December 12, 2023 • 42 mins
What kind of titan of industry has a "giddy mode"? Or a "demon mode"? The two aspects of Musk’s personality are forces that drive his choices and behavior at work—and vectors Isaacson finds critical to understanding how Musk operates. From ripping out servers on Christmas Eve on a whim to buying Twitter against better wisdom, and reaming out staff members left right and center, we stare into the darker parts of Musk as chronicled by Isaacson.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
So he's at Twitter the night before Christmas Eve, December
twenty third, and they've got three server farms and if
they keep them going, it's going to be a few
million dollars each year. He says, let's get rid of
the Sacramento one. And people have been working at Twitter
a long time, engineers. He hasn't yet fired them, and
they say, no, you can't pull out those servers. It'll
(00:31):
take six months to move those out of Sacramento. And
there are rules and regulations. I know, demon modes about
to strike, but they were trying to argue with them
on it, and finally he just goes really angry and leaves.
The next day, Christmas Eve, he's on his plane flying
(00:54):
from San Francisco to Austin, bringing these two cousins, and
as they're flying over you know, Nvaada, one of them says,
why don't we just take those servers out ourselves, and
Bust goes into Gudea mode and turns the plane around,
goes right to Sacramento. They get to the server facility,
(01:16):
it's the afternoon of Christmas Eve, so nobody's really working
and it's a facility that has servers of other companies.
As well, so it's hard to get into. But being Musk,
he just finds somebody and makes them let them in.
And he says, we're going to take these servers out,
and they said we can't have You need electrician to
open the floorboard, and somebody to cut off the cables,
(01:36):
and somebody who can handle the dollies. Must turns to
his security guard, said you got a pocket knife, and
he takes off the floorboard himself. He just pries it
open from event. Then he gets a pair of pliers
I think they had gotten at home depot, and he
cuts the cable to the servers and waits and nothing happens.
It's fine. So they start in a friend see moving
(02:01):
these servers out on racks on Dolly's into this rental truck,
and he proves to everybody that yes, you can do it.
You said it was gonna take six months. It took
us six hours and we got a third of them move.
So he gets to prove people he's hardcore and he's intense.
And then he has Ron DeSantis announcer president, and there's
(02:24):
no backup servers, there's no casing, so the service Twitter
goes down for twenty minutes or more, and he says, well,
I guess it was a mistake taking the service out,
But like a lot of things, it's not clear this
was a total mistake or totally brilliant. And for me
(02:46):
it's a metaphor. He tends to take risks, and he
tends to leave rubble in his wake.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
When Walter Isaacson set out to write a boutography of
Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world
changing figure, certainly a visionary, maybe a genius. At Tesla
and SpaceX, Musk had attracted some of the most brilliant
engineering minds of our time to his side. His relentless
vision and exacting standards had driven those companies beyond what
many people thought possible. But Isaacson quickly came to see
(03:22):
what everyone else close to Musk already knew. Working with
him came with a cost. Musk's management style included utter
derision for work life balance, a belief that any camaraderie
at work only weakened employees' judgment, A lack of empathy
so pronounced that Musk might tear someone down in front
of everyone just because things had gotten too calm for
(03:43):
his comfort. And then instantly forget about it. He was
also busy seemingly squandering his legacy by the day on Twitter,
then of course buying Twitter, swapping out his lofty ambitions
of interplanetary colonization and combating climate change for you check
policies and content moderation, all while getting wrapped up in
(04:04):
a battle with what he called the quote woke mind virus.
I'm Evan Ratliffe and on this episode of On Musk
with Walter Isaacson, we write shotgun as Isaacson encounters the
darker parts of elon the earthword pull that threatens to
ground his highest aspirations, Episode two Demons. All right, ready, yeah,
(04:36):
there are moments in the book where he is just
reaming out someone. It's sometimes hard to tell the ones
where you're there and you're not, because you have such
comprehensive access to information that you can paint scenes that
you didn't actually witness through these various eyes. Did you
personally witness those things?
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Like absolutely all the time. And I was stunned because
I thought of the Heisenberg principle that is something being observed,
it's going to change its velocity or its position. And
I thought by being in the room. He wasn't going
to ream somebody out, and people were amazed, the people
around him that he was just as tough and as
(05:14):
bad and as much of an asshole or as much
of a genius when I was around that. It did
not calm him down, did not keep him from going
into demon mode.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Some of the targets on who Musk trained his fury
were people who'd gone the furthest for him, like one
executive named Brian Dawe, who'd been a hero of one
of Musk's so called surges. That's when Musk brings everybody
into the office for days or weeks of insane hours
to hit some target he's deemed crucial.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Back in twenty seventeen, when Musk went into total fury
about the battery factory in Nevada and lived there for
about three months, saying you've got to speed up this
battery line, he brings in this guy, Brian Dawe, who's
a can do person. Yes, Boss, we can get rid
of this machine. Yes, Bosh, we can do it. He
(06:02):
was so eager to help. And then I was there
sitting in mush little house when he calls up Brian
down says, I'm moving you to run the solar roof division.
It's like, I can do it. I can do it.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Chief Now, the solar roof division was a Musk project
that hadn't paid off so well. The basic idea was
that instead of retrofitting solar panels on houses, they would
make the roof tiles themselves into solar panels. Muskeet invested
in and then had Tesla buy a solar roof company
started by his cousins, not the cousins on the airplane,
but the other cousins. There were some accusations of nepotism
(06:39):
swirling around Musk. As you might imagine anyway, Musk is
trying to turn Tesla into an electric energy everything company, batteries, cars,
solar roofs, but the solar roofs are not getting installed
fast enough to scale the business. He's burned through three
executives there already. Incomes Brian Dow to Boca Chica where
(06:59):
ISAC's and is lurking nearby in his airstream trailer.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
And one day Musk became driven by the fact that
they had to install solar roofs faster, just like the
assembly line of the car or the rocket. He says,
how can we speed up this step? This step, this step,
And finally he says, all right, we're going to do
the roofs of my house and these other little tracked
(07:23):
homes down in the south tip of Texas. And Dow
is up in I think Seattle or wherever he was based,
and it's his birthday. But Musk said, okay, I need
you back down in Boca Chica. Things aren't going well,
and he abandons his family, but he misses the connection
in Houston, has to get a car and drive six hours,
(07:43):
gets there late at night.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
It was another surge the task to get the time
it took to install one roof down from three or
four days to just twenty four hours. So Dow is
leading his team of fellow designer, engineers and roofers to
meet the challenge.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
And I remember one day it must have been one
hundred and five in the shade and there was no shade,
and these roofers are working and they have to get
it done within twenty four hours. Musk goes on over
to this little subdivision by about nine at night, and
there's big industrial lighting and cables, and there's twelve people
(08:22):
scrambling on the roof and he climbs this rickety ladder
to the top of the roof, and I of course
have to climb up with him, you know, standing on
the peak of this roof, clinging on for dear life
as these people are scurrying around. And as always, Elon
has his little son X who is at about two
(08:43):
years old, and he's just starting to toddle on the
ground amid all the cables and the lights and the
moving equipment, and I'm petrified for him. I'm petrified for myself.
And there's Elon standing at the peak of the roof saying,
why do we need four fasteners for each of the
roof tiles. Couldn't it be done with two? And they say, well,
(09:06):
if a hurricane comes, and he's like, okay, here would
be the strength of the winds, here's how much it
would take. And he's looking at the wiring and how
it works and trying to simplify it. And there's somebody
there who's supervising and must get furious because he believes
that every person working on a solar roof team should
(09:30):
be on the roof installing it. And if you're not
installing it, with your own hands, You're not really going
to understand what the problems are. And this guy is saying, well,
you know, I've done many roofs. I've watched it. Says,
how many of you actually installed with your own hands? Well? None,
I'm a designer. I knew that was going to be
(09:50):
one of those triggers. And for about an hour standing
on that roof, on the roof, and then finally we
come down on the ladder and we're standing next to
the house, and it continues for another thirty minutes. He's
reaming this guy out and finally says to Brian Dow
that he had to be fired. We came back a
(10:12):
couple days later and there's another house they're doing, and
then yet another house, and I remember once it was
so hot that people were fainting, they were throwing up,
and yet they worked all day to install it within
twenty four hours. And finally Musk is satisfied, but not
(10:32):
until he fires Brian Dowe, the guy in charge of
the division, as well as many of the people who
were helping do the roofs. And Brian talks to me
afterwards and says, I tried so hard. I was so eager.
He knew I would walk through walls with him, and
yet he fired me. And that's the type of toughness
(10:53):
that I don't find easy to stomach. It really really
turned me off when I was watching it, but I
tried to describe it. And also the fact that after
he kept pushing, he was able to get them to
do a solar roof per day.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Even after that, by the way, solar roofs still not scalable.
After the vomiting and the passing out and the firing,
it didn't really matter. The gold Musk had set of
twenty four hours to install. The roof didn't move the needle,
at least not by Silicon Valley standards. And Isaacson returns
again and again to these episodes trying to tease out
what they mean for the people involved in them.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
And as you'll see in the book, not only did
I report those I think in the full fury of
it all, I'm not sugarcoating. I also went back to
the people who got totally reamed out. I'd go back
a day later and sometime six months later, say what
did you learn? Like, why couldn't you take it? And
there's a scene in the book of a Friday Night
(12:00):
at Star Base, where he just reams out this wonderful
southern guy, Andy krabs for not having enough people working.
Just choose him up, left, right, and center, and then,
like Doctor Jekyll and mister Hyde, a few weeks later,
he doesn't even remember it, and he promotes Andy. But
then it keeps happening, so Andy leaves. Recently, I was
(12:21):
in Los Angeles and I'm signing books at the LA
Times book event. I see coming over for me. Say
that's Andy. I said, Andy, how you doing? He says,
I think I'm going to go back to SpaceX. I've
had the choice of being burned out or being bored.
I decided I'd rather be burned out on such a mission.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
That's amazing because the one that stuck with me was
the guy who was thought to have caused one of
the failed launches or crashes, because he had like turned
a nut on the rocket and that had disrupted something.
And Musk actually publicly said it was him, and then
he quit. And then Musk was sort of good ridden,
(13:03):
so he wasn't that great of an engineer. And then
you sort of end that section by saying it turned
out it was not the turning of the night. It
wasn't him, I know.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I try to show both the fierce urgency of these
things that Musk feels, and that without this crazed urgency
you wouldn't have gotten Tesla lines working as well. But
I also sometimes show where it was just awful the
(13:34):
way he did these things. And it happens on the
Tesla assembly line where somebody who's totally innocent, you know,
must then fires him. And that brings up the question
that so many people ask in the book, is is
it worthwhile? Do you make that trade off? And by
the end of the book, I kind of pretty clearly
(13:56):
say no, you don't really make that trade off that
getting the done excuse being a total asshole, But I
want the reader to see it in action.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
And right after the break, Musk manages to create a
truly unique level of Thanksgiving drama as we get into
just what makes this guy tick. There's a personal aspect
(14:28):
which I have experienced myself as a reporter because I
tend to spend time around relatively unpleasant people and the
stuff that I write about. But the moment that you
have to experience him reading someone out him, yelling him
being an asshole. You know, it's not all the time,
but what kind of persona do you go into in
that moment. I mean, this is not something I assume
(14:50):
you would choose in your life to be around people
who are behaving in this way.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, and there's some people who love conflict that go
to world wrestling, you know, matches and stuff, and I'm
the opposite. I don't like seeing people fight and be
really mean, So at those moments I kind of shrink
back a bit. I try to be a bit invisible.
And then there were a lot of personal things that
had to figure out whether to put in the book,
(15:15):
especially when it came to his complex relationship with women
and the women who are the mother of his children.
Right before Thanksgiving of twenty twenty two, Claire Bouchet, the
performance artist on his Grind, is in the hospital with
the surrogate who's having their child, but in the same hospital,
Chavon Zillis, who runs Neuralink, is having twins that are
(15:40):
from Elon as a sperm donor, and they don't know
that the other is actually in the same hospital. Even
though they know each other, they don't know they're both
having kids of Elon's at the same time, this is
complicated emotionally, and Elon flies off Thanksgiving and says, I've
(16:01):
got a crisis happening with one of the engines they
were building, and I have to go focus on it.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Now.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
It's like Thanksgiving Friday, you don't have to focus on it.
But it was like rocket engines were simpler to him
than human emotions. After the book is published, you can
go on x or Twitter and see Grimes posting and
Chavon posting and how they're all mad about this scene
in the book. But I felt that that was all
(16:30):
key to understanding the turmoil right around the time he's
trying to get Starship launched, right around the time he's
getting this new huge factory done in Austin, that he
loves drama, that he lives for turmoil, and that the
personal side is in turmoil as well. And I kind
(16:52):
of felt you had to know it all to understand
what was swirling around him and inside as he's doing
all this.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
For Isaacson, Musk's approach to life seemed rooted in his upbringing,
what he describes in the beginning of the book as
a violent childhood with an alternately neglectful and cruel father.
At what point in your reporting did you sort of
start to get those stories and understand that you were
going to use those stories as a way into understanding
(17:26):
sort of the psychology behind his work.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Elon Musk had never really talked about his childhood or
about the difficult relationship with his father, and there'd been
profiles of him and Rolling Stone in which he says,
is something I just can't say. And so I knew
there was a key there, and so I kept pushing
on it gently, month after month. Tell me about your dad,
(17:52):
tell me about your childhood, tell me about being beaten up.
And he go silent, stoney faced, and I'd stay silent.
I'd try to outlast him, occasionally give me a little something.
And then finally, on the tenth attempt at the conversation,
we were flying somewhere actually, and you said, tell me
(18:13):
about your father, and tears came to his eyes, and
then it started to tumble out. After that, I was
able to get more and more, and of course from
his brother Kimball, and from his father who I talked to,
and from his mother, who said, the danger for Elon
is that he becomes his father, And so that's how
(18:35):
that theme developed. But it wasn't something I could do
in one, two, three, or four interviews. It was really
a year into the reporting that slowly that door began
to open.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Well, I think that makes a big difference to me,
at least in how you read the book in a way,
knowing that, because I think he has a difficult and
in some ways horrible father, you start out with these
scenes of violence, in him being bullied in different ways,
And it feels different to me to know that on
day one he didn't say to you, let me explain
(19:08):
myself to you. The reason I'm a jerk is because
I had this difficult up bringing, rather than that being
something that you pulled out of him.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
I sometimes think, and this will sound a bit arrogant,
that I understand him better than he understands him. He'll
tell me I've got emotions buried under concrete, and I
didn't blast through them, but I slowly, slowly bore through
them and dug through them. And yes, it's a lot
(19:39):
about the demons of childhood. It's also about being wired differently,
which is complicated, meaning he says he has aspergers, which
isn't even used in medical realm. That much anymore. He
doesn't have very good input output signals for human emotions,
(20:00):
and that means he was socially awkward and beaten up
as a kid all the time. And since the book
came out, one of the things that surprises me is
how many people come up to me. I'll say one
of them Andrew Yang, because he did it on his podcast,
But certain TV hosts will say, I have a kid
with Asperger's, and what I have to do is I
(20:22):
keep my arm around him at all times when we're
on baseball games or out somewhere, and I say, look
the person in the eye when he hands you the popcorn,
and do this. And then I realize that Musk's father,
instead of putting his arm around him and helping him,
said you're stupid, You're a loser. You deserve to be
beaten up. And that doesn't excuse all of musk behavior.
(20:48):
And sometimes we confuse explaining something with excusing it. I
think it's important to explain it.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
I want to note here that this is all pretty
tricky territory. For one thing, Asperger's, as Walter notes, is
an outdated diagnostic term for one form of autism spectrum disorder,
but It's a term that some people still use to
self identify, including Musk and ASD in general, and what
people call aspergers specifically, are both frequently misunderstood. Someone having
(21:19):
trouble with social cues obviously does not mean they lack empathy,
but challenges with social interactions can sometimes be confused for
narcissism and vice versa. Part of what I wanted to
know from Isaacson was how he tried to navigate this
territory when it came to Musk and his previous subject,
Steve Jobs. I was also struck by the contrast between
(21:39):
the Jobs book and this book, because Jobs, also you
describe has the lack of empathy. That's something that comes
up in the Job's book a few times. But his
ex girlfriend identifies it as narcissistic personality disorder, and she
says something like, I realized that telling him to be
more less self centered was like telling a black man
(22:00):
to see And.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
By the way, this is true of Tallulailey, the second
wife of Elon Musk, and it's true of Grimes. Is like, no,
sometimes you just can't tell must be a different way
because that is the way he's wired. Or you look
at some of the great disruptors, I mean Bill Gates
(22:23):
early days of Microsoft. No empathy, you know, Jeff Bezos
could be that way.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
And it is such a delicate issue because I feel
like you're careful to say he says that he has
Asperger's and it's not your job I believe to challenge that.
But in this case, it makes a difference whether he's
right in terms of the explanation versus the excuse.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
He has ever been diagnosed, but his mother said, oh yeah,
he definitely has Asperger's, and his brother Kimball says it
and one of the things that had happened since the
job's booked to Now, as we start using terms like
neurodivergent as opposed to chark or as opposed to trying
to slap a broad label like Asperger's, Musk knows he
(23:13):
goes into multiple personalities and almost forgets what he has
done when he's dark depressed, or when he's, as Grimes
puts it, in demon mode, or when he gets back
into just being engineering mode personality. There are times when
he's friendly and joking, in times when he's inspirational, in
(23:36):
times when he's laser focused like an engineer and a
monotone with a specific problem. And he also has talked
to both me and the people around him about being bipolar.
It would be useful with all of these semi awarenesses
if he would go to a doctor, get analyzed, get treatment.
(23:58):
But as he said, these things are buried under layers
of concrete, and I don't want to blast through them.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
So when you started connecting with the family and you
end up talking to his father, and from a journalistic
point of view, this seems like a very difficult character
to be entangled with in terms of like his connection
to the truth but also his beliefs. How do you
sort of manage that relationship.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Well, I'm still in contact with Erl Musk, who's not
really in contact with Elon. Elon doesn't take his emails,
doesn't speak to him. But Eryl Musk is a really
good engineer, has a real feel for the physical properties
of everything from you know, Micah to steel. He's also
somebody who has been successful at times, even once owned
(24:50):
a Rolls Royce in South Africa and built a wilderness
camp with his kids, and at times goes through this.
Doctor Jekyl too miss high transition and has lost a
whole lot of money. He's a fabuloust, which means he
fabricates things. I mean, he makes himself the hero of
some of his own adventures. On the other hand, he
(25:14):
understands that his own son has many of these traits.
And he'll say, when I ask him about taking this
side of the person who beat up Elon, he'll say, well,
Elon deserved that, or el was stupid. And he will
say I applied a very strict authoritarian attitude towards Elon,
(25:37):
and he does that with other people as well. So
in unraveling the mystery and the enigma inside of Musque,
you start by peeling back the layers that come from
his father, and you keep in mind his mother's admonition
(25:57):
to be which is that the danger for youe Elon,
is that he becomes his father.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
It's interesting that she says that because there's also this
other side, which is he has a very supportive mother,
so he it's not just the father. And without becoming
too much of an you know, armchair psychologist, I guess
because he's got these let's just say, unusual relationships with
women over time, and he's got this supportive mother, what's
(26:25):
the decision to sort of ground it more in the
in the Bad Father than in the in The Good Mother.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Well, the mother is a wonderful character throughout the book,
but both with her, with May the Mother and with Elon,
they're attracted to dramatic relationships. And May will say of
her son that he can't relax and smell the flowers.
(26:51):
He's always attracted to the storm, to the drama. And May,
who I really like she has, hasn't been in life
very good at relationships. He's attracted to people who cause problems,
and so too is it with Elon. You know, his
first wife a truly stormy relationship, but they thrived on
(27:15):
fighting all the time. And he said, there's just something
about the flame. I'm always attracted to the flame and
drama and relationships. And I ask him why, And I
ask to Lula's second wife why, and Tallulah says, there,
he was growing up with his father and his father
is mentally torturing him. And somehow you internalize storm and
(27:42):
drama with your childhood nurturing. That's probably overthinking it. Because Kimball,
his brother, you know, he's much more stable in his
relationships and his ability to show empathy, whereas Musk he
(28:05):
would see some calm, he'd see some calm on a
factory line or at a launch pad, and he'd be unhappy.
He'd say, I've got to stir things.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Up up next Twitter. And whether Musk did ever turn
his demon mode on Isaacson.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
In April of twenty twenty two, when he's kicking around
the idea of buying Twitter, he's starting to buy the
stock and he's going a bit dark on management, thinking
maybe I'll make a hostile offer. It was a day
he opened the Giga Texas factory, amazing, big event. And
(28:54):
he goes out to dinner that weekend at a club
called the Pershing, very quiet and private in an upstairs room,
and it's him, his artistic son Saxon, his young three
year old ex Grimes comes in a little bit late
May Musk. She's at the dinner and it's myself and
(29:16):
a couple of other people. I'm asking, why are you
thinking of buying Twitter? And I'm my own mind, I'm
thinking that's a bad idea, but I'm just asking, and
then everybody else is chiming in, like why do you
really want it? And what you do with it? And
at some point he says to Griffin in one of
(29:36):
his teenagers. Do you use Twitter? He said, no, Dad,
none of my friends use Twitter, and may Musk, you know,
his mother says, well, I use Twitter. I'm thinking, okay,
this may be an indication of the demographic that they're
heading towards. And everybody is trying to nudge him away
(29:57):
from going down this path, really hurting his reputation, but
sucking up his time of trying to fix Twitter, and
all this keeps coming out of the dinner. By the
end of the dinner, I realize, okay, he's gonna go there.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
So now Isaacson has a subject on his hands who
isn't just an innovator, a Silicon Valley darling with some
libertary inflect politics. Now he's got someone gearing up to
fight a war over free speech and right wing censorship
on Twitter, where he's about to try and manifest his
original X dot com Everything platform vision.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
When I first started working on the Elon Musk's book,
he was very well known, but not quite as controversial.
He wasn't quite as toxic or as canonized. Then the
Twitter deal happened, and that changes things. It really increases
by at least two orders of magnitude, how controversial he is,
(31:00):
and also how famous he is. So suddenly the narrative
becomes much more of a roller coaster. So it's good
for the book, but there were parts of it that
I kind of wish, Hey, he was a calmer personality,
But he says, I got to keep in mind that
(31:22):
the mission is getting to Mars. It's not absolutely caring
about the psychological pleasures and safeties of everybody. I can
remember the time he walked into Twitter headquarters, right before
he has officially acquired it, and they're telling him what
a nurturing place it is to work, and they're saying,
(31:42):
you know, we've got quiet rooms, and we have mental
health days off, and we have yoga studios so people
can stay in balance. And then they say, and we
really value psychological safety. And must sort of had that
raspy laugh, and he says, psychological safety, that's our enemy.
(32:04):
That's an impediment. We have to have a fierce sense
of urgency. We aren't aiming for psychological safety.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
The other reason Musk gives for buying Twitter, one that
he seems to get a lot of play for in
some corners of the world, is that he's fighting against
quote unquote wokeness. Musk has his own term for it.
When he talks about anti woke mind virus, he uses
that phrase, and that really touches on things that have
become you know, third rails in society in terms of
(32:35):
how they're discussed. I'm curious how you kind of engaged
with that idea with him. I mean, he's someone who
grew up in aparteight South Africa, so obviously, like his
views on race and other societal issues are going to
be colored by that. Like what does he mean when
he says something like that.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Well, the way I engage with it, and you see
it in the book is I question it. I say,
why are you following this particular conspiracy? And I'll even
talk about Okham's razor, which is the simplest explanation may
be the best one. Instead of thinking there's a vast
conspiracy of drug makers and COVID vaccines, or people trying
to lock down so they control government, or any of
(33:14):
these things that he goes to, I'm not that way.
I'm not conspiratorial, and I find that anti political correctness
and wokeness. It's a little hard for me to explain
because my head's not there, you know. I think sometimes
what we call being woke is being polite and sensitive
to other people's feelings. And I'll ask him about that.
(33:38):
I say, hey, understand, you've got a daughter who transitioned.
Why do people care about pronouns? And he'll say things
when he's in a more rational mood of why don't
mind people using pronouns? But it gouges my eyes out
when I see it too much. I'm going, why, what's
the problem. But it's when he's in his dark mood.
(34:00):
This eats away at him. And I describe his political
evolution from being an Obama supporter to being supporting Bobby
Kennedy than Ron DeSantis, people who are worried about wokeness
or worried about conspiracy theories. And I never try to
(34:23):
excuse it in the book, I don't excuse the rabbit
hole going down these rabbit holes of conspiracy. I do
try to explain it from his childhood, from his father, whatever.
And then I'll tell a story about a particularly horrible
tweet he did, like prosecute fauci are my pronouns? I mean,
(34:48):
just in a few words, is able to attack transgender
pronouns and Anthony Fauci, and I talk about his father
having said all these sort of things, being in a
hot box room in Twitter, and he's going dark and giddy,
and one of the people in the room starts joking
about Fuci and pronouns. And until you read the book,
(35:15):
I think critics can have a difficulty saying is he
explaining it or is he excusing it? But if you
read that anecdote or that story, you're not gonna say
Walter excused it. You're going to see the rawness that's there.
Sometimes in Elon Musk.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Must begins purging Twitter employees based on their relative quote hardcorenice.
When Twitter's finally down to a quarter of its previous size,
he's created the ultimate test for his delete, Delete, delete
management algorithm.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
And it's a hardcore, small cadre and that cadre of
people and you now see it at Twitter. He whittled
down eighty percent of the staff. But it's a very
hardcore cadre that will march through walls for him. And
I think he tests people. He drives them there, but
(36:08):
also drives them to do things they didn't think they
could do.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Did he ever turn his anger on you?
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Did?
Speaker 2 (36:16):
You experience demon mode directed at you as you describe it.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Everybody told me he was going to turn demon mode
on me. The people worked for him, plus crimes and
his former wives. They'd all say, is going to happen
to you. And if there's one small mystery, I can't
quite figure out why it never did happen to me.
But I didn't fill the silences when he went dark
(36:42):
and he went silent. I would just sit there. When
he would say something provocative, I just ask a question.
And I don't think I did anything that would have
triggered that demon mode, but I must say, as I
watched it get triggered by people around me, I always said,
(37:03):
at some point, this is going to happen to me,
where he tells me I'm stupid or whatever, like he
did to some other people who worked with him. I
didn't really want it to happen, but in the back
of my mind I knew if it did, it would
be a pretty good passage in the book. And I waited.
I waited, and I was pretty clear having watched him
(37:27):
after the first few months, I knew what brought on
the storm. I knew the type of things that would
just set him off, and sometimes I'd see it happen.
I'd see it happened on an assembly line where some
poor young worker. There's a scene in the book where
Musk is saying, did you design this process here? And
(37:49):
the young guy can't figure out what he's talking about, said,
what do you mean design it? And you could tell
Musk was about to go ballistic, and he does and
he fires the guy for no real reason. And I
watched over and over again. Must get triggered by people
giving opinions not backed up by data, or not understanding
(38:11):
what he was saying, or trying to make excuses.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Isaacson did find a few people who always seem to
dodge Musk's flamethrower, Mark gi and Kosa, the California surfer
type who was a key SpaceX engineer, and Gwinn Shotwell,
the president of SpaceX for the last twenty years.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
I also watched people like Mark o'gwynn and I learned
how they did it, which wasn't being a yes person.
It was just slowly and methodically making factual arguments, and
when Musk made a decision, say fine, I get it,
but then presenting him over and over again with more
facts and saying, all right, we're going to try it
(38:49):
that way. But here's what we learned when we tested
it this morning. Because they're people who've been there almost
twenty years at SpaceX or at Tesla, who have never
really been the object of his flamethrowing personality. But as
a few people in the book said, Yoel roth It
(39:12):
was in charge of moderation at Twitterit. Yoel told me
over and over again those first few weeks how he
had learned to deal with Mosk, how it worked out fine,
and he said, I know these type of people. He
basically saying, I know bosses that can turn into assholes
all of a sudden. I've dealt with this before. And
(39:32):
then finally Yoel doesn't get fired, he doesn't get reamed out.
He finally says it's just too much. I'm leaving. It's
time for me to go.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
It kind of highlights this aspect. I think if you
only hear about the incidents where Musk mistreats people. He's
an asshole, he doesn't have any empathy, you kind of
wonder why would anyone work for him?
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Over and over again, he would do things like force
a surge to stack a rocket on a launch pad,
even though there was no rush to do it or
force a surge at one of the manufacturing plants, and
people would go through hell for about a week to
do it, and it was exhausting, and a few would
(40:15):
fall by the wayside, and a couple would quit and
then decided, I'd rather be burned out than bored. And
so he's able to get those twenty percent of the
people in any workforce who are totally inspired by somebody
always in battle, and he gets a very lean team
(40:38):
that's willing to put up with him being cold and
angry for those amazing moments where they feel like they're
changing the world.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
In the next episode of Von Musk, we turn our
lens on Isaacson and his process, teasing out exactly how
he wrote this behemoth biography, how he resists hot takes
even as he's surrounded by them, and how he sorted
out what was going on with the supposed Musk family.
Emerald mind, I mean.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
It's just so brutal. They hate each other, he said.
I'm just a middle class kid trying to build a company,
and when people do things at sock, I've got to
tell them it socks. And if I'm too collegial, We'll
never get things done. Well, I thought that was going
to be the end of all my access, and I
had violated what he may have thought was just a
(41:28):
private comment. But there were moments as the book was finishing,
I'd get up in the morning and just turn on
my phone. Is it still there? It was? It like
the rocketship? Did it blow up? On?
Speaker 2 (41:41):
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 and Ali Perry.
(42:04):
For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by Manges Hatikador, with
an assist from Oz Walishan Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special
thanks to Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson, Nicki Etour,
Kerrie Lieberman, Nathan Otoski, Ali Gavin and the folks at
WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio in New Orleans.
(42:25):
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.
So he's at Twitter the night before Christmas Eve, December
twenty third, and they've got three server farms and if
they keep them going, it's going to be a few
million dollars each year. He says, let's get rid of
the Sacramento one. And people have been working at Twitter
a long time, engineers. He hasn't yet fired them, and
they say, no, you can't pull out those servers. It'll
(00:31):
take six months to move those out of Sacramento. And
there are rules and regulations. I know, demon modes about
to strike, but they were trying to argue with them
on it, and finally he just goes really angry and leaves.
The next day, Christmas Eve, he's on his plane flying
(00:54):
from San Francisco to Austin, bringing these two cousins, and
as they're flying over you know, Nvaada, one of them says,
why don't we just take those servers out ourselves, and
Bust goes into Gudea mode and turns the plane around,
goes right to Sacramento. They get to the server facility,
(01:16):
it's the afternoon of Christmas Eve, so nobody's really working
and it's a facility that has servers of other companies.
As well, so it's hard to get into. But being Musk,
he just finds somebody and makes them let them in.
And he says, we're going to take these servers out,
and they said we can't have You need electrician to
open the floorboard, and somebody to cut off the cables,
(01:36):
and somebody who can handle the dollies. Must turns to
his security guard, said you got a pocket knife, and
he takes off the floorboard himself. He just pries it
open from event. Then he gets a pair of pliers
I think they had gotten at home depot, and he
cuts the cable to the servers and waits and nothing happens.
It's fine. So they start in a friend see moving
(02:01):
these servers out on racks on Dolly's into this rental truck,
and he proves to everybody that yes, you can do it.
You said it was gonna take six months. It took
us six hours and we got a third of them move.
So he gets to prove people he's hardcore and he's intense.
And then he has Ron DeSantis announcer president, and there's
(02:24):
no backup servers, there's no casing, so the service Twitter
goes down for twenty minutes or more, and he says, well,
I guess it was a mistake taking the service out,
But like a lot of things, it's not clear this
was a total mistake or totally brilliant. And for me
(02:46):
it's a metaphor. He tends to take risks, and he
tends to leave rubble in his wake.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
When Walter Isaacson set out to write a boutography of
Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world
changing figure, certainly a visionary, maybe a genius. At Tesla
and SpaceX, Musk had attracted some of the most brilliant
engineering minds of our time to his side. His relentless
vision and exacting standards had driven those companies beyond what
many people thought possible. But Isaacson quickly came to see
(03:22):
what everyone else close to Musk already knew. Working with
him came with a cost. Musk's management style included utter
derision for work life balance, a belief that any camaraderie
at work only weakened employees' judgment, A lack of empathy
so pronounced that Musk might tear someone down in front
of everyone just because things had gotten too calm for
(03:43):
his comfort. And then instantly forget about it. He was
also busy seemingly squandering his legacy by the day on Twitter,
then of course buying Twitter, swapping out his lofty ambitions
of interplanetary colonization and combating climate change for you check
policies and content moderation, all while getting wrapped up in
(04:04):
a battle with what he called the quote woke mind virus.
I'm Evan Ratliffe and on this episode of On Musk
with Walter Isaacson, we write shotgun as Isaacson encounters the
darker parts of elon the earthword pull that threatens to
ground his highest aspirations, Episode two Demons. All right, ready, yeah,
(04:36):
there are moments in the book where he is just
reaming out someone. It's sometimes hard to tell the ones
where you're there and you're not, because you have such
comprehensive access to information that you can paint scenes that
you didn't actually witness through these various eyes. Did you
personally witness those things?
Speaker 1 (04:52):
Like absolutely all the time. And I was stunned because
I thought of the Heisenberg principle that is something being observed,
it's going to change its velocity or its position. And
I thought by being in the room. He wasn't going
to ream somebody out, and people were amazed, the people
around him that he was just as tough and as
(05:14):
bad and as much of an asshole or as much
of a genius when I was around that. It did
not calm him down, did not keep him from going
into demon mode.
Speaker 2 (05:24):
Some of the targets on who Musk trained his fury
were people who'd gone the furthest for him, like one
executive named Brian Dawe, who'd been a hero of one
of Musk's so called surges. That's when Musk brings everybody
into the office for days or weeks of insane hours
to hit some target he's deemed crucial.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
Back in twenty seventeen, when Musk went into total fury
about the battery factory in Nevada and lived there for
about three months, saying you've got to speed up this
battery line, he brings in this guy, Brian Dawe, who's
a can do person. Yes, Boss, we can get rid
of this machine. Yes, Bosh, we can do it. He
(06:02):
was so eager to help. And then I was there
sitting in mush little house when he calls up Brian
down says, I'm moving you to run the solar roof division.
It's like, I can do it. I can do it.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
Chief Now, the solar roof division was a Musk project
that hadn't paid off so well. The basic idea was
that instead of retrofitting solar panels on houses, they would
make the roof tiles themselves into solar panels. Muskeet invested
in and then had Tesla buy a solar roof company
started by his cousins, not the cousins on the airplane,
but the other cousins. There were some accusations of nepotism
(06:39):
swirling around Musk. As you might imagine anyway, Musk is
trying to turn Tesla into an electric energy everything company, batteries, cars,
solar roofs, but the solar roofs are not getting installed
fast enough to scale the business. He's burned through three
executives there already. Incomes Brian Dow to Boca Chica where
(06:59):
ISAC's and is lurking nearby in his airstream trailer.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
And one day Musk became driven by the fact that
they had to install solar roofs faster, just like the
assembly line of the car or the rocket. He says,
how can we speed up this step? This step, this step,
And finally he says, all right, we're going to do
the roofs of my house and these other little tracked
(07:23):
homes down in the south tip of Texas. And Dow
is up in I think Seattle or wherever he was based,
and it's his birthday. But Musk said, okay, I need
you back down in Boca Chica. Things aren't going well,
and he abandons his family, but he misses the connection
in Houston, has to get a car and drive six hours,
(07:43):
gets there late at night.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
It was another surge the task to get the time
it took to install one roof down from three or
four days to just twenty four hours. So Dow is
leading his team of fellow designer, engineers and roofers to
meet the challenge.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
And I remember one day it must have been one
hundred and five in the shade and there was no shade,
and these roofers are working and they have to get
it done within twenty four hours. Musk goes on over
to this little subdivision by about nine at night, and
there's big industrial lighting and cables, and there's twelve people
(08:22):
scrambling on the roof and he climbs this rickety ladder
to the top of the roof, and I of course
have to climb up with him, you know, standing on
the peak of this roof, clinging on for dear life
as these people are scurrying around. And as always, Elon
has his little son X who is at about two
(08:43):
years old, and he's just starting to toddle on the
ground amid all the cables and the lights and the
moving equipment, and I'm petrified for him. I'm petrified for myself.
And there's Elon standing at the peak of the roof saying,
why do we need four fasteners for each of the
roof tiles. Couldn't it be done with two? And they say, well,
(09:06):
if a hurricane comes, and he's like, okay, here would
be the strength of the winds, here's how much it
would take. And he's looking at the wiring and how
it works and trying to simplify it. And there's somebody
there who's supervising and must get furious because he believes
that every person working on a solar roof team should
(09:30):
be on the roof installing it. And if you're not
installing it, with your own hands, You're not really going
to understand what the problems are. And this guy is saying, well,
you know, I've done many roofs. I've watched it. Says,
how many of you actually installed with your own hands? Well? None,
I'm a designer. I knew that was going to be
(09:50):
one of those triggers. And for about an hour standing
on that roof, on the roof, and then finally we
come down on the ladder and we're standing next to
the house, and it continues for another thirty minutes. He's
reaming this guy out and finally says to Brian Dow
that he had to be fired. We came back a
(10:12):
couple days later and there's another house they're doing, and
then yet another house, and I remember once it was
so hot that people were fainting, they were throwing up,
and yet they worked all day to install it within
twenty four hours. And finally Musk is satisfied, but not
(10:32):
until he fires Brian Dowe, the guy in charge of
the division, as well as many of the people who
were helping do the roofs. And Brian talks to me
afterwards and says, I tried so hard. I was so eager.
He knew I would walk through walls with him, and
yet he fired me. And that's the type of toughness
(10:53):
that I don't find easy to stomach. It really really
turned me off when I was watching it, but I
tried to describe it. And also the fact that after
he kept pushing, he was able to get them to
do a solar roof per day.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Even after that, by the way, solar roofs still not scalable.
After the vomiting and the passing out and the firing,
it didn't really matter. The gold Musk had set of
twenty four hours to install. The roof didn't move the needle,
at least not by Silicon Valley standards. And Isaacson returns
again and again to these episodes trying to tease out
what they mean for the people involved in them.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
And as you'll see in the book, not only did
I report those I think in the full fury of
it all, I'm not sugarcoating. I also went back to
the people who got totally reamed out. I'd go back
a day later and sometime six months later, say what
did you learn? Like, why couldn't you take it? And
there's a scene in the book of a Friday Night
(12:00):
at Star Base, where he just reams out this wonderful
southern guy, Andy krabs for not having enough people working.
Just choose him up, left, right, and center, and then,
like Doctor Jekyll and mister Hyde, a few weeks later,
he doesn't even remember it, and he promotes Andy. But
then it keeps happening, so Andy leaves. Recently, I was
(12:21):
in Los Angeles and I'm signing books at the LA
Times book event. I see coming over for me. Say
that's Andy. I said, Andy, how you doing? He says,
I think I'm going to go back to SpaceX. I've
had the choice of being burned out or being bored.
I decided I'd rather be burned out on such a mission.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
That's amazing because the one that stuck with me was
the guy who was thought to have caused one of
the failed launches or crashes, because he had like turned
a nut on the rocket and that had disrupted something.
And Musk actually publicly said it was him, and then
he quit. And then Musk was sort of good ridden,
(13:03):
so he wasn't that great of an engineer. And then
you sort of end that section by saying it turned
out it was not the turning of the night. It
wasn't him, I know.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
I try to show both the fierce urgency of these
things that Musk feels, and that without this crazed urgency
you wouldn't have gotten Tesla lines working as well. But
I also sometimes show where it was just awful the
(13:34):
way he did these things. And it happens on the
Tesla assembly line where somebody who's totally innocent, you know,
must then fires him. And that brings up the question
that so many people ask in the book, is is
it worthwhile? Do you make that trade off? And by
the end of the book, I kind of pretty clearly
(13:56):
say no, you don't really make that trade off that
getting the done excuse being a total asshole, But I
want the reader to see it in action.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
And right after the break, Musk manages to create a
truly unique level of Thanksgiving drama as we get into
just what makes this guy tick. There's a personal aspect
(14:28):
which I have experienced myself as a reporter because I
tend to spend time around relatively unpleasant people and the
stuff that I write about. But the moment that you
have to experience him reading someone out him, yelling him
being an asshole. You know, it's not all the time,
but what kind of persona do you go into in
that moment. I mean, this is not something I assume
(14:50):
you would choose in your life to be around people
who are behaving in this way.
Speaker 1 (14:54):
Yeah, and there's some people who love conflict that go
to world wrestling, you know, matches and stuff, and I'm
the opposite. I don't like seeing people fight and be
really mean, So at those moments I kind of shrink
back a bit. I try to be a bit invisible.
And then there were a lot of personal things that
had to figure out whether to put in the book,
(15:15):
especially when it came to his complex relationship with women
and the women who are the mother of his children.
Right before Thanksgiving of twenty twenty two, Claire Bouchet, the
performance artist on his Grind, is in the hospital with
the surrogate who's having their child, but in the same hospital,
Chavon Zillis, who runs Neuralink, is having twins that are
(15:40):
from Elon as a sperm donor, and they don't know
that the other is actually in the same hospital. Even
though they know each other, they don't know they're both
having kids of Elon's at the same time, this is
complicated emotionally, and Elon flies off Thanksgiving and says, I've
(16:01):
got a crisis happening with one of the engines they
were building, and I have to go focus on it.
Speaker 2 (16:06):
Now.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
It's like Thanksgiving Friday, you don't have to focus on it.
But it was like rocket engines were simpler to him
than human emotions. After the book is published, you can
go on x or Twitter and see Grimes posting and
Chavon posting and how they're all mad about this scene
in the book. But I felt that that was all
(16:30):
key to understanding the turmoil right around the time he's
trying to get Starship launched, right around the time he's
getting this new huge factory done in Austin, that he
loves drama, that he lives for turmoil, and that the
personal side is in turmoil as well. And I kind
(16:52):
of felt you had to know it all to understand
what was swirling around him and inside as he's doing
all this.
Speaker 2 (17:03):
For Isaacson, Musk's approach to life seemed rooted in his upbringing,
what he describes in the beginning of the book as
a violent childhood with an alternately neglectful and cruel father.
At what point in your reporting did you sort of
start to get those stories and understand that you were
going to use those stories as a way into understanding
(17:26):
sort of the psychology behind his work.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
Elon Musk had never really talked about his childhood or
about the difficult relationship with his father, and there'd been
profiles of him and Rolling Stone in which he says,
is something I just can't say. And so I knew
there was a key there, and so I kept pushing
on it gently, month after month. Tell me about your dad,
(17:52):
tell me about your childhood, tell me about being beaten up.
And he go silent, stoney faced, and I'd stay silent.
I'd try to outlast him, occasionally give me a little something.
And then finally, on the tenth attempt at the conversation,
we were flying somewhere actually, and you said, tell me
(18:13):
about your father, and tears came to his eyes, and
then it started to tumble out. After that, I was
able to get more and more, and of course from
his brother Kimball, and from his father who I talked to,
and from his mother, who said, the danger for Elon
is that he becomes his father, And so that's how
(18:35):
that theme developed. But it wasn't something I could do
in one, two, three, or four interviews. It was really
a year into the reporting that slowly that door began
to open.
Speaker 2 (18:46):
Well, I think that makes a big difference to me,
at least in how you read the book in a way,
knowing that, because I think he has a difficult and
in some ways horrible father, you start out with these
scenes of violence, in him being bullied in different ways,
And it feels different to me to know that on
day one he didn't say to you, let me explain
(19:08):
myself to you. The reason I'm a jerk is because
I had this difficult up bringing, rather than that being
something that you pulled out of him.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
I sometimes think, and this will sound a bit arrogant,
that I understand him better than he understands him. He'll
tell me I've got emotions buried under concrete, and I
didn't blast through them, but I slowly, slowly bore through
them and dug through them. And yes, it's a lot
(19:39):
about the demons of childhood. It's also about being wired differently,
which is complicated, meaning he says he has aspergers, which
isn't even used in medical realm. That much anymore. He
doesn't have very good input output signals for human emotions,
(20:00):
and that means he was socially awkward and beaten up
as a kid all the time. And since the book
came out, one of the things that surprises me is
how many people come up to me. I'll say one
of them Andrew Yang, because he did it on his podcast,
But certain TV hosts will say, I have a kid
with Asperger's, and what I have to do is I
(20:22):
keep my arm around him at all times when we're
on baseball games or out somewhere, and I say, look
the person in the eye when he hands you the popcorn,
and do this. And then I realize that Musk's father,
instead of putting his arm around him and helping him,
said you're stupid, You're a loser. You deserve to be
beaten up. And that doesn't excuse all of musk behavior.
(20:48):
And sometimes we confuse explaining something with excusing it. I
think it's important to explain it.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
I want to note here that this is all pretty
tricky territory. For one thing, Asperger's, as Walter notes, is
an outdated diagnostic term for one form of autism spectrum disorder,
but It's a term that some people still use to
self identify, including Musk and ASD in general, and what
people call aspergers specifically, are both frequently misunderstood. Someone having
(21:19):
trouble with social cues obviously does not mean they lack empathy,
but challenges with social interactions can sometimes be confused for
narcissism and vice versa. Part of what I wanted to
know from Isaacson was how he tried to navigate this
territory when it came to Musk and his previous subject,
Steve Jobs. I was also struck by the contrast between
(21:39):
the Jobs book and this book, because Jobs, also you
describe has the lack of empathy. That's something that comes
up in the Job's book a few times. But his
ex girlfriend identifies it as narcissistic personality disorder, and she
says something like, I realized that telling him to be
more less self centered was like telling a black man
(22:00):
to see And.
Speaker 1 (22:01):
By the way, this is true of Tallulailey, the second
wife of Elon Musk, and it's true of Grimes. Is like, no,
sometimes you just can't tell must be a different way
because that is the way he's wired. Or you look
at some of the great disruptors, I mean Bill Gates
(22:23):
early days of Microsoft. No empathy, you know, Jeff Bezos
could be that way.
Speaker 2 (22:30):
And it is such a delicate issue because I feel
like you're careful to say he says that he has
Asperger's and it's not your job I believe to challenge that.
But in this case, it makes a difference whether he's
right in terms of the explanation versus the excuse.
Speaker 1 (22:49):
He has ever been diagnosed, but his mother said, oh yeah,
he definitely has Asperger's, and his brother Kimball says it
and one of the things that had happened since the
job's booked to Now, as we start using terms like
neurodivergent as opposed to chark or as opposed to trying
to slap a broad label like Asperger's, Musk knows he
(23:13):
goes into multiple personalities and almost forgets what he has
done when he's dark depressed, or when he's, as Grimes
puts it, in demon mode, or when he gets back
into just being engineering mode personality. There are times when
he's friendly and joking, in times when he's inspirational, in
(23:36):
times when he's laser focused like an engineer and a
monotone with a specific problem. And he also has talked
to both me and the people around him about being bipolar.
It would be useful with all of these semi awarenesses
if he would go to a doctor, get analyzed, get treatment.
(23:58):
But as he said, these things are buried under layers
of concrete, and I don't want to blast through them.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
So when you started connecting with the family and you
end up talking to his father, and from a journalistic
point of view, this seems like a very difficult character
to be entangled with in terms of like his connection
to the truth but also his beliefs. How do you
sort of manage that relationship.
Speaker 1 (24:26):
Well, I'm still in contact with Erl Musk, who's not
really in contact with Elon. Elon doesn't take his emails,
doesn't speak to him. But Eryl Musk is a really
good engineer, has a real feel for the physical properties
of everything from you know, Micah to steel. He's also
somebody who has been successful at times, even once owned
(24:50):
a Rolls Royce in South Africa and built a wilderness
camp with his kids, and at times goes through this.
Doctor Jekyl too miss high transition and has lost a
whole lot of money. He's a fabuloust, which means he
fabricates things. I mean, he makes himself the hero of
some of his own adventures. On the other hand, he
(25:14):
understands that his own son has many of these traits.
And he'll say, when I ask him about taking this
side of the person who beat up Elon, he'll say, well,
Elon deserved that, or el was stupid. And he will
say I applied a very strict authoritarian attitude towards Elon,
(25:37):
and he does that with other people as well. So
in unraveling the mystery and the enigma inside of Musque,
you start by peeling back the layers that come from
his father, and you keep in mind his mother's admonition
(25:57):
to be which is that the danger for youe Elon,
is that he becomes his father.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
It's interesting that she says that because there's also this
other side, which is he has a very supportive mother,
so he it's not just the father. And without becoming
too much of an you know, armchair psychologist, I guess
because he's got these let's just say, unusual relationships with
women over time, and he's got this supportive mother, what's
(26:25):
the decision to sort of ground it more in the
in the Bad Father than in the in The Good Mother.
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Well, the mother is a wonderful character throughout the book,
but both with her, with May the Mother and with Elon,
they're attracted to dramatic relationships. And May will say of
her son that he can't relax and smell the flowers.
(26:51):
He's always attracted to the storm, to the drama. And May,
who I really like she has, hasn't been in life
very good at relationships. He's attracted to people who cause problems,
and so too is it with Elon. You know, his
first wife a truly stormy relationship, but they thrived on
(27:15):
fighting all the time. And he said, there's just something
about the flame. I'm always attracted to the flame and
drama and relationships. And I ask him why, And I
ask to Lula's second wife why, and Tallulah says, there,
he was growing up with his father and his father
is mentally torturing him. And somehow you internalize storm and
(27:42):
drama with your childhood nurturing. That's probably overthinking it. Because Kimball,
his brother, you know, he's much more stable in his
relationships and his ability to show empathy, whereas Musk he
(28:05):
would see some calm, he'd see some calm on a
factory line or at a launch pad, and he'd be unhappy.
He'd say, I've got to stir things.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
Up up next Twitter. And whether Musk did ever turn
his demon mode on Isaacson.
Speaker 1 (28:33):
In April of twenty twenty two, when he's kicking around
the idea of buying Twitter, he's starting to buy the
stock and he's going a bit dark on management, thinking
maybe I'll make a hostile offer. It was a day
he opened the Giga Texas factory, amazing, big event. And
(28:54):
he goes out to dinner that weekend at a club
called the Pershing, very quiet and private in an upstairs room,
and it's him, his artistic son Saxon, his young three
year old ex Grimes comes in a little bit late
May Musk. She's at the dinner and it's myself and
(29:16):
a couple of other people. I'm asking, why are you
thinking of buying Twitter? And I'm my own mind, I'm
thinking that's a bad idea, but I'm just asking, and
then everybody else is chiming in, like why do you
really want it? And what you do with it? And
at some point he says to Griffin in one of
(29:36):
his teenagers. Do you use Twitter? He said, no, Dad,
none of my friends use Twitter, and may Musk, you know,
his mother says, well, I use Twitter. I'm thinking, okay,
this may be an indication of the demographic that they're
heading towards. And everybody is trying to nudge him away
(29:57):
from going down this path, really hurting his reputation, but
sucking up his time of trying to fix Twitter, and
all this keeps coming out of the dinner. By the
end of the dinner, I realize, okay, he's gonna go there.
Speaker 2 (30:17):
So now Isaacson has a subject on his hands who
isn't just an innovator, a Silicon Valley darling with some
libertary inflect politics. Now he's got someone gearing up to
fight a war over free speech and right wing censorship
on Twitter, where he's about to try and manifest his
original X dot com Everything platform vision.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
When I first started working on the Elon Musk's book,
he was very well known, but not quite as controversial.
He wasn't quite as toxic or as canonized. Then the
Twitter deal happened, and that changes things. It really increases
by at least two orders of magnitude, how controversial he is,
(31:00):
and also how famous he is. So suddenly the narrative
becomes much more of a roller coaster. So it's good
for the book, but there were parts of it that
I kind of wish, Hey, he was a calmer personality,
But he says, I got to keep in mind that
(31:22):
the mission is getting to Mars. It's not absolutely caring
about the psychological pleasures and safeties of everybody. I can
remember the time he walked into Twitter headquarters, right before
he has officially acquired it, and they're telling him what
a nurturing place it is to work, and they're saying,
(31:42):
you know, we've got quiet rooms, and we have mental
health days off, and we have yoga studios so people
can stay in balance. And then they say, and we
really value psychological safety. And must sort of had that
raspy laugh, and he says, psychological safety, that's our enemy.
(32:04):
That's an impediment. We have to have a fierce sense
of urgency. We aren't aiming for psychological safety.
Speaker 2 (32:13):
The other reason Musk gives for buying Twitter, one that
he seems to get a lot of play for in
some corners of the world, is that he's fighting against
quote unquote wokeness. Musk has his own term for it.
When he talks about anti woke mind virus, he uses
that phrase, and that really touches on things that have
become you know, third rails in society in terms of
(32:35):
how they're discussed. I'm curious how you kind of engaged
with that idea with him. I mean, he's someone who
grew up in aparteight South Africa, so obviously, like his
views on race and other societal issues are going to
be colored by that. Like what does he mean when
he says something like that.
Speaker 1 (32:51):
Well, the way I engage with it, and you see
it in the book is I question it. I say,
why are you following this particular conspiracy? And I'll even
talk about Okham's razor, which is the simplest explanation may
be the best one. Instead of thinking there's a vast
conspiracy of drug makers and COVID vaccines, or people trying
to lock down so they control government, or any of
(33:14):
these things that he goes to, I'm not that way.
I'm not conspiratorial, and I find that anti political correctness
and wokeness. It's a little hard for me to explain
because my head's not there, you know. I think sometimes
what we call being woke is being polite and sensitive
to other people's feelings. And I'll ask him about that.
(33:38):
I say, hey, understand, you've got a daughter who transitioned.
Why do people care about pronouns? And he'll say things
when he's in a more rational mood of why don't
mind people using pronouns? But it gouges my eyes out
when I see it too much. I'm going, why, what's
the problem. But it's when he's in his dark mood.
(34:00):
This eats away at him. And I describe his political
evolution from being an Obama supporter to being supporting Bobby
Kennedy than Ron DeSantis, people who are worried about wokeness
or worried about conspiracy theories. And I never try to
(34:23):
excuse it in the book, I don't excuse the rabbit
hole going down these rabbit holes of conspiracy. I do
try to explain it from his childhood, from his father, whatever.
And then I'll tell a story about a particularly horrible
tweet he did, like prosecute fauci are my pronouns? I mean,
(34:48):
just in a few words, is able to attack transgender
pronouns and Anthony Fauci, and I talk about his father
having said all these sort of things, being in a
hot box room in Twitter, and he's going dark and giddy,
and one of the people in the room starts joking
about Fuci and pronouns. And until you read the book,
(35:15):
I think critics can have a difficulty saying is he
explaining it or is he excusing it? But if you
read that anecdote or that story, you're not gonna say
Walter excused it. You're going to see the rawness that's there.
Sometimes in Elon Musk.
Speaker 2 (35:35):
Must begins purging Twitter employees based on their relative quote hardcorenice.
When Twitter's finally down to a quarter of its previous size,
he's created the ultimate test for his delete, Delete, delete
management algorithm.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
And it's a hardcore, small cadre and that cadre of
people and you now see it at Twitter. He whittled
down eighty percent of the staff. But it's a very
hardcore cadre that will march through walls for him. And
I think he tests people. He drives them there, but
(36:08):
also drives them to do things they didn't think they
could do.
Speaker 2 (36:12):
Did he ever turn his anger on you?
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Did?
Speaker 2 (36:16):
You experience demon mode directed at you as you describe it.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
Everybody told me he was going to turn demon mode
on me. The people worked for him, plus crimes and
his former wives. They'd all say, is going to happen
to you. And if there's one small mystery, I can't
quite figure out why it never did happen to me.
But I didn't fill the silences when he went dark
(36:42):
and he went silent. I would just sit there. When
he would say something provocative, I just ask a question.
And I don't think I did anything that would have
triggered that demon mode, but I must say, as I
watched it get triggered by people around me, I always said,
(37:03):
at some point, this is going to happen to me,
where he tells me I'm stupid or whatever, like he
did to some other people who worked with him. I
didn't really want it to happen, but in the back
of my mind I knew if it did, it would
be a pretty good passage in the book. And I waited.
I waited, and I was pretty clear having watched him
(37:27):
after the first few months, I knew what brought on
the storm. I knew the type of things that would
just set him off, and sometimes I'd see it happen.
I'd see it happened on an assembly line where some
poor young worker. There's a scene in the book where
Musk is saying, did you design this process here? And
(37:49):
the young guy can't figure out what he's talking about, said,
what do you mean design it? And you could tell
Musk was about to go ballistic, and he does and
he fires the guy for no real reason. And I
watched over and over again. Must get triggered by people
giving opinions not backed up by data, or not understanding
(38:11):
what he was saying, or trying to make excuses.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Isaacson did find a few people who always seem to
dodge Musk's flamethrower, Mark gi and Kosa, the California surfer
type who was a key SpaceX engineer, and Gwinn Shotwell,
the president of SpaceX for the last twenty years.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
I also watched people like Mark o'gwynn and I learned
how they did it, which wasn't being a yes person.
It was just slowly and methodically making factual arguments, and
when Musk made a decision, say fine, I get it,
but then presenting him over and over again with more
facts and saying, all right, we're going to try it
(38:49):
that way. But here's what we learned when we tested
it this morning. Because they're people who've been there almost
twenty years at SpaceX or at Tesla, who have never
really been the object of his flamethrowing personality. But as
a few people in the book said, Yoel roth It
(39:12):
was in charge of moderation at Twitterit. Yoel told me
over and over again those first few weeks how he
had learned to deal with Mosk, how it worked out fine,
and he said, I know these type of people. He
basically saying, I know bosses that can turn into assholes
all of a sudden. I've dealt with this before. And
(39:32):
then finally Yoel doesn't get fired, he doesn't get reamed out.
He finally says it's just too much. I'm leaving. It's
time for me to go.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
It kind of highlights this aspect. I think if you
only hear about the incidents where Musk mistreats people. He's
an asshole, he doesn't have any empathy, you kind of
wonder why would anyone work for him?
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Over and over again, he would do things like force
a surge to stack a rocket on a launch pad,
even though there was no rush to do it or
force a surge at one of the manufacturing plants, and
people would go through hell for about a week to
do it, and it was exhausting, and a few would
(40:15):
fall by the wayside, and a couple would quit and
then decided, I'd rather be burned out than bored. And
so he's able to get those twenty percent of the
people in any workforce who are totally inspired by somebody
always in battle, and he gets a very lean team
(40:38):
that's willing to put up with him being cold and
angry for those amazing moments where they feel like they're
changing the world.
Speaker 2 (40:50):
In the next episode of Von Musk, we turn our
lens on Isaacson and his process, teasing out exactly how
he wrote this behemoth biography, how he resists hot takes
even as he's surrounded by them, and how he sorted
out what was going on with the supposed Musk family.
Emerald mind, I mean.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
It's just so brutal. They hate each other, he said.
I'm just a middle class kid trying to build a company,
and when people do things at sock, I've got to
tell them it socks. And if I'm too collegial, We'll
never get things done. Well, I thought that was going
to be the end of all my access, and I
had violated what he may have thought was just a
(41:28):
private comment. But there were moments as the book was finishing,
I'd get up in the morning and just turn on
my phone. Is it still there? It was? It like
the rocketship? Did it blow up? On?
Speaker 2 (41:41):
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 and Ali Perry.
(42:04):
For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by Manges Hatikador, with
an assist from Oz Walishan Kostaslinos and Kate Osbourne. Special
thanks to Bob Pittman, Connell Byrne, will Pearson, Nicki Etour,
Kerrie Lieberman, Nathan Otoski, Ali Gavin and the folks at
WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio in New Orleans.
(42:25):
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.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.