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