Walter Isaacson, best-selling author, and Professor of History at Tulane University

foreign [Music] ER needs much introduction everybody knows he's a great author written a dozen books you know Henry Kissinger's line when somebody said that that I may not need a great introduction but nobody enjoys one more right it's probably true so you would enjoy an introduction all right well here's an introduction from New Orleans went to Harvard Rhodes scholar uh rose up to Time Magazine to be the editor of Time Magazine then be president of CNN then was the CEO of the Aspen Institute for a number of years and now is a professor at Tulane University and he's moved back to his native New Orleans and he has written books on Geniuses including the aforementioned Henry Kissinger most recently Jennifer doudna and then also Steve Jobs Leonardo da Vinci among others and now he has a new genius um I guess mad genius Elon Musk I should also mention that Benjamin Franklin who all the people you've written about if you could have dinner with anyone oh I mean Ben Franklin man he's great he opens up the big barrel of Port when George Washington comes to Philadelphia he's like you he throws good parties Okay so okay so um you finished a book on Jennifer delner and you timed it well because the Nobel committee when your book came out just about gave her the Nobel Prize so did you know in advance she was going to win no it's very hard to hack the Nobel Prize committee voting machines but uh we worked out I did stay up she didn't but it's 4 a.m in New Orleans and you know they're about to announce it and I did stay up that night all right so that was good timing and now you have um a book how did you decide to do Elon Musk as opposed to I assuming a lot of people who were presumed to be Geniuses will call you and say by the way I'm a genius can you write a book on me well you actually did I don't know if you remember say no no no no I'm not saying you call me I'm saying you told me to do Elon Musk you said it was the most interesting character around well he hasn't called he called but me but yeah she right I did suggest you did suggest it and when you for which thank you I think um and when you suggested it was so interesting to me because I love the intersection of Technology business humanity and he's bringing us into the Arab electric vehicles almost single-handedly after uh jam and Ford have gotten out of it and into space travel and dealing with artificial so I said this is a great book of technology and then of course it became a wild away so when you have an idea for someone like Elon Musk you call him up and say guess what this is your lucky day I'm gonna write a book about you how hard was it the convention to do it there's a guy Antonio gracias you may know at Ballard Capital who's on the Aspen Institute board and also old friend of musk and he kept saying you ought to do it so one day he put us together by phone and we talked for an hour and a half I'm asking myself and I said if I do it I'd like to not just do it based on a few interviews but I want to take two years and be by your side one week a month wherever you go every meeting nothing off limits and secondly I don't want you to have any control over the book and I'm not going to let you read it in advance and he went okay just in a monotone wow and then I was with a group of people I had gone somewhere to take the call came back and they said my God we didn't know you're doing musk so what do you mean he said well he just tweeted out that Walter isaacson's riding my body I said wait I haven't even told my I hadn't told Simon and Schuster yet so um he did honor his commitment basically lets you spend two years with him you spent roughly two years going to any meeting you wanted to is that right yeah the only exceptions uh which are somewhat relevant were ones that were uh High classified uh discussions like with General milley okay all right so um how did you come up with a clever title you know I've always uh all my books are unclevered titled meaning Ben Franklin Albert Einstein Elon Musk I figure you might as well be straightforward so after spending roughly two years with him your friend kessinger if I can do one more joke of his yes go ahead I I did a book on kisses just called you know Henry Kissinger and somebody said to him do you like the book and he says I love the title you might need to tell people when uh he didn't actually like anything other than the title and so he stopped talking to you for a while and then what happened Time Magazine when I was the editor decided to invite for its anniversary everybody had been on the cover of time and of course he was invited and I didn't know if he come phone rangs my assistant says it's Dr Kissinger I'll pick up the phone he goes there and my first reaction is this is great in Carter who does a great imitation playing a joke on me so I just don't say anything he says even the 30 Years War had to end at some point I will come to your party but his wife and then a positive said that's great we'd love to have you and Nancy he says will you know Nancy she's partial to the Hundred Years War and we're gonna have to work on her so um okay so you Trail him for roughly two years and when when you're doing that um you come away with a sense now that he is truly an incredible genius but personality is a little bit complicated or most Geniuses have complicated personal lives and other kinds of psychiatric issues yeah and head tenfold you know order of magnitude greater because all people have dark and light strands interwoven I came away feeling he was much more of an engineering genius especially when it came to creating assembly lines and factories and products and understanding with a fingertip feel the material properties of everything from inconel to stainless steel but also he had zero emotional well close to zero emotional receptors and that lack of empathy and this is a very complicated thing in the book uh that lack of empathy his brother says is actually makes him a I can't use the word it begins with a uh but it also is one of his superpowers which is he can care about the mission and not care about who he crushes when he goes to it so uh we won't dwell on it but his upbringing was a little complicated uh you might just sometimes yeah he had uh you know a new pain he was in South Africa and he used to get beaten up all the time went to a Wilderness Camp where they encourage the kids to fight over the food and you know he's squawny and socially awkward second time he went he had gotten bigger he said I just learned to punch everybody in the nose as hard as I could and even though they'd beat me up at least I'd punched them in the nose and it's almost a metaphor for later but when he gets beaten up in the schoolyard as a kid he has to go to the hospital at one point because they smash him on the concrete steps and those scars were nothing compared to when he gets home his father makes him stand in front of his father for an hour and a half and the father berates him for being a loser for being stupid for takes a side of the person who beat him up and so that's one of the dark demons that's he'll dance in his head his mother may said about when I was starting to write the book here's your theme the dangers that Elon becomes his father so he ultimately the parents divorce um she gets tired of being abused by the father she moves to a different part of South Africa and then the three children they have elon's brother and his sister moved with her for at least a while then they moved back with the father what's really interesting is at age 12 Elon is living with his mother who is you know her is a delightful person decides to move back with the father and that's a deeply psychological thing he says I was made for the storm I like drama and his brother says he Associates pain with love because he just wanted to be with his father who psychologically abused him so his father and he don't talk anymore is that right definitely not yeah and his father also had two children by what was his step-daughter in other words his father remarried and then he after he remarried he divorced his second wife but the step-daughter he had with the second wife in effect he then married her and had two children with her wow you read the book carefully but I had trouble it's unusual so that's right more or less yes that's exactly okay so how does he come to the United States uh why did and how did he 17 years old he's basically a runaway and look if you have a common theme on things people who are Misfits as kids whether it be Leonardo being born out of wedlock his dad won't legitimate him he's gay he's from the village of venti he runs away to Ben Franklin running away because he's been apprenticed by his father to his brother uh obviously Einstein and Kissinger leaving at that age because of a misfit and so it happens to Elon at age 17 he just basically runs away can't get into the United States but goes to Canada because his mother's father was from Canada okay so he gets eventually he gets into the United States and he goes to the University of Pennsylvania yeah yeah you're on the board there too no no okay I didn't go there but he goes to the University of Pennsylvania I couldn't get into Duke right uh or Harvard so um okay so he um all right he goes to University of Pennsylvania and he graduates right yeah physics and business but he but his board scores as you got access to them are not 800 SATs no yeah you really did read this book uh it's interesting about Geniuses is that they aren't necessarily the smartest people meaning the ones with the most mental processing power uh they tend to be the people who think different that Steve Jobs would say and that was him all right so he did okay gets in the pen and then he decides he's going to go to get a PhD at Stanford one day drops out after the last of the day because he wants to start his own company the Silicon Valley and the irrational exuberance so he starts a company that later becomes zip two yeah but more importantly of course is the payment and social media company starts called x.com and that's his second company after it was successful was zip two and he wanted to be in everything app where you can transfer payments and money you can be part of a Social Circle you can post content and people will pay for it and he does it's pretty good and he and Peter Thiel merge their companies and Peter Thiel ends up winning the battle to call it PayPal rather than x.com and then ALS Elon and for 20 years or so elon's saying I want to fulfill that vision of x.com of a social media company that includes payments he was part of PayPal he merges company to PayPal and then they pushed him out as a CEO so he's wandering around he's got some money and then ultimately in PayPal is sold he gets some real money yeah definitely and he has two companies that he's sold for quite a bit and everybody thinks he's going to relax he you know they're got a vacation and he says I always want to put my chips back on the table I hate the calm I want the storm and so he decides I want to build a rocket company to send Rockets to Mars they stage an intervention with him in which they make a highlights wheel of every rocket blowing up and stuff he says you don't get it that's what I I know I might go bankrupt but I need to push this Mission so his mission was not necessarily to do what SpaceX became initially it was to get to Mars to save the the species you know I always thought that that was like the type of pontificating you do on podcasts or at pep talks for your team which is we have to get Humanity to Mars and after a while after that Mantra came over and over again I'd hear him mumbling it to himself he would be walking through the launch pad down in South Texas or just sitting in the car he said we have to get humanity and I think he truly believes that mission and he's Mission driven he had three missions coming out of college get us to the era of sustainable energy your electric vehicles batteries and solar roofs get us to humanity to Mars and he had red eyes at gazimov once too often and believed that we had to keep artificial intelligence from harming humanity and as you said with satellites he backfills once he has a mission he says okay my missions get to Mars what's the best way to do it oh these Rockets can launch communication satellites I can make a ton of money by recreating the internet in low earth orbit but that wasn't his original goal that's just a way to fund the mission so he gets SpaceX off the ground um and where does he get the money for that is it his money it's his money and of course in 2016 seven in the early 2008 they blow up the first three rockets because unlike NASA or Boeing or anything else he's just like okay it may work let's try and fail and fail fast and then iterate and so of course he runs out of money and I know I'm dumping ahead but also Tesla runs out of money in 2008 zero money and he's writing money out of his personal checkbook to try to keep this fourth launch going and teslaud going the first three launches blow up on the blow up the fourth launch works and it's right at the end of 2008 everything is gone he is uh sort of staying up all night Tallulah Riley his second wife is like holding his head as he vomits he has such stress but he loves the stress and in December Christmas Eve both companies are out of money but then the fourth rocket attempt goes up and Karma happens because he had this huge fight with Peter Thiel and everything else when he's ousted but he decided to try and he's not very empathetic but he decided all right maybe you guys are right and he stays friends with them and and this late 2008 they all chip in to keep SpaceX alive all right so he gets the money to keep SpaceX going and SpaceX becomes the thing that NASA used to be it used to be NASA was launching uh rockets and now he's launching the rockets for NASA gave up sending astronauts into orbit with this grounding of the Space Shuttle 12 years ago no entity has been no entity in the world has been a able country or company to launch rockets of things into orbit like I said and then re-land the rocket upright and was that his idea to re-land it so it's reusable or so yeah it was his idea but you're I don't know this would amuse you uh Jeff Bezos is like one click he patents the idea of re-landing rockets upright now he's never done it and somehow your friends at the U.S patent office provisionally give him a patent and musk is actually trying to do it didn't even think you could patent the idea and they do have a Bezos backed off okay so he lends these uh Rockets yeah and Boise Ballinger um Mitch Boise Bollinger has these drone whatever they are flat uh things in the Gulf of Mexico and he lands them so SpaceX ultimately evolves into another business that he has starlink can you explain what starlink is well that was a way to make money which is he realized that internet and communication services at least a trillion dollar business if you get three percent of it then he has a budget larger than NASA and so uh surprisingly nobody else has been able to launch these satellites that can be in low earth orbit I didn't know that Scott even has had to figure out do we use them for airplane travel because it's used for boats now and uh he's launched almost 5 000 of them uh the amount of satellites or mass he has launched to orbit is greater than the total of everything launched by every country and every company in the world so he's got more and so he's able to recreate the internet in low earth orbit so recently part of your book you made a correction part of it but explain how starlink became so important that the war in Ukraine was dependent on it yeah and the correction doesn't change the thrust of the fact that he had the only satellites and he got to decide whether they could be used or not are you convinced he told you that yeah yeah well what happened was uh in March Ukraine invades Russia and teledesic which is what they were using gets knocked out all the military satellites no communication between the Ukrainian and the military you know they can't control their troops and the only Communications that that isn't able to be disabled by the Russians is startling so you see that first night all the text messages are in the book can you help us can you save us and musk having read you know Hero Comics as a kid feels he's the hero in the world says he sends a hundred two hundred then a thousand Starling dishes to the to Ukraine and uh they use it and without them they would have been crushed uh in the first week of the war what happens in September of that year is I'd been a week with musk down in Texas I finally get back to New Orleans it's a Friday night and my high school football team is playing I know that sounds ridiculous only one person heals this and it's Arch Manning's one of his last home games so you know also to people we're going this phone keeps raining it's Elon I finally go underneath the bleachers at the Newman school and he's saying to me they're using Starling to do a sneak Pearl Harbor attack on the Russian Fleet and Crimea and I'm not allowing it I'm not going to allow it I'm not going to allow it I'm going wow and and the ukrainians don't know so I wrote In the book he turned off starlink in the Crimean coast and he later said no it had been geofenced before then the issue that night was whether I should enable it for this attack so whichever way it was he has the power that night to make the attack fail or succeed and he allows it to fail okay so um the business is part of SpaceX SpaceX is a privately owned Company still as a market value uh last round well over uh I guess over a trillion dollars last round or something never argued with the valuations when is he going to take that public I think you know he hates taking things public as you know famously in 2018 he announced he was taking Tesla private and that he had funding from the Saudis which was not exactly true and four years of lawsuits because of that I think he has zero desire to take SpaceX public right you don't need to now SpaceX is by the way the reason SpaceX succeeds is it takes enormous risks uh things that you know neither Boeing or Lockheed or Rockwell or NASA would do and I think he feels that if he were a public company it would constrain him by what's the obsession with X he has SpaceX he's renamed Twitter X he has a child name X too so why what is this yeah and x.com and xai is his AI company because as a very lonely kid who had no friends he would sit in the corner of the bookstores in Pretoria and then later and read comics and the X-Men Comics all named x uh he became he thought it was a great mystery a known letter there's something in the book that's very poignant too because he named his was his firstborn child dies in infancy and then his next child he named Xavier after the comics and she transitions and becomes a at age 16 and becomes Jenna and rejects him totally says you know I hate bill you know she's a very Progressive thinking and changes her name on goes to court so she doesn't have to have anything to do with him and this pains him so much too and it's also in that mysterious X Factor how many children does he have uh surviving children he has ten because there's one more than people knew from how many women were the mothers of those two children there was um justina's first wife Claire Boucher the actress is he married now no but he's got young children by both Siobhan zillas who runs norlink and by Claire Boucher no name Grimes let's go to another company that many people in the public know better because they buy the product which is Tesla did he start Tesla no but that uh the whole chapter called the founders because as I think half the people in this room can relate to any failure in somebody else's idea but when it's successful a lot of people say you know I started that company there was uh there were three groups it was JB Straubel I won't go into too much detail but he's trying to start a battery car company there's Mark knepperhard and Mark tarponing who had no money and nothing but they had registered the name Tesla and they wanted to do it and then musk musk meets with all of them and funds this group and all five of them become involved as usual with musk there's a falling out later and they actually had a lawsuit in which all five get to be called Founders okay so the agreement on the if the lawsuit is they're all going to be called Founders but he is really the funder of it and Alchemy becomes the CEO right he funded it totally he was the chair at the beginning in the house everybody else and how easy was it to get the first car off the well you know here's an interesting thing for you know economic club or whatever the problem with the first car was he had done they had done what every automaker and lots of other companies did In America which is the Auto industry went from making 80 percent of its IP to about 30 percent they Outsource everything so the first Tesla the batteries are made in Japan they're shipped to Thailand to a place that used to make barbecue pits to become the battery pack then they're shipped to England more Lotus but a chassis and the French make the thing then they go back to anyway it is a far-flung stupid supply chain that supposedly saves money but it burns cash and it also doesn't allow you to keep control he like Steve Jobs feels you have to have end-to-end control otherwise you can't innovate and so he brings a manufacturing back to America and believes that the building of the assembly line is as important as the design of the product and he makes his designers sit on the assembly line so they can see every little design they make what implications and he's a person that likes to sleep overnight in the factory just to be there all the time yeah I mean he's almost compelled at times when he does and certainly doesn't need right after Grimes had their third child and Siobhan was pregnant with twins and they didn't know and they were both in the same Hospital uh it was Thanksgiving and he flies out to Los Angeles because he says he's got a problem with Tesla and he's sleeps on the factory floor is like Thanksgiving weekend and I'm knowing he just is getting away from these money but he wants a surge at the factory there to make sure they can make their because they hit a million cars that period so um people are saying that Tesla's going to go bankrupt their short sellers are after him and he is determined to beat the short seller so what does he do to kind of Meet the Target that he's supposed to get which is I think 5 000 cars yeah 5 000 a week and this is 2018. he's in a total Tail Spin it's when his father has just had a I mean yes Father just had a child with a stepdaughter Amber Heard has just broken up with him he's having issues that he considers probably bipolar so he's getting medicated he's lying on the factory floor sometimes catatonic but he decides that if they can't get to 5 000 cars a week the short seller is going to win and he thinks the short sellers or evil uh and they have inside information they have drones they're looking at how much the two assembly lines in Fremont California can do per week and they know there's no way it can do more than 3 700 cars and so they it's the most shorted stock in history and at a certain point musk who loves World War II military history says they used to build the fighter planes in the parking lots because they needed to do enough there's a provision in the uh California law that if you're a car you know service place you can erect a temporary tent it's like for muffler shops to be able to do it it's a tent almost well actually more longer than this room and wider uh in the parking lot behind Tesla without a permit uh and within two weeks he tells his people we've got to build this tent and they have an assembly line they can't even get a permit to have a motorized assembly line so they put it on an incline so the cars rolled down at the right speed and everybody's assembling it and the last day of the month the car that comes off the line just rides 5 000 on it the stock becomes pretty quickly worth more than all other next nine car companies combined and short sellers you probably know more than I do on the numbers lost more on that short than ever so the Tesla today is a company that is very successful you would say oh God yeah and SpaceX is very successful but he has taken on another because in his spare time he didn't have anything to do he took on another company called Twitter why did he buy Twitter complex and I'm there right when he's opening gigafactory the big Factory in Austin and everything has gone well they've just done a million cars uh 33 rocket launches in a world landed safely and got astronauts and uh cargo into orbit and I even talked to him about you know you've got to be pretty satisfied he said you don't get it I I don't like enjoyment I don't like to be satisfied I need a storm I need drama and that's when he says uh that he's buying Twitter stock secretly and there's almost an intervention there too that early April where his friends his brother Kimball Antonio can howary his son Griffin he has an autistic son named Saxon his mother is there we're all having dinner at the purging and stuff they're all saying you can't do this is really you don't have a feel for social media well that's not a good thing so he gets pushed he leaves kind of abruptly to go to Larry Ellison's house and um Lanai Hawaii uh meeting another girlfriend um Natasha Bassett I think her name is Australian and just stays up three nights in a row and starts sending these text messages to the Twitter management you don't know what you're doing you've not improved things and I had asked him I said man social media company that doesn't seem to be he said no it's an engineering problem it's a technology company I'm thinking no it's an advertising medium to gather emotional eyeballs for Brands but he doesn't feel that way and so after three days in Hawaii texting them he says I'm going to go hostile on you then flies to Vancouver where he's meeting Grimes with his son X to introduce him to his grandparents and he's they release a game called Elden ring which you and I are a little bit too old to know but it like becomes as phenomenal he stays up till 5 30 in the morning playing Elden ring and at about 5 35 he sends out a message I made an offer so this is a crazed ambient and Red Bull fueled four nights making an offer and then half the time after that he's thinking how do I get out of this um the reason he does it is first of all he wants he's I said what are you doing he said I want to fulfill my vision for x.com the one he had done 20 years earlier we have to have a social media platform that's like WeChat that allows people to pay Etc secondly between being attacked by the Biden Administration Elizabeth Warren he's paid more taxes than anybody in history has ever paid to anything but Elizabeth Warren says he's avoiding taxes so he's getting his backup he thinks the quote won't mind virus is infected Twitter uh and he just loves the product and he wants the storm all right so he ultimately goes ahead and buys it even though he wishes he hadn't one that way you know there are many Elon Musk and you can be them in the middle of the day and he's like yelling at Alex Spyro his lawyer saying fight it in Delaware this is ridiculous she can't meaning the chancellor can't force me to do it and then late at night he's Getty talking about this is going to be the booster at this moment is he happy that he owns it yeah uh I mean happy is a word that does not apply to his emotions often he is um energized and crazed about owning it and it's a bad thing for him because he's also tweeting like crazy and crazy is the right word for somebody he's running SpaceX he's running uh Tesla and he's also running this company right and if you don't mind me jumping ahead in March of this year right as he's trying to Lodge the largest movable object ever made Starship he says you got to come back to Austin this is uh and I'm thinking I'm finishing the book uh I have to talk to you but I can't do it over the phone we gotta do it so I go and he's at Siobhan's house we sit in the back and he says Larry Page at Google and Microsoft with open AI they were a danger to the planet because they're going to make unsafe AI I'm going to start an AI company at this point counting the number of companies and Counting the number of children becomes a mathematical problem like all right is that now seven companies you're running so he actually helped start open AI is that right he did it because uh deep mind he had invested in Dennis's company that comes up with the notion of pure machine learning that Larry Page who used to be musk's best friend musk used to stay at his house in Palo Alto buys Deep Mind and musk gets serious thinking Larry Page doesn't care about AI safety and so he starts open AI with Sam Altman but then decides he wants to do it in-house at Tesla because correctly he believes that all these little chat Bots that everybody's been excited about with large language model generative that's okay but that's mainly a parlor trick what counts as real world AI meaning cars that can drive themselves robots that can walk this room and figure things out that transforms our life and economy and that requires visual data not just language data and that's what he has because he has eight billion frames a day from Tesla cars so um oh he has us now he is has his new artificial AI okay which not to be found with x.com what about what about neural link what is that you know one of the all the great advances of the digital age is ways to make us closely connect with our computers better whether it's Steve Jobs in his last board meeting that I went to where they show them Siri and you could talk to the phone or Doug ingelbart before that with a graphical user interface the ultimate connection of humans and machines is a chip that can read your brain signals and do things they have already made one uh neuraling that allows a monkey to play Pong just by thinking about it and for musk if you had connected to a higher vision if he believes that AI artificial intelligence office will run out of control will no longer be guided by human agency unless we can have an extremely tight connection between our minds and our machines and that is this epic vision for neuralink but typically as starlink is to SpaceX he's using it to help people with ALS and paralyzed uh that's going to be his business model right so do you think he will live to a normal age old age and get to be 80 years old and just live a nice retired life at that point I mean I'm not I want to you know go there too much but he really does not take care of himself he's incredible stress he you know has can't sleep he's uh you know if I were he has some doctors that prescribe many things for him uh my doctor would probably ask for a difference he's bipolar you would say he says he's never been diagnosed but in that 2018 period when he became catatonic so often he said I guess I may be and he says he has Asperger's he says this that and the other it'd be useful if he actually went to some doctors who told him exactly multiple personality disorder too definitely with that I don't know if that's a I shouldn't say because I don't know if that's a whatever that's called a diagnostic manual thing but he goes from Jekyll to Hyde just like his father did his mother said this is it he'll be in a really happy giddy mode and sometimes like walking late at night in front of the launch pad in the Gulf of Mexico those of us from the Gulf Coast we can feel when the atmosphere is changing and the storm is about you could see him get dark and he becomes a demon and that's what Grimes calls it demon mode and when he snaps out of it like Dr Jekyll he doesn't remember what he did as Mr high oh is it easier to write a book about a genius who's alive or who's dead dead I didn't know that when you told me to do musk so is your next one well I mean as you know after I did Kissinger which was a bit of a much I said okay I'm going back 200 years you know the bed Frank and then after Steve Jobs is like okay I'm going back to Leonardo this time I think Aristotle Socrates somebody who's been dead for a while your next book yeah but somebody who's at the intersection of science and art and Humanities probably doesn't have to be dead a thousand years I've got a couple ideas okay so well it's a great book a great read it's number one bestseller uh now right because of Elon not because of me but thank you okay so um today um do you think if you saw Elon he would be happy and congratulate you on getting him or he would say I wish I hadn't done that the interesting thing is I don't know he's posted a few things at a fine uh about parts of the book he jokingly said Walter told me not to read the book so I haven't is that true I don't know uh I'm sure I'm going to find out but um you know here's the main thing and this is what Kathy my wife and my editor helped me do every sentence every paragraph I have to say this is aimed at the reader the good the bad the ugly is there as a story to help the reader understand I'm not writing it within the back of my mind saying how is Elon Musk going to feel and you just have to cut off thinking about that otherwise you you only have one client and that's your reader so the book is written in a different style than your other books it's you know the chapters are a couple pages I tried to do the frenetic by the end especially the frenetic life of Elon Musk meaning you know on a given day when the Twitter board accepts his offer he flies down to Boca Chica to worry about a methane leak for two hours in Starship and then he's jumping around and he's not a multi-tasker he's a Serial Tasker we'll spend two hours super focused and then leap to something totally different and I wanted the book to be incredibly fast paced as if it's I mean I'm not good at movies but one of these movies with Quick Cuts because it captures the freneticness of his life it's going to be made into a movie I think yeah but I am Elon Musk uh at one point he joked he wanted Benedict Cumberbatch and I was about to say he's too good looking Too Tall too skinny uh I'm not very good as you know on movies and uh um Walter um I know you've had a lot of uh demands on your schedule since your book came out so I want to thank you for coming thanks David and thank you for um you know giving us insights in this book I highly recommend it I think everybody has a copy so thank you very much appreciate it

Channel: The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

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Length: 37min 56sec (2276 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2023