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