ON MUSK Episode Four: What is Musk's Legacy?

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0:58Walter Isaacson: experts from MIT and Harvard and is trusted by millions of teachers and parents. Sign up at brilliant.org slash tutor and get 20 % off for back to school. That's brilliant.org slash tutor. The sale's right there. Don't miss it. This holiday, give shoppers a flexible way to pay with PayPal Pay Later and turn them into regulars. PayPal is built for all business. Get started at paypal.com slash business. You want to talk about pressure? Try having millions of people watching and waiting to see what you're going to do once that ball hits your hand. Hey, it's Marcus Allen, Pro Football Hall of Famer, NFL MVP, and Super Bowl champion.

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2:26Walter Isaacson: I'm Walter Isaacson. Welcome to The Builders, my new series of interviews featuring the most consequential minds shaping our future. Our series starts with Elon Musk, but in anticipation, we're re-airing our critically acclaimed show, On Musk, in this feed. The show originally aired in December of 2023. It has four episodes of backstories from the years I spent following Elon while writing his biography. Give it a listen, then stay tuned for The Builders. I think you'll like it.

3:14Walter Isaacson: Musk is probably the richest couch surfer ever. He didn't have a home in Palo Alto, so he would stay with Larry Page, and they'd stay up all night. And Musk would talk about how we have to be careful of AI. It could destroy us. And Page was having nothing of it. Page loved the notion of AI. And Page would even say, it'd be great if we could have robots that would be conscious, and then we could upload our consciousness into it. It would be the next phase of evolution. Why are you so worried about humans being left behind by the robots? And once Page even called him species, meaning you're biased towards the human species.

3:59Walter Isaacson: And Ma said, yeah, dude, I am species. I like the human species. And believe it or not, these fights cause them to quit speaking to each other. I mean, they really still don't speak to each other because of this philosophical fight.

4:19Walter Isaacson: I think Musk looks upon himself as an epic figure on a grand quest, just like the comic book characters wearing their underpants on the outside and kind of knowing they're ridiculous but also very insecure about it. And I think it's true of a whole lot of people. I think it's a human trait, but I think like every human trait in Elon Musk, it's at least two orders of magnitude greater.

4:51In the weeks since the release of Walter Isaacson's doorstop biography of Elon Musk, some stories from the book have jumped off the page. Tabloidish fodder, like the secret birth of Musk's third child with Grimes, or the secret births of his twins with his colleague. Non-procrative stories, like the fact-checking drama around the role that Musk's Starlink satellite network has and has not occupied in Ukraine. And since Isaacson and I spoke, there's of course been the unending drama emanating from Musk himself, from amplifying anti-Semitic tweets to publicly telling Disney CEO Bob Iger to go fuck himself.

5:30But after each tempest dies down, what should we really take away from this 600-page epic retelling of the life of Musk and about the world in which he operates? I'm Evan Ratliff. This is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. And today, we're tangling with Isaacson over questions around Musk, the speciest. I mean, whose side is he on anyway? What does his growing geopolitical influence tell us about the power that one man can hold in the modern world? And finally, what are we meant to learn from Isaacson's exhaustive account? How does he think the book will age, as Musk seems to grow more divisive, and even self-destructive by the day.

6:12Episode 4, Legacy. I mean, you spent so much time with Jobs in the world of Silicon Valley, understanding that world, the whole way that world operated at that time, Jobs versus Gates, et cetera. And when you came to the end of that, there's one way you could go where you would say, I think I get it. I think I get what Silicon Valley is all about. But then you go after Musk.

6:51Walter Isaacson: We biographers have a dirty little secret that we sometimes distort history by making it seem like one guy or one gal goes into a garage in a garret. They have a light bulb moment and then history happens. And usually it's done by groups of people and teams as a collaborative nature to creativity. And so after doing Steve Jobs, in which I showed him as a motive force pushing the digital revolution, I decided to do a book called The Innovators. It was a collective biographical study with dozens of people who helped invent the concept of the personal computer and the concept of the network and then the microchip and how they interwove and collaborated.

7:42Walter Isaacson: I think in some ways that can be more true to history is to show partnerships and teamwork that lead to things. I kind of liked it, but it didn't really sell all that well. I do think that people like following a main character. But for Musk, some of the minor characters are pretty big personalities, and sometimes controversial ones. As Musk's bluster about buying Twitter turns into reality, a crew of his old Valley pals start to resurface in Isaacson's tale. Many of them are from what Fortune magazine once called the PayPal mafia. Ex-PayPal execs like David Sachs, Ken Howery, Reid Hoffman, and Peter Thiel.

8:28Many of them seem to be Musk's whispers, simultaneously steering Musk away from jagged financial shoals and toward a frothing ocean of an anti-woke, free-speech maelstrom. There is a whole world of how these Silicon Valley moguls, you would call many of them, or executives sort of like relate to each other. And a lot of it goes back to PayPal and the PayPal mafia and people who started PayPal then becoming these friends and Musk being involved in it. I mean, you mentioned Antonio Gracias. You already knew him. Is that a world that you already had entry into and understood or you learned through Musk the relationships between these people and how that actually influences what happens in these?

9:09Walter Isaacson: By writing about Steve Jobs and then doing the innovators, I certainly got to know that world very well of tech bros and even that world of the quasi-libertarian tech bro mentality that's a Peter Thiel at the center. One of the things that helps understand Musk today goes back to those PayPal years. He had started a company called X.com, which he wanted to have be a payments app, but also an everything app, an app that would be social media and would be a publishing platform. And it merges with a company that Peter Thiel has done, and it becomes PayPal. Musk wants to keep it named X, X.com. He loves the mystery of that letter X.

10:02Walter Isaacson: He thinks it's hardcore, and they overrule him. And they use the name PayPal, which he thinks is a sweet little name of pals who want to pay each other. But it's not an everything app that's going to change the world. And they kick him out. And for 20 years, it's eating away at him, which is why, of course, he wants to buy Twitter. And it becomes the booster to create what he'd always wanted, which is a payments platform connected to a publishing platform connected to social media. But he does something that I found somewhat surprising until I fully understood it, is when he gets kicked out of PayPal in this coup by Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman, Ken Howery, David Sachs, and Max Levchin.

10:54Walter Isaacson: Musk decides instead of hating them forever and thinking they're enemies, he makes up with them, even though he says, they knifed me in the forum, kicked me out of my job. And it comes back as good karma. They end up investing in SpaceX. Yeah, Teal gives them$20 million. Basically, you write as an apology almost. As a way after three rocket launches by SpaceX have failed and they've run out of money, Teal says it's a good way to try to make it up to him. And it saves SpaceX. And this crowd remains relatively friendly. And their political views and their technology views influence each other. And it all feeds in to understanding why his politics have become somewhat of this populist right libertarian streak.

11:55This book is going to – people are going to take lessons from it, even if you don't explicitly prescribe what those lessons are going to be. And especially in the business world, people like to read these books for tips and for advice. And let's take people in Silicon Valley, for example. What do you think they are going to draw from the book? And are you at all concerned that they might draw the wrong lesson?

12:21Walter Isaacson: Now, with Steve Jobs, when that book came out, there were a lot of stories of, do you have to be like Steve Jobs to be successful? A Wired Magazine cover story did it. And I was saying, no, this book was not a how-to manual. Sometimes people come up to me after I talked about Steve Jobs, and they'd say, I'm just like Steve Jobs. Like, I'm not a waz, I'm a Jobs. Yeah, I'm not waz, I'm not sweet, I'm not cuddly, I'm like Jobs. If people screw things up, I tell them they've screwed up. I fire them. I tell them they stink, I'll say on a podcast. And I'll look at them and I say, yeah. And have you ever invented the iPod?

13:03Walter Isaacson: Did you ever make the Macintosh, the iPhone? You don't have the right to do this. Probably Steve Jobs didn't have the right to do it. But you're not supposed to try to be like this. Do you worry at all? You mentioned the person who comes up to you and says, I'm like Steve Jobs. that there are going to be Musk acolytes who will take those wrong lessons, and that some of those people run Silicon Valley. They run very important aspects, if not the most important aspects of our society right now. Does it concern you that people might take a Muskian approach and lack the vision but have the persona, and that those people are making consequential decisions about the tools we use?

13:46Yeah.

13:47Walter Isaacson: I mean, one lesson a lot of Silicon Valley executives seem to have taken from the book is, oh, my workforce is probably too flabby. I could fire 80 % the way Elon Musk did at Twitter. And no, you can't just do that. Also, there's a larger issue, which the book wrestles with, which I call the old Twitter, new Twitter issue, which is that life is about a little bit more than simply having the leanest, meanest machine you can create. And some people may want to do that, especially people doing startups. They may want to be lean, mean, and hackathon all night long. But there are other people who will keep in mind the larger mission of having an enterprise or a company and that it's there to create good for all of society, for consumers, for good products, but also the people who work there and the communities where they're based.

14:48Walter Isaacson: And I think that's a good tension to have in our society. You know, I used to work at Diamond Incorporated and boy, it was nice and flabby. You know, we had a dozen people working in the nation section to produce maybe eight pages every week. Sounds lovely. We had researchers. We had assistants and schedulers. We even had the person who brought the food cart and the drink cart around every evening. And then, you know, everybody from activist investors to McKinsey consultants come in and say, you can cut this. You can cut that. You can make it leaner and meaner. And there are people who are comfortable being all in and hardcore.

15:35Walter Isaacson: Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, totally hardcore. And there are people who are more comfortable finding a nurturing, good environment for people. We have to find the right balances. I would disdain somebody who is always as tough as an Elon Musk. I'd also kind of disdain people who lack a sense of passion and mission, but the books aren't a how-to manual saying you should do this at your company. These books, especially when it comes to Elon Musk, are supposed to do two things that people have a hard time keeping both in their mind. Be inspirational, And be cautionary. But above all, it is a story of a real person that is one of the most consequential of our day and generation.

16:31And I mean, I think a certain percentage of people today have a hard time understanding the approach where you could happily sit and listen to a Peter Thiel or someone with those politics and not kind of challenge them, be angry, and just sort of sit with them in a very reporter-like way.

16:56Walter Isaacson: I go back to the notion of I'm supposed to tell you the story. Am I supposed to say I totally disagree with Peter Thiel's view on the Ukraine war? No, that's bull. I mean, do I disagree? Yeah. I don't share his beliefs on that or many other things. But if you want the hot take on whether or not you agree with Peter Thiel's politics, my book's not for you. I'm telling you how this story happened. When we come back, stacking Musk up against jobs and answering Isaacson's critics, including those who keep quoting him. Stay with us.

17:44This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR. Fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

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20:52Walter Isaacson: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is a very small detail, but because you're a New Orleanian, I have to ask this. You quote Musk talking about how if he could skip meals and just get his nutrients from like, you know, soylent or liquid beverage or whatever. He would just do that. It's very a valley thing. And what did you do for food when you were alongside him? One of the wonderful things about Boca Chica, Texas, and this rough little scrub land, there's a canteen that's stocked with amazingly good barbecue, salads, and you can walk in 24 hours a day. I And remarkably, it actually had good coffee too, or at least good coffee for Texas.

21:43Walter Isaacson: But Musk doesn't care about food. He doesn't care about fine wines. He really doesn't drink that much. Occasionally, you go out to dinner with him and a few people, and there'll be craft cocktails, you know, I don't know, cactus juice with tequila. And he'll always try one and never quite finish it. He never cares that much about the food he's ordering. but I know that when I finally came off the trail, having traveled with him and having been summoned back even in April to watch the Starship launch or then to Austin for him to launch XAI, I finally said, okay, I'm going to have to start eating right again.

22:27Walter Isaacson: And I remember eating very carefully, but also craving really good food. And so I'd be down in New Orleans and my wife, Kathy and I, we made a habit of once a week eating at Galatoire's, once a week eating at Herb Saint, and once a week eating at Pesce, and maybe once every week or two eating at Mosca's, which is a great place. I've been to Mosca's. Yeah, just so I can remember the taste of really good food, having spent two years watching him grab sandwiches and hamburgers. On Isaacson's book tour for his Musk biography, he was regularly quizzed about how Musk compares with jobs, perhaps the most obvious foil among Isaacson's subjects.

23:10Walter Isaacson: At one of my events, a high school student came up to the microphone, and he actually had read the whole book. Impressive. He had a question that he said I hadn't answered. I said, what's that? And he said, was Elon Musk nice to waiters and waitresses? And I realized that was an insightful question. And I thought of Steve Jobs, who I remember one day at a Whole Foods in Palo Alto. There's an older woman who was making the smoothie. And Steve Jobs just chewed her out because she wasn't doing it fast enough and wasn't doing it in the right way. And I remember of all the things that made me recoil, it was being mean to a person making the smoothie or being a waiter, like jobs could be.

24:04Walter Isaacson: Musk was actually incredibly rough on people he worked with. But all the times I saw him where there were waiters or waitresses or somebody at a shop or whatever, he would get into sort of a jovial mood. And so I don't think he had a meanness that would have been reflected in the way he treated waiters. And I thought, shoot, that was a really good question that kid asked. And I probably get in trouble with Steve Jobs, but boy. Well, Jobs isn't around anymore, sadly, but Musk could still, is there something he could do that would make you fundamentally rethink whether you should have written the book about him?

24:50Walter Isaacson: No, I think the book explains correctly who he is. And his reputation will go way up and way down, as it has for the past 25 years. And he'll get Starship into orbit someday, and he'll be on the front page of the paper. And also, he will do things, be it with Twitter or with self-driving, that'll cause problems and be bad. So there will be a roller coaster on his reputation, and that will be the case for the next 20 years. How does that feel to kind of be connected to someone who, as you have amply captured, is extremely volatile and is also maybe becoming a little more controversial every day?

25:38Walter Isaacson: Yeah, I mean, it's not great. I would love it if he would lie low for like a year, but he ain't going to do that. And that's what this book explains, which is at one point, Antonio Gracias, his friend, like takes his phone away from him when they're traveling and puts it in the hotel room safe so Musk won't get up. And in the middle of the night, Musk calls hotel security and makes him open the safe so he can start tweeting out where things. That's who Musk is. And you have this body of work when it comes to biographies. You've got Ben Franklin, you've got Einstein, you've got Da Vinci, and then you have the living ones, Doudna, Jobs, now Musk.

26:18And I think it tends to create an impression, even sometimes I think they're packaged together for marketing purposes, that all of these people are of a kind. They're almost like a trajectory of human achievement. Do you think of Musk as fitting in with Da Vinci, Einstein, these world legendary figures? Or do you feel like, well, the jury's still out on that, but he's the closest I can get in modern times?

26:46Walter Isaacson: I don't think that all the people I've written about are of one kind. But the reason you write biographies rather than sort of how-to manuals for innovation is that each is different. And there's certain common threads, which is a passion to push reality into a certain mission that you have. but I don't try to say I'm writing about Elon Musk because he's like Benjamin Franklin. Do you think he's spoiled other subjects for you in that it's difficult to find a subject who has those different personalities, all of that contained in one person? Yeah. I mean, it would be hard to find a contemporary character who comes even close to being as head-snapping, amazing, gut-wrenching, mercurial of a rollercoaster and emotional and professional subject.

27:54Walter Isaacson: I can't think of anybody who's this fascinating for good and for bad. So I want to talk about some of the criticism that comes up around the book and getting you a chance to respond to some of that stuff. There's Musk being a difficult and demanding person, even an asshole, whether that matters for how creative he is, how innovative he is. And then there's these sort of larger societal accusations, let's say, like allowing misinformation or encouraging misinformation or the self-driving and people getting killed or the sort of lawsuit against Tesla when it comes to racial discrimination. Those seem to be two separate ideas.

28:39And I'm wondering, we've talked a lot about the first one and how you feel about that second basket, that question of whether, aside from whether he is or isn't a bad person to his employees, there are things that he's doing in the world that have negative implications.

28:57Walter Isaacson: Yeah, I think when you barrel ahead impulsively, you do things that have negative implications. You know, bad workplace environments. Well, it starts at the top because he's all in hardcore driven. He's not into what he thinks are touchy-feely HR guidelines, and that's bad. Likewise, he pushes a little fast on full self-driving. I mean, he feels that humans will kill 10 or 100 times more people than a self-driving car will. So he doesn't get the fact that if self-driving just, you know, one time, as it did this once, hit a side of a big white truck, you know, and that's been in the news after three, four years.

29:40Walter Isaacson: It's still in the news. He says, you know, people focus on that, not the million people got killed by humans. Well, it's because he doesn't have a real feel for human feelings and emotions. He doesn't realize that a self-driving car smashing somebody into a truck is going to really shake people up more than the fact that a bad driver, you know, here on Claymore Avenue in New Orleans got into an accident. So these are the things that his engineering mindset doesn't feel as well. And I feel like when people bring those things up, they're often saying they want you to engage with those things more.

30:21And we've talked about, you know, explaining what's going on versus moralizing. But how do you feel about how you engaged with sort of that aspect of Musk?

30:31Walter Isaacson: Well, I like the fact that people who say I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk. And a couple people have pointed that out. I mean, certainly if you're looking at the bad workplace environments that he may engender either at Tesla or at Twitter, that's in the book, you know, in no uncertain terms. Likewise, the accidents on the self-driving cars are definitely in the book, starting with Autonomy Day in 2019 all the way to the present. There's a lot of evidence that his obsession with this might be moving things too fast.

31:12Walter Isaacson: So I'm perfectly happy if people say I should have been tougher on Musk, but also say, man, read the book. If you want ammunition, both of how amazing he can be at times in getting things done, but also the rubble he leaves in his wake. When it came to the Ukraine Starlink situation, you've talked about that, the thing that got corrected in the post and Musk tweeting. But maybe you've talked about this, but I haven't heard it yet. But I'm interested in what it felt like for you. Like you strike me as someone who's like relatively unbothered by some of the noise that's around these things. I think you have to be unbothered by the noise and you have to keep the essence of the story in mind.

31:53Walter Isaacson: The essence of that story was fine. It was correct, which was that night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled or not be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. And there was a fix that had to be made because it had already been geofenced. So his decision was not to permit the movement of the geofencing. I hadn't gone into enough. I just said he turned it off. So that was oversimplifying. But I didn't want to get distracted from the main thing, which is this private citizen is suddenly deciding that night whether or not Ukraine gets to do a sneak attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea.

32:32The essence is a private citizen has that power to decide.

32:37Walter Isaacson: And neither he nor anybody else corrected that. And then I talked to him. I said, well, have you talked to the U.S. government? and he turns over power to these satellites to the U.S. government, finally. At a later point. Yeah, at a later point, after that night where we talk about it. So you see all of these things happen, and I try to have it shown in real time, and the essence of the story being how does somebody acquire this much power? Why is it that the rest of government and other contractors have become so paralyzed and sclerotic that they can't do some of these things? And then how does he, with his megalomania, finally back down and say, maybe I should give up some of this power?

33:25There's something chilling about Musk's power and influence growing beyond his companies, beyond the rocket launch pad and the Tesla factory floor. And in the case of Starlink satellite's use in Ukraine, even Musk himself finds this a little unsettling. From failing to understand how people might respond to self-driving car deaths, to his outwardly blasé approach to controlling global geopolitics with a thumbs up or thumbs down, like a Roman emperor in the Coliseum. People are not Elon Musk's forte, by his own admission, but we are increasingly in his hands. And depending on where you stand on Musk, some of his ideas can seem either sinister, logical, or simply baffling.

34:06Take, for example, his stated concern about underpopulation and declaration that people need to be having more children. Well, more specifically, smart people need to be having more children. It's Acreides lived with all 10 of his surviving children born by IVF. He's put his money behind it too, funding a University of Texas at Austin research group called the Population Wellbeing Initiative, to the tune of$10 million. What I wanted to know from Isaacson was, given his front row seat to Musk's unusual family dramas, what are we supposed to make of this particular Musk obsession? He tweets and talks about low birth rates, and he seems very obsessed, maybe is too much.

34:45But I think I wanted to know, what does this add up to? What is this about? I was sort of left, I don't understand what this tells me about Elon Musk, which is maybe my problem. But

34:54Walter Isaacson: Like a lot of things with Elon Musk, it goes back to the father a bit. It also goes to Musk's theory of consciousness. The human species is a fragile thing. And one of the threats is a low birth rate. Now, most of us probably don't think that way. We think we're overpopulated, but there is a decline in birth rate in many, many countries. And Musk deeply feels that's a problem. And, you know, people can totally disagree with that and say, hey, overpopulation is a big problem. They can also think he's weird to fund IVF for other people or fund clinics. That's it. It's the kind of thing where people can look at it and they can say he has this vision for humanity and it involves like people having more children.

35:46And then there are people who see it through a lens of, is this some kind of eugenics situation? I feel like people bring these lenses to it. And I'm wondering if that has happened in your past work or if this is a unique situation.

36:00Walter Isaacson: I think it's somewhat unique that people have such extraordinarily strong feelings for and against Musk. When I started working on this book, he was one of the most popular people on earth. There's some people who didn't like him, but his politics was generally a supporter of Obama. He had done really bad, dumb tweets in the past, like saying he was going to take Tesla private or calling some cave diver a pedophile. But generally, he wasn't that controversial. And then his politics shift, and it's reflected in his tweets, and he buys Twitter. And so I end up with a book in which people either think he's an absolute hero or an absolute villain.

36:50Walter Isaacson: And if you come at it from a frame of Musk is inherently an evil person, even having a lot of kids seems like something evil. And pushing for self-driving cars or robots seems evil. Likewise, if you're one of these starry-eyed fans, even the weird, dark things he does on Twitter, people will be slamming me for telling the stories of his behavior, both at Twitter and at factories. So, yeah, it's a difficulty that people frame his every action often based on their own love or hatred for him. Up next, I ask Isaacson, does Musk really believe his own hype? Stay with us.

37:54This is Jacob Goldstein from What's Your Problem? Running a business is hard enough. Don't make it harder with a dozen apps that don't talk to each other. One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting. That's software overload. Odoo is the all-in-one platform that replaces them all. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, HR, fully integrated, easy to use, and built to grow with your business. Thousands have already made the switch. Why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. This holiday, the difference between buyers just checking things out and checking out comes down to the last few clicks.

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39:16But eventually, you have to make a decision and go. For me, that was the fun of football. The moment between getting the ball and finding out whether you made the right read, I loved it. And it's why I understand what underdog brings to sports fans. Because once you make your pick, you're not just watching anymore. Every snap matters. Every yard matters. Every decision matters. Everybody thinks they know what's coming next. Well, Underdog gives you somewhere to put that opinion into play. Pick them. Money lines, totals, spreads, games, and more across your favorite sports. So trust your read, make your call, and see what happens.

39:51Download Underdog and get in on the action today. Underdog. Unleash your dog. Trading involves risk, including total loss on positions. Content is promotional and not a recommendation to trade. Terms apply. I'm Melissa Jeldson, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck, because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed.

40:30They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year. You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

40:58Walter Isaacson: Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

41:28himself an epic figure, or is he actually trying to solve the energy problem, send us to Mars, for humanity reasons?

41:35Walter Isaacson: When Musk first started talking about his three great missions, you know, space travel, artificial intelligence, and sustainable energy, I thought it was a type of pontifications that you'd do for a biographer, or do for a podcast, or do for a pep talk. And then I'd see him over and over again just chant it to himself, like walking around the factory for building Starship and things are getting delayed. And he would keep saying to himself and others around him, we have to have an urgency of getting humanity to Mars. And I came to believe that, I don't know if he always fully believed it, but I know he believed he believed it.

42:25Walter Isaacson: I know that sounds strange, but sometimes, as Shakespeare teaches us, we become the mask we wear. And he had internalized and externalized this so much that he was driven by a fierce urgency that we've got to get rockets that can get us to Mars within the next few decades, or that we have to sustain solar and battery and electric vehicle energy on this planet. And I am totally convinced that he is driven by his belief in those missions. And then he backfills and figures out, well, how can I make money on the way? But if you're driven mainly by financial or selfish reasons, you're not going to start a rocket company.

43:18Walter Isaacson: That's not a good idea for making money. You're not going to start an EV company when every other car company is getting out of the business. You're not going to worry about robots, and you're not going to buy Twitter. So I don't think he was motivated by money. He was motivated by this almost man-child epic sense of him as a hero in a comic book or a video game. Well, the Twitter one is interesting because I felt like the way you wrote that almost reversed the polls there in which he decides to buy Twitter. He impulsively decides, gets stuck with it. And then he almost seems to be backfilling the mission where he says, actually.

44:00I asked him at one point, how does this fit into your mission?

44:05Walter Isaacson: It makes no sense. I mean, I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertip feel for social emotional networks. And he admits, he said, yes, maybe it's a lark. Maybe it doesn't really fit in. And then later he says, well, maybe it will help democracy so that civilization will survive long enough that we'll be able to become multi-planetary. And that's why I just didn't believe him. And I'm not even sure he believed himself. That's just a bullcrap explanation. But he had to try to justify it to himself. But my own opinion is he kind of stumbled into that impulsively and had mixed feelings about it.

44:46Walter Isaacson: And if he had to do it all over again, I'm not sure he would. you've talked about how you think Twitter will just be a blip of his legacy, but he certainly can and is getting mired in it. And there's this quote in the book, it's him saying, I probably spend too much time on Twitter. It's a good place to dig your own grave. You get your shoulder into it and you keep on digging. Do you feel that he could be undoing some of that magic, that vision that you captured when it comes to space or electric cars. Yeah, I personally feel that the time he spends in Twitter and the mindshare he devotes to it is not as important.

45:30Walter Isaacson: It's not as high value as him doing something else. And I don't think he's particularly good at the social interactions and human emotions that come in Twitter. and he admits he's just addicted to it. I don't think it's going to be an important part of his legacy. It's not going to be a great part of his legacy. I think it makes the book more interesting for this guy to go down this rabbit hole, but also near the end of the book to say, you know, this isn't the best use of my time even talking about Twitter. He said, we probably could be talking about more important things. It's also, it's made him disliked in a way that I feel like he wasn't disliked before.

46:11I mean, if you look at the category of things that people dislike him for, Twitter and things he's said on Twitter and done with Twitter occupy a large percentage of those things.

46:23Walter Isaacson: Absolutely. When you look at the controversies caused and for that matter, the enmity and hatred that he's engendered, about 95 % of that comes either from what he says on or what he does on Twitter or what he does to Twitter. Musk is polarizing, arguably one of the two most polarizing figures of our time. I'll let you guess the other. His fans can be slavishly adoring. His critics can be blind with rage. But if there was one common thread among the more critical takes on Isaacson's biography, it was a demand for more judgment, or at least analysis, from Isaacson. What was the ultimate meaning in all these stories he'd gathered, these hours at Musk's side?

47:06Were we supposed to believe that he was some kind of tortured genius, or that he was a cruel tyrant who'd muscled his way to valley success and was now inflicting a dangerous outlook on the world outside it? What did it all add up to? For two days, I played out different versions of this question with Isaacson.

47:23Walter Isaacson: I'm here to be as straightforward as I can with a reader in mind to tell you stories that I think are very revealing, somewhat exciting, somewhat appalling, but always informative. And in face of the criticism that, well, maybe I didn't render too much judgment, I tried pretty hard to pull back a bit to say, you can kind of tell what I think by the way I'm telling this story, but I'm not going to hammer that into you, you should wrestle with each of these things and figure out how it fits with your own vision of life. You never say to yourself, maybe I should put 10 % more judgment in there. No, no.

48:07Walter Isaacson: That's something I cop a plea to totally. I certainly don't feel in any way bad that I didn't impose more of my judgments in it. There's a lot of writing in the book about the chaos that surrounds Musk. But then I wondered, you have had many war reporters working for you that you're responsible for in some sense. And so do you feel like the reporting and editing that you did prepared you for the chaos of Musk or to say like, this is not real chaos compared to other types of reporting? Every now and then when Musk is doing something incredibly chaotic or has himself worked up into a lather. I do remember times where things were much worse.

48:52Walter Isaacson: And I remember being in Belfast in Northern Ireland when I worked for the Sunday Times and all the explosions. And I certainly remember the Gulf War when I was at CNN and went out to one of America's aircraft carriers, which is where CNN had some of its reporters embedded. And I think, okay, when we think things are going bad, let's remember there's some really bad things happening in this world. And I wish if I could do many things for Musk, it would sometimes be calm down a bit. You know, don't be so apocalyptic about things because he has an apocalyptic mindset.

49:42You told a story about going to Northern Ireland when you were a reporter. And you were with another reporter. And you left the hotel. And the hotel got bombed. And then he actually later died reporting in El Salvador. Yeah. And the question I had was, what's the lesson from that? Like, leaving the hotel saved you, in a way. But he then was killed, taking risks. Where do you triangulate the lesson in that?

50:11Walter Isaacson: One of the things you learn is that sometimes there are no lessons, that sometimes things happen and they're random. Sometimes a sniper bullet kills somebody. Sometimes risk-taking can get you killed. Sometimes not taking enough risk makes you paralyzed. So there's not always easy lessons. and those stories happen to be as valuable because they tell you that there's a mosaic in life. Sometimes complex patterns are there and sometimes you can't see the pattern just with one or two data points. Maybe you should restrain yourself. Maybe, maybe there's not a hot take to be had. Maybe there's not even a lesson.

51:02Walter Isaacson: It's just a part of this beautiful complexity of humans and human life. And you appreciate those patterns and eventually they lead to intuitions as opposed to quick lessons. That's a great ending for this whole show, perhaps. I just want to point that out, so I'll have that on tape. Don't ask it again. I'll never be able to repeat that. We've got it. But it has a virtue of being true. I feel that way.

51:35On Musk with Walter Isaacson is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeart. This show is based on the writing and reporting of Walter Isaacson. It's hosted by me, Evan Ratliff, produced by Lizzie Jacobs, assistant production from Serena Chow, mixing and sound design by Rick Kwan, Thomas Walsh did the engineering. From iHeart Podcast, the executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by Mangesh Hattikador, with an assist from Oz Willition, Kostas Linos, and Kate Osborne. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Conal Byrne, Will Pearson, Nikki Etor, Carrie Lieberman, Nathan Otoski, Allie Gavin, and the folks at WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio in New Orleans.

52:19If you like stories about writers and their process, check out my other show, The Long Form Podcast. If you want a story about a different South African programmer who became one of the world's biggest criminals, you can check out my book, The Mastermind. And for more shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit kaleidoscope.nyc. Thanks so much for listening.

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