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On March 16th, 2000, two sheriffs' 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.

At some point, I'm in college, and I didn't quite know what I wanted to be when I grew up. And a legendary but young editor back then, Harry Evans, had just moved to the Sunday Times of London, and he was the Boy Wonder editor. And so he came to my college and he's talking about a new form of journalism, investigative journalism done in narrative fashion. I got my clips and I sent it off to him by mail, a packet of these clips and saying, Could I get a job? A few months later, I get a telegram. Now, I don't think I've ever gotten a telegram in life. And I open it up and says, Will hire on limited basis. And it was Harry Evans. And I couldn't even figure out what he was talking about. I'd almost forgotten I had sent off my clips. But in the end, I went off that summer and I worked in London for The Sunday Times. And not only was Harry the most vibrant editor you could imagine, but he'd send me off to all sorts of places. I went to Northern Morocco to cover the Spanish-Sahara fights. I remember being in Greece because there were people that were busting the sanctions to Rhodesia back then.

I had this mentor pal named David Blundie, who I went to Northern Ireland with. He was fearless. I remember one night we were in the restaurant at the Europa Hotel in Belfish in We got to go cover the riots. I'm like, David. I learned a lesson because we went and covered the riots when we got back. The hotel had been bom. He was this person who influenced me on getting out there being a bit of a risk taker as a journalist.

Walter Isaacson is the author of eight biographies before Musk. He started back in 1986 with one called The Wise Men, co-authored with journalist Evan Thomas about the architects of US foreign policy. He's written about lightning rods like Henry Kissinger, technologists and scientists like Steve Jobs and Jennifer Doudna, historical eminences like Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein. But Isaacson's own roots are in the golden age of magazine journalism, a time where he rose to become editor of the magazine in a pre and early internet era when its influence was at its peak. He jumped to the head of CNN right before 9/11, then the Aspen Institute, before returning to his hometown of New Orleans to teach and write. If you've heard Isaacson talk about his approach to telling stories, including ones like Musk's, he often harkens back to growing up here and what he learned as a kid in New Orleans.

I'm.

Evan Ratliff, and this is On Musk with Walter Isaacson. Episode three, The Big Easy and beyond.

Where are you ordering from? Where are you ordering from? Where are you ordering from? Where are you ordering from? I'll eat almost anything. But if there are pro-boy sandwiches anywhere near here, that'd be fine or whatever. Cell phones or, just off chance that you have any - Totally.

I've consumed a lot of the interviews that you've done since the book came out. There's a lot of talk of the man in the arena and then this Boswell character, the biographer. I would like to treat you like the man in the arena. I want to start pretty far back. Can you paint a picture for me what it was like growing up here in New Orleans?

Storytelling was essential in New Orleans. It was the only way you could be popular, whether you were at the lunch table, the dinner table, or on the playground. And so there was in bread in all of us, especially the kids I grew up with, the notion of seeing if you could amuse people with good stories. You've heard the Walker Percy story, right?

Yes, I want to talk about that, actually.

I had a group of friends. We used to go to the Boga Falaya, Above Lake Pontchartrain, and we'd fish and ski and try to capture turtles. We'd all tell the stories about the rope swing or the time that this happened. One of the people with us was a young woman named Anne, whose father was Walker Percy. We never knew what Walker did. I'd say, And he just always sits on the dock and drinks bourbon. And she said, Well, he's a writer. I didn't know you could be a writer. One day, I was about 12 or 13, I read The Movie-goer, the novel he had just published. I said to him, Man, this book's got a lot of lessons in it. You're trying to teach things. Explain it to me.

This is the point where if you've heard Isaacson on any number of podcasts or TV shows over the years or read interviews with him, you'll know that Walker Percy gave him a singular piece of advice. He repeats it all the time. For heaven's sake, be a storyteller. The world's got far too many preachers. It's advice that has shaped his thinking ever since.

I learned that that's the way the Bible helps move us along. We start with the greatest lead sentence ever, which is in the beginning, and we learn lessons through stories.

But, of course, he didn't follow Walker Percy into fiction writing, although he says he's got a novel in a drawer that he plans to leave there. Instead, he started as a beat reporter at the legendary New Orleans Daily.

I remember my first day on the at the Times Picion. My first day as a reporter, high school kid, police reporter, 5:00 AM to noon. There's a murder happening on Carrollton Avenue. It's early in the morning. I get sent there and I talk to the police. I get all the facts from the police spokesman. I had to go to the payphone on the quarter to phone it into the city editor. City editor says, Did you talk to the family? I go, No, Billy. They just had somebody killed in their family. He said, Go back and knock on the door and say, You're from the picky and you want to talk to them. Take a deep breath, walk back. I was amazed. They said, Come on in. They made me coffee. They brought out pictures. They talked for more than an hour and a half. I learned two things. One is people will talk if you're really there just to listen. You don't have an agenda. You're not trying to mess with them. Secondly, back then, you had this ability to say, I'm from the paper. Let me talk.

Even after the times, Pick-Eon, though, Isaacson's path wasn't set. There were other options, ones that probably wouldn't have led to Elon Musk.

A year or two after college and university, I got three job offers in one week. One of them was to go into politics, congressional race. I was going to help manage it. It was a guy named Ricktonrie who ends up in jail. That was not going to be the right way to go. The second one, I got a call from Cordy Byer. He said, We met when you were studying in England. What I didn't know is that he was CIA station chief for Europe, and he used to meet students and young Americans there and keep track of them. I was offered a job with the CIA. But he said, We wouldn't, of course, want you to be undercover. We'd want you to be in Langley as an analyst. I'm thinking, Wait a minute. If I'm going to join the CIA, do I want to just be an analyst at headquarters? And the third job offer I got was because I had covered the mayor's race in New Orleans that year, and 12 candidates had run. It was a total zoo. But I went around to every ward leader and every assessor at every bar in New Orleans and said, Who's going to win your precinct?

And I toted it up and I did a chart. Here's how it's going to turn out. Well, it turns out that exact way. The 12 finish in the order I said within a half a percentage point of what we said. Oh, wow. And the paper is touting it. Our City Hall reporter got it right. And it was just when a guy from Time Magazine, and I don't think they knew what to do with them in the days before they fired people, so they sent him around the country to find new journalists, and he offered me a job. And my mother said, Take the job at Time Magazine. And she was right because this is, I guess, the late '70s and that's when news magazines were general interest news magazines. And for me, it was a godsend because I had always been somebody who was interested in a wide variety of things. And one week I might be in charge of the medicine section, next week it'd be music, then foreign affairs, then business. And in some ways, it was like Huckfinn on the raft. You'd get off the raft, you'd have a wonderful adventure for a week, and then get back on the raft and who knew where it was going to lead?

And so it meant I was never the world's greatest expert on European foreign policy or on astrophysics, but I knew a little bit about everything and could see how there were patterns that rippled across the universe. We can talk about all the downsides there, which is we were gatekeepers. Walter Cronkite could say, That's the way it is, and Time Magazine could. But there were no citizen journalists. There were nobody challenging the mainstream narrative. But let me just say selfishly, if you were a 20-something-year-old and you got to ride on the boat with the mainstream narrative people, it taught you a lot. We didn't even have bylines at Time Magazine then. The stories were unsigned. And yet when I called up Henry Kissinger's office and said, I'm at Time Magazine, and I want to write about you, partly it was the ego of Henry Kissinger, but partly it was the good fortune I had to have an institution behind me.

One of the reviews of your Kissinger book talked about how you had gotten this access to him and that he was probably going to regret it, or he probably did now regret it. That made me wonder, how did you start to formulate an idea of what you owe that person when you spend time with them?

Back then in the 1980s, there were two types of journalists. One were the access journalists, the Hugh Seidies and James Reston, who could always talk to people in power. And then there were the Woodwood and Bernstein investigative journalist types. And I always tried to see if you could combine both. And so in the case of the Kissinger book, I think it's an honest story. In the end, Time Magazine was having a big celebration of everybody had been on the cover. I was wondering if Kissinger would come back because he wasn't speaking to me. He was so angry about the book. He called up, he said, Valvolta, even the 30 years war had to end at some point. I will come to the party for Time Magazine. I said, That's great. And he said, But you know my wife, Nancy, she's partial to the 100 years war. We're going to have to work on her. I learned from that that if you tried to be honest and straight and tried to get it right, you weren't slamming them just for the sake of slamming them, but you were making it clear that the secret bombing of Cambodia was not a great idea.

In the end, people would respect you. After I dealt with Kissinger, it's like, All right, I'm going to go and do somebody who's been dead for 200 years, so I don't have to worry what they think.

I think a thing that I was pondering reading about Musk, and there's a lot about Musk's management philosophy, but you were also a manager. Eventually, you were the editor of Time Magazine and then, of course, CNN. And it made me wonder, what was your management style when you were running a newsroom?

I had a very collegial management style, and that worked well at Time Magazine. There were about 400 people who were the main core of the magazine, and I knew them all. I've been to their house. They had come out to my house. We used to have parties at my house. And it was easy because it was the 90s and the magazine was doing well.

Even in say, there was a big event and it was stress and you had to.

Deliver late clothes. Especially intense coverage. One of the things that Walker Percy taught us is that people are never happier than when a hurricane is coming. In other words, you know what you're supposed to do. You don't have that little angst and free-floating anxiety. So when big things happened, impeachment of Bill Clinton or major disasters around the world, we all rallied together. We'd stay up all night. We'd put out the magazine. When I talked to Steve Jobs, he was a rougher manager. He was the opposite. He was not collegial. He said, You had a lot of empathy and you thought you were kind, but mainly it was because you wanted other people to like you. And he said about himself, I don't have that luxury. I'm just a middle class kid trying to build a company. And when people do things that suck, I've got to tell them it sucks. And then I've got to fire them. If I'm too collegial, we'll never get things done.

Did you look back at your own time? Did you say, Well, maybe you were right about if when I ran CNN, I.

Should have been- I look back and said maybe you were right because soon after I got there, 9/11 happens and we've got the best team in the world. But then the war winds down. Fox starts coming up. Msnbc starts coming up. And I'm being too nice. I care that Lou Dobbs and Greg of ancestors didn't like me, that Larry King thinks I'm a nice person. And I needed to disrupt CNN at that point. It needed to be brought into a digital age to compete with MSNBC and Fox. And I was terrible at that. I was not a tough enough, a disruptive enough manager, and I didn't have it in my heart to want to be. And so after my contract was up, I left and went to the Aspen Institute, which is dedicated to finding consensus. And it's the oracle of Delphi, know thyself. And what I learned about myself was I'm not going to be a disruptor like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk. I'm not going to be that tough of a manager.

You've talked about how the heyday of time and there was a heyday of CNN. A lot of people have written that down, and you ejected from that. And as you watched it subsequently, did you feel like you had escaped to another planet and then the one that you left blew up?

I try to wake up every morning and be grateful. Boy, my timing has been good. I got out of Time Magazine just in time. I mean, after I left, news magazines get decimated. Likewise, CNN. Whether or not it's still doing good journalism, it's certainly been decimated as a business model. So, yeah, I sometimes feel like in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of Elon Musk's favorite books, I feel like I'm just making it off of each planet just in the nick of time.

Stay with us after the break to learn how Isaacson managed to capture Musk's manic lifetime across 600 pages and get to the truth about Musk's Emerald Mind inheritance and who really founded Tesla.

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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 Moses 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, 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.

I want to talk about that preacher versus storyteller distinction a little bit. First of all, because I also grew up in the south, I grew up in Georgia. Oftentimes the best preachers are, in fact, storytellers. What did it mean to you, the distinction? What's the divide there?

As I learned from reading the movie, Goa, when I first read it at age 12, any story has a moral behind it, but the moral should be behind it, not in front of it. I'm leading with what I'm bringing to the party because everybody on talk radio and cable TV and every blog and podcast, they have opinions about Musk. But I got the story of what happened that Friday night or that story of what's in the hospital in Austin with his two girlfriends or any of these stories. That's what I'm bringing to the party. I try to give you the story as clear, honest, straight, and unvarnished. I have a card that's on my wall near my computer, and I look at it whenever I get stuck trying to convey, Well, is Musk rough on people, or has he got some political feelings in a certain way? The card simply says, Let me tell you a story. I stop and I don't try to preach or I don't try to Pontificate. I say, What's the best story in my notebook that illustrates this?

I want to shift gears slightly and find out a little bit about the writing process because this book, first of all, is there stuff that went to the cutting room floor that you still think about or wish you had included?

First of all, nobody has ever accused this book of being too short. People always begin with it's 600 pages.

People love doorstop.

Yeah, the word doorstop. When I was young and Evan Thomas, my friend and I were doing The Wise Men about the Six Friends and Cold War foreign policy, our editor looked at a whole section about the World Bank and said, Cut it out. Nobody is going to care. And so we did. And then there was one review that said, There's not enough in it about the creation of the World Bank. And I mentioned it to our editor and she said, Yes, I think we're going to use that as a blurb on the paperback to say, Not enough about the creation of the World Bank. That'll be a selling feature of the book. You have to learn some things are important, but maybe not that interesting.

I love getting in the weeds on process myself, but what's your literal organizational system? Do you have a paper-based system? Do you ever use a software? How do you keep all of this stuff?

Early on, I was a fast adopter of computer technology, so I was looking for all sorts of complex ways to do note cards and organize them and stuff. I discovered that the best organizational structure is chronological. Whether you're writing about Leonardo da Vinci or you're writing about Elon Musk, you put all your notes in chronological order. And the simplest way to organize it, I discovered, was just a big word file. It would be- A.

Very big word file.

Yeah, maybe 800,000 words by the end. And I would just put things in order little keywords that I could search like asshole with an asterisk and so on. And then when you write the book, you try to keep it as chronological as you can. But you can't make it totally chronological, especially with a musk. If one morning he's obsessing about buying Twitter, but then he has to worry about a valve leak on a Raptor engine happening in Texas, and then he's on a meeting about full self-driving, you don't want the book to just be one damn thing after another. You decide, All right, how am I going to cluster these so that they have a certain coherence to them. In the must book, you'll notice something different from my other books. The chapters are very short and they're very fast paced because I want to show how he moves Bing, Bing, Bing really fast through things. Not a whole lot of pausing and reflecting. And that's consciously to make you feel like you're going through this book the way he goes through life.

What does it look like when Walter Isaacson sits down to write? How do you get to a 600 page or could have been 1,200 page biography? What does the daily process look like?

I work at night. I tend to like to start writing at 8:00 PM. I'm happily married to somebody who's a morning person, so we each have our quiet time while the other is not awake. And I'll work till 2:00, 3:00 in the morning. I now use a trick I learned from Leonardo da Vinci, which is I'll sketch something out, and then I'll add another layer of brushstrokes, then I'll add another layer of polish, then I'll refine it a bit. So if I'm going to write about, say, the launch of XAI, the artificial intelligence company, I'll have rough chronological notes of sitting there in the backyard with them. Here's what happens when he calls Sam Altman to Twitter headquarters. Here's what happens when they have a showdown over how OpenAI became closed, and it'll all be chronological. And then I'll do a rough draft in which I weave it into a story making a point not to use transition sentences. This is something I learned at Time Magazine, which is transition sentences lock you into a certain order of paragraphs, whereas if it got an integrity to it, you don't need the transition sentence, but it also allows you to move the paragraphs around.

And so I write in a rough way without transitions, then I reorder the paragraphs. And then as if I were Leonardo, although I'm not as good as Leonardo, I put another layer of refinement, of finishing, of gloss onto it and then read it out loud, print it out on paper because it reads different on paper than on the screen, read it out loud on paper, let my wife read it, and then do one more round of polishing.

Walter Isaacson interviewed about 100 different people for the book: Musk's friends, family and colleagues, and a smattering of detractors or frenomies. It was a massive undertaking, and it's those interviews that inform everything until 2021 when Isaacson set out to be Musk's ever-present shadow.

I did the first half of the book first, wrote it all the way through, getting me up to the point where I'm riding alongside Musk. Now that I'm not there in 27, 2018, when he's smoking dope on the Joe Regan show. I'm not in the studio. I'm happily ensconced in Jennifer Doudin's biotech lab or something. And then I had the stuff that was unfolding at the time and me being there as it's happening. I kept that in this big chronological set of notes and waited to start writing it until pretty much I had done most of the reporting. I was putting the finishing touches six weeks before it got published in September.

When do you know when you're done? I mean, like in the middle of your story, he bought Twitter. How far do you need to see that through before you feel like, Okay.

It's done? I felt I needed to make sure that you understood Musk fully. So that whatever happens five years from now, this book still explains who he is because even though there are multiple Musk personalities, it's not like he changes in essence. But there were moments as the book was finishing where I get up in the morning and just turn on my phone, Is it still there? Was it like the rocket ship did it blow up? So, yeah, I held my breath a couple of times, but I began to see that it had come to a good logical conclusion.

There are some stories about Musk that have been repeated so many times, often without supporting details, that they become slogans for his critics or his supporters. Musk is the Cion of an emerald mine or no, Musk came from nothing. Musk founded Tesla or he just bought it from some other guys who did. Part of Isaacson's task was winding his way back through these layers of Musk lore. There are people who have extremely strong views of Musk, and they're often based on stories that get told over and over again. Did you start the book knowing those stories and wanting to delve into them? Did you keep tabs on the perceptions that people have and you were trying to play against those or you were trying to block out.

That type of- Oh, I knew all the disputes. Whether or not he deserved to be called a co-founder of Tesla. That's a big one. Whether or not his father had an emerald mind. And you know what? There's not an exact one sentence answer, but there's a maybe two-paragraph answer on the emerald mind and the fact that his father didn't have an ownership stake but did for a while get a supply of emeralds from a mine that was in Zambia, not in South Africa, and then it went bankrupt. So he had money for a while, but then the business collapses. That's not as easy or as fun of a hot take of he's an emerald mine heir or he didn't own an emerald mine.

But at the same time, he did invest in Musk's first company and his mom gave him some money.

There was a - There was a very, I can't remember, but but - was like like 10, 20, -10,000. $10,000.

They did support him. The part of the story that's like he had a little leg up because his family could give him some money to start a company. There's a nugget there.

That's- A A And I I both the starting of the company, but also basically running away to Canada when he's 17. And he arrives with virtually no money. He has a couple of thousand dollars of traveler check, which he loses on a bus. He ends up student loans. So it's not as if he gets there and has like Benjamin Franklin, only three coins in his his pocket, he also doesn't have have pockets of emeralds, and he's not a trust fund kid. So that just shows that this knee-jerk, all or nothing, that he had huge sums of money in his his when he came or he was totally... No, life is a bit more complex. And I try to show just the truth, the exact number he had and what that did and what it didn't do.

The Tesla origin story is that's something that that I heard about, knew very little about, and it's very messy. It takes a long time to go through actually how they ended at the point of who's a founder and who's not a founder of Tesla.

If something's a big success, all of a a everybody remembers, Hey, that was my idea, or, Hey, they stole that idea from me. And so the story is not a one sentence answer, but it's a pretty fast moving, a hope chapter. Martin Martin and Mark Tarpany having tried to start a a company. Had no money and no employees, but they had the name Tesla that they had had registered. J. Straubel, who was also creating a battery company and trying to do AC AC propulsion. Then Musk, who puts in the money, puts all these groups together, becomes the chairman and funds it. So in the end, who gets to be called the founder? Well, boy, they fight over it. I mean, it's just so brutal. They hate each other. I mean, if you you Mark Mark name, he gets mad mad and versa. And it went to court. And in the end, the court said, Here are five people who equally have the rights to call themselves co-founders of Tesla. Once again, I got no dog in this hunt. I tell you the story, and I try to do it step by step. Who does what?

And you demystify things, you debunk certain myths, and you also don't fall into the cortex of all these controversies. I love.

The detail that they actually did have a nondisparagement agreement as part of the court case, but.

They just just violated it. Couldn't help themselves. I mean, these are guys, even when they're talking to me, I have signed a nondisparagement. But he's an asshole. He's lying.

And one of the guys even says, I don't understand. He's the richest man in the world. Martin Martin Martin Abahard says, He's the richest man in the world. Why does he have to keep talking about it? He has everything.

Why did you do this? Yeah, I would think they're asking, Musk, why are you so mad about Martin Martin Why does it eat away at you so much? And he would say, This guy tried to take the credit. Credit. And the end, you don't understand Musk if you don't understand why Musk is so obsessed by these things.

After the break, Isaacson recounts how he maintains access even as he's divulging embarrassing details his subjects don't want the world to know. 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 former power power 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.

He said to me, You don't need to take care of them for not doing something to pain you or something like like I said, No, what what are 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 said Yeah.

I'm thinking murder in a minute.

I think that's what he was thinking too. From Tenderfoot TV, TV, Media, and iHeart Podcasts, Radical is available now. Listen to the new podcast, Radical, for for free 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 renowned broadcaster 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, events, pop 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 what 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.

It's one thing to be able to tell the story, but to tell it, you have to have it. You have to not only show up in the right places at the right times, lingering long enough that people might even forget why you're there, but you also need an eye for the details and an ear for the the that combined to create the story. Something Isaacson learned decades ago working at Time Magazine.

The very first story I wrote as a political reporter for for involved the Ronald Reagan campaign, and I was covering it. I had gotten to know one of his advisors on the airplane trips, a guy named Mike Diever. One day, Reagan is giving giving stomp speech, and he's spouting off all these these things. Just just that trees cause pollution, that typical Reagan things, welfare queen stories or whatever. And I look at Mike Diever who's standing next to me, and he's shaking his head, and he says, I don't know, where did he get those facts? We always try to correct him. He, of course, thought he was just talking to me, but I'm a journalist. So the end of the week, the story comes out, and it leads with Mike Diever saying to me, He's making all this up. It's so frustrating. Where Where did get those facts? Well, I thought that was going to be the end of all my access. Stunningly, I get on the campaign plane for the next trip, and I get called to the front of the plane. And Deverdre sits me next to Ronald Reagan. Suddenly, they knew who I was.

They paid attention. It was as if by swatting him, I mean, I just told the truth. It's like, Oh, okay, this is a guy to be be reckoned with. And was another of those lessons that if you have access, they respect you more, not less, if you use it to try to tell the truth even in ways they may not like.

With Musk, that access meant logging miles in the ground, on the factory floor, and many more in the air. Granted, it was on Musk's private jet. Not exactly the the 1980s reporting Isaacson came up on.

I'm very good at sleeping on airplanes. I learned that when I covered the 1980 presidential presidential I was really young, just coming out of the Times, Picking in New New and joined Time magazine. They put me on the Ted Kennedy campaign, which was a relentless campaign in a small charter plane. I learned to fall asleep instantly because it was the only time time get sleep. But when I was traveling with Musk, you'd get on the plane. Plane. And, course, you couldn't sleep because it was the one time when he would just be there, free associating. I never tried to bother him when he was thinking. I'd just be there, alert, during the entire plane ride, three, four four hours, and I'd just say one or two words words Cybertruck. Cybertruck. And talk about his autistic son, son, saying the future should look like the future and how he had changed the design. But you just prompt him with a word or two and let him reassociate. I didn't do any truly formal interviews where you're just sitting across from somebody with a notebook. I would just let him talk as we walked along an assembly line or let him talk during the airplane ride.

Ride. And he'd have 15 minutes between meetings. They knew to schedule that, where he'd be in an intense meeting, say, about Optimist, the Robot. And then in the same conference room, they might do another meeting about battery cells and what the anode and cathode should be made of. But there'd always be 10 or 15 minutes between them. And at first, I thought maybe I should step out because he used that private time to do emails. Sometimes I'd fire up Twitter to see if he was tweeting while I was sitting in the room with him. Sometimes he'd play video games. But then he would look up at some some point, I would do something we, in New Orleans, always do at dinner. I'd say, Tell me a story. I'd say, Tell me the story of the 2018 surge at the Fremont factory. Tell me the story of when you went on Joe Regan. Tell me the story of when you did that tweet about calling a British cave diver a pedophile. It wouldn't be a a question. It was always prefaced with, Tell me the story. And sometimes he'd be be with, have been working with him for a long time.

So in some ways, my role was not to interview him, but to extract stories and buy my time. And the great luxury of having two years and almost indefinite amounts of time with him is you could go back to it later and say, say, Tell again about that story of where you're looking at the toy at your desk. The difficult thing with Musk is that sometimes he'd recount things, but his memory wasn't perfect. That's true of all of us, but but everything with Musk, it's more so with him. He could embellish or whatever. I often would have to go to five or six people. I'd have to go to Mark Ginkgoza and say, Tell me the story about when he fired everybody at at put you in charge and you redesigned the Starlink satellite to make it simpler. I'd have Musk tell the story, and I'd have Musk's assistant who was there tell the story. Sometimes you get Kimbo to tell the story. Story. And so the book, I'm very careful to say, hear all the sources. I warned Musk. I said, You're going to read the the and the stories are not going to be exactly the way you remembered them because other people remember them differently.

And he said, I know that's the case. I know that the stories may not be the way I remembered them. And even nowadays, I talked to to Kimbo, after the book came out, said, I think the book is really good. It's not always the way I remember it. But then I looked at your sources, and I realized you were talking to a lot of people.

You said that came off the trail in in the summer of 2023, I know you've described how you did get called back by him for for some reporting. But before that, what you thought was your last day, was that a day that you had designated where you said, I'm going to close my notebook at the end of this day, and that's it?

Early in 2023, I realized I had enough material that you could understand Musk. I had enough stories. Whatever he did in the future, you'd get him. I looked for what should be the culmination of the book. Book. I really want it to be Twitter and it pottering along and also messing up moderation because I think that's not a big deal for him. The big deal was space travel. I knew that he was going to do the launch of Starship in Boca Chica. I'd been there for the surges over the course of 2022, where they stacked it and unstacked it and tested its 33 Raptor engines and fixed all the valves. I said, I I think will be the culminating scene in the book.

This takes us back to that opening scene from our first episode, where the Starship Rocket makes lift off, but then goes off course, and they have to blow it up over the ocean.

I remember talking to my editor and to my wife a few hours later, and they had watched this on television. They said, Oh, my my God, does this do to the end of this book? I said, It's a perfect metaphor. We know Starship is going to to launch We know at some point it's going to get to orbit. But I wanted to have a scene that was somewhat somewhat of him being determined, of him being visionary, of him having taken too many risks and blown up a rocket, and him being with people who had worked with him for 20 years, but also being alone no matter who was hugging him: his girlfriend, his mother, his son, and him just staring at that little red dot of Mars. I know it sounds like I'm embellishing a bit, but it was rising in the sky. I'm thinking, All right, there's a lot of smoldering rubble, but if anybody's going to get us to Mars, it's this guy. It's not as if I absolutely respect everything about Musk, but I do respect the fact that he's worth writing about because he's having this enormous impact.

You're very comfortable holding that tension in your head.

Those of us who are biographers have to be able to create characters that we hold many things in our minds about them. I'm very comfortable holding that tension ahead. I'm very uncomfortable with the fact that as a society, we've lost the ability to hold that in our heads. We either canonize or demonize somebody in 140 characters. We used to be able able to to go back to Shakespeare, that even the best are molded out of their flaws. That's true of our historical figures, and it's true of of Musk.

There is also a question, though, embedded in the we there that goes back to this time news week, Walter Cronkite. Is it possible that approach, the dismissive approach, that always existed, their voice just wasn't included in the that we, that was balancing out positive and negative negative Yes.

I think you're right. There's often a mainstream consensus that leaves a lot of people out of forming that consensus. And so often the reputations of complex people are not just about them, but they're a mirror that's reflecting ourselves. And it tells us a lot about ourselves at any given time. And as you say, say different people will have different views of it. This is why I can write a book about Ben Franklin, even though maybe maybe a books have been written about Ben Franklin, because every person in every period probably does well to try to paint their own view of what he was like. I think history is painted in many layers. I think I give you unvarnished what I I the good, the bad, and the the ugly, I know that that's not the final word. I know that a century from now, people will figure out the historic significance of an Elon Musk. They'll probably be using some of the stories of my book to prove whatever case for against them they want to use. But each of us gets to write a subsequent draft of our time.

Or a Sentient AI will just be writing it like they're writing the history of the Doto bird or some some extinct creature.

It be interesting to know what a generative large language model will do when they can read every biography of Musk. And you say, was Musk a good guy or a bad guy? I think that simple question will flummix even the most sophisticated AI.

Coming up on the final episode of On Musk with Walter Isaacson, we weigh up Musk's legacy. What should we take away from on Musk? We ask Isaacson to answer his critics, try to suss out how this portrait will age, and surface some stories from the book everyone seems to have ignored.

They kick him out. And for 20 years, it's eating away at at which is why, of course, he wants to buy Twitter. 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 that's why I just didn't believe him. And I'm not sure he believed himself. 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. I would love it if he would lie for like a year, but he ain't going to do that.

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 by Jacobs, assisted 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 Oz Waleishan, Costas Linos, and Cate Osborne. Special thanks to Bob Pitman, Pitman, Byrne, Will Pierson, Nicky Nicky Etore, Lieberman, Nathan Nathan Ali Gavin, and the folks at at who let us use their beautiful studio in New Orleans. If you like stories about writers and their process, us. 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.

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