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0:29

I'm Barry Weiss,

0:32

and this is Honestly. For

0:35

the longest time, when you would think about the most

0:37

powerful person in the world, the

0:39

person that probably came to mind was the President

0:41

of the United States,

0:43

the leader of the free world. But

0:46

in 2023, I suspect the person that

0:48

comes to mind for most people these days when

0:50

you say who is the most powerful person

0:53

in the world isn't an elected official

0:55

at all.

0:57

Instead, a lot of people

0:59

picture a 52-year-old civilian

1:02

who, through his own determination, fantasies,

1:05

ambition, and sheer will, has

1:08

amassed an enormous amount of wealth,

1:10

more than any other person on this planet, and

1:13

also an enormous amount of influence over

1:16

just about every industry that will define

1:18

the future of the global economy.

1:21

To anyone I've offended, I just want to say I

1:23

reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people

1:26

to Mars in a rocket ship. Of course. Did

1:28

you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?

1:33

I'm talking about none other than Elon

1:35

Musk. Why is Elon

1:38

Musk permitted by shareholders,

1:40

employees, his board, to behave

1:42

in a way that no other CEO

1:45

in the world can act? Is

1:48

it all just, well, he controls his board and

1:50

he's made a lot of money for shareholders with Tesla? Or

1:52

is it all just put up with it because they like to be part

1:55

of the Elon Musk circus that he

1:57

conducts on a 24-7 basis all the time?

1:59

across the globe. I'll say what I want to say, and

2:02

if a consequence

2:04

of that is losing money, so be it.

2:08

Elon's biography is too vast to sum

2:10

up in a little intro here, but that's

2:12

why I've invited on my guest today, Walter

2:15

Isaacson, who has spent the past two

2:17

and a half years doing just that, summing

2:20

up Elon Musk's life to

2:22

the tune of about 700 pages. Isaacson

2:26

is an award-winning biographer of people

2:28

including Henry Kissinger, Benjamin

2:31

Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo

2:33

da Vinci, Steve Jobs, and Jennifer

2:35

Doudna. But this recent undertaking

2:38

has no doubt been his most complicated one

2:40

to date. That's because the person

2:42

he's writing about has a story that's

2:44

very much still unfolding. In

2:47

fact, when Walter Isaacson started writing

2:49

this biography, Musk hadn't even

2:51

purchased Twitter yet, perhaps his

2:53

most

2:53

controversial move to date. The

2:55

Elon before Twitter and the Elon after

2:58

Twitter are two different Elons, and Elon

3:00

didn't just break Twitter, Twitter

3:02

broke Elon Musk. And so, you know,

3:04

the Elon of today is not beloved

3:06

by everybody.

3:07

What does it mean for a single man to control

3:11

one of the most powerful digital public

3:13

squares? Also, the most powerful

3:15

private satellite internet company? Also,

3:18

the most successful electric

3:20

car company? AI, space

3:23

travel, and oh yeah, whatever it is

3:25

that the boring company does.

3:28

We've gotten a glimpse into what exactly

3:30

it means for the world during

3:33

the past year with two hot wars

3:35

raging, one in Ukraine and now

3:37

one in the Middle East. Wars with enormous

3:40

geopolitical consequences and stakes

3:43

that Elon Musk has inadvertently become

3:45

a part of.

3:46

According to SpaceX, there are around 20,000

3:49

Starlink terminals in Ukraine, and

3:51

they've been vital for

3:53

soldiers' communication, flying drones,

3:55

and artillery targeting.

3:59

forward-deployed drone and the artillery

4:02

that's conducting the strike against

4:04

Russian positions.

4:05

Take for example how when Israel briefly

4:07

cut off internet inside of Gaza as part

4:10

of their war strategy to eliminate Hamas.

4:11

Elon Musk has said SpaceX's

4:14

Starlink will support communication links with

4:16

internationally recognized aid organizations

4:19

in Gaza. A phone and internet blackout

4:21

in the Gaza Strip has cut people.

4:23

Elon took to Twitter and announced that he was going

4:25

to provide it himself

4:26

through Starlink.

4:28

After widespread criticism, he posted

4:30

a head exploding emoji. And

4:32

then when a commenter suggested that he

4:34

must have felt pressure to provide the coverage, Elon

4:37

simply responded, yeah, with a frowny

4:40

face.

4:42

Musk apparently then met with the head of Shin

4:44

Bet, Israel's internal security service,

4:46

and announced that he would, quote, double check with

4:49

Israeli and U.S. security officials before

4:51

enabling any connections. The

4:54

point, as my friend writer

4:56

Jacob Seagel put it on Twitter naturally,

4:59

is that non-state kingmakers are

5:01

redefining the scope of warfare through

5:04

direct intervention. And

5:08

then there's Elon's power over information,

5:11

the information that all of us consume on Twitter.

5:14

It's hard to imagine under Twitter's previous

5:17

regime that we would have had

5:19

access to the raw violent

5:21

footage from Hamas's massacre. And

5:24

this is thanks to Elon's version of Twitter,

5:26

which is less than serious than the previous guard.

5:30

Being able to see what Hamas did was

5:32

enormously important to be able to understand

5:35

everything that followed. And

5:37

yet with those loosened rules, there's

5:40

also disinformation, genuine

5:42

disinformation that's being spread at a pace

5:44

like never before. Scores

5:46

of people, including our elected officials

5:48

like Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, are

5:51

posting horrifying photos and videos

5:54

of crying children from Gaza, except

5:57

they are actually children from Syria.

5:59

2013. That

6:02

transformation of Twitter has also

6:04

meant the encountering of antisemitism

6:07

bald and explicit in

6:09

ways that I never encountered it before. All

6:14

of this is to say that this one

6:16

man wields an enormous amount

6:18

of influence from social media

6:21

to warfare and the question

6:23

is, should he? And so he's got

6:25

this sort of a God complex I think

6:28

in many ways. I'll say

6:30

what I want to say and so be it is kind

6:32

of his policy and ultimately

6:34

it hasn't he hasn't paid a price for it in any way.

6:38

That's the theme of my conversation on today's

6:40

episode with Walter Isaacson.

6:45

Please note that I spoke to Walter a month

6:47

ago now. Actually it was just a few days before

6:49

Hamas attacked Israel. The world

6:51

feels like a very different place in that short

6:54

month but the core of the conversation

6:57

is just as if not more

6:58

relevant today. Stay

7:01

with us.

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slash honestly. Walter

9:23

Isaacson, welcome to Honestly.

9:25

Hey, thank you, Mary.

9:27

Like so many other people in this

9:28

country and maybe around the world, I tore

9:30

through your new 670 page

9:32

biography,

9:33

which is titled simply Elon

9:35

Musk. And I found myself struck by

9:37

a few themes, but I think one of them is

9:40

the theme of power and

9:42

specifically whether Elon Musk, who

9:44

is the richest man in the world, has

9:47

too much of it, not necessarily too much

9:49

money, but too much power, too much power

9:51

in private enterprise, too much

9:53

power in foreign policy, too much power in

9:55

his family life and his romantic life.

9:58

And arguably, and I want to talk about this. later in

10:00

the podcast, maybe too much power

10:02

over journalists like you and me. So

10:05

that's where I want to start. Well,

10:06

the answer is pretty simple. There's a

10:08

simple answer, which is yes, he

10:10

does have too much power.

10:12

But then if you want to drill down deeper, it's like,

10:15

okay, how come? And

10:18

one reason is this all

10:21

in hardcore intensity that

10:24

causes him to make engineering things

10:26

work. I'm on Twitter for the moment,

10:29

but you know, when I first started this book,

10:32

every other car company had gotten

10:35

out of the electric vehicle

10:37

market almost. They were smashing the cars.

10:40

He went to the edge of bankruptcy

10:43

and not only designed good electric

10:45

vehicles, but he designed factories

10:47

in America that can make them at scale.

10:51

So just this year, he's made a million

10:53

electric vehicles more than all the

10:55

other car companies in America combined

10:57

for full. Likewise, NASA

11:00

quit trying to send people to the moon 50

11:03

years ago or so. It gave

11:05

up on sending astronauts to the

11:08

space station when it grounded the space

11:10

shuttle a dozen or so years ago. Musk

11:13

has been able to launch

11:16

more satellites into space

11:19

and reuse the rockets in any

11:21

company. In fact, this year

11:23

he will send, I think, 1600 tons

11:26

of payloads and satellites into orbit,

11:29

which is more than every other

11:31

country, every other company

11:34

combined. And not only that, it's four

11:36

times as much as every company combined.

11:38

This gives you enormous power when you're the

11:41

only person who can launch US military

11:44

spy satellites into high earth orbit.

11:46

Boeing can't do it. NASA can't do it. And

11:49

likewise, of course, in Ukraine, his

11:51

was the only satellite and communication

11:53

system that survived, which

11:56

is why he comes to the rescue of the Ukrainians

11:59

and would have been crushed because

12:02

they were no longer able to communicate with their troops.

12:05

As I'm sure we'll get into, that gave

12:07

a boy too much power on

12:09

how to handle those sort of things. But

12:12

besides just saying, yes, he has too much

12:14

power, the book shows how did he

12:16

accrue it?

12:17

So in other words, it's not necessarily

12:19

a knock on Musk for his will to power.

12:22

It's in a way a knock on so many

12:24

of the systems, including the American federal

12:26

government has failed and he has sort

12:29

of stepped into

12:29

the breach. A hundred percent. I

12:31

mean, we used to be a nation of great risk

12:33

takers and

12:36

that's how you get rockets into orbit

12:39

or make an electric vehicle company.

12:42

And wherever you came from, it's

12:44

likely your family took risks, whether

12:46

they came from Europe,

12:49

fleeing oppression, or whether they

12:51

came on the Mayflower or they came across the

12:54

Rio Grande. But now we've

12:56

become a country more filled with

12:58

referees than risk takers, more

13:00

filled with regulators and lawyers

13:02

and guardrail builders than

13:04

innovators. And I

13:06

think that's made us sclerotic as

13:09

a country. We don't have the factories

13:11

that we used to have to build things. We

13:13

don't shoot off the rockets the way we used

13:16

to. And Musk

13:18

is not only a risk taker, he's risk

13:21

addicted. I mean, it comes from a childhood

13:25

that was a very brutal childhood,

13:27

but he associated risk with

13:29

pleasure in some ways. Peter Thiel,

13:32

who helped found PayPal with

13:34

him, said, you know, most entrepreneurs

13:36

take risks, but Elon runs towards

13:38

them, embraces them. There's a picture in my

13:41

book at one of the birthday parties, his

13:43

second wife, Tallulah Riley, threw

13:45

for him. And he's up

13:47

against a target

13:49

and there's a blindfolded

13:52

knife thrower throwing things at

13:54

him. And he has a pink balloon

13:56

right at his crotch. And a

13:58

shit eating grin on his face.

14:00

Right. And there's no

14:02

upside to taking that risk. Right.

14:04

I mean, and there's a lot of downside if you picture

14:07

the balloon.

14:08

And yet, he was so addicted

14:10

to risk, he did that. There's many,

14:13

many instances in the book of

14:15

the way that when things are sort of calm

14:17

and peaceful, he creates sort

14:20

of a whirlwind, almost like a war

14:22

around him, which we'll get into. Briefly,

14:25

Walter, I think of you as, you

14:27

know, the man drawn to genius. You

14:29

have written award-winning biographies of some

14:31

of the greatest minds, the

14:33

greatest innovators that have walked

14:36

this country and this planet. Leonardo da

14:38

Vinci, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger,

14:40

Benjamin Franklin, Jennifer Doudna,

14:43

most recent book, Steve Jobs, and now, of course,

14:45

Elon Musk. There are three things

14:47

combined that I think set Musk apart

14:50

from these other subjects. First,

14:52

as we just discussed, he has an amazing amount

14:54

of power. Many of these other people did,

14:56

so does he. The second is

14:59

that he is unbelievably polarizing.

15:02

I can't tell you the number of people while I was reading

15:04

this book who had come up to me and say,

15:07

ugh, I can't believe you're reading that when

15:09

I'd be sitting in a cafe or something like that.

15:11

Just revulsion. And then other people

15:13

came up to me and said, I kind of love that

15:15

guy, right? He is unbelievably polarizing

15:17

even the cover of this book. Obviously,

15:19

there are people who are selling their Teslas because

15:21

they refuse to drive a car that he created, other

15:24

people are buying them up. Very, very polarizing.

15:26

Some of these other people also were. But the third

15:28

is that he is alive, and so you needed

15:30

him to cooperate with you. You could,

15:32

in fact, say that you needed

15:35

him more than he needed you. So what

15:37

do you do when you're trying not

15:40

only to write about the richest and arguably

15:42

most powerful private person in the world,

15:44

but you need him to cooperate with you? How do

15:47

you deal with that imbalance of power? You've

15:49

talked about, you've written about in the book how there

15:51

were absolutely no guardrails. You could ask him anything.

15:53

But I'd love if you can reflect a little bit just

15:56

on that,

15:57

the dynamic of sort of trying to capture

15:59

someone.

15:59

Who you need to cooperate

16:02

in order for the book to come out and the way you want it to

16:04

it was surprisingly easy

16:07

I told him at the very beginning. I said I

16:09

don't want to do this book based on 10 or 15 interviews

16:13

I want to spend two years whenever I

16:15

want by your side morning noon and

16:17

light night and He went

16:19

okay, and then I said and the other

16:22

caveat is yeah, I got no control

16:24

over this book You know, I'm not even gonna let you

16:26

read it in advance before it's published. He went okay

16:29

and It was weird to me,

16:31

but he has this sense of transparency

16:33

And so when I was there whether it be

16:35

walking the factory floor or sleeping

16:38

in the trailer next to his launch pad

16:40

in South Texas, I

16:43

kind of receded in the background. I

16:45

just took notes I observed

16:48

and he did not seem to care as you

16:50

know because you've dealt with him He's

16:53

a intense person but not

16:55

a person with a whole lot of emotional incoming

16:58

or outgoing signals He's talked

17:00

about being Asperger's. He's definitely

17:03

on the autism spectrum and It

17:06

wasn't as if he was ever trying

17:09

to push me to do something and

17:11

I never felt in any way Threatened

17:13

that I had to curry his favor in any way because

17:15

he didn't seem to care

17:17

When you first started writing this biography

17:19

a few years ago Elon Musk had

17:21

a very different persona at least in the

17:24

public sphere I think the most controversial things he had

17:26

done up until that point where he had

17:28

openly tweeted his disdain for kovat lockdowns

17:31

He had smoked a blunt on Rogan, but

17:33

a lot has changed in

17:34

the past few years Yeah, you know, it was amazing

17:36

because I was you calling the most

17:39

polarizing figure and he definitely is

17:41

now And we have trouble

17:43

in this day and age holding in our

17:45

head the fact that somebody can be an absolutely Amazing

17:49

engineer when it comes to doing

17:51

a raptor engine that Boeing and NASA

17:53

can't figure out But also

17:55

be polarizing and say god-awful

17:58

things on Twitter And

18:00

what happened in the middle of this journey

18:03

when i started it he was. Not

18:06

all that polarizing he was person of the year

18:08

exactly his personal financial

18:11

time he had brought us into the air of electric

18:13

vehicles brought us into the aerospace

18:15

adventuresome. And then as

18:17

you said a moment ago he was born

18:20

for the storm when things are going to well he

18:22

tells me at the beginning of twenty twenty two i said man.

18:25

You know richest person on earth now

18:27

person of the year he said it doesn't

18:29

make me feel comfortable it makes me uncomfortable

18:31

i was born for a storm. Any

18:34

likes to go all in and shake things

18:37

up and i'm like what are you gonna do is

18:39

i'm gonna buy twitter. And that of course

18:42

in my mind was a mistake cuz he doesn't

18:44

have the fingertip feel finger

18:46

spits and good fuel as we would say for

18:50

emotional. Human

18:52

feelings the way he does for

18:55

the difference between ink and l and carbon

18:57

fibers and stainless

19:00

steel. Material

19:02

properties and then he becomes

19:05

wildly polarizing. What

19:07

you gotta do when you're writing about this or

19:10

frankly reading about it is you have

19:12

to keep multiple things in your head at the same

19:14

time what makes him polarizing

19:17

i think eighty percent of it. Is

19:19

basically twitter now called

19:22

x both what he tweets on it

19:24

and the way he runs it and the way he's

19:26

opened it up. And his political

19:29

evolution from being a barack

19:31

obama fundraiser to

19:33

being somewhat in

19:35

that rabbit hole. All

19:38

right at least we

19:41

tweeting or commenting on people who

19:43

are in that sphere. That's where

19:45

the controversy comes from but it doesn't

19:47

affect the fact that he makes rockets and batteries

19:50

and you gotta keep both in your head the same time

19:52

i'm capable of keeping both in my head in the same

19:54

time just want to clarify would you characterize

19:56

Elon musk politics as alt

19:58

right

19:59

now i tried.

19:59

to sort of modify it in the middle of that sentence.

20:03

I think he amplifies

20:06

a lot of what I would call Tucker

20:09

Carlson himself and Tucker

20:11

Carlson fans. I

20:15

don't use the word conservative, which

20:17

a lot of people do because to me that's

20:20

what conservatism was all about.

20:24

I think he's hard to classify,

20:26

which is good. I think he's a populist,

20:30

sometimes believer

20:33

in conspiracy theories,

20:35

but on the other hand, a lot

20:37

of those conspiracy theories turned out to

20:39

have a kernel of truth to them, so it's complex.

20:43

And once again, you gotta hold some complex

20:45

things in your head. As you said, it started

20:48

even with COVID lockdowns and

20:50

he was just furious about COVID lockdowns.

20:53

And then furious that Twitter was repressing

20:57

things like people wrote the Barrington Declaration

20:59

saying that lockdowns are gonna cause more harm

21:02

than the virus might. Now, I've

21:04

written a whole book on Jennifer Doudna, RNA

21:07

technology, I'm pretty good at biochemistry.

21:10

I'm so not sure exactly what the

21:12

right balance was, but I do

21:14

know we should have had more of a debate

21:16

over that right balance. So when

21:19

I look at Musk's politics, there's

21:22

a long sections in the book

21:24

about his evolution and his politics

21:26

from being a conventional Barack

21:28

Obama supporter, but

21:30

I don't put a three word label on it.

21:33

As you were writing the book and he decides,

21:35

which of course we'll come to, the decision to buy

21:37

Twitter, and he believes he's born

21:39

for the storm, that's obviously true, he creates

21:42

a storm when one is not present on a

21:44

sunny day. Did you ever have a moment of

21:46

saying to yourself, this isn't the right

21:48

time for this book because this man is

21:50

so clearly in the midst of an evolution,

21:54

better for me to sort of continue on

21:56

and see where it lands. Did

21:58

you ever have a moment of saying, right time

22:01

for this book.

22:02

Yeah, I mean, when, when he bought

22:04

Twitter or decided to start doing

22:06

so, say March, April

22:08

of 2022, I thought, well, that A

22:12

is going to make the book a whole lot more interesting,

22:14

more of a roller coaster, and it's going to extend

22:17

the book, you know, who knows, I'll end it 234

22:20

years from now, we'll see. But

22:22

after a while, I did

22:24

not want Twitter to become some vortex

22:27

that sucked the whole book in Kimball

22:29

musk, his brother said that's going to be a pimple

22:31

on the ass of his legacy. It's not

22:33

an important thing. I don't think it's

22:35

unimportant. And I think it's very revealing

22:38

of his character. But I did not

22:40

want the book to be sucked down on

22:42

what I consider amongst the less

22:44

interesting and less capable things

22:47

he's doing. And so then when

22:49

he finally was able to get starship

22:51

to launch, even though it explodes

22:53

after it reaches the edge of space after three minutes,

22:56

and when he's able to start his own AI company,

22:59

and he's able to get optimus a robot to

23:01

walk, he's able to get neural link

23:03

chips, FDA approval to put them in

23:05

human trials, I thought, okay,

23:08

the book doesn't end with him figuring

23:11

out what to do on Twitter. The book

23:13

ends with him back on his real passions,

23:15

which are robotics, artificial

23:18

intelligence, space travel, and

23:20

sustainable energy.

23:21

Just those small topics. If

23:23

there's a theme to Elon Musk's life today,

23:26

it's about the unbelievable

23:28

reach of his power. But if there

23:30

is a theme to the story that you tell about

23:32

his upbringing, it's really the story

23:35

of powerlessness and pain.

23:37

Here's what you write as a kid growing up in South Africa,

23:40

Elon Musk knew pain, and

23:42

he learned how to survive it. You quote

23:45

Grimes, the mother of three of Elon Musk's

23:47

children who will get to who told you that Elon

23:49

quote, got conditioned in his childhood

23:51

that life is pain. He

23:54

was bullied at this wilderness survival camp

23:56

that sounds like Lord of the Flies, where

23:58

bullying as you write was considered a virtue, but

24:00

he was also bullied at his school. One time

24:03

a group of boys sort of cornered

24:05

him and beat him so badly he was hospitalized

24:07

for a week. An experience that you write

24:09

affected him for the rest of your life. Here's what Elon

24:12

told you about it. If you have never been

24:14

punched in the nose, you have no idea

24:16

how it affects you for the rest of your life.

24:19

While those regular physical beatings

24:21

were surely traumatic, you write

24:24

that quote, those scars were minor compared

24:27

to the emotional ones inflicted by his

24:29

father. Tell us a bit about

24:31

those scars. Tell us a little bit about

24:33

Errol Musk. After Elon

24:35

was beaten, as you said, in the

24:38

playground of his high school one time,

24:40

he had to go to the hospital for almost

24:42

a week. And when he comes

24:44

home, his father makes him stand

24:47

for more than an hour in front of him. While

24:50

his father tells him how worthless he is, how

24:52

stupid he is, and takes the side

24:54

of the kid who beat him up. That

24:57

instills a lot of demons. And

24:59

sometimes you can turn demons into

25:02

drives, as Musk has done.

25:04

But sometimes demons still remain demons.

25:06

And as Grimes said, he goes in the demon

25:08

mode and he's like his father. He

25:11

will suddenly shift into

25:13

a dark mode and

25:15

be kind of quiet. He won't physically

25:18

be abusive. He won't even yell, but

25:20

he will be cold and callous

25:22

and cruel at times. And

25:25

it's almost like Jekyll and Hyde. When

25:27

he gets into that mode, it's

25:29

hard to break him out of it. And then when he comes out

25:31

of it, he hardly remembers what

25:33

he did. And so I think

25:36

those are the type of demons

25:38

that were instilled in his childhood

25:41

and makes him associate

25:43

sometimes love

25:45

with pain and with storm.

25:48

He's a drama addict, as his

25:50

brother Kimball said. And so he'd

25:53

go to the corner of the bookstore. No

25:55

friends, scrawny, you know,

25:57

Asperger's as he says. and

26:00

read the superhero comic books.

26:03

And he said, they were all trying to save the

26:05

world. They were wearing their underpants

26:07

on the outside, so they looked ridiculous, but

26:10

at least they were trying to save the world. So

26:12

he comes out of this experience with

26:15

a love for drama, a

26:18

love for risk-taking, and

26:20

this sort of, I'm a scrawny

26:22

kid, but I'm gonna become the epic superhero

26:25

of my own comic book.

26:26

In a way, it's sort of the oldest trope in the

26:28

world. Someone trying to outrun their

26:31

daddy issues, trying to outrun the long

26:33

shadow of the man that tortured them, but

26:35

ending up echoing it, replicating

26:38

it, becoming it themselves. And you hear that reflected

26:40

in so many of the many women,

26:43

especially, that Elon has been with

26:45

that mothers some of his children. Do you think

26:47

he's aware of that? May Musk,

26:50

his mother, who obviously divorced

26:52

the father early on, said

26:55

to me at the very beginning, here's

26:57

what you gotta write about. The danger

27:00

for Elon is he becomes his father.

27:03

And as you say, it's the oldest trope. It's Luke

27:05

Skywalker, the epic hero, discovering

27:08

who Darth Vader really is in fighting

27:10

the dark side of the Force. There

27:13

are times when Musk is self-aware

27:17

and almost humorous about

27:19

it, knowing that he's Captain Underpants,

27:22

playing epic hero, dark

27:24

side of the Force, fighting, and

27:26

he can joke about himself. But

27:29

there were times when he would go into demon mode

27:32

and he wouldn't be self-aware. He'd just be

27:34

cold and angry. And

27:38

he just had to sit back and be quiet

27:40

and wait it out.

27:42

The obvious criticism, and several

27:45

sort of have brought this up in reaction to your biography,

27:48

of starting with the abuse

27:50

that Elon suffered in

27:52

childhood, is that it justifies

27:55

his cruelty, or it justifies

27:57

his demon mode. Some have said that they

27:59

feel the book sort of uses Elon's past,

28:02

uses Elon's issues with

28:04

his father to sort of justify his behavior.

28:07

And I wanted to let

28:07

you respond to those criticisms. Yeah, no,

28:10

no. And it's very interesting

28:12

because when you explain

28:15

and try to understand the forces

28:17

that make a person, it

28:20

can seem like you're edging into justifying

28:23

or excusing the

28:25

forces. There are a lot of people with really bad

28:27

childhoods who turned out to be perfectly

28:30

nice. And there are a lot of people

28:32

who are total jerks who

28:35

had really good childhood. So I'm

28:37

not trying to justify what

28:39

Musk does, but what a biographer

28:42

tries to do is give you the

28:44

narrative story and

28:46

help you understand

28:49

what happened. And

28:51

that sometimes becomes a cautionary tale.

28:54

Like, okay, he had all these demons

28:56

and he succumbs at times to him or makes

28:59

them too cruel. But I

29:01

think each reader should make a judgment

29:03

and each reader will. I mean, everybody has a judgment

29:06

on Musk. I give you the

29:09

true facts of that childhood.

29:11

I give you his father's side as well and

29:14

his brother's side and everybody who

29:16

knew him

29:17

that. And

29:18

if you think that justifies

29:20

his really bad behavior, that's on

29:23

you. That's not on me. And

29:25

if you say, wow, I get

29:27

where he's coming from, but that doesn't

29:29

excuse him doing this, that's

29:32

sort of the camp I'm in. There

29:34

are two diagnoses of

29:36

conditions that are brought up in the book. You mentioned

29:38

one before autism spectrum disorder

29:41

or Asperger's and the other is bipolar.

29:44

And there's a very

29:45

sort of harrowing

29:48

set of scenes during one of his down

29:50

periods, during one of his storms

29:52

where Elon sort of can't get up

29:54

from a conference room floor

29:56

and people have to take meetings laying

29:58

side by side with him.

29:59

And one of them sort of says to him in sympathy

30:02

and true concern, do you think you

30:05

might have bipolar? This is a person that has a relative

30:07

with bipolar and Elon says, you know, maybe

30:09

I do. Uh, the guy suggests

30:11

getting treatment never happens. You

30:14

spent a lot of time with Elon. Do

30:16

you think that he has either of those

30:18

disorders? Um, or do you think in

30:20

a way, those are his

30:23

ways of excusing, uh, his

30:25

selfishness or his bullheadedness

30:28

or his, you know, maniacal focus,

30:30

their crutches for him to explain away

30:33

his character?

30:34

Oh, I definitely think

30:36

he's got, you know, psychological

30:39

differences, especially in

30:42

terms of emotional receptors in

30:44

and out of emotional receptors. You know,

30:46

he says he has Asperger's. I don't

30:48

think he's like making that up to justify

30:51

his cruelty. I don't try

30:53

to be a psychiatrist. He's

30:56

never been in therapy

30:58

and fully diagnosed, but

31:01

yeah, he goes into deep

31:03

manic and catatonic states

31:05

as we describe in the book, uh,

31:07

where he can't even get off the floor. And

31:10

I don't know. Is your question. Does he, is he faking

31:12

those? I'm not faking

31:14

faking, uh, being in a catatonic

31:17

state on the floor of the factory where

31:19

John McNeil, the North American

31:21

president of Tesla is trying to shake

31:23

them and get them up to go onto an earnings

31:25

call. I mean, this is a complicated

31:28

question. We as a society

31:30

are pretty good at dealing with

31:33

people's mental issues if they're depressive,

31:37

for example, we get

31:39

it, we understand it.

31:42

Then the question becomes, does that excuse

31:44

things? And I think I'm going to let each person

31:47

decide what do you excuse and what do you don't

31:50

musk

31:51

really does have the

31:52

ability to, to

31:55

ease deep psychological

31:57

moods and states. And

32:01

you can see both

32:04

the intensity of his focus,

32:07

but also the emotional lack

32:10

of receptivity. And that

32:12

makes him a jerk. Or there's a technical term

32:15

you probably don't use on your podcast that begins

32:17

with A. And I

32:19

don't know that we need to condone that. But

32:23

it's not bad to understand that

32:26

it exists.

32:28

Oh, I mean, there's a moment in the book

32:30

where Grimes, who I think has a lot of insight in

32:32

this book, she says he has numerous

32:34

minds and many fairly distinct personalities.

32:37

He moves between them at a rapid pace. You feel

32:39

the air in the room change and suddenly the

32:41

whole situation is just transferred over his

32:44

other state. I saw that in the weeks we spent

32:46

at Twitter, what I'm getting at. And then we can move

32:48

on to so many other things. Does he own

32:51

that? I felt sometimes

32:53

like he would enter into kind of

32:56

this dark, vacant place. And

32:58

then the next day he could be completely

33:00

sunny and different. And he almost didn't

33:03

remember how he was the night before.

33:05

Exactly.

33:06

And no, he doesn't own it. And perhaps he should.

33:09

But I'm so glad you saw it. You saw it

33:11

with your own eyes, just like Grimes. Oh! Like

33:14

I did. Yeah, totally. And he'd done

33:16

it. The next day, I went back to a whole

33:18

lot of people he reamed out. You know, Andy

33:20

Krebs. Lucas. And he was like, you know, people

33:22

who get into his line of fire when he's in demon muffs.

33:25

I said to them, what happened? He says, well, like

33:27

two days later, I'd be talking to him. And he

33:29

had no memory of doing that to me.

33:31

Yeah. So from the scrawny,

33:34

bullied kid in South Africa to

33:37

the many, many times over the billionaire of

33:39

today, we only have so much time together.

33:41

I'm going to attempt to do an extraordinarily foolish

33:43

thing and summarize all of

33:46

Elon Musk's career in the span

33:48

of a single question because we could spend many

33:50

hours on each of his companies. So bear

33:53

with me. At age 24, Elon

33:55

Musk drops out of his Stanford PhD

33:57

program and starts his first company. with

34:00

his brother Kimball who's throughout the book and this company

34:02

is called zip2. It was kind of a

34:04

digitized version of the yellow pages

34:06

directory with maps. Four years later

34:09

zip2 is acquired for $307 million. Elon,

34:14

age 28, gets $22 million out of that deal. He

34:17

describes his bank account going from like

34:19

a few thousand dollars to 22 million and $5,000

34:23

and changes his life. And

34:25

from there, and you document all of this

34:28

in your biography, it's really just boom,

34:30

boom, boom, boom, boom. There's almost not a minute

34:33

of downtime aside from a few days

34:35

he sometimes spends at Larry Ellison's

34:37

island in Hawaii. He found PayPal,

34:40

which goes public in 2002, must

34:43

make something like 250 million, much

34:46

of which he uses to start SpaceX in

34:48

that very same year, a company that

34:50

manufactures and launches rockets

34:52

that wants to take us to Mars. In 2004,

34:55

two years later, he becomes Tesla's largest

34:57

shareholder and later its CEO.

34:59

About a decade later, he developed Starlink, which

35:02

has since sent thousands of satellites

35:04

into low earth orbit, providing coverage

35:06

to over 60 countries. In 2016,

35:09

he co-found Neuralink, arguably his

35:11

most interesting company, which is developing

35:14

implantable brain computer

35:16

chips in order to integrate the human

35:18

brain with AI, about to start

35:21

a trial run with people with ALS, amazingly.

35:24

In 2017, he found The Boring

35:26

Company, an amazing name. It's a

35:28

company trying to create low cost freight

35:30

tunnels. So leave aside Twitter

35:32

for the moment, which we'll get to soon. Right

35:35

now we have SpaceX, Starlink,

35:38

Tesla, Neuralink, Boring

35:40

Company, of course Twitter, which we'll get to. What

35:43

binds all of these projects together?

35:46

You know, if Musk's origin story

35:49

is being the sort of abused kid

35:52

drawn into sci-fi and

35:54

comic books wanting to save

35:56

the world, help us understand,

35:59

Walter, what binds all of these

36:01

seemingly disparate projects together.

36:04

There were three great missions. He came

36:06

away from that dark corner of the bookstore

36:09

when he was a kid with no friends. And

36:12

he said, there were three things I absorbed

36:14

from my sci-fi and comics. One

36:17

was that humans had to be space

36:19

explorers. We had to get back so

36:21

that we could become multi-planetary.

36:24

We could go to Mars. And that was because

36:26

consciousness may be unique

36:30

in this universe. And

36:32

if we confine it to one planet,

36:35

we'll be – now, these are not the things you and I worry

36:37

about as 17-year-olds, but he wants

36:39

to make life multi-planetary.

36:42

Number two, he wants sustainable

36:45

energy. He just realizes

36:47

that the planet's not going to survive with

36:50

a drill and burn type

36:52

energy system. And so he wants

36:55

to create electric vehicles, solar

36:57

roofs, power walls,

37:00

and things that will get us that way. The

37:02

third great mission

37:05

that he sets for himself as a kid from

37:07

reading Isaac Asimov's robot stories

37:11

is we have to make sure our robots,

37:13

our artificial intelligence, is

37:16

beneficial to humanity rather

37:18

than harmful to humanity. I

37:21

used to think that those three great missions

37:23

that he would talk about were the type of

37:25

pontifications a goofball

37:28

does for podcasts or pep rallies

37:31

of his team. But over

37:33

and over again, even in quiet moments,

37:35

it would almost be an incantation, which

37:38

is if we don't get moving, we'll never get

37:40

humanity to Mars. Or

37:43

if we leave Microsoft and Google to do

37:45

AI, the robots are going to destroy

37:47

us. And I came to believe

37:50

that at least he believed that

37:53

those were the three great missions that unify

37:56

what he did. And

37:58

there were times you know, it

38:00

seemed totally

38:03

ingrained into him.

38:04

You write this in the book. At first,

38:06

I thought this was merely role-playing, the

38:08

team-boosting pep talks and podcast fantasies

38:11

of a man-child who read the Hitchhiker's Guide

38:13

to the Galaxy once too often. But

38:15

the more I encountered it, the more I came to

38:18

believe that his Elon sense of mission

38:20

was part of what drove him. While other

38:22

entrepreneurs around him struggled to develop a worldview,

38:26

he developed a cosmic view. Yeah,

38:28

I would just love for you to reflect a little bit more on where

38:31

that comes from. Because a lot of these great

38:34

men and great women, you know, have

38:36

some kind of catalyzing experience,

38:38

maybe in their younger eras, often

38:41

tragic. And as you said, they

38:43

take that pain and they turn it into

38:45

propulsion. Why Mars,

38:48

though? I have to be honest, like, and

38:50

maybe this is a masculine feminine thing, but,

38:53

you know, of all of the things Elon does, I think

38:55

maybe one of the reasons that more

38:57

of us are drawn to companies like Tesla

39:00

and Twitter is simply because we don't have

39:02

the scope of imagination to think

39:04

about interplanetary travel

39:07

and civilization.

39:09

Hey, man, it's the biggest adventure. We

39:11

are a species that

39:14

thrives on being adventurous

39:16

at times. There's no reason, by

39:18

the way,

39:19

for

39:20

anybody who's driven by money

39:22

or a little bit of a worldview to start a rocket

39:25

company. I mean, it makes no sense. His friends

39:27

make a highlight reel of exploding rockets

39:30

that say, don't do it, Elon. It makes no

39:32

sense. But he believes we have

39:34

to get humanity to Mars. Now,

39:36

why Mars? I mean, he wants it to

39:39

be multiplanetary. He wants us

39:41

to explore. Part of it

39:43

is because he's worried that something could happen

39:45

to this planet and human consciousness would

39:47

die out. But part of it, too,

39:50

is he said, what gets people up in the morning?

39:52

Now, maybe you say it doesn't get you up

39:54

in the morning, but I'm one

39:56

of those kids who remembers the 109870. and

40:01

remembers Pad 39A and remembers

40:03

when we sent people to the moon. And

40:06

our little problems that we focus on

40:08

now, even the ridiculous ones

40:11

like the clown show in the House

40:13

of Representatives or something, we

40:16

got to rise above that sometimes

40:19

and say, yeah, but

40:21

there's something bigger the human species

40:23

could be doing. And that's space

40:26

exploration. I mean, maybe it doesn't

40:28

move you.

40:28

Well, no, I think it's a sign actually

40:31

of, frankly, like civilizational

40:34

decline that that

40:37

sense of adventure, that

40:39

sense of like pushing out and pushing

40:41

past boundaries, that is a

40:43

sign of civilizational

40:46

aliveness. And I think

40:48

in a way, the fact that Elon is

40:51

so singular is

40:53

a tragic sign or symbol

40:56

of like where the rest of us are, at

40:58

least in terms of this

41:00

lane. Absolutely. I mean, back when

41:02

I was growing up, we were creating

41:04

NASA, we were creating DARPA, the

41:06

internet, and we

41:09

believed in space and

41:11

believed in frontiers.

41:14

And now

41:15

we get mired in the everydayness

41:18

of our petty disputes. And

41:21

this, by the way, is not supposed to canonize

41:24

Musk, but those who demonize

41:26

him also have to realize that there's

41:28

nobody else who single

41:31

handedly has helped revive

41:33

the notion that Americans

41:36

can go to space. NASA

41:38

grounded the space shuttle. It

41:41

gave up going to the moon. And when

41:43

Musk was first thinking

41:45

of a rocket company, it was because he went on the NASA

41:47

website and said, I wonder what the plans

41:50

are for getting to other planets. And there were

41:52

no plans. Now, dismiss

41:55

it if you want, but it drives him.

41:58

There's a few themes that

41:59

sort of run through all of his

42:02

companies. And the first one is the way

42:04

that Elon works, which I think would

42:06

be very, very different from

42:08

sort of like the methodical CEO that

42:11

a lot of people imagine. He calls

42:13

it or you call it surging. You have many chapters

42:15

just with that word in the title, Starship

42:18

surge, Tesla surge. What

42:20

does surging look like? Explain

42:22

to people his maniacal

42:24

sense of urgency.

42:25

He says a maniacal sense of urgency

42:28

has got to be our operating principle.

42:31

And let me tell you a story. One night and

42:33

Friday night, it's 10 p.m.

42:35

and I'm walking alongside

42:37

him as he's inspecting the

42:40

assembly line for Starship,

42:42

largest movable object ever made, this

42:45

rocket he has down in South Texas. And

42:48

we get to the launch pad and there are only

42:50

two or three people working on the launch pad.

42:53

And he just starts asking Andy Krebs,

42:55

who's in charge of why are there not more

42:57

people working? And Andy

43:00

kind of tries to say, well, it's 10 o'clock

43:02

on a Friday night and we don't have any launches scheduled.

43:05

And Musk just goes into that cold,

43:08

callous mode, reams

43:10

Andy out and orders a

43:12

surge. And that meant that by

43:14

the next night they had to have whatever in the

43:17

book. I don't know, 200 people he wanted

43:19

working at the launch pad flying

43:22

in from Cape Canaveral and from Los

43:25

Angeles. And he just

43:27

says we have to guard against complacency.

43:30

That's why NASA can't

43:33

get rockets up. We have to have the fierce

43:35

urgency. I've watched

43:37

him over and over again

43:40

when things are calm and going well

43:43

to say, no, now we need a

43:45

surge. I watch him standing

43:47

late at night on a rooftop

43:50

of a tracked home in Texas

43:52

where they were trying to install a solar

43:54

roof and it wasn't working well. And

43:56

he orders a surge where they have to do

43:58

a certain number of homes in 24

44:01

hours. So that surge

44:03

mentality is his

44:06

way of excuse the language

44:08

he said it kind of extrudes the shit

44:11

from the system and that's

44:13

that drama. But it can

44:16

also extrude really good

44:18

people I mean take the example that you bring up

44:20

of the tract house at the solar panels I

44:22

don't remember the exact details but I remember a very

44:26

hard-working character who I think is a former

44:28

will you tell us?

44:29

Brian Dow a delightful guy

44:31

he was part of the surge at the battery

44:34

factory in Nevada. He would

44:36

walk through a wall for Musk and early

44:39

on when I first got there I remember

44:41

Musk summoning him in saying I'm gonna put

44:43

you in charge of solar roofs and

44:45

then it's hard it's

44:48

hard to build them at scale and night

44:50

after night Musk would be there watching

44:53

him do a solar roof and at one point

44:55

boom

44:56

he just decides you're not gonna make

44:58

it you're fired and the guy Brian can't believe

45:01

it. I spent a lot of time talking to him

45:03

figuring out what went wrong but I'll tell

45:05

you another little story you're in Los Angeles now

45:07

right? Yeah. So I was just out there

45:09

about four days ago remember

45:11

the star base Friday

45:13

night 10 p.m. surge I'm gonna say

45:15

something that Musk doesn't know so there's

45:18

that guy Andy Krebs he just reams

45:20

him out right and Andy

45:22

Krebs actually survives for a while

45:25

Musk doesn't even remember he reams him out and eventually

45:27

promotes him but Andy's

45:29

about to have a kid decides I just can't

45:32

take this any longer he's back in Los Angeles.

45:35

I did a book event for the LA Times

45:37

and I see Andy Krebs walking up to me

45:40

I said what's up mate he said well

45:42

I left but I gotta go back

45:45

I gotta go back I gotta be part of the

45:47

mission and so this

45:50

is what you have to get your head around

45:52

is that he's rough but

45:55

mission-driven people want to have that

45:57

fierce maniacal sense of urgency.

45:59

Well that's sort of like a theme that also

46:02

runs through the book which is he is

46:04

so I mean rough is an understatement

46:07

with people especially these young bright

46:09

eyed incredibly mission driven people i met

46:12

a few of them ross and james at

46:14

twitter who you there pictured in the book and

46:16

yet

46:17

they're willing to

46:19

put themselves through

46:21

absolute hell i mean a lot of these people

46:23

are having like major gi issues

46:25

as the result of being in proximity to elon

46:28

musk.

46:28

I assume you mean yes

46:31

they're like they're

46:31

vomiting their their vomiting from

46:33

the stress their vomiting from what they're having

46:35

to do and yet they're still

46:38

doing it can you just give us a little bit of

46:40

insight into why they are

46:42

doing what they are doing.

46:44

Look there are two different

46:46

ways of viewing the workplace and

46:49

frankly of viewing life and when twitter

46:51

was right before must took it over. It

46:54

was a very nurturing place it was

46:56

really flabby in some ways it has

46:59

as we know about. Five

47:01

times as many people as it needed to it had

47:03

rooms for quiet reflection

47:06

it had yoga studios it had mental

47:09

health days and it believed in psychological

47:11

safety. That's actually fine

47:13

that's good i worked at time magazine

47:16

in the nineteen eighties it was glorious

47:18

like that

47:19

but i'm assuming there weren't rooms for psychological

47:21

safety there was more like martini's at five.

47:24

That was true there was a drink cart

47:26

that came around it i think five thirty

47:28

not five but you know they

47:30

make drinks for all the writers. So

47:33

that was a nurturing environment

47:36

and you have on the other side of the

47:38

spectrum many places in

47:40

silicon valley where you're supposed to be all

47:42

in hackathon twenty four hours

47:45

stay up all night and crash clothes

47:47

things. That's another

47:50

type of all in environment each of

47:52

us when we run a company has

47:54

to say we're on that spectrum

47:57

do i want to be how hard core

47:59

am i going to. push people. I remember Bill Gates

48:01

in early Microsoft trying to fire his

48:04

partner, Paul Allen, because

48:06

he wasn't hardcore enough. Jeff Bezos

48:08

in the early days of Amazon. People

48:11

believe in the hardcore way of doing things. And

48:14

then there are people who believe, no, we need

48:16

a work-life balance. We need some

48:19

decency. We need people to

48:21

go home Friday nights before 10

48:23

p.m. And you have

48:26

to decide what type of company it is and

48:28

what type of person you are. And I

48:30

talked to one person at one

48:33

of Musk's companies, and he said, when

48:35

I was in my 20s, I sort of

48:37

believed in that all-in hardcore

48:39

thing. I believed in the mission. I

48:41

love staying up all night. I love the

48:43

intensity.

48:44

And now that I've gotten older, I'm thinking that's

48:46

bull.

48:47

I'm no longer there. You don't want it. So

48:51

Musk demands the all-in

48:54

hardcore intensity.

48:56

And he believes you can

48:58

go work in other places like Boeing

49:01

if you're not into that hardcore intensity.

49:27

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50:28

Okay, I want to spend a lot more time if we had it on

50:32

the sublime and the star stuff, but I need

50:35

to talk about the not so sublime, which

50:37

is the company formerly

50:39

known as Twitter, now known as X. On April

50:42

25th, 2022, Twitter accepts Elon Musk's $44 billion

50:47

bid to purchase it and take it private. Tell

50:50

us the story, if you would, about how

50:52

a man obsessed with getting to Mars

50:55

decides to purchase a microblogging

50:58

platform because the kind of 24 hours

51:00

leading up to the night that he decides to

51:02

go public and says he makes an offer in

51:05

a way sort of summarizes

51:06

the very abnormal way that Elon Musk

51:08

functions in this world. Yeah, very

51:10

impulsive. And there were multiple

51:13

reasons he was interested in Twitter. He had some money

51:15

because he had exercised stock options, paid

51:17

more tax than anybody's ever paid in history,

51:20

but still had lots of money left over. He

51:22

said, what product do I like? Says, well, I love

51:24

Twitter, I'm addicted to it. I use it every night.

51:27

And it hasn't changed in the past two years.

51:29

They haven't put up video. It's a bad technological

51:32

product. Secondly, I think there

51:34

was a psychological one. If you're bullied

51:36

on the playground and what's the

51:38

world's greatest playground now, Twitter,

51:41

you get to own the playground. Also,

51:43

it would fulfill his vision of x.com, which

51:46

we briefly touched upon, but 20 years earlier,

51:49

he had Peter Thiel and others started

51:51

a group of companies that become PayPal.

51:54

He had wanted to keep it called x.com,

51:57

which was his name for it, which was not

51:59

only. payments platform, but a payments

52:01

platform connected to a social media

52:04

platform where you could post content,

52:06

get paid for it. Everything from WeChat

52:08

to Substack to Medium to Twitter

52:11

all rolled into one. And he said,

52:13

if I buy Twitter, it can be my

52:15

accelerant to get to x.com

52:18

and make it what it should have been. So

52:21

on a frenzy of days, he flies

52:24

off to Hawaii from

52:26

Austin, where we've just been at the opening

52:28

of the biggest factory there is, you know, Gigafactory,

52:31

Texas, meets a

52:33

woman he was dating on Natasha Bassett,

52:35

the actress in Hawaii,

52:38

stays up two nights in a row,

52:40

sending messages back and

52:42

forth to the management team at Twitter, becoming

52:44

convinced they have a clueless. Then he goes to

52:47

Vancouver with Grimes and

52:49

stays up all night playing Elden Ring.

52:52

All the layers, keeps pushing himself to the

52:54

next layer of Elden Ring until 535, I

52:57

think, in the morning, at which point he gets

53:00

through that final horrible layer

53:02

of Elden Ring and

53:04

puts it down and says, I made

53:07

an offer, which is the impulsive

53:09

driven way he ends up buying Twitter.

53:12

Interesting thing is when the board of Twitter

53:14

finally accepts his offer and it's gone through,

53:17

I thought, OK, he's going to be excited. It

53:20

was almost cold. He

53:23

went down to a conference room in Boca

53:25

Chica, Texas, where they

53:27

were doing Starbase, which I talked about

53:29

where Starship is being launched. And there was

53:31

a methane leak in one of the designs

53:34

of the engines. They just spent two

53:36

hours focusing on that. None of the engineers,

53:39

they're all thinking about, man, you just bought Twitter. But

53:42

nobody says anything. He focuses

53:44

on the Raptor engine.

53:46

One of the things that I think is really

53:49

admirable about Elon and pretty

53:51

singular is that he doesn't

53:53

set out to say, what do people want?

53:55

I'm going to build it. He instead says,

53:58

what problem does humanity

53:59

needs solved, and then he works

54:02

backwards from the mission to come

54:04

up with the business proposition. Right?

54:07

At SpaceX, it's clear. It's make

54:09

humans multi-planetary and extend

54:12

life beyond Earth. At Tesla,

54:14

the mission is energy independence, getting

54:16

off fossil fuels, making it affordable. At

54:19

Neuralink, it's make our

54:21

cognitive capacity so much bigger

54:24

by combining our brains with computers.

54:27

But at Twitter, it's a big question mark.

54:30

When I spoke to Elon when he purchased

54:32

Twitter, he said he did it because I'm

54:34

worried about the future of civilization. He

54:36

says very similar things to you in the book.

54:39

But I wonder if you buy that, because we know that after

54:42

Elon makes that offer, he tries

54:44

to get out of it.

54:45

No, I don't really buy it. I buy

54:47

the fact that he really wants to make life multi-planetary.

54:50

And I really buy the fact that he wants to move to

54:53

the era of electric vehicles and get us out

54:55

of it. And I think you're absolutely right

54:57

that he backfills a big mission and

54:59

says, how am I going to pay for it? I mean, first,

55:02

it's a big mission. Make us multi-planetary.

55:04

Then he says, oh, I can pay for it

55:06

because I'm the only person who can get satellites into

55:08

orbit and reuse the rocket. So I'll

55:11

create an internet in outer space,

55:13

and that will pay for the mission. Likewise,

55:16

with Neuralink, the chips in the brain, it's

55:18

like, all right, I want to be able

55:20

to mind meld this with our machines.

55:23

But in the meantime, I'll cure ALS

55:26

or Parkinson's or some neurological

55:28

disease with these chips. With

55:30

Twitter, you

55:31

know, when I first asked him, I think it's in the

55:33

book,

55:34

he said, well, you're right. It doesn't

55:36

really fit into any of my missions. And

55:38

then he said, well, it's to help democracy

55:41

survive. I don't think he had really

55:43

thought it through, and I don't particularly buy that.

55:45

I think it was all

55:47

those impulsive things I told you about, from

55:50

wanting to fulfill his original vision of X.com

55:53

to loving the Twitter product. And

55:55

yeah, you're right. He had a lot of mixed feelings

55:57

after he made the offer. It's like, why did I

55:59

do that? I get into this mess. At other times

56:02

he was giddy. I get to do what

56:04

I wanted to do with x.com 20 years ago.

56:07

If you could ask Elon, and maybe you have

56:09

asked him this, if he could go back and undo the

56:11

decision to buy Twitter, given the

56:13

headaches it's caused in his life, do you think

56:16

he would undo that decision?

56:17

I hope so. And

56:19

I also think, as we said about Musk,

56:22

he has a variable mercurial multiple

56:25

personalities. And there are times,

56:28

I know, right before

56:30

he closed the deal and subsequently

56:32

is like, boy, was this a waste of time?

56:35

Is this a time suck? I should be focusing,

56:37

as he says in the book, when he starts the artificial

56:39

intelligence company after having

56:42

bought Twitter, that's his new thing. He said,

56:44

the time I'm spending on Twitter, I think

56:46

it's probably not valuable time.

56:48

I should be focusing more on artificial

56:50

intelligence. What I think he

56:53

realizes is not been good for

56:55

his legacy

56:58

and is probably not the best use

57:01

of his focus and attention.

57:03

Okay. Let's, let's talk a little bit about the Twitter files.

57:06

I understand that this might be remembered as less

57:09

than a pimple on the legacy of Elon

57:11

Musk, but for honestly listeners and

57:13

for free press readers, it was significant and

57:15

it's significant because, you know, it's weird to be interviewing

57:18

someone whose book has my picture in it.

57:20

And I talked to you sort of at length for this

57:23

book. And I want to talk to you a little bit about that period,

57:25

just to set the stage, to remind people in

57:28

December of 2022, almost a year ago. Now

57:30

I got a text from Elon Musk over signal,

57:33

got connected to him through the venture capitalist

57:35

Mark Andreessen. And it simply said,

57:37

are you interested in coming to Twitter to look at

57:40

Twitter's archive, to look at the Twitter files?

57:42

I was sitting there with my wife, Nellie, who

57:45

works at the free press with me. We

57:47

were there with our three month old baby. And

57:50

two hours later we were on a flight out of Burbank

57:52

to San Francisco because like any other

57:54

normal journalist in the world, we leapt at the opportunity.

57:57

And over the two weeks that followed, my. team

58:00

and I were given access to the company's

58:02

archives of internal communications.

58:05

And we broke stories about the platforms

58:08

Trump ban, how they came to that decision about

58:10

its shadow banning secret blacklists about

58:13

its interference in the COVID debate, something that

58:15

we referenced earlier in this conversation, which

58:17

sort of taken together revealed how

58:19

a handful of unelected individuals

58:22

at a private company, arguably

58:24

put its thumb on the scale to manipulate

58:26

the public discourse. And you sort of very clearly

58:29

document all of this on your book. Now, Elon

58:31

says that the reason that he invited Matt Taibbi

58:33

at first and then subsequently to Twitter

58:35

is because this was his version of a

58:38

truth and reconciliation commission, that

58:40

the only way for Twitter under

58:43

the new regime now acts to sort of recapture

58:45

the public's trust was to expose the

58:47

old regime. Now, do

58:50

you buy that? In other words, if his

58:52

argument for buying Twitter was I'm doing

58:54

it to save civilization, but actually

58:57

you're saying, nah, he probably bought it because it's

58:59

kind of like his chance to sort of own the playground.

59:02

Why did he invite us to Twitter? Actually,

59:04

he has

59:05

a radical transparency

59:07

that was surprising to me that reflected

59:10

in the fact that he said, yeah, all

59:12

meetings are there. As you know, I was hanging

59:14

out in that hotbox room with the bad smell

59:17

of Asian food or whatever of Thai

59:19

food, whatever they kept ordering and every greasy

59:22

takeout in the world. And he's allowing me in all those

59:26

meetings and the same reason he's allowing you and

59:29

Matt Taibbi to expose the files

59:31

he believes in or likes

59:33

to think he believes in a radical transparency.

59:36

As with many things with Musk, there's some, I won't

59:38

say hypocritical, but conflicting things

59:40

where then he'll be banning, as

59:43

you know, or suppressing certain

59:45

journalists that he thought were doxxing his location

59:48

or God knows what. So it's not

59:50

a simple thing with Musk. I

59:53

will tell you the story of the night.

59:55

I think you've read it in the book, but it was even hard

59:57

to figure out how to make it

59:59

a noun. in the book, but I think it was like December

1:00:02

2nd, right? You were called to come

1:00:05

up to Twitter. And that day,

1:00:07

he's dealing with the whole notion of how to use

1:00:09

machine learning to do full self-driving

1:00:12

from Davao Shroff. I think you met him

1:00:14

in the hot box. He also

1:00:16

has to come here to New Orleans.

1:00:19

He almost forgot he had to come, because

1:00:21

he's meeting President Macron, who was here

1:00:23

in New Orleans. So he's flying here to New

1:00:25

Orleans. In the meantime, the lawyers,

1:00:28

and I know you helped expose

1:00:30

one of the

1:00:31

problems with the lawyers in the book, I tell him, you

1:00:33

can't let Mattayebi

1:00:36

release all these files. It'll invade

1:00:39

privacy, other things. And he's

1:00:41

there dealing with Macron and

1:00:43

trying to figure out how to overrule the lawyers.

1:00:46

And then he's sending you signal messages,

1:00:48

even though he doesn't really know you. I think he met you

1:00:50

once to say, come on up.

1:00:52

Once for two minutes, and I don't think he has any

1:00:54

memory

1:00:54

of it. Right, and so come on up,

1:00:56

because I want you, I need more help. We

1:00:58

need more help with Mattayebi

1:01:01

on these files. So you fly up. And

1:01:03

if I remember that night, he's wandering

1:01:06

you through the building, showing you the stay

1:01:08

woke t-shirts, and in the giddy

1:01:10

way, making fun of the wokeness

1:01:13

of Twitter. And I don't know if you also

1:01:15

were in the subsequent thing, where he's sitting there

1:01:18

with Deval Shroff, going over

1:01:20

what is gonna become Full Self Drive 12, where

1:01:23

Deval is showing him a machine

1:01:25

learning version of taking a billion

1:01:28

frames of video from Tesla cars

1:01:31

and learning the way humans drive,

1:01:33

just as chat GPT learns

1:01:35

the way humans talk. And this is just

1:01:38

an eight hour period, right? In

1:01:40

many ways, you could argue a typical eight

1:01:43

hour period in the life of

1:01:45

this man. And let's add on to that,

1:01:47

the fact that he has no stable home.

1:01:49

When we were there, he was sleeping on, I

1:01:52

forget if it was the seventh floor, I think it was the seventh

1:01:54

floor at that point of Twitter.

1:01:55

Seventh floor, semi

1:01:58

is what had been a nice suite.

1:02:00

room and Twitter and they

1:02:02

discovered there were showers there. So he decides,

1:02:04

I'm going to live on the factory, so to speak. I'm

1:02:06

going to live in Twitter. Now,

1:02:09

this sounds

1:02:10

maybe to his fans a noble

1:02:12

thing. And it sounds to many

1:02:14

of us a totally nutty thing. But

1:02:17

it's not guaranteed to give you more

1:02:19

equanimity. And he was not sort

1:02:21

of operating on, you

1:02:23

know, a calm basis during those

1:02:26

weeks.

1:02:27

One of the things, Walter, that I thought a lot

1:02:29

about since that pretty, for

1:02:32

me, singular experience, not for you. You've

1:02:34

interviewed and met almost every powerful man

1:02:36

that's walked the face of the earth in the span of your

1:02:38

life. But I've been thinking a lot about

1:02:40

sort of the pitfalls of what's called access

1:02:43

journalism, right? The idea that when you're

1:02:45

dealing with a source that has information

1:02:47

you want and that you need and that you have decided

1:02:50

is in the public interest, you need to work

1:02:52

with that source and keep them engaged

1:02:55

and not isolate them or alienate them. Or

1:02:57

piss them off in order to get the information

1:02:59

you want. But there are trade offs. And I want to give you an

1:03:01

example. We got to Twitter at,

1:03:04

I think, midnight on that Friday.

1:03:07

The next day it was me and Nellie

1:03:09

and Elon. And that was it. And

1:03:11

I remember very distinctly, I had gotten like a donut

1:03:13

from Starbucks. It was half eaten. He walked into

1:03:15

a conference room at 11 30 and said, can I

1:03:17

have this? And it was just the polar

1:03:20

opposite of every very powerful,

1:03:23

wealthy person I've ever met that is just insulated with a source. Just

1:03:25

insulated with assistance and like has

1:03:27

their broiled salmon and greens

1:03:29

brought to them at noon. He's like eating

1:03:31

old pizza, sushi and donuts. And I just,

1:03:34

that really, really struck me about sort of the way he

1:03:36

functions. Anyway, the first day

1:03:38

we were there, this is before we had seen a

1:03:40

single document and we said to him, do you want to sit

1:03:42

down for an interview? And

1:03:45

he said, sure. And he was very, you know, game

1:03:47

for it. And had a very

1:03:49

cordial first 30 minutes of the conversation. And then

1:03:51

we get to the subject of China.

1:03:54

And the question I asked was essentially, how

1:03:57

do you respond to critics who

1:03:59

argue that you're not your business interests in

1:04:01

China, especially by way of

1:04:03

Tesla, come at the unfreedom

1:04:06

of Chinese, especially

1:04:08

of Uyghurs. And at first he gave a pretty

1:04:11

defensible answer. He said, well,

1:04:14

look at the phone in your pocket. Look at the computer you're

1:04:16

typing into. Look at the clothes you're wearing. It's

1:04:18

not like Tesla is alone in somehow carrying

1:04:21

the torch for oppression. It's

1:04:23

our entire economy. So many of our goods are dependent

1:04:25

on it. But then it

1:04:27

turned and he got very, very

1:04:30

uncomfortable. And he told me that

1:04:32

he had to suddenly fly to DC

1:04:34

for a matter of national security importance.

1:04:37

And then it kind of fell apart from there. And

1:04:40

before he sort of walked out of the room, he told me

1:04:42

that I should be very careful about

1:04:45

what I say about China and Tesla, because

1:04:47

in his words, it could cause grave

1:04:49

harm to his companies. And

1:04:52

it was clear to me in that moment that I sort of

1:04:54

needed to leave the subject of China,

1:04:56

the subject that we publish on a lot

1:04:58

here at the free press and that I've been passionate about

1:05:00

for a long time, sort of for another

1:05:03

day. But China was a long-relieved story.

1:05:06

We could tell it another time. But right

1:05:08

now I needed to grab as much information

1:05:10

about Twitter as possible while

1:05:12

he was giving me access. The

1:05:14

reason I raise all of this is I wonder, did

1:05:17

you have trade-offs like that in your

1:05:19

reporting? Where you decided, I'm going to leave

1:05:21

this naughty subject to the side for

1:05:24

the sake of the broader story that I want to

1:05:26

tell on this day?

1:05:27

No. No.

1:05:29

No. I never did, and it never

1:05:31

came up. But I certainly tell the story of

1:05:33

you and China in the book, which is

1:05:36

an example of where you just tell the

1:05:38

story on it. And by the way, you're talking about

1:05:40

access journalism. It's also, in

1:05:43

his case, we call it access capitalism,

1:05:46

which is you need access

1:05:48

to China, so you're going to

1:05:50

pull your punches, some on China or

1:05:52

do it with velvet gloves. And

1:05:54

so I think business people who do business

1:05:57

in China, and for that matter Saudi Arabia,

1:05:59

or maybe even Louisiana

1:06:02

or whatever, you need access if

1:06:04

you're a business person and you make

1:06:06

trade-offs and that's in life

1:06:09

can be problematic. I tried very

1:06:11

hard in terms

1:06:13

of my journalism not to make trade-offs.

1:06:16

There were things he did not wanna talk about

1:06:18

beginning with his father. And

1:06:22

I just kept pushing on the door, kept pushing on the

1:06:24

door. And there's

1:06:27

almost nothing I left

1:06:30

out of the book,

1:06:31

out of any fear or

1:06:34

because it was a trade-off. When

1:06:36

I say almost nothing, I think

1:06:39

the only two things were

1:06:41

he has, as you know, five

1:06:44

teenage children. One

1:06:46

of whom was very relevant to the book, Xavier

1:06:49

who had transitioned

1:06:52

and become his daughter, Jenna. And

1:06:54

the transition he gets his head around but

1:06:56

not her extreme

1:06:59

anti-capitalism thinking all rich

1:07:01

people are bad and wanting never to see him or talk

1:07:03

to him again and changing her name. Obviously

1:07:06

he said that pained him more than anything

1:07:09

other than the death of his first child

1:07:11

as an infant. And so that

1:07:14

had to be in the book. And Griffin is in

1:07:16

the book who you probably know who

1:07:18

has said, fine, you can quote

1:07:21

me and use me in the book. And he has

1:07:23

an autistic child, Saxon, and with

1:07:25

the mother's permission and

1:07:28

Elon's permission and Griffin said, okay,

1:07:30

you can talk about Saxon. Cause he says

1:07:32

wise and sweet things that I

1:07:34

think are important. Like why doesn't the

1:07:37

future look like the future and must

1:07:39

changes the Cybertruck design by

1:07:41

sort of saying this is what Saxon tells me. But

1:07:44

the other three kids, they're

1:07:47

young,

1:07:48

they were uncomfortable.

1:07:50

Some of the things I saw or whatever

1:07:52

they did want in the book. And

1:07:54

my wife told me, and

1:07:56

it happened with Steve Jobs as well, you

1:07:58

got to make some trade.

1:07:59

off

1:08:00

on what's important

1:08:03

to the reader versus how

1:08:05

much pain might it cause somebody

1:08:08

under the age of 18 who's an innocent

1:08:10

bystander. I don't think I made

1:08:12

trade-offs with him in that

1:08:15

sense.

1:08:16

What about China though? Because

1:08:18

there's one section, I think it's

1:08:20

chapter 50 about China called Shanghai,

1:08:23

but that's kind of it. There's not a

1:08:25

lot about that subject in

1:08:27

the book. Tesla shipments from Shanghai

1:08:30

account for more than half of its total sales.

1:08:33

Did you ask Elon about the political ramifications

1:08:35

of doing business in China or did you feel like this is

1:08:38

a personal biography of Elon and so it's outside

1:08:40

of the scope

1:08:40

of the book? Well,

1:08:42

you did mention it's more than a 600-page

1:08:45

narrative and I guess you could probably say why

1:08:47

didn't you take out the Neuralink part and

1:08:49

put in more about China.

1:08:52

I do have them in that chapter going toe-to-toe

1:08:54

with the Chinese, especially on their demands

1:08:57

that it be a joint venture. I

1:08:59

did talk to him and like

1:09:01

a lot of business leaders and

1:09:03

I know your head's not there, but you

1:09:05

can say Tim Cook, you can say Bob Iger,

1:09:08

any of the others you would know, they

1:09:10

feel having a more workable

1:09:13

competition with China rather

1:09:15

than a provocative relationship is

1:09:18

better because with two

1:09:21

huge economies, they're going to have to coexist.

1:09:24

China is a complicated issue and

1:09:26

I think Musk is somewhat typical

1:09:29

of major business leaders.

1:09:32

He's extremely typical, but

1:09:34

someone like Peter Thiel would say the idea

1:09:37

of believing that we can do business with China

1:09:39

is the equivalent of picking up pennies in front

1:09:41

of a bulldozer. So there are very

1:09:43

different views in Silicon Valley. I just had wondered

1:09:46

if it had come up.

1:09:46

And I look at very different views

1:09:49

in Washington and frankly very different

1:09:51

views within this administration

1:09:53

from two months ago to now. I

1:09:57

don't have an easy answer there. I feel the

1:09:59

same about Saudi Arabia. Arabia for what it's

1:10:01

worth.

1:10:02

Yeah, I think the difference is that one of those has

1:10:05

Imperial ambitions and one of them

1:10:07

doesn't one thing that I noticed

1:10:09

is how scared people are of Elon Musk

1:10:12

People are very very scared to say no

1:10:14

to him or to confront him I won't name names,

1:10:16

but you quote some very cringy sycophantic

1:10:19

Texts and things that people

1:10:21

around him say

1:10:22

to him. What if I name I want people to see

1:10:24

it

1:10:24

Yeah, it's it's very very cringy

1:10:27

and it makes sense, right? This is someone that

1:10:30

a lot of people can make a lot of money

1:10:32

off of by riding his coattails and

1:10:34

I remember my Heart

1:10:37

racing before I criticized

1:10:40

him on Twitter for kicking off journalists

1:10:42

and being hypocritical I knew he would get mad

1:10:45

at me I knew his fans and their allegiance

1:10:47

of them would swarm me and I knew I would

1:10:49

lose access to the Twitter file story And

1:10:51

I certainly don't have the security Elon Musk did

1:10:53

I did it anyway I thought it was the

1:10:55

principal thing to do but I was scared

1:10:57

to do it. Did you ever

1:11:00

fear?

1:11:01

Pissing him off.

1:11:02

No By the way, I told

1:11:04

the story of you in

1:11:06

the book doing that because I thought

1:11:08

it was admirable and I told the story of Yo, El

1:11:11

Roth Doing that and it was

1:11:13

admirable. I mean not Elon's

1:11:15

reaction. I Guess

1:11:17

it was in the back of my mind that

1:11:21

He would turn it could or would

1:11:23

turn the flamethrower on me at some

1:11:25

point But

1:11:28

I had all the reporting by the time

1:11:30

I was writing the book. I don't

1:11:32

need to be his pal these days He

1:11:35

says he's not even read the book

1:11:38

that you know that he jokingly said

1:11:40

that when I ran across him a few

1:11:42

weeks ago In Austin, I hadn't sent him the

1:11:44

book and He said should

1:11:47

I read it and I said no you shouldn't read

1:11:49

it and he now jokingly says I

1:11:51

told him not to read it So that's the one

1:11:53

piece of advice I gave him He

1:11:56

can be just brutal at times

1:11:58

and people are afraid of him him, but

1:12:01

I do show that in the book and

1:12:03

I show what people do who survive

1:12:05

that. Look, there's so many examples

1:12:08

of, all right, I'm going to make the next

1:12:10

generation car, a robot taxi with

1:12:12

no steering wheel over and over

1:12:14

again. People have to say no to them, turn

1:12:16

them around, give them the facts. I

1:12:19

can name you 20 times like that. Where,

1:12:24

including that night you were there in December,

1:12:27

where he's saying, no, we're not going to use

1:12:29

a complex machine learning algorithm.

1:12:31

And they keep showing him how to do

1:12:33

it. So, uh, my

1:12:36

book is supposed to be a narrative of how people

1:12:38

deal with him. It's not about me and whether he's

1:12:40

going to turn a flamethrower on me.

1:12:42

Much has been made of sort of Elon's, whatever

1:12:44

we want to call it, red pilling, right word turn.

1:12:47

We're not going to call it conservative because it's much more complicated

1:12:50

than that. And I think,

1:12:51

you know, if we're looking for a reason for it, sure,

1:12:54

we could look to his addiction to sort of funny

1:12:56

right-wing meme culture, but I think we could also

1:12:58

look at like his relationship

1:13:02

to the white house in the Biden administration.

1:13:04

And it's hard not to notice how much the government

1:13:07

has singled out or targeted Elon

1:13:10

first there's the fact that the Biden administration,

1:13:12

and you document this in the book completely

1:13:15

ignores Tesla and it's praised for other

1:13:17

electric car companies that produce like

1:13:19

half a dozen cars while Tesla is

1:13:21

producing hundreds of thousands that

1:13:24

definitely pisses off Elon. You capture that in

1:13:26

the book. But then there are actual government

1:13:28

probes happening right now. The feds

1:13:30

are currently suing space X for not hiring

1:13:33

illegal immigrants or refugees. The sec

1:13:35

is going after Tesla. It sure seems

1:13:38

like Elon Musk is getting targeted

1:13:40

because of his politics, or at least you

1:13:42

could imagine that he could feel that

1:13:44

way. What do you make of the fact that

1:13:46

the federal government seems to be training

1:13:49

a lot of its attention on Elon, even

1:13:51

as other parts of it are dependent on

1:13:53

him and his companies?

1:13:54

Yeah, obviously

1:13:56

he feels as a vast conspiracy.

1:14:00

to take them on from the SEC to

1:14:02

the FAA to whatever. I

1:14:04

am at the other end of

1:14:07

being a believer in vast conspiracies,

1:14:10

like Ben Franklin, that three people can keep

1:14:13

a secret if two of them are dead. There's no vast

1:14:15

conspiracies happening. I

1:14:18

think that there is a mindset

1:14:22

among both regulators and bureaucrats,

1:14:25

but also people from

1:14:27

Elizabeth Warren, who says he's dodging

1:14:29

taxes, to people who are probably regulators

1:14:32

at the SEC that,

1:14:34

shall we say, aren't favorably

1:14:36

disposed to him. But

1:14:39

I don't think, even though he

1:14:41

does think, that it's a

1:14:43

top-down. The White House has decided,

1:14:46

let's get Elon and instruct all of our

1:14:48

regulatory agencies to be

1:14:50

against him. I think if you're a regulator

1:14:53

and a bureaucrat, and

1:14:56

you

1:14:57

may be

1:14:58

sympathetic to a more progressive

1:15:01

ideology, you're likely

1:15:03

to go after Elon Musk. And I'll tell you

1:15:05

something. Elon Musk gives him a

1:15:08

lot of ammunition. He skirts regulations.

1:15:11

He does things that are unsafe.

1:15:13

He questions every rule and requirement

1:15:16

and tries to get around things. I'm

1:15:19

not totally surprised that he's

1:15:21

the target of regulators.

1:15:24

If

1:15:25

I discover through some

1:15:28

next version of the Twitter files where people

1:15:30

open up the federal government's internal communications,

1:15:33

that there was a lot of, let's see how we can go

1:15:35

get Elon, I would be surprised,

1:15:38

but not absolutely surprised.

1:15:40

I think it's just regulators

1:15:42

being regulators.

1:15:44

We're heading into a major

1:15:46

election, obviously. Elon

1:15:48

has made it very clear that he is interested

1:15:51

and invested in politics. He was at the

1:15:53

Mexican border with Texas Congressman Tony

1:15:55

Gonzalez. He used the

1:15:57

platform, ex-formally Twitter, to

1:15:59

launch.

1:15:59

Governor Ron DeSantis' presidential

1:16:02

campaign with David Sachs,

1:16:04

he dabbled into politics a lot.

1:16:07

And, you know, if the story of old Twitter

1:16:10

and the Twitter files reporting revealed it, I

1:16:12

think, was about the biases

1:16:14

maybe of the former overlords

1:16:17

of the

1:16:17

company, the story of new Twitter

1:16:19

seems to be the exact same story. It's

1:16:22

just different biases in different directions

1:16:24

and really less of a handful of employees

1:16:27

and more of the biases and prejudices

1:16:29

of one man. How are

1:16:31

you thinking about the way that

1:16:33

he is using this platform

1:16:36

in the run-up to the election? And do

1:16:38

you think he grasps the

1:16:41

influence that he could have

1:16:43

over 2024? Yeah, I mean, I

1:16:45

don't think it's a great idea that he's

1:16:47

putting his thumb on the scale and reposting

1:16:51

and amplifying people

1:16:54

who

1:16:55

say hateful things, say bad things.

1:16:57

Sometimes

1:16:58

people who are so- Are anti-Semites. Yeah,

1:17:01

I was going to say, who associate with

1:17:03

anti-Semites, I don't think any of his

1:17:06

own tweets are specifically

1:17:09

that way, but he's amplifying that stuff

1:17:11

and it's toxic. And when he says

1:17:13

that the ADL was the cause

1:17:16

of all the advertising boycott, no, advertisers

1:17:19

don't want to be in a toxic hellscape,

1:17:22

putting Pepsi-Cola or

1:17:24

Chevrolet in a toxic hellscape.

1:17:27

So I just think that's bad. It's

1:17:29

not in his self-interest. It's not in the interest

1:17:31

of the country. And

1:17:34

I think it was a good idea

1:17:37

to open up the aperture at Twitter

1:17:39

to allow more speech,

1:17:42

especially speeches from more

1:17:44

on the fringes that had gotten repressed. But

1:17:47

I think it's a really bad idea for him

1:17:49

to be putting his thumb on the scale and amplifying

1:17:52

people who I

1:17:54

think are harmful to civil

1:17:57

discourse.

1:17:59

that is maybe the craziest

1:18:02

about this man is how

1:18:05

chaotic his personal life is. He

1:18:08

has been married three times to two women,

1:18:10

one of them he married twice. He has 12 children

1:18:12

with four different women and one of the things you

1:18:15

reveal in your book, and it's

1:18:17

almost like a Jerry Springer episode, is

1:18:19

that one of the leaders

1:18:22

of Neuralink, this very interesting woman

1:18:24

named Siobhan Zillis, uses

1:18:27

Elon Musk's sperm to get

1:18:29

impregnated with twins. She

1:18:32

is in a Texas hospital giving

1:18:35

birth while down the hall a surrogate

1:18:38

pregnant with Grimes' third child

1:18:41

with Elon Musk's sperm and her egg

1:18:43

is giving birth at the same

1:18:46

time and yet Grimes, the

1:18:48

mother of three of Elon's children, has

1:18:51

no idea. Did I get that right?

1:18:53

And they don't know that they're each

1:18:55

there. And I'll tell you, that was Thanksgiving

1:18:58

and he's dealing with his emotional things

1:19:01

and he loves emotional storm as

1:19:03

well as professional storm. But that

1:19:05

emotional storm even was too much for

1:19:07

him. He decides he has to leave

1:19:09

Thanksgiving or that Friday to go

1:19:12

back to the SpaceX factory

1:19:15

near Los Angeles and deal

1:19:18

with some problems with the manufacturing

1:19:21

of the engine, which certainly were not real

1:19:23

problems. But I think at that point he

1:19:25

realized he'd rather deal with the simplicity

1:19:28

of rocket engines rather than the complexity

1:19:30

of human emotions.

1:19:32

But what does it tell us about this person's judgment

1:19:34

that he would keep this a secret from,

1:19:37

you're right, they were never married, but someone who's

1:19:39

really a partner in his life.

1:19:42

Why did he do that? Look,

1:19:44

he has really bad

1:19:46

emotional

1:19:49

receptors,

1:19:51

ability to deal with human

1:19:53

emotions, and he has

1:19:55

a love of drama and it's not the world.

1:19:58

pretty

1:20:00

a sight and that's why it's in the book

1:20:02

because you're so got to say man

1:20:04

this is a cautionary tale but

1:20:08

he does not deal

1:20:10

well

1:20:11

with other people

1:20:14

and

1:20:15

the emotional turmoil that

1:20:17

surrounds him on the other hand

1:20:20

he likes emotional turmoil

1:20:22

as one of his wives said he

1:20:24

associates emotional turmoil

1:20:26

with childhood love

1:20:29

Walter you just spent two years with I

1:20:32

think one of the most interesting people in the world

1:20:34

it's not the most interesting do

1:20:36

you like him and what do you think people

1:20:38

most misunderstand about Elon Musk there

1:20:41

are moments when he was

1:20:43

fun to be around as you saw probably

1:20:46

a quarter of the time you were with him you thought

1:20:48

hey

1:20:50

I like this guy in a way and there were times

1:20:52

I was on by his

1:20:54

engineering genius which is something

1:20:57

you know we don't talk about as much in podcast

1:20:59

but in the book it's really

1:21:01

important to figure out how did he make

1:21:03

the Raptor engines work not just how

1:21:06

did he escape the Texas hospital

1:21:09

when he's having children to do so you

1:21:11

got to keep all that in mind and try

1:21:13

to figure out what we don't do

1:21:15

very well in this day and age Shakespeare

1:21:18

does it beautifully but since then we haven't

1:21:20

been able to do it which is hold conflicting

1:21:23

thoughts in your mind about a person who

1:21:25

can do molded

1:21:28

out of faults they have deep faults

1:21:30

but they're also molded in ways that

1:21:33

they harness those demons sometimes

1:21:36

so when I'm with him there were times

1:21:38

it was kind of interesting and fun

1:21:40

it was always interesting

1:21:41

kind of interesting I mean this is the

1:21:44

most interesting thing in the

1:21:45

world right and that's why I don't when people say

1:21:47

I'll never read that book because he's bad

1:21:51

yeah but life is interesting this

1:21:53

guy's interesting well like wasn't

1:21:55

the first adjective that comes to mind but

1:21:57

compelling interesting sometimes

1:22:01

sometimes inspiring when he was totally

1:22:03

into trying to inspire people

1:22:06

on the larger mission but also very

1:22:08

off-putting repellent

1:22:10

at times.

1:22:12

I try to let the reader,

1:22:15

scene by scene and they're kind of fast-paced

1:22:17

scenes, see all

1:22:20

of this.

1:22:21

Each reader will make his or

1:22:23

her different judgments about

1:22:25

each thread in the book

1:22:29

but I give you enough ammunition that

1:22:31

if you really want to hate them boy you'll be, if

1:22:33

you really want to admire them you'll be reinforced

1:22:36

and if you want to be like me to say

1:22:38

okay there are lots of threads

1:22:41

in this fabric and they're interwoven

1:22:43

well and we have to be grown up enough

1:22:45

that we understand light

1:22:47

and dark strands and try

1:22:50

to

1:22:50

see them

1:22:52

even if they're ones we don't like. The

1:22:55

book is a narrative it's

1:22:57

a

1:22:58

fast-paced

1:22:59

set of cautionary

1:23:01

and inspiring tales

1:23:04

and if

1:23:05

you truly just want to hate them or you truly just

1:23:07

want to be a fan that says he does

1:23:09

no evil fine

1:23:11

go buy a different book

1:23:13

but if you want the most interesting person around

1:23:15

today and

1:23:16

the complexities and you'll

1:23:19

end up feeling like I did I think

1:23:22

which is in times repelled by what

1:23:24

he does and at times a little bit

1:23:26

awed by what he does and at times laughing.

1:23:29

The line you put at

1:23:30

the front of the book is part of Elon Musk's

1:23:33

monologue from

1:23:33

SNL and he says to anyone I've

1:23:35

offended I just want to say I reinvented

1:23:38

electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars in

1:23:40

a rocket ship did you also think

1:23:42

I was gonna be a chill

1:23:43

normal dude

1:23:44

which I sort of think sums it up Walter

1:23:47

Isaacson the author of the

1:23:49

new biography called Elon Musk and

1:23:51

of so many

1:23:52

other incredible biographies thank

1:23:54

you Barry and thanks for all you do

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Thanks for listening. If you

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liked this conversation, if it made

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you mad or frustrated, or

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maybe if it inspired you to go out and

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owning one in the first place, that's all great.

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That's the point of what we do here. Share

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this episode with your friends and family

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and use it to have a conversation of your own.

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And if you want to support honestly,

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there's just one way

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and becoming a subscriber today. We've

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7th, and that takes money. So if

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