary, of him
having taken too many risks and blown up a rocket,
and him being with people who had work with him
for twenty years, but also kind of being alone, no
matter who was hugging him, his girlfriend, his mother, his son,
and him just staring at that little red dot of Mars.
(39:23):
And I know it sounds like I'm embellishing a bit,
but it was rising in the sky and thinking, all right,
there's a lot of smoldering rubble, but if anybody's going
to get us to Mars is this guy. So it's
not as if I absolutely respect everything about Mosque, but
I do respect the fact that he's worth writing about
(39:44):
because he's having this enormous impact.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
And you're very comfortable holding that tension in your head.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
Those of us who are biographers have to be able
to create characters that we hold many things in our
minds about them. So I'm very comfortable holding that tension
I head. I'm very uncomfortable to the fact that as
a society we've lost the ability to hold that in
our heads. We either canonize or demonize somebody in one
(40:15):
hundred and forty characters, and we used to be able
to understand, to go back to Shakespeare, that even the
best or molded out of their flaws, and that's true
of our historical figures, and it's true of an Eon Musk.
Speaker 2 (40:36):
There is also a question, though embedded in the WEI
there that goes back to this sort of Time Newsweek
Walter Cronkite, Is it possible that that approach, the dismissive
approach that always existed their voice, just wasn't included in
the WEI, that was sort of balancing out positive and negative.
Speaker 1 (40:55):
Yes, I think you're right. There's often a mainstream concent
census that leaves a lot of people out of forming
that consensus, and so often the reputations of complex people
are not just about them, but they are a mirror
that's reflecting ourselves and It tells us a lot about
(41:17):
ourselves at any given time, and as you say, different
people will have different views of it. This is why
I can write a book about Ben Franklin, even though
maybe one hundred books have been written about Ben Franklin,
because every person in every period probably does well to
(41:38):
try to paint their own view of what he was like.
And I think history is painted in many layers. I
think I give you unvarnished what I saw, the good,
the bad, and the ugly. But I know that that's
not the final word. I know that a century from
now people will figure out the historic significance of an
(42:02):
Elon Musk. No, they'll probably be using some of the
stories of my book to prove whatever case for against
them they want to use. But each of us gets
to write a subsequent draft of our.
Speaker 2 (42:16):
Time, or a sensient AI will just be writing it
like they're writing the history of the Dodo bird or
some extinct.
Speaker 1 (42:22):
We'll be interesting to know what a generative large language
model will do when they can read every biography of
Musk and you say, was Musk a good guy or
a bad guy? I think that simple question will flummix
even the most sophisticated AI.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
Coming up. On the final episode of On Musk with
Walter Isaacson, we weigh up Musk's legacy. What should we
take away from Isaacson On Musk? We ask Isaacson to
answer his critics, try to sess out how this portrait
will age and surface some stories from the book everyone
seems to have ignored.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
They kick him out, and for twenty years it's eating
away at which is why, of course he bunched by Twitter.
And in the middle of the night, Musk calls hotel
security and makes him open the safe so he can
start tweeting out where thinks. That's who Musk is, And
that's why I just didn't believe him, And I'm not
even sure he believed himself. People who say I'm not
(43:21):
as tough on Musk as I should be are always
using anecdotes from my book to show why we should
be tough on Musk. I would love it if he
would lie love for like a year, but he ain't
gonna do that.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
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
(43:56):
and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by
Monga Shatikador with an assist from Oz Walishan Kostaslinos and
Kate Osbourne. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson,
Nikki Etur, Kerrie Lieberman, Nathan Otowski, Ali Gavin and the
folks at WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio
(44:17):
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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