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On March 16th, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta. A Muslim leader and former black power activist was convicted. But the evidence was shaky and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Moses Secret. When I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America. From Tenderfoot TV, campside media, and iHeart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast, Radical, for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the new Amy and TJ podcast, news anchors Amy Robach and TJ Homes explore everything from current events to pop culture in a way that's informative, entertaining, and authentically groundbreaking. Join them as they share their voices for the first time since making their own headlines.

This is the first time that we actually get to say what happened and where we are today.

Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Musk is probably the richest couch surfer ever. He didn't have a home in Palo Alto, so he would stay with Larry Pagee, and they'd stay up all night. And Musk would talk about how we have to be careful of AI. It could destroy us. And was having nothing of it. Page loved the notion of AI. And Page would even say, It'd be great if we could have robots that would be conscious and then we could upload our consciousness into it. It would be the next phase of evolution. Why are you so worried about humans being left behind by the robots? And once Paige even called him Speicist, meaning you're biased towards the human species. And Mass said, Yeah, dude, I am Speicist. I like the human species. Believe it or not, these fights cause them to quit speaking to each other. I mean, they really still don't speak to each other because of this philosophical fight. I think Musk looks upon himself as an epic figure on a grand quest. Just like the comic book characters wearing their underpants on the outside and knowing they're ridiculous, but also very insecure about it. I think it's true of a whole lot of people.

I think it's a human trait. But I think like every human trait in Elon Musk, it's at least two orders of magnitude greater.

In the weeks since the release of Walter Isaacson's doorstop biography of Elon Musk, some stories from the book have jumped off the page, tabloidish foughter, like the secret birth of Musk's child with crimes, or the secret births of his twins with his colleague. Non-procrative stories like the fact-checking drama around the role that Musk's Starlink satellite network has and has not occupied in Ukraine. Since Isaacson and I spoke, there's, of course, been the unending drama emanating from Musk himself, from amplifying anti-Semitic tweets to publicly telling Disney CEO Bob Iger to go fuck himself. But after each Tempest dies down, what should we really take away from this 600-page epic retelling of the life of Musk and about the world in which he operates? I'm Evan Ratliff. This is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Today, we're tangling with Isaacson over questions around Musk, the specious. I mean, whose side is he on anyway? What does his growing geopolitical influence tell us about the power that one man can hold in the modern world? Finally, what are we meant to learn from Isaacson's the tough, exhaustive account? How does he think the book will age as Musk seems to grow more divisive and even self-destructive by the day?

Episode 4, Legacy. I mean, you spent so much time with jobs in the world of Silicon Valley, understanding that world, the whole way that world operated at that time, jobs versus gates, etc. When you came to the end of that, there's one way you could go where you would say, I think I get it. I think I get what Silicon Valley is all about. But then you go after Musk.

We biographers have a dirty little secret that we sometimes distort history by making it seem like one guy or one gal goes into a garage in a garage. They have a light bulb moment, and history happens. And usually it's done by groups of people and teams as a collaborative nature to creativity. And so after doing Steve Jobs, in which I showed him as a motive force pushing the digital revolution, I decided to do a book called The Innovators. It was a collective biographical study with dozens of people who helped invent the concept of the personal computer and the concept of the network and then the microchip and how they interwove and collaborate it. I think in some ways that can be more true to history is to show partnerships and teamwork that lead to things. I liked it, but it didn't really sell all that well. I do think that people like following a main character.

But for Musk, some of the minor characters are pretty big personalities and sometimes controversial ones. As Musk's bluster about buying Twitter turns into reality, a crew of his old Valley Pal start to resurface in Isaacson's tale. Many of them are from what Fortune Magazine once called the PayPal mafia, ex-PayPal execs like David Sachs, Ken Howrie, Reed Hoffman, and Peter Teale. Many of them seem to be Musk's whispers, simultaneously steering Musk away from jagged financial sholes and toward a frothing ocean of an anti-woke, free-speech, maelstrom. There is a whole world of how these Silicon Valley moguls, you would call many of them, or executives relate to each other. A lot of it goes back to PayPal and the PayPal mafia and people who started PayPal then becoming these friends and Musk being involved in it. You mentioned Antonio Grazia, you already knew him. Is that a world that you already had entry into and understood? Or you learned through the relationships between these people and how that actually influences what happens in these?

By writing about Steve Jobs and then doing The Innovators, I certainly got to know that world very well of tech bros, and even that world of the quasi-libertarian tech bro mentality that's a Peter Teale at the center. One of the things that helps understand Musk today goes back to those PayPal years. He had started a company called X. Com, which he wanted to have be a payments app, but also an everything app, an app that would be social media and would be a publishing platform. And it merges with a company that Peter Teale has done, and it becomes PayPal. Musk wants to keep it named X, X. Com. He loves the mystery of that letter X. He thinks it's hardcore. And they overrule them. And they use the name PayPal, which he thinks is a sweet little name of pals who want to pay each other. But it's not an everything app that's going to change the world. And they kick them out. And for 20 years, it's eating away at them, which is why, of course, he wants to buy Twitter, and it becomes the booster to create what he'd always wanted, which is a payments platform connected to a publishing platform connected to social media.

But he does something that I found somewhat surprising until I fully understood it, is when he gets kicked out of PayPal in this coup by Peter Teale and Reed Hoffman, Ken Howry, David Sachs, and Max Levin. Musk decides, instead of hating them forever and thinking they're enemies, he makes up with them. Even thoughhe says, They knife me in the forum, kick me out of my job. And it comes back as good karma. They end up investing in SpaceX. Yeah, Teale.

Gives them $20 million. Basically, you write as an apology almost.

As a way after three rocket launches by SpaceX have failed and they've run out of money, Teale says it's a good way to try to make it up to him, and it saves SpaceX. And this crowd remains relatively friendly, and their political views and their technology views influence each other. And it all feeds in to understanding why his politics have become somewhat of this populist-right, libertarian streak.

This book is going to... People are going to take lessons from it, even if you don't explicitly prescribe what those lessons are going to be. And especially in the business world, people like to read these books for tips and for advice. Let's take people in Silicon Valley, for example. What do you think they are going to draw from the book? Are you at all concerned that they might draw the wrong lesson?

Now, with Steve Jobs, when that book came out, there were a lot of stories of, Do you have to be like Steve Jobs to be successful? A Wired magazine cover story did it. I was saying, No, this book was not a how-to manual. Sometimes people come up to me after I talked about Steve Jobs, and they'd say, I'm just like Steve Jobs.

I'm not a was, I'm a Jobs.

Yeah, I'm not was, I'm not sweet. I'm not cuddly. I'm like Jobs. If people screw things up, I tell them they've screwed up. I fire them. I tell them they stink, I'll say, on a podcast. I'll look at them and I say, Yeah. And have you ever invented the iPod? Did you ever make the Macintosh, the iPhone? You don't have the right to do this. Probably Steve Jobs didn't have the right to do it. But you're not supposed to try to be like this.

Do you worry at all? You mentioned the person who comes up to you and says, I'm like Steve Jobs, that there are going to be musk acolytes who will take those wrong lessons and that some of those people run Silicon Valley. They run very important aspects, if not the most important aspects of our society right now. Does it concern you that people might take a Muskian approach and lack the vision but have the persona and that those people are making consequential decisions about the tools we use?

Yeah. I mean, one lesson a lot of Silicon Valley executives seem to have taken from the book is, Oh, my workforce is probably too flabby. I could fire 80 % the way Elon Musk did at Twitter. And now you can't just do that. Also, there's a larger issue which the book wrestles with, which I call the old Twitter, new Twitter issue, which is that life is about a little bit more than simply having the leanest, meanest machine you can create. And some people may want to do that, especially people doing startups. They may want to be lean, mean, and hackathon all night long. But there are other people who will keep in mind the larger mission of having an enterprise or a company, and that it's there to create good for all of society, for consumers, for good products, but also the people who work there and the communities where they're based. I think that's a good tension to have in our society. I used to work at Diamond Corporation, and boy, it was nice and flabby. We had a dozen people working in the nation section to produce maybe eight pages every week. Sounds lovely.

We had researchers, we had assistants and schedulers. We even had the person who brought the food cart and the drink cart around every evening. And then everybody from activist, investors to McKinsey consultants come in and say, You can cut this. You can cut that. You can make it leaner and meaner. And there are people who are comfortable being all in and hardcore. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, totally hardcore. There are people who are more comfortable finding a nurturing, good environment for people. We have to find the right balances. I would disdain somebody who is always tough as an Elon Musk. I'd also disdain people who lack a sense of passion and mission. But the books aren't a how-to manual saying you should do this at your company. These books, especially when it comes to Elon Musk, are supposed to do two things that people have a hard time keeping both in their mind: be inspirational and be cautionary. But above all, it is a story of a real person that is one of the most consequential of our day and generation.

I think a certain percentage of people today have a hard time understanding the approach where you could happily sit and listen to Peter Teale or someone with those politics and not challenge them, be angry, and just sit with them in a very reporter-like way.

I go back to the notion of I'm supposed to tell you the story. Am I supposed to say, I totally disagree with Peter Thiel's view on the Ukraine war? No, that's ball. I mean, do I disagree? Yeah. I don't share his beliefs on that or many other things. But if you want the hot take on whether or not you agree with Peter Thiel's politics, my book's not for you. I'm telling you how this story happened.

When we come back, stacking Musk up against jobs and answering Isaacson's critics, including those who keep quoting him, stay with us.

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On March 16th, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta. Jamil Al Amin, a Muslim leader and former black power activist, was convicted. But the evidence was shaky and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosie Secret. When I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America.

He said to me, You don't need to take care of them for not.

Doing something.

To pain you or something like that? I said, No, what are you talking about? But I had no idea. I don't know who he had become.

That's how he approached you? You know what he meant when he said that?

Yeah, I'm thinking.

Murder in a minute.

I think that's what he was thinking too. From Tenderfoot TV, Campside Media, and iHeart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast, Radical, for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the new Amy and TJ podcast, Amy Robach and TJ Homes, a renowned broadcasting team with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide, are sharing their voices and perspectives in a way you've never heard before. They explore meaningful conversations about current events, pop culture, and everything in between. Nothing is off limits.

This was a scandal that wasn't, and this was not what you've been sold.

The Amy and TJ podcast is guaranteed to be informative, entertaining, and above all, authentic. It marks the first time Robach and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines.

This is the first time that we actually get to say what happened and where we are today.

Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a very small detail, but because you're a New Orleansian, I have to ask this. You quote Musk talking about how if he could skip meals and just get his nutrients from, soylent or liquid beverage or whatever, he would just do that. It's a very valley thing. And what did you do for food when you were alongside him?

One of the wonderful things about Boca Chica, Texas, and this rough little scrub land, there's a canteen that's stocked with amazingly good barbecue, salads, and you can walk in 24 hours a day. I could walk from my Airstream trailer. And remarkably, it actually had good coffee, too, or at least good coffee for Texas. But Musk doesn't care about food. He doesn't care about fine wines. He really doesn't drink that much. Occasionally, you go out to dinner with him and a few people, and they'll be craft cocktails, I don't know, cactus juice with tequila. And he'll always try one and never quite finish it. He never cares that much about the food he's ordering. But I know that when I finally came off the trail, having traveled with him and having been summon back even in April to watch the Starship launch, or then to Austin for him to launch XAI, I finally said, Okay, I'm going to have to start eating right again. I remember eating very carefully, but also craving really good food. I'd be down in New Orleans and my wife, Kathy, and I, we made a habit of once a week eating at Galatois, once a week eating at Herb Saint, and once a week eating at Pech.

And maybe once every week or two eating at Moscas, which is a great place.

I've been.

To Moscas. Yeah, just so I could remember the taste of really good food, having spent two years watching him grab sandwiches and hamburgers.

On Isaacson's book tour for his Musk biography, he was regularly quized about how Musk compares with jobs, perhaps the most obvious foil among Isaacson's subjects.

At one of my events, once a high school student came up to the microphone, and he actually had read the.

Whole book. Impressive.

He had a question that he said I hadn't answered. I said, What's that? And he said, Was Elon Musk nice to waiters and waitresses? I realized that was an insightful question. I thought of Steve Jobs, who I remember one day at a Whole Foods in Palo Alto. There's an older woman who was making the smoothie, and Steve Jobs just chewed her out because she wasn't doing it fast enough and wasn't doing it in the right way. I remember of all the things that made me recoil, it was being mean to a person making the smoothie or being a waiter like Jobs could be. Musk was actually incredibly rough on people he worked with. But all the times I saw him where there were waiters or waitresses or somebody at a shop or whatever, he would get into a jovial mood. I don't think he had a meanness that would have been reflected in the way he treated waiters. I thought, shoot, that was a really good question that kid asked. I probably get in trouble with Steve Jobs, but boy.

Well, Jobs isn't around anymore, sadly. But Musk could still... Is there something he could do that would make you fundamentally rethink whether you should have written the book about him?

No, I think the book explains correctly who he is. And his reputation will go way up and way down as it has for the past 25 years. And he'll get Starship into orbit someday, and it'll be on the front page of the paper. And also, he will do things, be it with Twitter or with self-driving, that'll cause problems and be bad. So there will be a roller coaster on his reputation. And that will be the case for the next 20 years.

How does that feel to be connected to someone who, as you have amply captured, is extremely volatile and is also maybe becoming a little more controversial every day?

Yeah, I mean, it's not great. I would love it if he would lie low for like a year, but he ain't going to do that. And that's what this book explains, which is at one point, Antonio Grazia, his friend, takes his phone away from him when they're traveling and puts it in the hotel room safe so Musk won't get up. And in the middle of the night, Musk calls hotel security and makes him open and safe so he can start tweeting out where things... That's who Musk is.

And you have this body of work when it comes to biographies. You've got Ben Franklin, you've got Einstein, Einstein, you've got da Vinci, and then you have the living ones, Doudna, Jobs, now Musk. I think it tends to create an impression, even sometimes I think they're packaged together for marketing purposes, that all of these people are of a kind. They're almost like a trajectory of human achievement. Do you think of Musk as fitting in with Da Vinci, Einstein, these world legendary figures? Or do you feel like, Well, the jury is still out on that, but he's the closest I can get in modern times?

I don't think that all the people I've written about are of one kind. But the reason you write biographies rather than how-to manuals for innovation is that each is different. There are certain common threads, which is a passion to push reality into a certain mission that you have. But I don't try to say I'm writing about Elon Musk because he's like Benjamin Franklin.

Do you think he's spoiled other subjects for you in that it's difficult to find a subject who has those different personalities, all of that contained in one person?

Yeah. I mean, it would be hard to find a contemporary character who comes even close to being as head-snapping, amazing, gut-wrenching, mercurial of a roller coaster and emotional and professional subject. I can't think of anybody who's this fascinating for good and for bad.

I want to talk about some of the criticism that comes up around the book and getting you a chance to respond to some of that stuff. There's being a difficult and demanding person, even an asshole, whether that matters for how creative he is, how innovative he is. Then there's these larger societal accusations, let's say, like allowing misinformation or encouraging misinformation or the self-driving and people getting killed or the lawsuit against Tesla when it comes to racial discrimination, those seem to be two separate ideas. I'm wondering, we've talked a lot about the first one and how you feel about that second basket, that question of whether, aside from whether he is or isn't a bad person to his employees, there are things that he's doing in the world that have negative implications.

Yeah, I think when you barrel ahead impulsively, you do things that have negative implications, bad workplace environments. Well, it starts at the top because he's all in hardcore driven. He's not into what he thinks are touchy feely, HR guidelines, and that's bad. Likewise, he pushes a little fast on full self-driving. I mean, he feels that humans will kill 10 or 100 times more people than a self-driving car will. So he doesn't get the fact that if self-driving just one time as it did this once hit a side of a big white truck. And that's been in the news after three, four years, it's still in the news, he says people focus on that, not the million people got killed by humans. Well, because he doesn't have a real feel for human feelings and emotions. He doesn't realize that a self-driving car, smashing somebody into a truck is going to really shake people up more than the fact that a bad driver here on Clayborn Avenue in New Orleans got into an accident. These are the things that his engineering mindset doesn't feel as well.

I feel like when people bring those things up, they're often saying they want you to engage with those things more. We've talked about explaining what's going on versus moralizing, but how do you feel about how you engaged with that aspect of Musk?

I like the fact that people who say, I'm not as tough on Musk as I should be, are always using anecdotes from my book to show why we should be tough on Musk. And a couple of people have pointed that out. Certainly, if you're looking at the bad workplace environments that he may engender either at Tesla or at Twitter, that's in the book in no uncertain terms. Likewise, the accidents on the self-driving cars are definitely in the book, starting with autonomy Day in 2019 all the way to the present. There's a lot of evidence that his obsession with this might be moving things too fast. I'm perfectly happy that people say I should have been tougher on Musk, but also say, Man, read the book. If you want ammunition, both of how amazing he can be at times and getting things done, but also the rubble he leaves in his wake.

When it came to the Ukraine Starlink situation, you've talked about that, the thing that got corrected in the post and Musk tweeting, but maybe you've talked about this, but I haven't heard it yet. But I'm interested in what it felt like for you. You strike me as someone who is relatively unbothered by some of the noise that's around these things.

I think you have to be unbothered by the noise, and you have to keep the essence of the story in mind. The essence of that story was fine. It was correct, which was that night, he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled or not be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. There was a fix that had to be made because it had already been geofence. So his decision was not to permit the movement of the geofencing. I hadn't gone into it enough. I just said he turned it off. So that was oversimplifying. But I didn't want to get distracted from the main thing, which is this private citizen is suddenly deciding that night whether or not Ukraine gets to do a sneak attack on the Russian fleet in Crimea. The essence is a private citizen has that power to decide. And neither he nor anybody else corrected that. And then I talked to him. I said, Well, have you talked to the US government? And he turns over power to these satellites to the US government finally. At a later point. Yeah, at a later point. After that night, where we talk about it.

So you see all of these things happen, and I try to have it shown in real time. And the essence of the story being, how does somebody acquire this much power? Why is it that the rest of government and other contractors have become so paralyzedized and sclerotic that they can't do some of these things? And then how does he, with his megalomania, finally back down and say, Maybe I should give up some of this power.

There's something chilling about Musk's power and influence growing beyond his companies, beyond the rocket launch pad and the Tesla factory floor. In the case of Starlink's satellite's use in Ukraine, even Musk himself finds this a little unsettling. From failing to understand how people respond to self-driving car deaths to his outwardly blase approach to controlling global geopolitics with a thumbs up or thumbs down like a Roman emperor in the Coliseum. People are not Elon Musk's forte by his own admission, but we are increasingly in his hands. Depending on where you stand on Musk, some of his ideas can seem either sinister, logical, or simply baffling. Take, for example, his stated concern about underpopulation and declaration that people need to be having more children. Well, more specifically, smart people need to be having more children. It's a credis lived with all 10 of his surviving children born by IVF. He's put his money behind it, too, funding a University of Texas at Austin research group called the Population Wellbeing Initiative to the tune of $10 million. What I wanted to know from Isaacson was given his front row seat to Musk's unusual family dramas, what are we supposed to make of this particular Musk obsession?

He tweets and talks about low birth rates, and he seems very obsessed. Maybe it's too much, but I think I wanted to know, what does this add up to? What is this about? I was left, I don't understand what this tells me about Elon Musk, which is maybe my problem.

But like a lot of things with Elon Musk, he goes back to the father a bit. It also goes to Musk's theory of consciousness. The human species is a fragile thing. And one of the threats is a low birth rate. Now, most of us probably don't think that way. We think we're overpopulated. But there is a decline in birth rate in many countries. And Musk deeply feels that's a problem. And people can totally disagree with that and say, Hey, overpopulation is a big problem. They can also think he's weird to fund IVF for other people or fund clinics.

It's the thing where people can look at it and they can say he has this vision for humanity, and it involves people having more children. And then there are people who see it through a lens of, Is this some eugenics situation? I feel like people bring these lenses to it. I'm wondering if that has happened in your past work or if this is a unique situation.

I think it's somewhat unique that people have such extraordinarily strong feelings for and against Musk. When I started working on this book, he was one of the most popular people on Earth. There's some people who didn't like him, but his politics was generally a supporter of Obama. He had done really bad, dumb tweets in the past, like saying he was going to take Tesla private or calling some cave diver a pedophile. But generally, he wasn't that controversial. And then his politics shift and it reflected in his tweet, and he buys Twitter. I end up with a book in which people either think he's an absolute hero or an absolute villain. And if you come at it from a frame of Musk is inherently an evil person, even having a lot of kids seems like something evil and pushing for self-driving cars or robots seems evil. Likewise, if you're one of these starry-eyed fans, even the weird, dark things he does on Twitter, people will be slamming me for telling the stories of his behavior, both at Twitter and at factories. So, yeah, it's a difficulty that people frame his every action often based on their own love or hatred for him.

Up next, I ask Isaacson, Does Musk really believe his own hype? Stay with us.

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Donate now to DublinSIMON@dubsimon. Ie.

On March 16th, 2000, two sheriff's deputies were shot in Atlanta. Jamil Al-Amin, a Muslim leader and former black power activist, was convicted. But the evidence was shaky and the whole truth didn't come out during the trial. My name is Mosie Secret. When I started investigating this case in my hometown, I uncovered a dark truth about America.

He said to me, You don't need to take care of them for not.

Doing something to.

Pain you or something like that. I said, No, what are you talking about? But I had no idea who he had become.

That's how he approached you? You know what he meant when he said that?

Yeah, I'm.

Thinking.

Murder in a minute.

I think that's what he was thinking too. From Tenderfoot TV, Campside Media, and iHeart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast, Radical, for free on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts.

In the new Amy and TJ podcast, Amy Robach and TJ Homes, a renowned broadcasting team with decades of experience delivering headline news and captivating viewers nationwide, are sharing their voices and perspectives in a way you've never heard before. They explore meaningful conversations about current events, pop culture, and everything in between. Nothing is off limits.

This was a scandal that wasn't, and this was not what you've been sold.

The Amy and TJ podcast is guaranteed to be informative, entertaining, and above all, authentic. It marks the first time Robach and Holmes speak publicly since their own names became a part of the headlines.

This is the first time that we actually get to say what happened and where we are today.

Listen to the Amy and TJ podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

There's a tension, it feels like, between the way that Musk talks about that epic idea, getting to Mars, helping save humanity with interplanetary species, etc, and the way he treats individual people. He doesn't like people sometimes. He can be very cruel. I'm wondering, does he really care? Or is he just trying to make himself an epic figure? Or is he actually trying to solve the energy problem, send us to Mars for humanity reasons?

When Musk first started talking about his three-grade missions, space travel, artificial intelligence, and sustainable energy, I thought it was a type of quantifications that you do for a biographer or do for a podcast or do for a pep talk. Then I'd see him over and over again, just chant it to himself, like walking around the factory for building Starship and things are getting delayed. He would keep saying to himself and others around him, We have to have an urgency of getting humanity to Mars. I came to believe that I don't know if he always fully believed it, but I know he believed he believed it. I know that may sound strange, but sometimes, as Shakespeare teaches us, we become the mask we wear. He had internalized and externalized this so much that he was driven by a fierce urgency that we've got to get rockets that can get us to Mars within the next few decades, or that we have to sustain solar and battery and electric vehicle energy on this planet. I am totally convinced that he is driven by his belief in those missions. Then he backfills and figures out, Well, how can I make money on the way?

But if you're driven mainly by financial or selfish reasons, you're not going to start a rocket company. That's not a good idea for making money. You're not going to start an EV company when every other car company is getting out of the business. You're not going to worry about robots and you're not going to buy Twitter. So I don't think he was motivated by money. He was motivated by this almost manchild, epic sense of him as a hero in a comic book or a video game.

Well, the Twitter one is interesting because I felt like the way you wrote that almost reversed the poles there in which he decides to buy Twitter. He impulsively decides, gets stuck with it. And then he almost seems to be backfilling the mission where he says.

Actually- I asked him at one point, How does this fit into your mission? Makes no sense. I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a fingertips feel for social, emotional networks. And he admits he said, Yes, maybe it's a lark. Maybe it doesn't really fit in. And then later he says, Well, maybe it will help democracy so that civilization will survive long enough that will be able to become multoplanetary. And that's why I just didn't believe him. And I'm not even sure he believed himself. That's just a bulk wrap explanation. But he had to try to justify it to himself. But my own opinion is he stumbled into that impulsively and had mixed feelings about it. And if he had to do it all over again, I'm not sure he would.

You've talked about how you think Twitter will just be a blip of his legacy, but he certainly can and is getting mired in it. And there's this quote in the book. It's him saying, I probably spend too much time on Twitter. It's a good place to dig your own grave. You get your shoulder into it and you keep on digging. Do you feel that he could be undoing some of that magic, that vision that you captured when comes to space or electric cars?

Yeah, I personally feel that the time he spends in Twitter and the mind share he devotes to it is not as important. It's not as high value as him doing something else. I don't think he's particularly good at the social interactions and human emotions that come in Twitter. And he admits he's just addicted to it. I don't think it's going to be an important part of his legacy. It's not going to be a great part of his legacy. I think makes the book more interesting for this guy to go down this rabbit hole, but also near the end of the book to say, This isn't the best use of my time even talking about Twitter. He said, We probably could be talking about more important things.

It's made him disliked in a way that I feel like he wasn't disliked before. I mean, if you look at the category of things that people dislike him for: Twitter and things he's said on Twitter and done with Twitter, occupy a large percentage of those things.

Absolutely. When you look at the controversy he's caused and, for that matter, the equity and hatred that he's engendered, about 95% of that comes either from what he says on Twitter or what he does on Twitter or what he does to Twitter.

Musk is polarizing, arguably one of the two most polarizing figures of our time. I'll let you guess the other. His fans can be slavishly adoring, his critics can be blind with rage. But if there was one common thread among the more critical takes on Isaacson's biography, it was a demand for more judgment or at least analysis from Isaacson. What was the ultimate meaning in all these stories he'd gathered, these hours at Musk's side. Were we supposed to believe that he was some tortured genius or that he was a cruel tyrant who'd muscled his way to Valley success and was now inflicting a dangerous outlook on the world outside it? What did it all add up to? For two days, I played out different versions of this question with Isaacson.

I'm here to be as straightforward as I can, with a reader in mind, to tell you stories that I think are very revealing, somewhat exciting, somewhat appalling, but always informative. And in face of the criticism that, well, maybe I didn't render too much judgment, I tried pretty hard to pull back a bit to say, You can tell what I think by the way I'm telling this story, but I'm not going to hammer that into you. You should wrestle with each of these things and figure out how it fits with your own vision of life.

You never say to yourself, Maybe I should put 10% more.

Judgment in there. No, that's something I cop a plea to totally. I certainly don't feel in any way bad that I didn't impose more of my judgments in it.

There's a lot of writing in the book about the chaos that surrounds Musk. But then I wondered you have had many war reporters working for you that you're responsible for in some sense. Do you feel like the reporting and editing that you did prepared you for the chaos of Musk, or to say this is not real chaos compared to other types of reporting?

Every now and then when Musk is doing something incredibly chaotic or has himself worked up into a lather, I do remember times where things were much worse. I remember being in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, when I worked for the Sunday Times and all the explosions. I certainly remember the Gulf War when I was at CNN and went out to one of America's aircraft carriers, which is where CNN had some of its reporters embedded. I think, Okay, when we think things are going bad, let's remember there's some really bad things happening in this world. I wish if I could do many things for Musk, it would sometimes be, Calm down a bit. Don't be so apocalyptic about things because he has an apocalyptic mindset.

You told a story about going to Northern Ireland when you were a reporter and you were with another reporter and you left the hotel and the hotel got bombed. And then he actually later died reporting in El Salvador. Yeah. And the question I had was, what's the lesson from that? Like leaving the hotel saved you in a way, but he then was killed, taking risks. Where do you triangulate the lesson in that?

One of the things you learned is that sometimes there are no lessons that sometimes things happen and they're random. Sometimes a sniper bullet kills somebody. Sometimes risk-taking can get you killed. Sometimes not taking enough risks makes you paralyzed. So there's not always easy lessons, and those stories happen to be as valuable because they tell you that there's a mosaic in life. Sometimes complex patterns are there, and sometimes you can't see the pattern just with one or two data points. Maybe you should restrain yourself. Maybe there's not a hot take to be had. Maybe there's not even a lesson. It's just a part of this beautiful complexity of humans and human life. And you appreciate those patterns, and eventually, they lead to intuitively as opposed to quick lessons.

It's a great ending for this whole show, perhaps. I just want to point that out, so I'll have.

That on tape. Don't ask it again. I'll never be able to repeat that. We've got it. We've got it. But it has the virtue of being true. I feel that way.

On Musk with Walter Isaacson is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeart. This show is based on the writing and reporting of Walter Isaacson. It's hosted by me, Evan Ratliff, produced by Lizzie Jacobs, assistant production from Serena Chao. Mixing and sound design by Rick Kwan. Thomas Walsh did the engineering. From iHeart Podcasts, the executive producers are Katrina Norvel and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by Mangash Haticadour, with an assist from Ozwylishan, Costas Linos, and Kate Osborne. Special thanks to Bob Pitman, Colonel Byrne, Will Pierson, Nicky Etour, Cary Lieberman, Nathan Otosky, Ali Gavin, and the folks at www. No. Who let us use their beautiful studio in New Orleans. If you like stories about writers and their process, check out my other show, The Long Form Podcast. If you want a story about a different South African programmer who became one of the world's biggest criminals, you can check out my book, The Mastermind. For more shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit kaleidoscope. Nyc. Thanks so much for listening.

Awake and in danger. No hope of a bed.

This little.

Lane.

Here.

Is where he'll try sleep instead. The shop fronts are closing.

As he walks with.

No aim.

And with.

Nowhere worth going.

He'll stay.

Out in the rain.

Christmas.

Isn't Christmas when you're homeless.

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