Best Of: Decoding Elon Musk

Next week, Walter Isaacson, former editor of Time, ex-CEO of CNN, and the biographer of Steve Jobs, Ben Franklin, and Leonardo da Vinci will publish a new book. It's called The Greatest Sentence Ever Written. You know the one. The one that begins, we hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal.

that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Walter's book is a close reading of those immortal lines. what they meant when they were set down on parchment, and why, 250 years later, they matter more than ever. I just interviewed him about it, and that episode comes out on Tuesday.

In preparation for our conversation, I went back and listened to my last chat with Walter. He came on the show in 2023 when he published his biography of Elon Musk. I was surprised listening back by how relevant that episode feels. And also, of course, how dated. Relevant because Musk remains one of the most powerful and frustrating people on the planet.

dated because a lot has happened since 2023. That was before Musk's flirtation with far-right provocateurs blossomed into a full-fledged love affair. before he spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to get Donald Trump elected, before Musk, as the head of Doge, cut $1.4 billion in federal spending.

A mere fraction of the $2 trillion he sought to slash, but still enough, according to some calculations, to cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people around the world due to defunding USAID. When Walter and I spoke the other day, I asked him about Musk's evolution. Does he see Elon as a threat to the democracy his new book celebrates? You'll have to come back next week to hear his answer. But first...

Here's that conversation from 2023. Listen for the version of Elon Musk that Walter saw then, brilliant, mercurial, and see if you can hear, in Walter's words and in mine, the early signs of what was coming.

I'm Rufus Griscom, and this is The Next Big Idea. Today, Walter Isaacson spent the last two years shadowing Elon Musk. What did he learn? In the summer of 2021, Walter Isaacson, the former Time Magazine editor and CNN CEO turned legendary biographer who's written books about Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, Einstein, and Da Vinci, was in the Hamptons.

when he got a call from Elon Musk. At the time, Musk seemed to many people like a hero. That year, he proved Tesla skeptics wrong and shipped nearly a million vehicles. As a result, Tesla's market cap soared past a trillion dollars, exceeding that of the next nine largest auto companies combined. It was also the year his other company, SpaceX, landed its 100th rocket standing up.

locked in an exclusive contract with NASA to put astronauts on the moon, and launched mega constellations of Starlink communication satellites, exploiting their near monopoly on launching payloads into space. To cap it all off, Time magazine named Musk its person of the year. Oh, and he became the richest person in the world that year, passing Jeff Bezos. On the phone, the two men discussed the prospect of Isaacson writing a biography of Musk.

Isaacson said he had two conditions. One, I don't want to do it based on interviews. I just want to spend two years at every meeting, nothing off limits, watch you all the time, and you just trust me. Second is, you don't get approval rights of this book. Musk agreed. And just a few minutes later, he tweeted, if you're curious about Tesla, SpaceX, and my general goings-on, Walter Isaacson is writing a biography.

That biography was published this week. It's called Elon Musk, and it's already number one on Amazon. If Musk was a hero when he and Isaacson first spoke, today, two years later, He is seen by many as a villain. He changed political parties, moved to Texas, bought Twitter and used his new leverage to silence critics, increase distribution of his own tweets and reinstate Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andrew Tate and Donald Trump.

on the platform, resulting in a measurable increase in hate speech. As if that weren't enough, he's been in the news lately for his outsized and many would say problematic role in the Russia-Ukraine war. How do we square Elon's extraordinary contributions? Accelerating sustainable transport, revitalizing the American space program, taking precautions against the threat of AI.

with his acts of interpersonal cruelty and his mismanagement of the public square, formerly known as Twitter. How can someone care so much about humanity and so little about the individuals around him? And how much money and power should one man have? Walter Isaacson would say that we must begin by trying to understand the man. And that requires a close look at his personal journey.

He is, to quote Shakespeare, a man molded out of faults. Isaacson also makes a persuasive case that it is all too easy to forget that we need audacious people. Love him or hate him, Musk is unavoidable. He's like the knot in my back that seizes up and needs to be released by a skillful masseuse. That masseuse is Walter Isaacson.

Just as Musk has an uncanny ability to solve intractable engineering problems and infuriate people with his tweets, Walter has to use one of his favorite phrases, a fingertip feel for how to discern and communicate the complexity of the lives of people occupying pivotal moments in human history. Walter Isaacson, welcome back to the Next Big Idea podcast. Thank you. Good to be here. Congratulations on the imminent publication of your latest biography titled Elon Musk.

no subtitle needed this must be exciting for you walter having this book come out after all these years of working on it

No, it's been great. It's been a wonderful roller coaster ride with the most interesting guy on the planet. And being able to be right up close and just watch him rather than just interview him, it creates a narrative, which is what I want. Instead of... trying to preach it everybody about elon musk everybody's got their opinions of him i'm just telling you let me let me give you the story

Well, last time you were on the show, Walter, I read you this quote from another great American biographer, David McCullough, who said, I don't think you have to love your subject. Initially, you shouldn't. It's like picking a roommate. After all, you're going to be with that person every day, maybe for years. And why subject yourself to someone you have no respect for or outright don't like? Here's what you said a couple years ago.

You're spending a lot of time with a person, and you don't have to learn to love him, but you have to understand him or her. And that understanding has to have some empathy to it. And I know a lot of people who write biographies of people they can't stand. And I don't know how you get up and do that every day. For me, I have to find some admirable traits. So...

Elon Musk, of course, is one of the most controversial figures of our time, worshipped by some people, reviled by others. What was the process like of trying to understand him? And did you come to develop?

empathy for him and admiration. One of the really odd things you'll see in the book is that there's not one Elon Musk. There's a guy with multiple personalities, almost like Jekyll and Hyde, and he can switch. instantly from being in giddy funny mode or being charming to being deep engineering mode where he focuses like a laser on something and does some amazing abilities to figure out.

valves and factories and what will work and what won't there's also a concentration mode where he processes things and finally there's demon mode His girlfriend, Claire Boucher, known as Grimes, calls it a demon mode in which you can be really nasty and hard on people or just go silent sometime and brood darkly. So as Grimes says, there are a lot of Elon Musk that I like and there's some that I actually don't like and they don't like me. But it's demon mode, she says, that often get shit done.

So... The book is a complex tale of somebody who can be absolutely charming, totally amazing, who brought us into the era of electric vehicles, who's the only entity that's able to get American astronauts into orbit, leading us. into space travel has a his own internet and low earth orbit unlike anybody else trying to build something like that so he does amazing things but he can also at times be infuriating

Did you encounter in your interactions with him all of those different modes? You'll see in the book, he'll switch from mode to mode almost instantly. One of the odd things is when he goes into demon mode. He hardly remembers. I'll say, why did you say that to Andy Krabs or Lucas Hughes? And why did you do this? And he'll look at me almost blankly as if. It was just a phase he went through, but then when he snaps out of it, he'll treat everybody normally again. So it was an odd thing to watch.

It sometimes was quite effective. I mean, he would order up surges. That's what he called them, which is when he didn't think people were working hard enough or were all in or hardcore or intense, he would just say, okay. In 100 hours, we're going to have to do this. Or I want 100 people on this launch pad for the next three days getting the rocket stacked. And that would come out of some of his dark, demon-driven personality.

but it would actually be amazing to watch its effectiveness. So this is a very kind of thrilling but at times unnerving book. Most of the time, though, You see him in engineering mode or in inspiration mode where he's getting people to do great things. And you said that you had kind of an extraordinary level of access to him.

When we first started talking about this book, I made two conditions. One, I don't want to do it based on interviews. I just want to spend two years at every meeting, nothing off limits, watch you all the time, and you just trust me. Second is you don't get approval rights of this book. You don't have any control over it. He didn't even get a copy of it. He didn't get to read it in advance. So has he read it yet, do you think? I don't know.

Do you think when he does read it that he'll like it? I think there'll be parts that'll drive him crazy, including about the demons instilled in his head by his psychologically abusive father. But the question of whether he'll like it or not, I try to put that out of my mind totally. I got to focus on every paragraph, making sure that it's aimed at informing the reader.

not will Elon Musk like this or not. The timing of this, of your two years with him, is kind of extraordinary because he was already a candidate for the most interesting person in the world, as you say, before you started the book. In the last two years, he's also bought Twitter, become a key player in the war in Ukraine because of Starlink, the subsidiary of SpaceX.

As a biographer, as someone who's written biographies for many, many years, you must have been pinching yourself. You're bouncing from factory floor to factory floor to private jet, presumably. This must have been a head-spinning experience. Well, when we started, I started reporting this book and had talked to him about it, you know, near the end, you know, around 2022 or so early on. He had just become the richest person in the world. He had been Time Magazine's Person of the Year.

Suddenly, he had turned Tesla around, and they had sold about a million cars, and they were worth more than all other auto companies combined. He was the only person who was able to get astronauts from America into orbit. And then he's the only person to be able to land the boosters and reuse them again pretty quickly. So he was riding real high. But as soon as we...

I was following him around. He started buying Twitter stock. And I said, what's the deal? He said, well, I always got to put my chips back on the table. I don't like resting on my success. A period of calm doesn't suit me. I was made for a storm. I love the drama. And so, yeah, I started off with a guy who was one of the most popular people on the planet and ended up with a guy who's the most controversial.

And I find that a pretty exciting journey. The evolution of people's perception of Elon Musk from one of the most inspiring, maybe the most extraordinary inspiring innovators certainly in the world in recent years. to this really sort of objectionable, sometimes cruel and petty person who's recently bought the public square or a big piece of the public square on the form of Twitter, potentially threatening the civility of public discourse.

do you think his net impact on the world is positive or negative well i think bringing us into the era of electric vehicles When GM and Ford and other companies had started crushing their electric cars and decided not to get into the business. is one of the most transformative things of our time likewise leading us into an era of space exploration i think twitter will not be a good part of his legacy i think he's not suited to running twitter he has more

focused engineering intelligence and he has an emotional receptor intelligence. And I think there are times he does things on Twitter that, you know, are just really bad. Shakespeare teaches us at the end of Measure for Measure that even the best are molded out of faults, and he's certainly molded out of faults. I think that his impact on... Twitter will be very negative in his impact on many other things, including artificial intelligence, self-driving cars.

will be very positive. And that's why you don't just get to do a 140-character judgment on a person. Well, I think it is helpful, as you say, to get into his story, which begins with a childhood.

that was shockingly brutal. You know, he grew up in South Africa, and it was a violent place when he and his brother would go to the anti-apartheid concert. The train doors would open, and they'd see a guy with a knife sticking out of his head, and blood would get on the soles of their shoes, and it would be sticky for the rest of the evening. When he was a kid, Elon Musk was scrawny.

and didn't have great emotional intelligence, so he was beaten up by the bullies on his schoolyard and pushed down the concrete steps and had his face smashed. But the scars from that were... minor in some ways compared to the scars from his father. After he was bullied and beaten up and got out of the hospital, his father made him stand in front of him and berated him for more than an hour, calling him stupid. taking the side of the person who had beaten him up and

All of that led to a lot of demons jangling around in Musk's head. You still see those demons. But one of the themes of any biography is that most great... people have demons in their heads, have dark... things that emanate from childhood. And the question is, how much do you fall prey to those demons and how much do you harness those demons to become drives? And Musk has done both.

This detail I found extraordinary, that when he was 12 years old, he was sent to a wilderness survival camp where each child was given a small ration of food and water, and they were encouraged to fight over them. So he's a small, awkward boy, and he's beaten up by the bigger kids. His food is taken from him. He loses 10 pounds over the course of this.

survival camp it's just you know it's another world for the second time a few years later and he's gotten bigger he's almost six feet he's learned a little judo and he says I learned that if somebody's trying to bully you, you just punch them really hard in the nose. And they may still beat you up, but you just punch them really hard in the nose and they may not try it again.

And you want to look at what he's doing now, whether it's on Twitter or other things. He still has that quality that comes from having gone to a survival camp.

And sometimes thinking maybe I should just punch people as hard as possible in the nose. As you say, maybe the most painful piece of this childhood experience was his father just... who could be incredibly charming and warm and charismatic, and then would flip to being really verbally abusive and cruel, calling him a worthless idiot, forbidding him to look away as he screamed at him.

And then we hear from some of his closest friends and family members and wives that when Elon flies into rages, he uses some of the same language his father used. when he used to sort of verbally abuse him as a child. Yeah, whether it be his first wife, Justine, his second wife, Tallulah, or the people who are close to him, his brother, Kimball, his mother, May.

His mother, May, says Elon's great struggle. He says, you know, it's the dangers that Elon will become his father. And you see him in the book. whether it be in 2008 when both Tesla and SpaceX had run out of money, or 2018 when he's got a crisis in the manufacturing of Tesla cars. waking up at night, staying up all night, vomiting. And the people with him say, and you could hear the words of his father. He would just channel those words. He survives his brutal childhood.

He goes to Queen's University in Canada, transfers to UPenn, makes his way to Silicon Valley. He's accepted as a PhD candidate at Stanford's physics program, but he decides to defer that and start a new company with his brother, Kimball, instead. Zip2, which is a kind of hybrid of a mapping system and a business listing system, which is something we all enjoy today on our smartphones. We can navigate maps and find businesses, which it was prescient.

sells that, starts X.com, which merges with PayPal. We see in this early section of the book and this early part of... Elon's life, right out of the gate, some of the complexity of his approach to management and business. I mean, there's, first of all, this incredible intensity, right? He's hardcore, as he likes to say.

I think he and his brother Kimball slept in their office for the first six months. He works fanatically. At night, he rewrites the code of the other developers while they're sleeping. As he puts it, quote, fixes their fucking stupid code, which you write is not a path to endearment, right? So we see very early on this combination of really kind of fanatical intensity.

interpersonal brusqueness, but also some goofy humor and play. Yeah, one of his mantras is that it's important to be all in. It's important to be truly hardcore. And as you go through the narrative of the book, whether it's SpaceX or Tesla or even Twitter. That notion of being relaxed and having a fun work-life balance, that's not for him. He's a believer in hardcore intensity. And he also has... You know, from early on, this wildly ambitious.

instincts about going after the entirety of industries and disrupting them. Like with Zip2, this first company, he wants to buy the domain name city.com, compete directly with Yahoo and AOL instead of just license. their product in newspapers. With X.com, he wants to integrate, which becomes PayPal, he wants to integrate a social network with a payment platform instead of just servicing transactions on eBay. But in both cases, he gets overruled.

by co-founders and investors and eventually gets completely pushed out of PayPal in a coup while he's on vacation. So it seems like this wild ambition swinging for the fences and not... playing nicely with others was there from the from the very beginning well he's transformative he's innovative and that means shooting off rocket chips and blowing some things up and his ability

to aim for very high missions is both his strength in terms of inspiration, but it also makes him a bit crazy. Steve Jobs said that people are crazy enough to think they can change the world to the ones who do. He also has this vulnerable side, right? Like after the PayPal coup, it really hurts his feelings that he's pushed out of PayPal. And he says, after expressing this...

He says to you, I think, almost as an aside, of course, I would have turned PayPal into a trillion dollar company. So he's heard that he's pushed out, but he also, of course, he thinks they were all wrong. Do you think that he would have turned PayPal into a trillion-dollar company if he'd remained CEO?

I think he wanted to make it a financial services company that did all your financial transactions as well as a social network. And he wanted to call it X.com. And that's what he's doing with Twitter. And as I try to explain in the book, being driven. by that vision of X.com from 20, 25 years ago, that's what's driving him in many ways to totally disrupt Twitter.

Right. So he's still on that mission. And I guess we can't discount the possibility that he might have turned PayPal into a trillion dollar company, given what he's accomplished since then with Tesla and SpaceX. So continuing the narrative of his life. He takes his winnings from PayPal, it's like $250 million, puts most of that into his new venture, eventually all of his resources, right, into his new ventures. And these new ventures, you know, first SpaceX.

and then Tesla are really risky bets, right? And his friends and contemporaries, you quote Peter Thiel as saying, Silicon Valley wisdom would be that these were both... incredibly risky bets. So he's just, as you say, like double or nothing, risking it all. Well, one of the things he took from his childhood is...

Not only an ability to take risks, but an addiction to risks. He loves taking risks. And that's been really the theme of his life. Everything he's done is let's try it, let's shoot it off. To me, one of the most riveting parts of the book is this moment in 2008 where both Tesla and SpaceX are at risk of failing. Elon has to borrow money from... family and friends to try to keep the companies afloat. And he says, you know,

If Tesla dies, so does the electric car, the future of sustainable transport. If SpaceX dies, we will not become an interplanetary species, which is necessary for the candlelight of consciousness. lone teeny flickering flame of consciousness to survive. He really believes that it is necessary for us to become an interplanetary species to protect this light of consciousness. Is that right?

I think he's driven by three missions ever since he was young. Comes from reading Isaac Asimov and reading comic books and everything else, which is his three great missions are making humans. a multi-planetary species. To protect human consciousness, we got to explore other planets. And to be adventuresome, we have to explore. Secondly, we got to get into an era of sustainable energy. So he wants to bring us into the era of electric vehicles.

Thirdly, he's worried about the safety of artificial intelligence, that maybe our robots will someday turn on us. And so those are the great missions. They're epic missions. And at times I was sort of scoffing when he would talk about them. And I'd say, oh, these are just the fantasies of a person who has read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy once too often.

you know, somebody just bloviating. But after a while, I came to believe that there was deep in Musk something that really believed in these epic missions. It comes out of childhood too, which is... almost a superhero complex, but one that is channeled quite effectively to making him the only person who's gotten us into the era of electric vehicles efficiently, and the only...

company or entity, including NASA, that's been able to get American astronauts from the U.S. up to the space station or into orbit. You know, we can scoff at him having these grand visions. But each and every day, at each and every meeting, there would be a moment when that vision would both play out and inspire the people around him.

So Musk is driven by three lofty missions. And astonishingly, he and his teams have defied the odds so far in two of them, advancing electric mobility and a next generation of space travel. I think it's worth taking a moment to examine exactly how Musk and his teams execute, because the results at Tesla and SpaceX are, objectively, extraordinary.

In the first half of this year, Tesla sold more electric vehicles than any other carmaker and maintained dramatically higher profit margins than its rivals. Meanwhile, SpaceX leads the world in rocket launches, a record-breaking 63 launches so far in 2023, launching satellites into space at one-tenth the cost of NASA. How is this possible?

Musk attributes it to a culture that is driven by what he calls the algorithm. Number one, question every requirement, even if it comes from Musk. Number two, delete any part of a process that you can. Number three, simplify and optimize. Number four, accelerate cycle time. And number five, automate. Core to this is a fundamental principle repeated by Musk.

The only rules are those dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation, including apparently laws, rules, regulations, and common decency. Of course, when it comes to interacting with other human beings, there are other principles and laws at play. There's a sense I get reading the book that...

One is struck both by Musk's sometimes interpersonal cruelty, and I guess the more flattering term would be bluntness, right? He's extremely blunt to the point of sometimes being dismissive and really hurting people. But at the same time, you also get this sense that he just aches for the species. I mean, that he has this really deep kind of love for humanity. and is really fundamentally driven, not by making money,

but by trying to save the world in a way that's sincere. I mean, I imagine that a lot of people probably read this stuff and are dismissive, but it's an interesting combination to seem to not care that much about people around you.

but care enormously for the species. You see that in quite a few people. Musk says that he has Asperger's, which is a... a name for something on the autism disorder spectrum. And he... is hard at feeling the empathy. And so that makes them, you know, you really don't like a person like that sometimes until you see him do other things in which he really has this deep care, whether it's for children or humanity.

So it's a complicated mix. But a lot of times, whether it's Bill Gates or Albert Einstein, are people who may not be... that empathetic for the three or four people in front of them at any given time, but are driven by a love for humanity in general. uh you know that's sometimes unattractive i mean i tend to really care that the people around me are feeling good and that i you know feel their emotions and try to make them feel good but

To some extent, it's also important to keep the grand mission in perspective. And we can be judgmental. We can decry. We can be upset at. The times he'll be rough on people and be rude to people, just like in my Steve Jobs book, there was a lot of that. But as Steve Wozniak says in the Steve Jobs book,

You know, Wozniak was very cuddly and friendly to everybody around him, but he never would have driven Apple to do the Macintosh, the iPhone, and other things. So I think that we should in our lives. care about people's being nice and kind, but it'd not be surprised that there are people who are so mission-driven that they're not very kind. We can say, that's bad. I don't want to be like that. But I also think it's interesting to see what they do. So often when you look closely at...

innovators and scientific advances. As you and I talked about in our last conversation about Jennifer Doudna and that last book. that usually the story of science and innovation is one, it's a team sport. And the closer you look at it, the more you kind of conclude that, well, you know, there really should be eight or 10 or 12 people recognized.

this Nobel Prize, right? That it's a team sport. And certainly for Tesla and SpaceX, they're big teams of brilliant people and innovators who've made all those accomplishments happen. But reading this book... The sense I get is that, wow, this is a case where this one individual really was utterly critical to making these impossible things happen. I mean, that in the absence of Elon Musk.

We would not have seen these innovations in anywhere near the same time span. Does it feel that way to you? Yeah. One of the great debates in history is to what extent it's determined by... big, broad forces and teams. And I wrote a book called The Innovators that shows how that helped create the digital revolution, teams and forces of history.

but also to what extent individuals play a role. And we biographers actually believe that human agency, somebody really having a strong force of will, can play a role. And in this case... Everybody was moving away from electric vehicles in the early 2000s and companies getting out of it. But Musk pushed it. Likewise, the whole notion of private space travel, as you say, in 2008, he had fired off.

three rockets, and all had exploded. He was just taking incredible risks. But eventually, the fourth one happens, and NASA is unable to... continue the space shuttle program or get astronauts into orbit. And so it was a risk-taking entrepreneur that has really helped, I would say. save the possibility of space exploration along with some other people. So there are times when somebody has an enormous impact, I will say.

And I believe when you read the book, you'll see there are times when Musk had an enormous impact. He's doing it now trying to push. uh full self-driving and i think it'll be five or six seven years before we'll get to really autonomous vehicles he thinks it'll be in one or two years he's always too optimistic but One of the themes that you see in many of the stories in the book is that he takes the impossible and turns it into the merely much later than he thought it would be.

Yeah, yeah. Of course, yeah, he's thought it would be one or two years for five or six years now. But he sometimes acknowledges that, that he's cracked jokes about he's not always great with the timing. Because of these crazy deadlines and this ferocious drive, probably things do happen much sooner than they would have otherwise. Well, I think you can read the book and see. The times that it does happen much faster. And these are the surges where he's almost trying to bend.

The speed of light, you know, bend time and make it hurry up. He has a fierce sense of urgency. And there are times when you do that and the rocket blows up or you do it. And the card, and especially if you do it to Twitter and people get really pissed off because they're friendly, sweet, tweeting little service.

where they, you know, got to have gentle conversations with blue checkmark celebrities, it no longer exists. You say at one point in the book that a common Musk statement is, that's the stupidest thing I ever heard.

And then you also observe that that's something that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos were also known to say. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. On the other hand, we have a new breed of very effective kind of kinder leaders, right? You think of like Tim Cook, who replaced Steve Jobs. Andy Jassy, he replaced Jeff Bezos, the CEO at Amazon. Satya Nadella. So how do you think about this? I mean, they're clearly, I would like to believe that kinder leaders.

can be very effective, but it seems like the leaders who are doing a lot of the disruption are less kind. Yeah, this is not a how-to book. Because we all should be kinder. John McNeil, who was president of Tesla for a short period, way back in the early 2000s, said that... The price you pay for success, maybe somebody's really brusque and runs roughshod over people. And then John McNeil says, but I don't want to be that way. We all got to look into ourselves. I know that when I ran a couple of.

places time and cnn and then the aspen institute i was kind of one of those gentle kind leaders who didn't want to piss people off i'm sure that people at cnn who said This is 20 years ago. He should have been rougher. He should have been tougher. He should have broken things. We needed to get more innovation and things done faster.

I do think that I've written about people like Jennifer Doudna, like Benjamin Franklin, who are great innovators and also very, very kind to the people around them. Yes. So you don't have to be a jerk in order to be successful. But sometimes being tough and rough is useful if you have to really disrupt things because disruption and complacency, you know, are...

enemies. And you got to sometimes be rough in order to be a disruptor. I wish a lot of the disruptors could have been a lot kinder and gentler. I'm not sure that the generation of kind CEOs that you've mentioned are all disruptors. They are people doing a really good job running companies, and we need that as well. But they're not Andy Grove disrupting the microchip industry, you know, or Bezos inventing a new way of buying everything.

Or Steve Jobs disrupting the music industry, the personal computer industry, the phone industry. So... I think I'm not going to make broad generalizations. I hope people are more like Jennifer Doudna and Benjamin Franklin in their personal lives. But I think it's useful to read biographies and say to what extent. Does disruption require being forceful? And how forceful can I be before I cross the line? And is the disruption really that important of making people's lives less pleasant?

And even the larger question of maybe you make the people in front of you less, having less psychologically enjoyable workspace, but they end up.

doing great things. These are all very complex questions, which is why we write biographies instead of seven secrets to leadership books. The other pattern we see in some of the people you've written about and some of these leaders we're talking about is issues with their fathers, right? I mean, we obviously... Elon Musk had this hugely complicated and fraught relationship with his father. Steve Jobs was adopted. All this causes me to think, Walter, that maybe I've been too...

warm and affirming as a father to my three points. You know, I watch Elon Musk as a father. He's very, very devoted, I mean, obsessively to all of his children. But he's not hovering. He said when little X, his three-year-old, is running around at a solar installation site and playing with the cables at midnight and moving equipment is happening all around him.

My instincts are like, oh, my God, let me go grab the kid and, you know, put him in a car seat or something. But Musk just says he was given a free range childhood without hovering. So, too, he. let his children be risk takers and adventuresome. And it's true that everybody does have demons. of some sort they got a harness and some of the most successful people were misfits uh you know leonardo comes out of the village of venci to florence and he's

illegitimate and left-handed and gay and distracted, and his father hasn't legitimized him, and so it's really weird. And yet he takes all those storms in his head and... does the deluge drawings in the Mona Lisa, but also becomes a great engineer. Reading your biography of Steve Jobs, I like the narrative that he became less of an asshole over time.

And he became more effective over time, right? There was a sense that he became wiser and warmer. And it's less clear to me that that's... the part of the narrative of Elon Musk. Do you think that's happening with Elon? Yeah, there are times where he no longer gets quite as angry at meetings. He no longer choose people out quite as much. But there's a fierce intensity he still has of getting things done quickly where he will just say.

as we walk through the launch pad area in South Texas, the tip of South Texas, Boca Chica, the town. And he'll start saying, we'll never get humanity to Mars if we don't hurry up. So I don't think he's lost his hardcore intensity. You certainly see it when he takes over Twitter and there's a scene on Christmas Eve where he and his two young cousins personally go to Sacramento with pliers from Home Depot and start ripping.

out the servers because he was told it couldn't be done for six months, and he wants to do it as fast as possible. So he hasn't done the total mellowing bit. But then again, near the end, even Steve Jobs was pushing pretty hard. And when he came back from his liver transplant, everybody thought he would totally mellow. And he started being pretty strong-willed on things. As I say, it's interesting to watch people evolve, and that's what this book is about.

And of course, there is a cost to some of the brustness, particularly when it comes to losing talent. We saw recently, I think this year, Andre... carpathy uh the great ai developer left tesla to return to open ai just last month tesla cfos at kurkorn left the company after 10 years

This is clearly the cost of some of that brusqueness and drive. Does that worry you for the future of these companies? Well, certainly there has been some turnover and in some cases just the opposite if you look at the top of, say, Uh, SpaceX, you know, Gwen Shotwell has been there more than 20 years as the president of SpaceX. And Mark Giancosa has been the sidekick for about 20 years in terms of technology officers. And whether it's Drew Baglino or Lars.

as Maravi at Tesla. A lot have been there a long time. One of the things I do in the book is try to answer that question with stories. And so... I'll take a few examples of him being really rough on somebody, whether it be the guy in charge of the finances of the Raptor engine or the guy building the pad in Boca Chica, Texas.

And Musk will get really rough on them. And in some cases, the people will leave. They just don't want to take it. And in other cases, as in... you know there was some of the people at tesla and spacex say milan kovac who is doing full self-driving they stay And I try to figure out to what extent you can be inspired and pushed. And I think for Musk, the people who don't want to be pushed very hard.

He's fully understanding. They get really nice payoffs and everything else, but he wants people who are going to be pushed, and he's got the turnover. at approximately where he wants it he doesn't want people as he put it to call in rich in other words they've made a lot of money so they're not going to work quite as hard but they're going to stay at the company

Let's talk about Starlink, which has generated news in the last 24 hours. Your chapter on Starlink and its role in the Ukraine war, you wrote that... Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off the Starlink satellite communications near the Crimean coast to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet.

This resulted in a loss of connectivity, and these submarine drones washed ashore harmlessly that were headed for the ships. There's been a lot of coverage recently, a New Yorker... article and New York Times coverage of how strange it is to have one man making decisions that are impacting the outcome of a war.

Reading that section of your book, I now have a more nuanced understanding of what a kind of difficult position Musk and his team was in in trying to assess what to do. What do you make of... Musk's decision to restrict this Starlink access to the Ukrainians. It was a complex and interesting thing, which is when Russia invades Ukraine, the U.S. satellites...

Companies like Viasat, Russia can knock them out. They can just hack them with denial of service attack. But Starlink was built good enough that Russians couldn't take it out. So Musk starts sending large amounts of Starlink satellites in service to Ukraine that they can use.

in conducting the war. They wouldn't have been able to coordinate their troops at all had Starlink not been rushed in that very day. There was a certain... point Friday night, I think it was, in which they were going to use Starlink. to take drone submarines and do a Pearl Harbor-like sneak attack on Sevastopol in the Crimea, where the Russian fleet is based. And Crimea is, as you know, very disputed territory, but totally occupied by Russia.

And the Ukrainians thought that they could use star linking all the way through to Zvastopol. And there was an issue that they didn't fully get on geofencing. And on that Friday, Musk decides. that that leads to World War III maybe, if you do a sneak attack and you take out the Russian fleet in Sevastopol. And he said, you know, I made Starling so people could watch movies and play video games, not to start World War III. Why am I in this war?

And so what he does is keep the geofencing working in a way that the submarines end up washing ashore harmlessly. And then I have in the book... something others didn't have, which is the encrypted text messages between him and the Ukrainian ministers. As they try to sort out, where are you going to allow us to use this and where is it not going to be allowed to use?

because Musk didn't want it to be used for the type of offensive purposes that could widen the war. And even Musk, by this point, realizes he's got far too much power.

And Musk doesn't mind having power, but I mean, this is... too much so he creates something called star shield which you'll see in the book and in the washington post which actually got the story right uh i mean they got an excerpt of my book uh and it has it right and star shield is something that's licensed to and sold to the US military and the CIA, and they get to determine how it's used.

including in Ukraine. And so having talked to General Milley of the Joint Chiefs and having talked to Jake Sullivan, who's a national security advisor, Musk decides, all right, some of this power ought to be transferred to the US government. And I think there's a broad perception, particularly coming after following some of the journalism covering this subject, that there are two problems with Starlink and Musk's role in this. One is that...

He actually is arguably making a lot of money or will have made a lot of money by licensing these. this technology to governments. And so, though it appeared to be a generous act initially, perhaps it's profiteering. But secondly, just the sense that to have any individual citizen... in this kind of position of power and finding that in the reporting, U.S. government officials seem afraid of Musk or beholden to him. They won't speak to journalists on the record without Musk's sign-off.

I think there's a broad perception that... We shouldn't have individuals in this position. I guess you're saying that Musk maybe agrees with that, that this should not be his role. Do you think there's a problem here or do you think we have a solution with the Star Shield approach? Musk donated these, I think, was it 80 million or more, maybe 100 million worth of it for the initial part of the war.

And then at a certain point, it's licensed and sold to the U.S. government so that they have control. over how it's going to be used and i've talked i mean government officials will talk i've talked to someone for the book and they say okay this is how it got resolved and it was a good thing Reading is a form of meditation that makes you smarter. It's a radical act of patience in this frenetic, tech-addicted world we all live in.

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In the last few paragraphs of the book, there's this wonderful moment of Musk acknowledging that he jokes, I've shot myself on the foot so often I ought to buy some Kevlar boots. He ruminated that Twitter should have an impulse control delay button, which is not a bad idea. Maybe Elon should have an impulse control delay button. But then you ask the question,

What a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is. It seems like you think it is, you know, that his bias for action and... tendency to do things impulsively is perhaps a necessary piece of the puzzle for a man to accomplish all that he has. Is that where you land?

Well, that's the theme and the question in the whole book is how much of a risk taker do you have to be? How impulsive do you have to be? Musk with an impulse control button. get rockets into orbit as fast as a Musk unbound. And there are times when things happen that are totally amazing because he's willing to take more risks. And of course...

You've talked about, and I talk about in the book, the downside of both being a risk taker and pushing people too hard. I try to weave it so that you understand it's a whole cloth of a person. And it's true of... many people that they have dark strands and they have light strands. They have risk-taking strands and they have adventuresome strands and they have, uh, impulse control buttons too.

And you can't necessarily say, let me just unravel the cloth and pull out the bad things. You have to understand a person as a whole. I think it's my opinion. that I wouldn't want to be like Musk, but also it's my opinion that I ain't going to ever get a rocket into orbit. I'm not driven in that way, but it's also my opinion that... We used to be a nation that was a little bit more innovative. We were more adventurous. Almost everybody in this country got over to this country.

And they took a lot of risks to get here, whether it was on the Mayflower or across the Rio Grande River. And it wasn't just adventuresomeness. It was a willingness to take risks. Nowadays, We have more referees in our society than we have risk takers. We have more regulators than we have. And that's a pretty good thing. You don't want people shooting off rockets without the FAA saying it's approved and putting on.

self-driving cars we need lawyers to say you can't do that and we need regulators and we need referees however if you get to be the type of place that can't build high-speed rail or can't build affordable housing in cities or, you know, can't deal with certain problems. You'll end up with an aging infrastructure and you'll end up with what was happening.

in the years, the early 2000s when Musk started SpaceX, which is a country that 50 years earlier had put men on the moon and yet now couldn't even get people into orbit. And so the whole purpose of the book is to show how an impulsive, impetuous, and often immature person gets things done. And it's not to excuse or justify them being impulsive, impetuous, or rude, but it's how this happened and how we as a society can recalibrate a little bit.

maybe be willing to take a few more adventures to try to get to become spacefaring, maybe to take a few more risks. And answer to the question at the end, You know, a mosque with an impulse control button would not have infuriated people as much. He would not have been as controversial. But no, he would not have brought us into the era of electric vehicles, and he would not have made us.

a country that could get astronauts into orbit uh it's up to each reader to say well does that excuse this stupid tweet he did or is that excuse this way he yelled at somebody My own view is, no, it doesn't really excuse it. He shouldn't have done that. But it is part of the whole cloth, and I think you got to understand that. It sounds like you wouldn't want to be him.

wouldn't want to trade places with him, but you're glad that he's out there doing what he's doing. I think that's a really smart way to put it, Rufus, which is we shouldn't try to aspire to all be Musk. You know, after my Steve Jobs book, sometimes people come up to me and they say, I'm just like Steve Jobs.

And I'd sort of look at them and I'd say, why? And they'd say, because when somebody does something that sucks in my company, I just tell them it sucks. And when they're bad, I just get rid of them and fire them. And I say, have you ever invented the iPhone? You know, have you ever created the Macintosh? Have you ever done the iPod? In other words, don't try this at home. You know, there are certain people get things done. And secondly, read the John McNeil part of my book too.

which is, yeah, maybe it gets things done, but maybe we shouldn't all try to be this way. So there are a lot of lessons in the book about how we don't necessarily... want to turn ourselves into assholes, but we also don't want to turn ourselves into people who can't take risks, they can't innovate. And I guess the final thing I would say on that...

is in all my books as almost the maxim that was inscribed upon the temple of Delphi in ancient Greece, which is know thyself. I know myself. I'm a pretty... empathetic person almost to a fault. I care a whole lot that people feel good, but also that they kind of like me. So when I ran CNN, I didn't break a lot of things. And I realized, okay,

My role in life is probably not being a hardcore executive that's going to disrupt an industry. My role in life is probably better off being an observer, a writer, a writer who... talks about a Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk or a Jennifer Doudna. And those of us who write about disruptors in the arena shouldn't... confuse ourselves or fall prey to the conceit that we're also in the arena. We're not actually changing the course of the human race. So I think every reader should make...

his or her own judgment about Elon Musk and also make his or her own judgment about what they want for themselves, their lives, and their children. And people like me, I choose. kind of a balanced life. Musk doesn't believe so much in psychological safety and work-life balance. I don't think that's a great thing, but it has. produce some amazing results. Perhaps even more amazing results for his...

for humanity than for the individuals with whom he interacts on a daily basis. That's a really good point. And that's, I mean, that's a key point to understand. And Musk would say it as well, that a person like myself, cares about the humans in front of him, sometimes will do things that will hold back the larger enterprise. They won't fire the B players. They won't try to...

Cut things. And that's being nice to the person in front of you. That's being nice to the people around you because they, you know, push them hard or fire them. But he would argue. That it's not being nice to the thousands of people who depend on the enterprise or maybe even to humanity. And for me, it's all about striking the right balance. He goes to the extreme, in my opinion. But...

I also know that people who aren't willing to be disruptors tend not to disrupt things. As you say, it may be true that... that your personality is better suited to writing game-changing biographies and books about the world than running media companies. And maybe Musk's is better suited to running. game-changing technology companies than media platforms like Twitter. I agree with that. I wish he hadn't bought Twitter. I think he doesn't have the fingertip feel for the...

broader emotional feel that people have for social networks. But I do suspect not only will he disrupt it, but he'll turn it to his original vision of X.com, and it'll be really hardcore, and we'll have a lot of people. posting content and getting paid for it. But if he asked my advice, which he never does, I'd say, hey, focus on the rockets, focus on AI, focus on the robots.

focus on self-driving and focus on Tesla. And it'd probably be better if he had kept that focus, but it's better for the book and better for this amazing tale. to watch where he succeeds and where he fails. Yeah, it'll continue to be fascinating to watch it all on Furl. And the book is an absolutely fascinating read. Thank you so much, Walter, for this book and for your time this morning. It's been a pleasure as always.

Hey, thank you, Rufus. Thank you, thank you. It was a very smart, I appreciate how much you read, I mean, that you read the whole book and you had all these smart insights. Thank you.