ON MUSK Episode Three: Storytelling and Hot Takes

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1:41Walter 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.

2:28Walter Isaacson: At some point I'm in college, and I didn't quite know what I wanted to be when I grew up. And a legendary but young editor back then, Harry Evans, had just moved to the Sunday Times of London, and he was the Boy Wonder editor. And so he came to my college, and he's talking about a new form of journalism investigative journalism done in narrative fashion. I got my clips and I sent it off to him by mail, a packet of these clips and saying, could I get a job? A few months later, I get a telegram. Now, I don't think I've ever gotten a telegram in life. And I open it up and it says, we'll hire on limited basis.

3:14Walter Isaacson: And it was Harry Evans. And I couldn't even figure out what he was talking about. I'd almost forgotten I'd sent off my clips. But in the end, I went off that summer, and I worked in London for the Sunday Times. And not only was Harry the most vibrant editor you could imagine, but he'd send me off to all sorts of places. I went to northern Morocco to cover the Spanish-Sahara fights. I remember being in Greece because there were people that were busting the sanctions to Rhodesia back then. And I had this mentor, a pal named David Blundy, who I went to Northern Ireland with. And he was fearless. I remember one night we were in the restaurant at the Europa Hotel in Belfast.

4:02Walter Isaacson: He said, no, we've got to go cover the riots. I'm like, David. And I learned a lesson because we went and covered the riots. When we got back, the hotel had been bombed. And so he was this person who influenced me on getting out there being a bit of a risk taker as a journalist. Walter Isaacson is the author of eight biographies before Musk. He started back in 1986 with one called The Wise Men, co-authored with journalist Evan Thomas, about the architects of U.S. foreign policy. He's written about lightning rods like Henry Kissinger, technologists and scientists like Steve Jobs and Jennifer Doudna, historical eminences like Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein.

4:48But Isaacson's own roots are in the golden age of magazine journalism, a time where he rose to become editor of the magazine in a pre - and early internet era when its influence was at its peak. He jumped to the head of CNN right before 9-11. than the Aspen Institute, before returning to his hometown of New Orleans to teach and write. And if you've heard Isaacson talk about his approach to telling stories, including ones like Musk's, he often harkens back to growing up here and what he learned as a kid in New Orleans.

5:22I'm Evan Ratliff, and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Episode three, The Big Easy and Beyond.

5:35Walter Isaacson: Where are you ordering from? Where are you ordering from? Wherever you'd like. I'll eat almost anything. But if there are Po' Boy sandwiches anywhere near here, that'd be fine or whatever. Cell phones are silent. Totally. I've consumed a lot of the interviews that you've done since the book came out. And there's a lot of talk of sort of the man in the arena and then this sort of Boswell character, the biographer. And so I would like to treat you like the man in the arena. So I want to start pretty far back. Can you paint a picture for me what it was like growing up here in New Orleans? storytelling was essential in new orleans it was the only way you could be popular whether you were the lunch table the dinner table or on the playground and so there was in bread in all of us especially the kids i grew up with the notion of seeing if you could amuse people with good stories you've heard the walker percy yes yes i want to talk about that actually yeah i had a group of friends.

6:42Walter Isaacson: We used to go to the Bogafalaya above Lake Pontchartrain, and we'd fish and ski and try to capture turtles. And we'd all tell the stories about the rope swing or the time that this happened. And one of the people with us was a young woman named Ann, whose father was Walker Percy. And we never knew what Walker did. I'd say, Ann, he just always sits on the dock and drinks Bourbon. And she said, well, he's a writer. I didn't know you could be a writer. And so one day, I was about 12 or 13, I read The Movie Goer, the novel he had just published. And I said to him, man, this book's got a lot of lessons in it.

7:24Walter Isaacson: You're trying to teach things. Explain it to me. And this is the point where if you've heard Isaacson on any number of podcasts or TV shows over the years or read interviews with him, you'll know that Walker Percy gave him a singular piece of advice. He repeats it all the time. For heaven's sake, be a storyteller. The world's got far too many preachers. It's advice that has shaped his thinking ever since. And I learned that that's the way the Bible helps move us along. We start with, you know, the greatest lead sentence ever, which is in the beginning. And we learn lessons through stories. But of course, he didn't follow Walker Percy into fiction writing.

8:07Although he says he's got a novel in a drawer that he plans to leave there. Instead, he started as a beat reporter at the legendary New Orleans Daily.

8:15Walter Isaacson: I remember my first day on the job at the Times-Picayon. My first day as a reporter, high school kid, police reporter, 5 a.m. to noon. There's a murder happening on Carrollton Avenue. It's early in the morning. I get sent there and I talk to the police. I get all the facts from the police spokesman. I had to go to the payphone on the corner to phone it in to the city editor. City editor says, did you talk to the family? I go, no, Billy. They just had somebody killed in their family. He said, go back and knock on the door and say you're from the Picay-In and you want to talk to them. Take a deep breath, walk back.

8:53Walter Isaacson: I was amazed. They said, come on in. They made me coffee. they brought out pictures. They talked for more than an hour and a half. I learned two things. One is people will talk if you're really there just to listen. You don't have an agenda. You're not trying to mess with them. And secondly, back then, you had this ability to say, I'm from the paper. Let me talk. Even after the Times-Picayune, though, Isaacson's path wasn't set. There were other options, ones that probably wouldn't have led to Elon Musk. A year or two after college and university, I got three job offers in one week. One of them was to go into politics, congressional race.

9:40Walter Isaacson: I was going to help manage it. It was a guy named Rick Tonry who ends up in jail. So that was not going to be the right way to go. The second one, I got a call from Cord Beyer. He said, we met when you were studying in England. What I didn't know is that he was CIA station chief for Europe, and he used to meet students and young Americans there and keep track of them. And I was offered a job with the CIA. But he said, we wouldn't, of course, want you to be undercover. We'd want you to be in Langley as an analyst. And I'm thinking, wait a minute. If I'm going to join the CIA, do I want to just be an analyst at headquarters?

10:19Walter Isaacson: And the third job offer I got was because I had covered the mayor's race in New Orleans that year and 12 candidates had run. It was a total zoo. But I went around to every ward leader and every assessor at every bar in New Orleans and said, who's going to win your precinct? And I toted it up and I did a chart. Here's how it's going to turn out. Well, it turns out that exact way. The 12 finished in the order, I said, within a half a percentage point of what we said. Oh, wow. And the paper is touting it. Our city hall reporter got it right. And it was just when a guy from Time Magazine, I don't think they knew what to do with him in the days before they fired people.

11:04Walter Isaacson: So they sent him around the country to find new journalists. And he offered me a job. And my mother said, take the job at Time Magazine. And she was right, because this is, I guess, the late 70s. And that's when news magazines were general interest news magazines. And for me, it was a godsend because I had always been somebody who was interested in a wide variety of things. And one week I might be in charge of the medicine section. Next week it would be music, then foreign affairs, then business. And in some ways, it was like Huck Finn on the raft. You'd get off the raft, you'd have a wonderful adventure for a week, and they'd get back on the raft, and who knew where it was going to lead?

11:52Walter Isaacson: And so it meant I was never the world's greatest expert on European foreign policy or on astrophysics, but I knew a little bit about everything and could see how there were patterns that rippled across the universe. We can talk about all the downsides there, which is we were gatekeepers. Walter Cronkite could say that's the way it is and Time magazine could, but there were no citizen journalists. There were nobody challenging the mainstream narrative. But let me just say selfishly, if you were a 20-something-year-old and you got to ride on the boat with the mainstream narrative people, it taught you a lot.

12:37Walter Isaacson: And we didn't even have bylines at Time Magazine then. The stories were unsigned. And yet, when I called up Henry Kissinger's office and said, I'm at Time Magazine and I want to write about you, partly it was the ego of Henry Kissinger, but partly it was the good fortune I had to have an institution behind me. One of the reviews of your Kissinger book talked about how you had gotten this access to him and that he was probably going to regret it or he probably did now regret it. And that made me wonder, how did you start to formulate an idea of what you owe that person when you spend time with them?

13:23Walter Isaacson: Back then in the 1980s, there were two types of journalists. One were the access journalists, sort of the Hugh Sides and James Reston, who could always talk to people in power. And then there were the Woodward and Bernstein investigative journalist types. And I always tried to see if you could combine both. both. And so in the case of the Kissinger book, I think it's an honest story. And in the end, Time magazine was having a big celebration of everybody had been on the cover. And I was wondering if Kissinger would come back because he wasn't speaking to me. He was so angry about the book. And he called up, he said, Velvalta, even the 30 years war had to end at some point.

14:07Walter Isaacson: I will come to the party for Time Magazine. I said, that's great. And he said, but you know, my wife, Nancy, she's partial to the Hundred Years' War. We're going to have to work on her. So I learned from that, that if you tried to be honest and straight and tried to get it right, you know, you weren't slamming them just for the sake of slamming them, but you're making it clear that the secret bombing of Cambodia was not a great idea. In the end, people would respect you. after I dealt with Kissinger, it's like, all right, I'm going to go and do somebody who's been dead for 200 years, so I don't have to worry what they think.

14:44I think a thing that I was pondering, reading about Musk, and there's a lot about Musk's management philosophy, but you were also a manager. Eventually, you were the editor of Time Magazine, and then, of course, CNN. And it made me wonder, what was your management style when you were running a newsroom?

15:03Walter Isaacson: I had a very collegial management style, and that worked well at Time Magazine. There were about 400 people who were the main core of the magazine, and I knew them all, you know, been to their house. They had come out to my house. We used to have parties at my house, and it was easy because it was the 90s, and the magazine was doing well. Even in, say, there was a big event, and it was stress, and you had to deliver a lay close. Especially intense coverage. One of the things that Walker Percy taught us is that people are never happier than when a hurricane's coming. In other words, you know what you're supposed to do.

15:39Walter Isaacson: You don't have that little angst and free-floating anxiety. So when big things happened, impeachments of Bill Clinton or major disasters around the world, we all rallied together. We'd stay up all night. We'd put out the magazine. When I talked to Steve Jobs, he was a rougher manager. He was the opposite. said he was not collegial. He said, you had a lot of empathy and you thought you were kind, but mainly it was because you wanted other people to like you. And he said about himself, I don't have that luxury. I'm just a middle-class kid trying to build a company. And when people do things that suck, I've got to tell them it sucks.

16:16Walter Isaacson: And then I've got to fire them. And if I'm too collegial, we'll never get things done. That makes you an asshole. Back at your own time. Did you say, well, maybe you were right about if when I ran CNN, I look back and say, maybe you were right. Because soon after I got there, 9-11 happens, and we've got the best team in the world. But then the war winds down. Fox starts coming up. MSNBC starts coming up. And I'm being too nice. I care that Lou Dobbs and Greta Van Susteren like me, that Larry King thinks I'm a nice person. And I needed to disrupt CNN at that point. It needed to be brought into a digital age to compete with MSNBC and Fox.

16:59Walter Isaacson: And I was terrible at that. I was not a tough enough, a disruptive enough manager, and I didn't have it in my heart to want to be. And so after my contract was up, I left and went to the Aspen Institute, which is dedicated to finding consensus. And it's the Oracle Adelphi, know thyself. And what I learned about myself was, I'm not going to be a disruptor like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I'm not going to be that tough of a manager. You've talked about how the heyday of time and there was a heyday of CNN and a lot of people have sort of written that down and you kind of ejected from that. And as you watched it subsequently, did you feel like you had escaped to another planet and then the one that you left blew up?

17:48Walter Isaacson: I try to wake up every morning and be grateful. Boy, my timing has been good.

17:57Walter Isaacson: You know, I got out of Time magazine just in time. I mean, after I left, news magazines get decimated. Likewise, CNN, you know, whether or not it's still doing good journalism, it's certainly been decimated as a business model. So yeah, I sometimes feel like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of Elon Musk's favorite books, I feel like I'm just making it off of each planet just in the nick of time.

18:26Stay with us after the break to learn how Isaacson managed to capture Musk's manic lifetime across 600 pages and get to the truth about Musk's emerald mine inheritance and who really founded Tesla.

18:50This 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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21:41So what did it mean to you, the distinction? What's the divide there?

21:46Walter Isaacson: As I learned from reading the movie Goer when I first read it at age 12, any story has a moral behind it, but the moral should be behind it, not in front of it. I'm leading with what I'm bringing to the party. Because everybody on talk radio and cable TV and every blog and podcast, they have opinions about Musk. But I got the story of what happened that Friday night or that story of what's in the hospital in Austin with his two girlfriends or any of these stories. So that's what I'm bringing to the party. I try to give you the story as clear, honest, straight, and unvarnished. And I have a card that's on my wall near my computer, and I look at it whenever I get stuck trying to convey, well, is Musk rough on people, or has he got some political feelings in a certain way?

22:40Walter Isaacson: And the card simply says, let me tell you a story. And so I stop. And I don't try to preach or I don't try to pontificate. I say, what's the best story in my notebook that illustrates this? I want to shift gears slightly and find out a little bit about the writing process. Because this book, first of all, is there stuff that went to the cutting room floor that you still think about or wish you had included? First of all, nobody has ever accused this book of being too short. People always begin with, it's 600 pages. People love doorstop. Yeah, the word doorstop. When I was young and Evan Thomas, my friend, and I were doing the wise men about the six friends in Cold War foreign policy, our editor looked at a whole section about the World Bank and said, cut it out.

23:40Walter Isaacson: Nobody is going to care. And so we did. And then there was one review that said, there's not enough in it about the creation of the World Bank. And I mentioned it to our editor, and she said, yes, I think we're going to use that as a blurb on the paperback to say, not enough about the creation of the World Bank. That'll be a selling feature of the book. You have to learn, you know, some things are important, but maybe not that interesting. I love getting in the weeds on process myself. But what's your literal organizational system? Do you have a paper-based system? Do you use the software? How do you keep all of this stuff?

24:18Walter Isaacson: Early on, I was a fast adopter of computer technology. So I was looking for all sorts of complex ways to do note cards and organize them and stuff. And I discovered that the best organizational structure is chronological. whether you're writing about Leonardo da Vinci or you're writing about Elon Musk, you put all your notes in chronological order. And the simplest way to organize it, I discovered, was just a big word file. You know, if I— It's a very big word file. Yeah, maybe 800 ,000 words by the end. And I would just put things in, in order, with little keywords that I could search, like asshole, you know, with an asterisk.

25:03Walter Isaacson: And then when you write the book, you try to keep it as chronological as you can. But you can't make it totally chronological, especially with a musk. If one morning he's obsessing about buying Twitter, but then he has to worry about a valve leak on a Raptor engine happening in Texas, and then he's on a meeting about full self-driving, You don't want the book to just be one damn thing after another. You decide, all right, how am I going to cluster these so that they have a certain coherence to them? In the Muss book, you'll notice something different from my other books. The chapters are very short and they're very fast-paced because I want to show how he moves bing, bing, bing really fast through things.

25:52Walter Isaacson: not a whole lot of pausing and reflecting. And that's consciously to make you feel like you're going through this book the way he goes through life. What does it look like when Walter Isaacson sits down to write? How do you get to a 600-page or could have been 1 ,200-page biography? What does the daily process look like? I work at night. I tend to like to start writing at 8 p.m. I'm happily married to somebody who's a morning person, so we each have our quiet time while the other's not awake. And I'll work till 2, 3 in the morning. I now use a trick I learned from Leonardo da Vinci, which is I'll sketch something out, and then I'll add another layer of brushstrokes.

26:43Walter Isaacson: Then I'll add another layer of polish. Then I'll sort of refine it a bit. So if I'm going to write about, say, the launch of XAI, the artificial intelligence company, I'll have rough chronological notes of sitting there in the backyard with him. Here's what happens when he calls Sam Altman to Twitter headquarters. Here's what happens when they have a showdown over how open AI became closed. And it'll all be chronological. And then I'll do a rough draft in which I weave it into a story, making a point not to use a transition sentences. This is something I learned at Time Magazine, which is transition sentences lock you into a certain order of paragraphs.

27:30Walter Isaacson: Whereas if it got an integrity to it, you don't need the transition sentence. But it also allows you to move the paragraphs around. And so I write in a rough way without transitions, then I reorder the paragraphs, and then as if I were Leonardo, although I'm not as good as Leonardo, I put another layer of refinement, of finishing, of gloss onto it, and then read it out loud, print it out on paper, because it reads different on paper than on the screen, read it out loud on paper, let my wife read it, and then do one more round of polishing. — Walter Isaacson interviewed about 100 different people for the book.

28:10Musk's friends, family and colleagues, and a smattering of detractors or frenemies. It was a massive undertaking, and it's those interviews that inform everything until 2021, when Isaacson set out to be Musk's ever-present shadow.

28:24Walter Isaacson: — I did the first half of the book first, wrote it all the way through, getting me up to the point where I'm riding alongside Musk. No, I'm not there in 27, 2018. Right. Yeah, when he's smoking dope on the Joe Rogan show. I'm not in the studio. I'm happily ensconced in Jennifer Doudna's biotech lab or something. And then I had the stuff that was unfolding at the time and me being there as it's happening. And I kept that in this big chronological set of notes and waited to start writing it until pretty much I had done most of the reporting. I was putting the finishing touches, you know, six weeks before it got published in September.

29:16When do you sort of know when you're done? I mean, like in the middle of your story, he bought Twitter. So how far do you need to see that through before you feel like, okay, it's done?

29:28Walter Isaacson: I felt I needed to make sure that you understood Musk fully. So that whatever happens five years from now, this book still explains who he is. Because even though there are multiple Musk personalities, it's not like he changes in essence. But there were moments as the book was finishing where I'd get up in the morning and just turn on my phone. Is it still there? It wasn't like the rocket ship didn't blow up. So yeah, I held my breath a couple of times, but I began to see that it had come to a good logical conclusion. There are some stories about Musk that have been repeated so many times, often without supporting details, that they become kind of slogans for his critics or his supporters.

30:19Musk is the scion of an emerald mine. Or no, Musk came from nothing. Musk founded Tesla, or he just bought it from some other guys who did. Part of Isaacson's task was winding his way back through these layers of Musk lore. There are people who have extremely strong views of Musk, and they're often based on stories that get told over and over again. Did you start the book knowing those stories and wanting to delve into them? Did you keep tabs on the perceptions that people have and you were trying to play against those or you were trying to block out that type

30:56Walter Isaacson: of oh i knew all the disputes whether or not he deserved to be called a co-founder of tesla that's a big whether or not his father had an emerald mine and you know what there's not an exact one sentence answer but there's a maybe two paragraph answer on the emerald mine and the fact that his father didn't have an ownership stake but did for a while get a supply of emeralds from a mine that was in Zambia, not in South Africa. And then it went bankrupt. So he had money for a while, but then the business collapses. That's not as easy or as fun of a hot take of, he's an Emerald Mine heir, or he didn't own an Emerald Mine.

31:34But at the same time, he did invest in Musk's first company and his mom gave him some money. There was a kind of...

31:39Walter Isaacson: There was a very... I can't remember, but... It was like$10 ,000. Yeah,$10 ,000. They did support him. The part of the story that's like, he had a little leg up because his family could give him some money to start a company. There's a nugget there. A nugget. And I explained both the starting of that company, but also basically running away to Canada when he's 17. And, you know, he arrives with virtually no money. He has a couple of thousand dollars of traveler's check, which he loses on a bus. He ends up, you know, with student loans. So it's not as if he gets there and has, like Benjamin Franklin, only three coins in his pocket, but he also doesn't have pockets full of emeralds and he's not a trust fund kid.

32:24Walter Isaacson: So that just shows that this knee jerk, all or nothing, that he had huge sums of money in his pockets when he came or he was totally, no, life is a bit more complex. And I try to show just the truth, the exact number he had and what that did and what it didn't do. The Tesla origin story is, that's something that I had heard about, knew very little about. And it's very messy. It takes a long time to go through actually how they ended at the point of like who's a founder and who's not a founder of Tesla. If something's a big success, all of a sudden everybody remembers, hey, that was my idea. Or hey, they stole that idea from me.

33:09Walter Isaacson: And so the story is not a one-sentence answer, but it's a pretty fast-moving, a hope chapter. Martin Eberhardt and Mark Tarpening, having tried to start a company, they had no money and no employees, but they had the name Tesla that they had registered. J.B. Straubel, who was also creating a battery company and trying to do AC propulsion. And then Musk, who puts in the money, puts all these groups together, becomes the chairman and funds it. So in the end, who gets to be called? The founder. Well, boy, they fight over it. I mean, it's just so brutal. They hate each other. I mean, if you mention Mark Tarpening's name, he gets mad and vice versa.

33:51Walter Isaacson: And it went to court. And in the end, the court said, here are five people who equally have the rights to call themselves co-founders of Tesla. Once again, I got no dog in this hunt. I tell you the story, and I try to do it step by step, who does what. And you demystify things. You debunk certain myths. And you also don't fall into the vortex of all these controversies. I love the detail that they actually did have a non-disparagement agreement as part of the court case. And they couldn't help themselves. I mean, yes, right. I mean, these are guys, even when they're talking to me, I've signed a non-disparagement.

34:31Walter Isaacson: But he's an asshole. He's lying, you know. And one of the guys even says, I don't understand. He's the richest man in the world. Martin Eberhardt. Martin Eberhardt says he's the richest man in the world. why does he have to keep talking about it? He has everything. Yeah, yeah. Why did he do this? We keep asking Musk, you know, why are you so mad about Martin Eberhardt? Why does it eat away at you so much? And he would say, this guy tried to take the credit. And in the end, you don't understand Musk if you don't understand why Musk is so obsessed by these things. After the break, Isaacson recounts how he maintains access, even as he's divulging embarrassing details his subjects don't want the world to know.

35:15Stay with us.

35:26This 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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38:05It's one thing to be able to tell the story. But to tell it, you have to have it. You have to not only show up in the right places at the right times, lingering long enough that people might even forget why you're there, but you also need an eye for the details and an ear for the dialogue that combine to create the story. Something Isaacson learned decades ago, working at Time magazine.

38:25Walter Isaacson: The very first story I wrote as a political reporter for Time involved the Ronald Reagan campaign. And I was covering it. And I had gotten to know one of his advisors on the airplane trips, a guy named Mike Deaver. And one day, Reagan is giving his stump speech. And he's spouting off all these things that are just untrue, that trees cause pollution, that, you know, typical Reagan things. welfare queen stories or whatever. And I look at Mike Deaver who's standing next to me and he's shaking his head and he says, I don't know, where did he get those facts? You know, we always try to correct him.

39:10Walter Isaacson: He, of course, thought he was just talking to me, but I'm a journalist. So the end of the week, story comes out and it leads with Mike Deaver saying to me, He's making all this up. It's so frustrating. Where did he get this back? Well, I thought that was going to be the end of all my access. Stunningly, I get on the campaign plane for the next trip, and I get called to the front of the plane. And Deaver sits me next to Ronald Reagan. Suddenly, they knew who I was. They paid attention. It was as if by swatting them. I mean, I just told the truth. It's like, oh, okay, this is a guy to be reckoned with.

39:53Walter Isaacson: And it was another of those lessons that if you have access, they respect you more, not less, if you use it to try to tell the truth, even in ways they may not like. With Musk, that access meant logging miles in the ground, on the factory floor, and many more in the air. Granted, it was on Musk's private jet, not exactly the 1980s-style reporting Isaacson came up on. I'm very good at sleeping on airplanes. I learned that when I covered the 1980 presidential campaign. I was really young, just coming out of the Times, speaking in New Orleans, had joined Time magazine, and they put me on the Ted Kennedy campaign, which was a relentless campaign in a small charter plane.

40:39Walter Isaacson: And I learned to fall asleep instantly because it was the only time you get sleep. But when I was traveling with Musk, you'd get on the plane. And of course, you couldn't sleep because it was the one time when he would just be there, free associating. And so I never tried to bother him when he was thinking. I'd just be there alert during the entire plane ride, three, four hours. And occasionally I'd just say one or two words like Cybertruck. And he'd talk about his autistic son, Saxon, saying the future should look like the future. And so how he had changed the design. But you just prompt him with a word or two and let him free associate.

41:25Walter Isaacson: So I didn't do any truly formal interviews where you're just sitting across from somebody with a notebook. I would just let him talk as we walked along an assembly line or let him talk during the airplane ride. And sometimes he'd have 15 minutes between meetings. They knew to schedule that where he'd be in an intense meeting, say, about Optimus the robot. And then in the same conference room, they might do another meeting about battery cells and what the anode and cathode should be made of. But there'd always be 10 or 15 minutes between them. And at first, I thought maybe I should step out because he used that private time to do emails.

42:13Walter Isaacson: Sometimes I'd sort of fire up Twitter to see if he was tweeting while I was sitting in the room with him. Sometimes he'd play video games. But then he would look up at some point. And I would do something we in New Orleans always do at dinner. So I'd say, tell me a story. So I'd say, tell me the story of the 2018 surge at the Fremont factory. Tell me the story of when you went on Joe Rogan. You know, tell me the story of when you did that tweet about calling a British cave diver a pedophile. And it wouldn't be a pointed question. It was always prefaced with, tell me the story. And sometimes he'd be with people who've been working with him for a long time.

43:01Walter Isaacson: So in some ways, my role was not to interview him, but to extract stories and bide my time. And the great luxury of having two years and almost indefinite amounts of time with him is you could go back to it later and say, tell me again about that story of where you're looking at the toy at your desk. The difficult thing with Musk is that sometimes he'd recount things, but his memory wasn't perfect. That's true of all of us, but as everything with Musk, it's more so with him. he could embellish or whatever. So I often would have to go to five or six people. I'd have to go to Mark Ginkosa and say, tell me the story about when he fired everybody at Starlink, put you in charge, and you redesigned the Starlink satellite to make it simpler.

43:58Walter Isaacson: And I'd have Musk tell the story. And I'd have Musk's assistant who was there tell the story. And sometimes you get Kimball to tell the story. And so in the book, I'm very careful to say, hear all the sources. And I warned Musk. I said, you know, you're going to read the book and the stories are not going to be exactly the way you remembered them because other people remember them differently. And he said, I know that's the case. I know that the stories may not be the way I remembered them. And even nowadays, I talked to Kimball Musk after the book came out. He said, you know, I think the book is really good.

44:38Walter Isaacson: It's not always the way I remember it. But then I looked at your sources, and I realized you were talking to a lot of people. You said it came off the trail in the summer of 2023. And I know you've described how you did get called back by him for some subsequent reporting. But before that, what you thought was your last day, was that a day that you had designated where you said, I'm going to close my notebook at the end of this day, and that's it? Early in 2023, I realized I had enough material that you could understand Musk. I had enough stories. Whatever he did in the future, you'd get him. And I looked for what should be the culmination of the book.

45:21Walter Isaacson: And I didn't really want it to be Twitter and it pottering along and also messing up moderation, because I think that's not a big deal for him. The big deal was space travel. And I knew that he was going to do the launch of Starship in Boca Chica. And I'd been there for the surges over the course of 2022, where they stacked it and unstacked it and tested its 33 Raptor engines and fixed all the valves. And I said, I think that will be the culminating scene in the book. And this takes us back to that opening scene from our first episode, where the starship rocket makes liftoff, but then goes off course, and they have to blow it up over the ocean.

46:07Walter Isaacson: And I remember talking to my editor and to my wife a few hours later, and they had watched this on television. And they said, oh my God, what does this do to the end of this book? I said, it's a perfect metaphor. We know starship's going to launch again. We know at some point, it's going to get to orbit. But I wanted to have a scene that was somewhat point of him being determined, of him being visionary, of him having taken too many risks and blown up a rocket, and him being with people who had worked with him for 20 years, but also kind of being alone, no matter who was hugging him, his girlfriend, his mother, his son, and him just staring at that little red dot of Mars.

46:55Walter Isaacson: And I know it sounds like I'm embellishing a bit, but it was rising in the sky. I'm thinking, all right, there's a lot of smoldering rubble, but if anybody's going to get us to Mars, it's this guy. So it's not as if I absolutely respect everything about Musk, but I do respect the fact that he's worth writing about because he's having this enormous impact. And you're very comfortable holding that tension in your head. Those of us who are biographers have to be able to create characters that we hold many things in our minds about them. So, well, I'm very comfortable holding that tension in my head.

47:36Walter Isaacson: I'm very uncomfortable with the fact that as a society, we've lost the ability to hold that in our heads. We either canonize or demonize somebody in 140 characters. And we used to be able to understand, to go back to Shakespeare, that even the best are molded out of their flaws. And that's true of our historical figures, and it's true of Elon Musk. There is also a question, though, embedded in the we there that goes back to this sort of Time Newsweek, Walter Cronkite. Is it possible that that approach, the dismissive approach, that always existed? Their voice just wasn't included in the we that was sort of balancing out positive and negative thoughts?

48:28Walter Isaacson: I think you're right. There's often a mainstream consensus that leaves a lot of people out of forming that consensus. And so often the reputations of complex people are not just about them, but they're a mirror that's reflecting ourselves. And it tells us a lot about ourselves at any given time. And as you say, different people will have different views of it. But this is why I can write a book about Ben Franklin, even though maybe 100 books have been written about Ben Franklin, because every person in every period probably does well to try to paint their own view of what he was like. And I think history is painted in many layers.

49:17Walter Isaacson: I think I give you unvarnished what I saw, the good, the bad, and the ugly. But I know that that's not the final word. I know that a century from now, people will figure out the historic significance of an Elon Musk. And they'll probably be using some of the stories of my book to prove whatever case for or against them they want to use. but each of us gets to write a subsequent draft of our time. Or a sentient AI will just be writing it like they're writing the history of the dodo bird or some extinct good creature. Interesting to know what a generative large language model will do when they can read every biography of Musk and you say, was Musk a good guy or a bad guy?

50:05Walter Isaacson: I think that simple question will flummox even the most sophisticated AI.

50:15Coming up on the final episode of On Musk with Walter Isaacson, we weigh up Musk's legacy. What should we take away from Isaacson on Musk? We ask Isaacson to answer his critics, try to suss out how this portrait will age, and surface some stories from the book everyone seems to have ignored. They kick him out.

50:33Walter Isaacson: And for 20 years, It's eating away at him. Which is why, of course, he wants to buy Twitter. And in the middle of the night, Musk calls hotel security and makes him open the safe. So he can start tweeting out weird things. That's who Musk is. And that's why I just didn't believe him. And I'm not even sure he believed himself. 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. I would love it if he would lie for like a year, but he ain't gonna do that.

51:30It was executive produced by Mangesh Hittikador, 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, Ali Gavin, and the folks at WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio in New Orleans. If 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.

52:07Thanks so much for listening.

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52:48Walter Isaacson: learning at the wrong pace. That's why I want to tell you about Brilliant. Brilliant is the online math tutor that's visual and interactive. It helps students actually understand math step by step and gives them guidance when they need it. Brilliant was built by 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. This 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.

53:23One 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. There are exciting things happening at your local CVS. Shop new Extra Big Deals with Extra Care every two weeks. No coupon needed. Plus, get access to exclusive sale prices, personalized deals, and more as a member. Extra Care is the way to save at CVS.

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