Decoding Elon Musk: The Untold Story of a Divisive Genius

LinkedIn [Music] presents I'm Rufus grisim and this is the next big idea today Walter Isaacson spent the last two years shadowing Elon Musk what did he [Music] learn in the summer of 2021 Walter isacon the former Time Magazine editor and CNN CEO turned legendary biographer who's written books about Steve Jobs Benjamin Franklin Einstein and D 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 name must it's 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 isacon 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 going on Walter isacon 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 2 years later he is seen by many as a villain he changed political parties mov mov to Texas bought Twitter and used his new leverage to silence critics increase distribution of his own tweets and reinstate margerie Taylor green 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 isacon 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 isacon 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 KN 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 [Music] 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 uh 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 them rather than just interview them it 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 them I'm just telling you let me let me give you the story well last time you were on the show Walter I I read you this quote from another great American biographer David Mulla 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 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 worshiped by some people reviled by others what was the process like of trying to understand him and and did you come to develop empathy for him and and 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 Jackal and Hyde and he can switch instantly from being uh 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 uh a concentration mode where he processes thing and finally there's demon mode his girlfriend Clare bushe known as Grimes calls it a demon mode in which you can be really nasty and and hard on people or just go silent sometime and and brood Darkly so uh as Grim said say uh there are a lot of Elon mus 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 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 own internet in 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 or 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 intense he would just say okay in a 100 hours we're going to have to do this or I want a 100 people on this Launchpad 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 um a kind of thrilling but at times unnerving book most of the time though uh you see him in engineer ing 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 that he'll like it I think there'll be Parts that'll drive him um crazy including about the demons instilled in his head by his abuse 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 but 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 biogra someone who's written biographies for for many many years you must have been pinching yourself you're bouncing from Factory floor to factory floor to private jet presumably uh this must have been a head spinning experience well when we started uh I started uh reporting this book and had talked to him about it you know near the uh in you know around 2022 or so early on he had just become the richest person in the world he had been time mag magazines 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 uh 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 uh was following him around he started buying Twitter stock 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 uh Journey the evolution of people's perception of Elon Musk from one of the most inspiring maybe the most extraordinary inspiring innovator certainly in the world in recent years to this really sort of objectionable sometimes cruel and Petty person who's 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 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 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 an emotional receptor intelligence and I think there are times he does things on Twitter that you know are just really bad um 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 I think that his impact on Twitter will be uh very net negative and his impact on many other things including artificial intelligence self-driving cars uh 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 uh it was a violent place when he and his brother would go to the anti aparti 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 uh when he was a kid Elon Musk was scrawny and didn't have great emotional intelligence so uh he was beaten up by the bullies on his schoolyard and pushed down the concrete steps and had his fate smashed uh but the scars from that were minor in some ways compared to the scars from his father uh 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 uh 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 right so he's 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 surv rival Camp it's just you know back 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 learn 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 you know on on Twitter or other things he still has that quality that uh 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 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 to Lula or the people who are close to him his brother Kimble his mother may uh his mother may says elon's great struggle he says you know it's uh 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 yeah 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 Queens University in Canada transfers to upen 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 Kimble instead zip 2 which is a kind of hybrid of a mapping system and a business listing system which is is something we all enjoy today on our smartphones we can navigate maps and you know find businesses which was it was preent then sells that starts x.com which merges with PayPal we see in this early section of the book and in this early part of elon's life right out of the gate some of some of the complexity of of his approach to management in business I mean there's first of all this incredible intensity right he's he's hardcore as likes to say I think he and his brother Kimble slept in their office for the first six months uh he works fanatically at night he rewrites the code of the other developers while they're sleeping as he puts it quote fixes their stupid code which you write is not a path to endearment right so we we see very early on this combination of of of really kind of fanatical intensity interpersonal brusk but also some goofy humor and play yeah one of his uh mantras is that it's important to be Allin it's important to be truly hardcore and as you uh 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 he's uh a believer in hardcore intensity and and he he also has you know from early on this wildly ambitious instincts about going after the entirety of Industries and disrupting them like like with zip 2 this first company he wants to buy the domain named 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 pay platform instead of just servicing transactions on eBay but in both cases he gets overruled by co-founders and investors and eventually get 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 Rock 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 as Steve Jobs said the 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 it really hurts his feelings that he's pushed out of PayPal and he says a after expressing this he says to you I think almost as an aside of course I would have turned PayPal into a trillion doll company right so he he's hurt 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 2025 years ago that's that's what's driving him in many ways to totally disrupt uh Twitter right so he's 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 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 these his new Ventures and these new Ventures you know first SpaceX and then Tesla are are really risky bets right and his friends and contemporaries you quote Peter theis saying Silicon Valley wisdom would be that these were both incredibly risky bats so he's just as you say like double or nothing risking at 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 uh 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 is this moment in 2008 where both Tesla and SpaceX are at risk of failing you know Elon has to borrow money from family and friends to try to keep keep the companies afloat and he says you know if Tesla dies so does the electric car the future sustainable transport if SpaceX dies we will not become an interplanetary species which is necessary for the candl light of Consciousness this lone teeny flickering flame of Consciousness to survive he really believes that it is necessary for us to become an interplanetary species to 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 azimov and reading comic books and everything else which is his three great missions are making humans a multiplanetary species to protect human consciousness we got to explore other planets and to be adventuresome we have to explore it secondly we got to get into an era of sustainable energy so he wants to bring us into the era of electric vehicles and 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 say oh these are just the fantasies of a person who has read Hitchhiker's Guide to the uh Galaxy once too often or or you know somebody just uh 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 um company or entity including Nas that's been able to get American astronauts from the US up to uh 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 [Music] 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 more electric vehicles than any other car maker 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 oneth 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 you know one is struck both by Muses sometimes inpersonal cruelty and or I guess you the more flattering term would be bluntness right he's extremely blunt to the point of sometimes being you know dismissive and really hurting people but at the same time you also get this sense that he just aches for the species you know 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 I imagine that a lot of a lot of people probably read this stuff and are dismissive but it's an interesting combination to to seem to not care that much about people around you but care enormously for the the species you know you see that in quite a few people uh musk says that he has Asbergers which is a name for something on the autism uh disorder spectrum and um he is hard at feeling the empathy and so that makes him 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 or whatever so it's it's a complicated mix but a lot of times whether it's Bill Gates or uh Albert Einstein are 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 that's sometimes unattractive I mean I tend to really care that the people around me are feeling good 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 was says in my in the Steve Jobs book you know wak 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 and we can say that's bad I don't want to be like that but I also think it's interesting to see uh what they do so often when you look closely at innovators and uh scientific advances as you and I talked about in our last conversation about Jennifer dowa and that last book that usually the story of Science and Innovation is is a is is one it's a team sport and the closer you look at it the the more you kind of conclude that well you know there really should be or 10 or 12 people recognized in this Nobel Prize right that it's 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 this 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 you know these Innovations in in anywhere near the same time span does it does it feel that way to you yeah one of the great debates in history is to what extent it's uh determined by big broad forces and teams and I wrote a book uh 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 uh we biographers actually believe that human agency somebody really having a strong force of will can play a role and in this case uh 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 different Ro three rockets and all had exploded he was 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 act 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 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 Imp possible and turns it into the mirely 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 but he sometimes acknowledges that that he's he's he's crack jokes about he's not always great with the with the timing but 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 uh 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 uh the speed of light you know Bend uh 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 uh the card do and especially if you do it to Twitter and people get really pissed off because their friendly sweet tweeting little service where they you know got have gentle conversations with blue check marked celebrities 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 jasse who replaced Jeff Bezos a CEO at Amazon SAA 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 are less kind yeah this is not a howto book uh because we all should be kinder uh don mcneel who was president of Tesla for a short period uh you know way back in the early 2000s said you know that the price you pay for Success maybe somebody's really brusk and runs rough shot over people and then John mcneel 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 and this is you know 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 dner 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 uh enemies and uh you you got to sometimes be rough in order to be a disrupter 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 you 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 uh uh buying everything or Steve Jobs disrupting the music industry the personal computer industry the uh phone industry uh so I think I'm not going to make broad generalizations I hope people are more like Jennifer Dow and Benjamin Franklin in their personal lives yeah 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 Liv Less Pleasant and even the larger question of maybe you make the people in front of you less uh having a 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 in many in some of the people you've written about and some of these leaders were talking about is issues with their fathers right I mean we obviously Elon Musk had this huge huge you know complicated and fraught relationship with his father you know Steve Jobs was was adopted all this causes me to think Walter that maybe I've been too warm and affirming as a father to my three point know I watch Elon Musk as a father he's very very devoted I mean obsessively to all of his children yeah um but not hovering he doesn't said when Little X his three-year-old is running around at a solar installation site and playing with the cables at midnight and uh moving equipment is happening all around him um my instincts are like oh my God let me go grab the kid and you know put him in a car seat or something uh but musk uh just says he was given a free range childhood without hovering so too he lets his children be risk taken and adventuresome and it's true that everybody does have Demons of some sort they got a horness 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 them and so it's really weird and yet he takes all those storms in his head and does the delu 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 over time and he became more effective over time right there was a sense that he became wiser and warmer and it it's less clear to me that that's that's that that's the part of The Narrative of of Elon Musk do do you think that's happening with Elon yeah there are times where uh he no longer gets quite as angry at meetings he no longer chews 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 Launchpad area in South Texas the tip of South Texas Bach Chica the town and he's 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 heart 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 uh even Steve Jobs uh was pushing pretty hard and when when he came back from his liver transplant everybody thought he would totally mellow and he started uh being pretty strong will on things um as I say it's an interesting to watch people evolve and that's what this book is about and of course there there is a cost to some of the bruss like particularly when it comes to losing Talent you know we saw recently I think this year Andre karpathy uh the great AI developer left Tesla to return to open AI just last month Tesla CFOs at kirkhorn left the company after 10 years this is clearly the cost of of of some of that buness and drive does that worry you for the future of these companies well certainly there's been some turnover and in some cases just the opposite if you look at the top of say uh SpaceX you know Gwen shotwell's been there more than 20 years as the president of SpaceX and Mark josa has been the sidekick for about 20 years in terms of Technology officers and whether it's Drew baglino or Lars maravi uh 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 and Bach at 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 they Milan kovak 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 you know 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 uh 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 about starlink which has generated news in the last 24 hours uh your chapter on starlink and its role in the Ukraine war you wrote that you know 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 on the Russian naval fleet and this this resulted in uh a loss of connectivity and these submarine drones washed ashore harmlessly that were that were headed headed for the for the ships you know there's been a lot of coverage recently A New Yorker article and New York Times coverage of how strange it is to have to have one man you know making decisions that are impacting the outcome of a war you know 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 what do you make of of must decision to restrict this starlink access to the ukrainians it was a complex and interesting thing which is when Russia invades Ukraine the US satellites companies like Viet Russia can knock them out they can just hack them with denial of service attacks but starlink was built good enough that Russians couldn't take it out so mus starts sending large amounts of starlink satellites and service to Ukraine that they can use in conducting the war they wouldn't have been able to coordinate their troops at all had uh starlink not been rushed in that very day uh there was a certain point a Friday night I think it was in which they were going to use starlink to take drone submarines and do a Pearl Harbor likee sneak attack on sasta pole 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 uh to sasta pole uh and there was an issue that they didn't fully get on Geo fencing 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 sasto he said you know I I I 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 uh keep the Geo fencing working in a way that the submarines end up washing a Shore 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 to use this and where was it not going to be allowed to use because mus 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 mus 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 me they got an excerpt of my book uh and it has it right and star Shield is something that's uh 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 Millie of The Joint Chiefs and having talked to Jake Sullivan who's a national security advisor musos 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 starlinks 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 um this technology to to governments and so though it appeared to be a generous act initially perhaps it's profiteering but but secondly just the sense that that to have any individual citizen I in this kind of position of power and and and finding that in the reporting US government officials seem afraid of musk or beholden to him they won't speak to journalists on the record without musk 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 is that this should not be be his role do you think there's a problem here or do you think you think we have a solution with the star Shield approach must donated these uh I think was it 80 million or more maybe a 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 US 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 some for the book and they say okay this is how it got resolved and it was a good [Music] thing reading is a form of meditation that makes you smarter it's a radical active patients in this frenetic Tech addicted world we all live in and the data shows reading is a kind of miracle drug it reduces stress increases motivation improves sleep it's correlated with more success higher income and books don't run out of batteries but what to read we at the next big idea Club can help you with that you've heard about our app which provides daily book summaries from the authors themselves but have you heard about our box subscription go to next big idea club.com to learn all about it here's the short version sign up for a next big idea Club hardcover box subscription and you will get four boxes per year each containing two books that's eight books per year and not just any books the best books of the Season according to our four legendary curators Malcolm Gladwell Susan Kane Daniel pink and Adam Grant plus we discuss the books with the authors and distill them into exclusive audio ecourses go to next big idea club.com and become a member of our growing [Music] community in the last few paragraphs of the book there's this wonderful moment of of of musk acknowledging that you 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 T tendency to to to to do things impulsively is is is perhaps a a necessary piece of the puzzle for for for a man to accomplish all that he has is that where you land well that's the theme in 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 would a musk with an impulse control button get Rockets into orbit as fast as a musk Unbound and there are times when things are 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 rist taking strands and they have venturesome 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 you know I just 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 adventuresome almost everybody in this country got over to this country and they took a lot of risk to get here whether it was on the Mayflower or across the Rio Grand 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 innovators 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 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 uh the early 2000s when must 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 space fairing maybe to take a few more risks and answer to the question at the end you know a musk 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 a of electric vehicles and he would not have made us uh 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 ises 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 uh after my jobs 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 him and I say why and they 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 uh 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 mcneel 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 but we also don't want to turn ourselves into to people who can't take risk and can't innovate and I guess the final thing I would say on that is in all my books there almost the maxim that was inscribed upon the Temple of Deli 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 uh 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 DNA 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 uh so I think every reader should make his or her own judgment about Elon Musk and also make his or 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 produced some amazing results perhaps even more amazing results for his uh for Humanity than than for the individuals with whom he interacts on a 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 who 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 don't push them hard or fire them uh 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 uh to be disruptors tend not to disrupt things well and as you say it may be true that that your personality is better suited to writing game-changing biographies and books about about the world uh than than running media companies and maybe musks is better suited to running game-changing technology companies than media platforms like Twitter so I agree with that I wish he hadn't bought Twitter I I think he doesn't have the fingertip feel for the uh 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 and it'll be really hardcore and we'll have a lot of people posting content and getting paid for it but you know 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 probably be better from uh if he had kept that focused but it's better for the book and better for this amazing tale to watch where he succeeds and where he failed yeah it'll continue to be fascinating to watch it all on furl uh and 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 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 so what can we make of all this do you share Walter's view that there's value in rekindling our willingness as a nation to explore take risks do hard things my own view is that Elon Musk is equal parts inspiration and cautionary tale I hate his callous mistreatment of the people around him but I do relate with his impatience his desire to solve what he believes to be urgent problems that a faster Pace than the rest of us this brings us to another question are his three missions epic missions as Walter calls them the right missions he wants to accelerate our transition to sustainable Transportation make humans interplanetary and protect us from the existential threat of AI he wants to do this by among other things colonizing Mars and merging humans and artificial intelligence through his company neuralink to many people the second and third missions are questionable doesn't this obsession with going to Mars distract us from the more important project of protecting the planet that we have and isn't merging humans with AI precisely the nightmare we're trying to avoid my own take is that going to Mars is not among the near-term or medium-term needs of our species however I do believe improving us space capabilities may prove to be critical to the ability of the US to remain a global leader and how about AI is it really a threat to our species are musk's intentions genuine should we consider brain implants so we can merge with AI one of the possible solutions Walter reports that musk was a key founder of open AI the company that later created chat GPT which began as an open-sourced nonprofit with the mission of quote building safe and beneficial AGI artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity musk named it and funded it with $100 million he now takes umbrage at the transformation of the company into a for-profit worth 30 billion substantially owned by Microsoft despite the fact that musk wanted to fold it into Tesla a for-profit company this resulted in a riff with Sam mman at CEO who said of musk Elon desperately wants the world to be saved but only if he can be the one to save it so should we merge human brands with AI this is not preferred solution but I think the risks of runaway super intelligence in The Next Century are real based on what we've learned from all the smart folks we've had on this show and I'm glad that musk is exploring a range of possible solutions one more thing on the way out in the day since Walter and I spoke he took to Twitter or X to clarify what he wrote about musk and Ukraine in his book apparently musk did not secretly tell his Engineers to turn off Starling coverage within 100 km of the Crimean Coast Coast instead Walter tweeted the ukrainians thought coverage was enabled all the way to Crimea but it was not adding that when military officials asked musk to enable coverage for their drone attack he refused because quote he thought probably correctly that would cause a major war that's Today's show if you have opinions I know you do look me up on LinkedIn just search for Rufus griscom and please share your thoughts in the comments under the post about today's show this episode was produced by Caleb bissinger sound designed by Mike TOA the next big idea is a proud member of the LinkedIn podcast Network see you next [Music] week

Channel: Next Big Idea Club

Views: 749

Keywords: Walter Isaacson, elon musk, ideas that will change your life, next big idea app, next big idea club, next big idea podcast, nonfiction, smart talks, transformative ideas, world's great thinkers, walter isaacson, elon musk book, elon musk biography, elon musk interview, elon musk walter isaacson, elon musk father, walter isaacson interview, walter isaacson elon musk book, elon musk isaacson, elon musk new book, spacex, ai, machine learning, biography, tesla, elon musk tesla

Id: Te1d5uIBUSo

Length: 64min 57sec (3897 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 05 2023