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