Transcript: The Man Who Followed Elon Musk Everywhere: 7 Elon Secrets! – Walter Isaacson

It just seems like the most obvious place because it’s the foundation of people and those fingerprints seem to remain on them as adults. When you look at Elon’s childhood, do you spot things that are the reason he is the man he is today?

WALTER ISAACSON: Absolutely. But let me step back and talk about almost all the people I’ve written about who are disruptors, they tend to have had childhoods in which they were misfits, starting with Leonardo da Vinci, who I wrote about. He grew up in a small village. He was left handed, illegitimate. His father doesn’t legitimate him. He was gay, he was distracted. And so he has demons driving him as he runs away from the village of Vinci to go to Florence.

And you can go all the way through Albert Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany. Steve Jobs having been adopted and adoptive family didn’t take to him and he moves on to another one.

For Elon Musk, it was particularly brutal. He grew up in South Africa as a scrawny kid on the autism spectrum. So he had no social input, output skills. He was no friends and he was beaten up quite often. But the scars from that were minor compared to what happened when he went home after being beaten up. Once he was in the hospital for four days. But he gets home and his father makes him stand in front of him for two hours while the father tells him he’s a loser and that it was his fault and takes the side of the kid who beat up Elon.

And so it’s one of the oldest tropes in mythology, which is the aspiring young superhero fighting the dark side of the force and finding out Darth Vader is his father, having to overcome those demons. I think most of us, I mean, you have a very interesting background yourself, from Botswana to Manchester to here in London. I think most of us have things that drive us and sometimes there’s some demons from childhood. But the question is whether you harness those demons or those demons harness you. And in Elon Musk’s case, the answer is both.

The Dark Side and Light Side of Greatness

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you find that that’s nearly always the case, that those demons create both your… As Tim Grover said to me, Tim Grover was the coach for Michael Jordan Kobe, and he speaks to everybody having a dark side and a light side and they have a two way relationship with each other. They typically come from the same place. So he’d speak to Michael Jordan’s greatness coming from the same place that his dark side came from.

WALTER ISAACSON: And you’ve just described the entire theme of the Elon Musk book, which is darkness and lightness woven together, each coming from the same place, sometimes driving people crazy, sometimes driving them to do things they didn’t think they’d be able to do.

And you want to take out the dark strands of Elon Musk, the “demon mode,” as his girlfriend Grimes calls it, where he just truly gets cold and in a very bad place. But if you take out those strands, maybe you don’t have Elon Musk at the end, because the dark and the light all come from the same roots.

Shakespeare, as usual, said it best: “Even the best are molded out of faults.” And indeed, that’s what you’re talking about, whether it’s Michael Jordan or Kobe or Elon Musk.

The Complex Relationship with His Father

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does Elon think of his father? Did you speak to him directly about him?

WALTER ISAACSON: Yes. He doesn’t speak to his father anymore, of course, and it’s very brutal relationship, but I spoke to his father.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You did?

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, for quite a long time, and still he’s in contact with me. It took a year of traveling around with Elon Musk before I could get him to open up about his father. And that’s why a biography done the way Boswell did with Dr. Johnson, and in a much smaller way I tried to do with Elon Musk or Steve Jobs is important because you’re not just doing a few interviews. You’re just with them day in, day out.

And after a year, every now and then say, “Tell me about your childhood. Tell me about your dad.” And he’d just stare blankly and be not wanting to speak. And then one day, we were actually on this plane flying to California from Texas, and once again, I just… It was very quiet. Finally said, “Tell me about your dad.” It was about the 20th time I’d asked him. He must have been silent for 2 minutes, 3 minutes. I didn’t say a word. And then it started coming out, the stories of childhood.

And so, yeah, he’s still rattled by the memory of it. His father has had two children by a young woman that he had raised as a stepdaughter. And so that really messed up Elon’s mind.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Elon’s father raised a stepdaughter and then…

WALTER ISAACSON: Had two kids with the stepdaughter. Yes. And so there’s… And he’s talked about it. Errol Musk also is an astonishingly good engineer who gave many good things in childhood. He was at times successful, at times less so.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Errol is his father.

WALTER ISAACSON: Errol is the father. But he also instilled some of these demons. So it’s the most complex relationship. Barack Obama begins one of his memoirs by saying, “I think every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of his father.” And Obama says, “In my case, it’s both.” Well, in Elon’s case, it’s both.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what did you learn, if anything, from speaking to Elon’s father.

WALTER ISAACSON: I learned that he was like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the Stevenson novel. In other words, he could be a brilliant doctor but then he’d snap into these demon like modes and Mr. Hyde and hardly remember when he would snap back out and became Dr. Jekyll. Hardly remember what happened. And that multiple personality was very much what Elon Musk himself says. “Yes, I go through these things.” Well, guess what? You see that in Elon Musk.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Based on what you saw in some of the resilient leaders that you’ve followed. If your job was to create a really resilient child, what would you do to the child?

The Risk-Taking Generation

WALTER ISAACSON: You know, that’s such an interesting question. And those of us who have children in this day and age, I think we can’t help but coddling them too much. I watch the way Elon was raised in South Africa where his father gave him a motorcycle when he was 11 or 12 years old. And driving, going around he would almost free reign be that way Elon would, he could walk or go wherever he wanted, get beaten up and his parents weren’t hovering.

Well, likewise I watch Elon who has 10 surviving children. And Elon is deeply committed to those children. He’s almost obsessed by them. And yet especially with Little X, I don’t know if you’ve seen the three year old kid who is always in the pictures with Elon. Like if you see a picture of Elon at the F1, he’s always holding, I’d be there at night, they’d be doing a solar roof installation at midnight and Musk would be in hyperdrive getting all the equipment and telling people what to do because Musk loved to be hands on.

And I’d watch Little X playing amid the cables and heavy equipment and my instincts are like, go grab this kid and make sure he’s safe. But I think that Musk, I remember when they shot off Starship this largest rocket ever for the first test, which went well for about three minutes. And afterwards we’re sitting down in South Texas at the launch pad behind it and having drinks in their fire pits.

And Elon is there with his mother Maye, his girlfriend Grimes, and Little X. And X is playing in a fire pit, just putting things in and putting, and my instincts are go grab the kid. And Musk says to me, “When I was a kid they used to say don’t play with matches. So I got a box of matches and I played with him behind a tree.” And it was his way of saying, I’m going to let X continue to do that.

And Maye Musk said, “I think it’s one generation of risk seekers training the next.” So maybe we should allow our kids to be a little bit more risk taking as opposed to hovering the way my wife and I do.

The Impact of Childhood Adversity

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I was reading in your book about how when Elon’s parents got a divorce when he was young, that meant that Elon’s mother, who was taking care of him, had to then go and get a job, which left Elon at home alone.

WALTER ISAACSON: Right. That’s what I’m saying. He was pretty much home. Maye’s mother had three jobs at times, and she’s a great person, but she wasn’t somebody who doted and worried every moment of the day. And so she was often not around. And divorced from his father at one point.

Elon, as a very young teenager, decides to move back in with his father, which is psychologically even now, Maye says “I why did he do that?” And Kimbal, his brother, says “He associates pain with love.” And Elon Musk says to me, “Adversity shaped me. It made me who I am.” So there’s a part of Elon Musk that loves drama and rushing into the fire.

STEVEN BARTLETT: He associates pain with love. From your observations, do you believe that regardless of whether it’s healthy or not, we tend to seek out the environment of our childhood when we’re older because familiarity is almost sometimes seems to be more important to us than whether it’s healthy?

WALTER ISAACSON: You know, that’s a brilliant observation, which is because certainly with Elon Musk, he’s almost always trying to recreate the drama, the turmoil of his childhood in apartheid South Africa, seeing people killed and having an abusive, psychologically abusive father.

And I think we’re all different. I’m personally somebody had a pretty nice childhood. My parents are the sweetest, nicest smartest people I’ve ever known. And I grew up in New Orleans and still go back there, still live with about eight blocks from where I was born and see the kids I went to kindergarten with. And I love going back to that magical, we call it the green trees of our childhood.

But it’s also why I’m not driven. I’m not as a disruptor the way Jobs and Musk are. I’m a little bit more suited to being amused and watching disruptors. So my role is a little bit more as an observer. You’ve been both. You’ve been an observer on this podcast or on TV, but you’re also a person in the arena by starting companies.

I was in the arena quite a while. I ran CNN during the Gulf War and it was a pretty intense thing to do. But in some ways I’m not as suited to running into fire and turmoil as Elon Musk is. And when the time came and the Gulf War was over, I decided I’d rather write books and have a go back to New Orleans.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So do you. You did touch on this earlier, but I just, it just came back to mind again. Do you think that these individuals who are most able to deal with running into the fire are those that were raised in the fire?

WALTER ISAACSON: It’s not a one to one correlation. As people sometimes when they’re arguing with me they’ll say, “Oh look, there are people with really bad childhoods who become totally ne’er do wells and you know, never amount to anything. And there are people with really wonderful childhoods who are very, very driven.”

I think though it may not be a one to one correlation, but it’s certainly a non zero correlation that having something to prove coming out of childhood and having demons to harness tends to drive you a bit more.

Academic Performance and Focus

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that surprised me in your book was that you said Elon was a good student, but not fantastic.

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, even in South Africa and at boys school. And then when he goes to college, his SATs are fine, but you know, they’re not all 800s, which is the scale we use in the US for a college admissions test. But he had an intense focus, so when he focused on something he would be awesomely smart.

Problem is, he doesn’t like things that don’t interest him. So when he had to learn Afrikaans in school and he flunks it, or when he has to learn certain things, but when it came to engineering, especially material science, he could focus like a laser on, and I mean that figuratively, but on the properties of materials or engineering problems.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I heard that when he discovered the computer, that was another example of that, that insane focus. He taught himself to code in a computer.

WALTER ISAACSON: Sure. I mean he grew up at that time that I can remember, and you can’t. Where computers suddenly pop up, you can have your own computer. And that’s one of the things Steve Jobs and Bill Gates brought us to, which is, oh, a computer you can actually plug in and have at home and code on.

Well, he got one and taught himself C and I think maybe Pascal, and at age 12 or 13 coded his own video game called Blastar, which he published. And he becomes addicted to two things. One is computers and two his video games.

Mother’s Recognition of Genius

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you spoke to his mother quite a lot.

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, still do. She’s very much around.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does she think of him at that age when he’s 11, 12, did she think he was a genius?

WALTER ISAACSON: Yes. She, for better or worse, was not a doting mother, was not somebody hovering all the time, but was when Elon was five or six years old, she decided he was a genius and used to fight with the schools when the schools would sometimes say he’s not doing well in school and he’d be distracted. He’s always looking out of the window and staring blankly.

And she would say, “Because he’s a genius and you’re not challenging him enough.” And I think she still feels he’s a genius.

Can You Choose to Be Like Elon?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think if someone wanted to be like Elon Musk, they could choose to be?

WALTER ISAACSON: No. There’s certain types of curiosity and drive that we can will ourselves to being. I’ve written about Benjamin Franklin, for example. Benjamin Franklin was very wise, but he’s probably not the smartest of the founders and I don’t mean that in a disparaging way, but you have Hamilton and Jefferson and people are really brilliant.

What you have in Franklin is somebody who’s purely curious, always open to new ideas and unbelievably observant. Well, we can all push ourselves to be that way more, but can we push ourselves to be Einstein and no, we can’t. And for Musk, he has a certain intensity that I think that even if you drank 50 cups of coffee and, you know, you put an electric volt prod in the back of your head, that focus and maniacal intensity and sense of urgency is something that’s not instilled in most of us.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think it’s a trauma response of sorts?

WALTER ISAACSON: It’s a trauma response. It’s also, and the book is, got a lot, you know, of pain. You know, it’s. You can’t have a one sentence, here’s why. But you start in childhood with the trauma. You also start with a guy who’s on the autism spectrum, talks about having Asperger’s, as he calls it.

And that means he doesn’t have good input output signals for emotional. He doesn’t have good emotional human receptors. But he does have this intense focus almost in a geek like way on certain engineering or mathematical or coding issues. I think everything from his hard wiring to his childhood and upbringing help make somebody who’s addicted to turmoil, who has a maniacal intensity of focus and also has multiple personality mood swings.

Physics and Business Education

STEVEN BARTLETT: He ends up leaving South Africa and studies physics and business at the same time. And I thought it was so fascinating that the reason why he took up business, which is quite rare for someone to do physics and business.

WALTER ISAACSON: I think he said he didn’t want to end up working for somebody who studied business and didn’t understand the science. And he felt that if he didn’t understand the business side, he’d end up having to work for somebody else.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s almost the first evidence of like. Well, not the first evidence, but it’s again, evidence of his first principle thinking in place.

First Principles Thinking

WALTER ISAACSON: Yes, you know, first principle thinking is key to frame that doesn’t know. And first principles thinking is, whenever you’re faced with a problem, you just go back to the very basic physics of it. Not all the rules and regulations and not all the metaphors you may have saying, “Here’s the way to do things.” But you first off say, there are no rules, there’s no regulations, there’s no protocols except for the laws of physics. Everything else is just a recommendation.

And to give you a concrete example, when he decides that he wants to send people into space as a young guy, at first he goes to Russia to see if he can buy used rockets and they jack him around, doesn’t work. And on the plane flight home, he says, “Let me go to first principles thinking, exactly how much is the cost of each material in a rocket? How much is the inconel, how much is the carbon fiber? How much is the fuel? And then how much is the total cost of a rocket compared to the cost of each of the components?”

And that’s first principles thinking, which is, I get it. If I can. I know the material cost, but if I can reduce by a factor of 10 the manufacturing cost, then I can make a rocket. And so somebody will tell them, “Hey, we need to have this patch or this piece of felt in the bottom of a Tesla?” And he’d say, “Tell me what the physics of the principles of physics that make that true are.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: When he’s pursuing first principles, what is he trying to get around and past, that frustrates him.

WALTER ISAACSON: Regulations, rules, people who won’t take risks. He says that the US was a nation of risk takers. Whether you came on the Mayflower, you came across a Rio Grande, or you came from Eastern Europe fleeing oppression. Your family took risks.

But now we’ve got more regulators than we have risk takers. We have more referees and people building guardrails and lawyers telling you “That’s probably not a good idea.” Then we have people willing to shoot off a rocket. And I think by going back to first principles, he wants to be able to not only calculate risk, but take risk more than most people would.

Comparison with Steve Jobs

STEVEN BARTLETT: Was Steve Jobs the same in that regard?

WALTER ISAACSON: Steve Jobs was not focused on hardware engineering in the same way Wozniak was his partner. But, yes, Jobs had a particular phrase, very famous now, which was “Think different.” And when Steve Jobs went back to Apple after his sort of like Sam Altman, you know, come and go, come and go, it took Steve Jobs a decade, not a weekend, to do it.

He wrote an ad for Apple, and it had pictures of Einstein and other disruptive intellectuals. And it said, “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the round pegs in the square hole, the ones who think different.” And then it ends by saying, “Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” And that was Steve Jobs way of thinking. And it also describes Elon Musk.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you seen moments yourself when you were following him where he was confronted by someone who had a default to telling him why things couldn’t happen and why they couldn’t be done?

The Server Farm Incident: Musk’s Extreme Problem-Solving

WALTER ISAACSON: Oh, absolutely. I mean, there’s like 20 to 30 times in the book where he goes ballistic. I’ll tell you a fun one, which is just last Christmas, not too long ago, he was at Twitter headquarters, and he looks at all the engineering things, and they have three server farms, one in Portland, one in Sacramento, and one, I think, in Atlanta.

And he does the calculus in his head, and he said, “We don’t really need three different redundant server farms.” And the engineers say, “Well, yes, we do, because we need backups and we need caching.” And he says, “No, you’re not going back to first principle thinking.” Anyway, he decides they should get rid of the servers in Sacramento.

Well, they say, “Fine, but that’ll take six months.” And he said, “No, you can do it in six weeks.” And I’m sitting there in the meeting, and he’s getting really dark, and they don’t know how to deal with him because this is like a month after he took over Twitter. So they don’t know this dude.

And they’re saying, “Well, no, I’m sorry, Elon, we can’t do it.” And he’d say, “You can do it in six weeks.” And by the end of the meeting, he said, “You can do it in six days.” It gets really dark and he decides he’s going to fire them. But it’s December 23rd, so it’s like two days before Christmas. He does fire them.

But the next day, Christmas Eve, he’s flying from San Francisco to Austin, Texas, to go home for Christmas. He’s with two young cousins on the plane who are engineers. And one of them says, “Why don’t we just take those servers out ourselves?”

Elon Musk makes a U-turn in his airplane, tells the pilot to go to Sacramento. They were already over Nevada. They land, he rents a truck, a sort of U-Haul truck rental truck. And they go to the server facility and the guard there is flummoxed. It’s Christmas Eve, and they’re forcing their way in, and they’re looking at the servers.

And one of the engineers says, “Well, you know, we can’t take them out because we need engineers to take off these elevated floors.” And Musk turns to his bodyguard and says, “Do you got a pocket knife?” The guy goes, “Yeah.” And he takes a pocket knife and pulls up one of the vents, rips up the floor thing, goes underneath the floor panel with a set of wire cutters that he got from Home Depot and cuts the cable to the servers, and they start moving them out and put him in the U-Haul truck.

And this is Musk. And by the way, it’s typical of Musk because it works fine for a few days, then you could see the service getting a bit degraded, but then eventually it comes back and he says, “You got to take risks. If you’re not causing 20% of the problems from the risks you take, you’re not taking enough risks.” But there it is. And they got rid of that server farm in Sacramento.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What happens to the people that Musk works with when they see that case study that in that moment when he presented that they could do it in six weeks, and it turns out he was right, that it could be done quicker? Is that what sort of galvanizes them?

WALTER ISAACSON: Totally. And about 20 to 30% of the people who work with him can go march through fire with him that way and realize what he can do. But it’s why 80% of the people who worked at Twitter when he took it over are gone. But it’s tough to work with him.

There’s another scene in the book where on a late Friday night, he’s down in the southern tip of Texas where they have the launch pad for Starbase. And it’s a Friday night after 10pm and he looks at the launch pad area and says, “Why are there only three or four people working?”

And this poor guy, Andy Krebs, nice tall southern young engineer, says, “Well, it’s a Friday night and we don’t have any launches scheduled.” And Musk goes dark on him and says, “I want tomorrow 100 people working. I want them to come from California, Florida, get them in here, and we’re going to stack this rocket, even though we’re not planning to launch anytime soon. But we’re going to have what’s called a surge.”

And they fly people in, people sleeping on the ground, on the floors to do this surge. And Andy Krebs survives it and does pretty well, but eventually he quits. He says, “Man, I have a kid. I just can’t keep going through these things with Elon.”

And so that’s in the book. About three weeks ago, I was in Los Angeles and talking about the book, and I see this tall guy I recognize coming up after the speech, Andy Krebs. I said, “What’s happened?” He said, “Well, as you know, I quit and I came back to Los Angeles and I got a much easier job. But I decided I’d rather be burned out than bored. And I’ve asked Elon if I could come back because I don’t want to miss working for SpaceX.”

The Twitter Acquisition and Political Evolution

STEVEN BARTLETT: So interesting, the acquisition of Twitter. Twitter was very much the antithesis of the Musk approach totally.

WALTER ISAACSON: And he had become, over the past three or four years, he’s edged from being what I would call a center left, somebody who donated to Obama and voted for Biden, to somebody who has become, I think, far too worked up about what he calls the woke mind virus. You know, the progressive mindset that he sees in colleges and in schools. Multiple reasons, which I go through in the book.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s the most important reason?

WALTER ISAACSON: The most personal reason is he had five older children, teenagers surviving, one died in infancy, and the oldest of them was named Xavier after his favorite character in the X-Men comics. And Xavier transitions and sends a note about three years ago saying, “I’m transitioning. My name is now Jenna and don’t tell my father.”

Now he gets his head around the fact that she transitioned and he loves her, but she becomes very anti-capitalist, very woke, hates all billionaires, thinks capitalism is theft, and rejects him and changes her last name and this causes him an enormous amount of pain.

And he partly blames it on Los Angeles. There’s this very progressive school she went to called Crossroads. And that was one of about seven or eight factors that led to this political evolution, where he felt the progressive left was overdoing COVID lockdowns, was overdoing gender ideology questions.

In some ways, it echoed his father, who was also somewhat conspiratorial in his thinking and didn’t believe in vaccines or Dr. Fauci. And it’s a weird evolution that we still see reverberating in the waters of Twitter today.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You say that it caused him a tremendous amount of pain, that Xavier transitioned and is now a woman. How’d you know that it caused him pain?

WALTER ISAACSON: Well, he said so. And he’s easy to read, even though he doesn’t read people’s emotions well. I mean, he will say, “Nothing has caused me more pain,” he says this outright, “than his daughter rejecting him. Not transitioning, but just totally rejecting him, other than the death of his first child in infancy.”

His first child died, and he gets very dark. And, you know, you talk to his sister, you talk to his brother or his brother’s wife, they say that’s the thing that’s caused him enormous personal pain. And he says so.

The Twitter Distraction

STEVEN BARTLETT: Going back to when he acquired Twitter, I, as a great fan of what Elon has achieved and the service that he’s sort of served humanity with some of these companies like Tesla and SpaceX. I was really hoping he didn’t buy the company because I thought it would just be a great distraction from really important, other things.

WALTER ISAACSON: Bingo.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Really important, other things.

WALTER ISAACSON: 100%.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You were there, right at the time I was there.

WALTER ISAACSON: So I’m sitting. He had just opened Giga Texas, which is the largest factory manufacturing things. It’s a Tesla factory in Austin, Texas, on the mezzanine. Factory’s not even open yet. I guess this is April 2022. And he tells me that he still needs more drama in his life. He can’t accept the fact that he’s now become the richest person on Earth. He’s person of the Year for Financial Times and Time. He sent up 33 rockets that year that landed safely and were reused.

And yet he says, “Okay, I’m buying Twitter.” And his brother, his son Griffin, were all his friends. Three or four friends. Is like, “Is this a good idea? Aren’t you going to be distracted?” And everybody is sort of trying to talk him out of it. I’m not, because I’m just taking notes I’m just the observer, but I’m thinking, “Boy, this is a bad idea.”

Not simply because it’ll be a distraction, but because you don’t have. I’m thinking of Musk. He doesn’t have emotional, human, emotional awareness. And so I asked him, “Why are you doing it?” He said, “Well, it’s a product problem. They need better engineering. They haven’t put any new features in. They don’t have full motion video. So it’s an engineering challenge.”

I’m thinking, “No, Twitter’s not an engineering product.” It’s an advertising medium. It’s supposed to gather eyeballs for advertisers in a friendly environment. And that’s not Elon’s specialty. So I think it was then and is now both a distraction and does not play to his strengths.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you see it at any point and do you believe it will hurt the trajectory of Tesla and SpaceX in any way, that acquisition?

WALTER ISAACSON: I think that it probably hurts his reputation, especially among more progressive people. It obviously is hurt, which means it probably has hurt Tesla sales. As for SpaceX, I don’t think it matters too much. He has been able to be intensely focused, including, I mean, just today while we’re taping this, I think he’s doing the 40th launch this year of the Falcon 9, sending up 20 more Starlink satellites. He launched Starship and got it all the way into space. They’re all 33 Raptor engines working. And he’s down there intensely focused.

So I think SpaceX is okay. I think Tesla will be okay, but it’d be better off if he weren’t. If A, he weren’t distracted by Twitter and B, if his reputation hadn’t become ten times more controversial, which is not great if you’re just trying to do a mass market car sales.

The Cultural Revolution at Twitter

STEVEN BARTLETT: When he went into Twitter, one of the very alarming things that he did was there was rumors that he called everyone up to the top floor and said, “This is going to be the new company culture. If you don’t like it…”

WALTER ISAACSON: Absolutely. I mean, I was there. I walked in with the day before he took over. He marches in and I think there’s a whole chapter in the book almost in the rapid change in corporate culture that happened. Something you’re very familiar with from companies you’ve dealt with, which is two extremes of doing a company.

One was the way Twitter was, which is nurturing and sweet and having yoga rooms and artisanal coffee bars. And when Musk walks in, they’re showing him how we have quiet spaces for people who need to get their mental energy restored. And they said “We value psychological safety.”

And Musk looked at me and kind of did his raspy laugh, says “Psychological safety? Screw that. An urgent intensity is our operating principle. Psychological safety is our enemy.” And so he turns it into a hardcore all-in environment where you have to say, “I’m all in. You’re going to work 24/7 some weekends. Because you’re all in.”

And he said, “I want a team that’s 20% of the size, but that’s an order of magnitude more intense and more all in.” And you’ve probably seen companies with your own eyes who are very nurturing, and you’ve seen companies in which everybody’s doing a hardcore all-in hackathon on a Saturday night. And he’s in the latter camp.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you believe? I often speak to large organizations that have cultural problems. They’re not innovative, they’re being eroded away by new market entrants, et cetera. And the problem they have is they can’t turn the ship around quickly enough before the innovation takes them out. Big companies that have 50,000 people. I’ve often. Because then I saw this Elon Musk approach to turning culture around, where you basically let off a grenade in the building.

WALTER ISAACSON: Totally.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you believe there’s merit in that? That approach?

The Price of Disruption

WALTER ISAACSON: Yes. But I also believe there’s a big old downside. And like everything with Elon Musk, including the shooting, the rockets, you get amazing things happen, but also rubble in the wake and damage in the wake and personal damage.

Tesla, he did that once. There’s a guy, John McNeil in the book, who was president of Tesla, another couple of people, they all say it, which is maybe that’s the price you have to pay if you want to be this disruptive. But is it a price that I want to pay? The answer is no. And maybe it’s too high of a price, causing so much emotional turmoil.

But there are people, including the guy Andy Krebs I told you about, who wants to go back to work at SpaceX, who like the challenge, who like the emotional turmoil.

I ran Time magazine. It was the good old days and it was about as wonderful of an environment. Even you would be in the clouds thinking about it. In the 1990s, we were rolling in money before the disruption of the Internet takes away the idea of a general interest paper magazine.

And we had. There was a drinks cart that would come around every day at 5 and make cocktails for all the writers. There was a roast beef carvery cart in the evenings, there were town cars that would take you out to your weekend houses. It was totally great. And that environment needed to be disrupted. But it was glorious when it happened.

Then I went to CNN and for a while the Gulf War know exactly what we’re doing. But once the Gulf War was over, CNN needed deep disruption. And I was not very good at being a disruptive leader. Firing like Elon Musk could 80% of the people. So sometimes CNN was one of those big old battleships, was as you said, lots of people working there. It probably needed a more disruptive leader than I was.

The Need for Speed in Modern Business

STEVEN BARTLETT: So interesting. So do you think that there’s a certain type of cultural approach that suits a certain type of company? Especially as we look at the world of AI and robotics and how things are going to be accelerating so quickly in technology. It seems to be the case that companies are going to need to disrupt themselves faster than ever. If you believe some of the forecasts about the future that people like Ray Kurzweil posit.

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah. And not only it used to be tech companies would have to be disruptive. But now if you’re an insurance company, if you’re a law firm, you know, if you’re a bank, the disruption is going to happen if you’re a health care company. So yeah, we’re going to have to be disruptive.

That doesn’t necessarily mean an all in intense hackathon work all weekend culture is necessary. I think it’s great to have corporate cultures in both sides. It’s like return to work after Covid. I’m not sure there’s exactly one answer. There’s some companies that say, “you know what? Remote working gets us really good people who can do better things.” And there are other people who say, “no, I got to have my people back in the office.” I think it’s good to experiment or not just experiment, but to have alternatives. Some people work better in some environments, some in others.

And you could also ask the question not just about corporate environments, but corporate leaders, which is what you discuss most of the time. Some corporate leaders have got to be Steve Jobs like or Bill Gates in the early days of Microsoft, or Bezos in the early days of Amazon or Musk, you know, basically assholes at times. But then some corporate leaders like Jennifer Doudna or even a Ben Franklin lead by being collaborative and inspiring and nice.

And I think the advice any CEO needs is the oldest piece of advice on this planet, maybe for humans, which is on the Oracle of Delphi Arts, which is just know thyself. And you got to know, here’s my approach and here’s where I feel most comfortable.

Leadership Styles: The Velvet Glove vs. The Iron Fist

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting, because I was just about to ask you which approach you think is generally more effective.

WALTER ISAACSON: But you know, for me, I couldn’t do the all in jerk, you know, asshole like approach. And there were times I needed to do that. And Jobs, Steve Jobs would say to me, it’s why you were never quite as good. But I also think that he would.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Say that to you.

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, he would say you. He called it velvet gloves. I’ve been on, I guess a metaphor. He said people like yourself, when you ran companies, you had velvet gloves on and you always trying to make people feel comfortable. He said, “for me, I got to make them feel uncomfortable. I have to make them feel challenged. I don’t have the luxury, I don’t have the luxury of tolerating B players and coddling them.”

So I know what type I am. But I think at times you can create a very creative place where people feel very comfortable and it allows great creativity to flourish. But I think you have to sometimes say, we got to be hardcore here, we’re being challenged.

I would also say it’s not just about the leader, it’s about the leadership team. If you’re going to make a good company, you have to make the right team. And when I ran CNN in time, I realized maybe I was a little bit too velvet gloved, as Steve Jobs would say. But I made sure in my leadership team there were people who had iron fists and could take Intel, a great company when it was founded.

And leadership team, you had to have Andy Grove. You had to have Bob Noyce, who was the nicest, friendliest CEO ever. He put his desk in the middle of the room and just loved, you know, people. You had to have somebody like Gordon Moore of Moore’s Law, who was a visionary, but you also, they have to bring in Andy Grove, who is really tough and gets the microchips out the door. And so every leadership team needs to have the hammer as well as the inspiring, nice guy.

The Danger of Wanting to Be Liked

STEVEN BARTLETT: Both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk did they. What was their view on being liked as a leader?

WALTER ISAACSON: Both of them told me that that could be a failing, that that could be a weakness, which is if you try too hard to be liked, you’re not going to be disruptive enough. And Musk even said empathy and collegiality can be your enemy. And Jobs told me, “you think you’re very empathetic and you care about other people’s feelings. But sometimes you take it too far and you do it out of vanity. You want people to like you. You care too much about whether the people working with you love you.” And he said, “that’s not the way to create a disruptive organization.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you agree with him?

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, I agree. I think I ran Time magazine just fine. We can ask other people, but. But with CNN, I sat there worrying about, I won’t name names, but these anchors on CNN who truly were problematic and yet I wanted them all to like me. And I was probably not tough enough.

But I also finally got to the know thyself, which is all right. This is not the job for me, because I’m better off trying to inspire teams that are friendly and collegial the way Jennifer Doudna, the way the heroine of my book, the code breaker, the one who helped invent CRISPR technology in her lab and in her companies, if they’re going to hire somebody new, even a graduate student to be in, you know, working with the pipettes and the test tubes, they make sure the whole team meets that person and then they all discuss, will this person fit in? Well, whereas. And that’s a culture that I can relate to.

But Elon Musk says no. I remember him yelling at some of his finance people who were friendly with some of the engineers and said, “no, collegiality is your enemy. You do not want them to like you. You’re there to challenge them. If they like you too much, you’re not doing your job.”

Love Him or Leave Him

STEVEN BARTLETT: But do Elon’s employees like him?

WALTER ISAACSON: Elon’s employees generally will walk through a wall for him. Those who have survived, whether it be Gwynne Shotwell or who is the president of SpaceX, or people at Mark John Kosa or the people at Tesla, like Drew Baglino or Franz von Holzhausen. But he burns out people pretty fast. So if he’s in an organization after a few years, maybe 20% are totally loyal and survive. But he’s not afraid of burning people out and having them leave.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sounds like they either love him or leave.

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, and as I say, sometimes with Andy Krebs, they love him, but then they leave. But then they come back. Some people truly want the challenge. As Steve Jobs said to Scully, the guy he hired to run Apple for a while, he was at Pepsi. He said, “do you want to make sugar water the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?”

And I’ve seen Musk talk to the people at SpaceX late at night, maybe midnight, where they’re all still working at the launch pad of the factory. And he’ll say, “I know how hard you’re working, but this is the most exciting job you could possibly have. It’s the most exciting, important job on Earth, which is getting people to Mars. Whatever is the second most exciting. You can’t even think of it what it is, because this is by far the most exciting thing you could be doing.”

And there are people who buy into that. And I could sit there watching the moon rise over the Gulf of Mexico and him saying that, and I could see why people buy into that. I could also see why some people say I’d rather have a wife and kids and get off Friday night at 5pm.

The True Believer

STEVEN BARTLETT: Does he believe it when he says that? And do typically people believe it when they hear it?

WALTER ISAACSON: When he first said to me that he had three missions to get humanity to Mars, to have sustainable energy on this planet and to make robots safe, I thought it was a type of pontification you do on podcasts like this one or pep talks for your team. But then I’d hear him say it over and over again and I’d hear him say it almost to himself as he walked around and saw something bad. And he said, “we’ll never get to Mars. We’ll never get.” And almost staring into the distance sometimes, he said, “we’ve got to get to Mars and we’ve got to. If we don’t do this, we’ll never get humanity tomorrow. We’ll never get the world to electric vehicles.” I totally think he believes it.

The Mars Mission

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why does he care so much about Mars?

WALTER ISAACSON: He believes in space faring. In other words, we have to be space adventurous for two or three reasons. One is he believes that human consciousness is rare and maybe unique. Then nowhere else in the universe do we know that there’s consciousness. And why? Because if consciousness existed somewhere else, it probably never became multiplanetary before the planet it was on got destroyed. It’s not something you and I wake up worrying about. But as a kid, as a 15 year old, he’s worried about the extinguishing of human consciousness if something happens to our planet.

Secondly, he says it’s the great adventure. We wake up every morning, we got all sorts of problems to worry about. There are more problems and Ukraine to the Middle east to Congress, to, you know, whatever it may be at Whitehall at the moment. But we have to have our vision set on some things that inspire us, that are truly make humans what they are. And there’s nothing more inspiring than the notion of being an adventurer, of going to new frontiers and the greatest new frontier is space.

So I think those are the reasons. It’s not because he wants to make money. If you decide you want to be the richest person on Earth, step one isn’t start a rocket company. So I think he believes in the mission.

Racing Against Time

STEVEN BARTLETT: And do you think that he’s at all scared that he might not get there in his lifetime?

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, I think that he wakes up all the time calculating that he’s 50, whatever, two or three years old, that maybe he’s got 30 years. Not that he necessarily wants to go to Mars, but he wants a mission to Mars and he believes it’ll be within 10 years. But he’s always wrong by two or three times. How fast self driving will come to be, how fast the cybertruck will be made, how fast we’ll get to Mars. I think in 30 years there will be missions to Mars. I think in 10 years it’s unlikely. And I think that’s the spread that he’s worried about.

STEVEN BARTLETT: As someone like Elon that thinks in terms of first principles. When he’s trying doing those calculations about how long he’s got left to live and the development of SpaceX and rockets and trying to correlate whether, trying to figure out if he’ll get there in his lifetime, does he not then look at his health and go, well, one way to extend the amount of time I have on Earth is to really obsess about my health. From everything I’ve read, he doesn’t seem particularly interested in his health.

Elon’s Health and Lifestyle Contradictions

WALTER ISAACSON: Now he makes fun of his tech bros who are sitting there with longevity plans of how they’re going to live to be much longer. And no, he does not care enough about his health. He’s very overweight now for a while. A year ago he decided to go on an intermittent fasting diet and also was using those weight loss drugs.

And I remember being with him one morning, he could only have one meal a day because of this. And we went to something called the Palo Alto Creamery, I think it’s called some diner. And Little X was with us. And Musk ordered a double bacon cheeseburger with sweet potato fries and an Oreo chocolate chip milkshake and said, “Okay, it’s my one meal of the day.” And I’m thinking, I’m not a diet expert, but this does not seem like the healthiest way to either lose weight or remain healthy.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Does that seem like a bit of a contradiction to you, in some respects he’s not.

WALTER ISAACSON: He’s crazy. I mean, and yeah, but he’s not. I mean, I look at, say, Sam Altman. Sam Altman is very disciplined in both exercise and diet. Jeff Bezos is now that way. Elon’s not that way. You know, you’re probably pretty good at diet and exercise. You know me, I try pretty hard, but I’m not quite as good. Elon’s at the side where he’s fanatic on many, many things, but getting on the treadmill and taking care of himself is not one of them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you ever see him exercise while you were with him?

WALTER ISAACSON: He has only one home now because when his daughter transitioned and became very anti-capitalist, he thought that if selling all five of his pretty nice homes, he would just live very frugally and that would please her, which didn’t work. But he’s got this two bedroom house in a town in South Texas where Starbase is, and there’s a little room that has one of those cross trainers.

And every now and then I’d be just sitting in that house day in and day out. He’d say, “Maybe I should use that more. I don’t use it that much.” I’ve never seen him say, “Well, I’ve got to go to the gym.” He doesn’t meditate, do yoga, swim, or do things that would both clear your mind and relax your body.

Mental Health and Mood Swings

STEVEN BARTLETT: How would you characterize his mental health?

WALTER ISAACSON: Incredibly mercurial.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does that mean?

WALTER ISAACSON: Means that it goes through multiple phases, personalities, and there will be times when he’s perfectly cheerful, inspiring, sometimes funny, sometimes focused on engineering. There’ll be times when he gets into a very, what Grimes calls “demon mode.” And he says he’s probably bipolar. He’s never been diagnosed, but he uses some medication that’s been prescribed.

And so he will get into these mood swings where he can be manic and depressive and bipolar. And so his mental health is not great. The difficult question in the book wrestles with him with this. You said at the beginning, smart thing you said at the beginning of this show was to what extent is that woven into who he is? And do those strands also cause him to have the drives?

STEVEN BARTLETT: In the time that you observed him, in the years that you were with him, were you ever concerned about him?

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, I mean, there are times when he would go into what I would almost feel was a tailspin. And even times before I knew him, like 2018, he goes into total meltdown. He’s almost catatonic, lying on the floor of the factory in Fremont, Texas, and the people who work with him can’t rouse him because he’s in a catatonic state.

He’s sending off horrible tweets back then, calling some cave diver a pedophile, or saying he’s going to take Tesla private. And you see that recur every now and then. Even this past month he hasn’t been, as far as I know, in any bad catatonic state. But he’ll get into a dark mood late at night and do tweets that are conspiratorial and dark and self destructive.

At Christmas he was with his brother and some other relatives and they all sit around talking. This is the day after the server farm anecdote I told you about. And they ask, “What do you regret most this year?” And he says, “I regret the fact that every now and then I start shooting myself in the foot or stabbing myself in the thigh.” That he gets into these periods.

Building Teams and Leadership

STEVEN BARTLETT: With all these great leaders. There’s a word you use throughout, which is the word team. The definition of the word company is group of people. How do they go about hiring great people?

WALTER ISAACSON: With Musk, he says that you always look first for the right attitude, skills, knowledge, they can all be acquired. But a change in attitude requires a brain transplant. So you make sure they have an all in hardcore attitude. Early on first few years of SpaceX and Tesla, he interviewed everybody that they were hiring.

He’s built a good team, but an unstable one. People come and go more often, but there are people like Gwynne Shotwell, who for more than 20 years has helped run SpaceX. And Mark Dunkosa has been probably the chief technology officer there. Likewise, you have a pretty stable team at Tesla.

Steve Jobs was a specialist at building teams. When he was dying, I was in his backyard with him and I asked him, “What’s the best product you ever made?” And I thought he’d say the iPhone or maybe the Mac. He said, “Well, building those products is hard, but what’s really important is building a team that will continue to build products. So the best thing I did was the team at Apple,” and that’s the Johnny Ive, Phil Schiller, Eddie Cue, Tim Cook Team. Musk is not as much of a superstar building teams, but he does get hardcore dedicated leaders to work for him.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And do they both think that the team is the most important thing, hiring great people?

WALTER ISAACSON: I would say that Jobs definitely thought that. I think Musk, if you ask him, would say he thinks that, but one of the things he hasn’t done perfectly is if he left Tesla, you know, there’s Tom Zhu, there’s Drew Baglino, there’s some people. But it’s not as if he has a big team in place as easily. He’s a little bit more the total boss.

And he’ll not try to run everything, but he’ll focus maniacally on specific things. And he does not. I guess the best way to say it is he doesn’t delegate authority as easily as I think other leaders do. On the flip side of that, his maniacal intensity to detail means that unlike Boeing, he knows how to get rockets into orbit.

Shared Leadership Principles

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are the principles of success or leadership that both Steve and Elon share?

WALTER ISAACSON: First of all, a passion. Musk had a passion for beauty and even the beauty of the parts unseen. I remember when I was first working with Steve Jobs, he had the same. Steve would take me around the backyard of his house where he grew up in a small tract home in California, and there’s a fence. And he made me look at the back of the fence, which faced scrubland.

He said, “My dad said we had to make the back of the fence just as beautiful as the front of the fence.” And Steve said to his father, “Why? Nobody will see it, nobody will know.” And he said, “Yes, but you will know.” If you have a passion for perfection, you’ll care even about the beauty of the parts unseen.

And so both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk cared more about details than your average CEO. They cared, in Jobs case, how the chips on the circuit board and the original Macintosh looked and whether the circuit board itself was beautiful, even though nobody would ever see it. It was in a sealed case.

And Musk, the night he, the Twitter board accepted his offer, he spends two hours in the tiny town in South Texas going over a valve in the Raptor engines under Starship and why it was leaking and there was a methane leak and just became involved in the details. And both of them felt that if you have a passion and intensity on the details, the rest will follow more easily.

Experimentation and Risk-Taking

STEVEN BARTLETT: What was their approach to kind of linked to that, their approach to experimentation? It’s something that I’m absolutely obsessed with conducting as many experiments as we possibly can in the shortest amount of time we can to get information back.

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, one of the things that Musk is successful because of is his ability to iterate to take risks, to conduct experiments. Twice now he’s launched Starship, which, as I say, is by far the biggest rocket ever made. And both times you saw stories the next day saying, “Musk launches rocket, it explodes.”

Well, he thinks both those were a success because he says if you’re not failing 20% of the time, you’re not risking enough. And so each of those are attempts to figure out, to take a risk, shoot something off and see what goes wrong and then to fix it. If you have a risk averse culture like NASA or Boeing or Lockheed or others, you’re not experimenting enough. And the experiment, by definition an experiment involves the unknown and taking a risk.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do they keep their cultures to be pro risk and to stop them getting complacent with their success?

WALTER ISAACSON: Well, I don’t think Musk has a problem with complacency because he’s so intense and hardcore that the minute, you know, I’ve watched so many meetings where even at Twitter where somebody says, “We can’t do this, we can’t take away the blue checks, we can’t change from carbon fiber to stainless steel on a particular component, or we can’t do cybertruck because cybertruck is too edgy and it’s made of stainless steel. And it is frightening to look at. And it’ll scare people.”

And he’ll just either run roughshod over them or fire them or push them to realizing, “Yeah, let’s make cybertruck look very futuristic and let’s make it totally out of stainless steel and let’s have the stainless steel be an exoskeleton so you don’t have to have internal chassis as much.” These are wild, out of the box things.

And they resisted him on Cybertruck, they resisted him on Starship, they resisted him on even some of the battery changes he’s made or things but. Or resist him on the amount of servers you need at Twitter or the rules for engagement on Twitter. I think sometimes it doesn’t work. I think Twitter is kind of toxic in places because he thought you could get rid of the moderation teams and do it through an algorithm. But he pushes things, 80% of which succeed. It means there’s a lot of rubble in the wake, though.

The Power of Delusion

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think they’re somewhat delusional, these people, Steve?

WALTER ISAACSON: I think they’re crazy. And as Jobs would say, crazy enough to think they can change the world, and thus they become the ones who do. Delusional. The phrase they used for Steve was reality distortion field, which is just a geek’s way of saying delusional, meaning you can wish something and think hard enough on something and try to make it happen.

And often it worked with Jobs. He’d say, “You got to shave 10 seconds off the boot up time.” And they say, “That’s reality, it can’t be done.” And he’d say, he’d stare without blinking. Something his guru had taught him in India. He’d say, “Don’t be afraid, you can do it.” And they would bend reality. And 80% of the time he’d get it done.

Sometimes it doesn’t work. He tried it on his cancer. Didn’t work. I mean, he just tried to will it away. Likewise with Musk, full self driving. I mean, for the past eight years, he’s always said, “It’s only a year away, we’re going to get there.” Well, that’s reality distortion. It’s driven his team to go further with machine learning on full self driving than most companies. But it’s also a reality distortion that hasn’t yet paid off.

Deadlines as Forcing Functions

STEVEN BARTLETT: Deadlines, you talked kind of about it there.

WALTER ISAACSON: That’s the same thing, which is being delusional about deadlines. But they’re forcing functions. As Musk himself said when I was talking to him once, I said, “Deadlines, man.” He says, “Yes, but I’m a specialist at turning the impossible into the merely very late.” So he misses deadlines, but he tends to eventually deliver.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The reason he’s setting deadlines, even though he knows sometimes they might not be hit, is because it speeds up the team.

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, he says, “A all in intensity, a hardcore intensity is our operating principle and you’re not going to have that without deadlines.” I remember so many times there were what his team called surges. I’d see it happen almost every month in a different field. He’d say, “All right, we have to stack this rocket by Friday.” And they’d say, “You know, no, it’s going to take months.” “No, it needs to be stacked by Friday.” And they’d work around the clock and do it.

And then a few weeks later he’d be on a house where they were putting a Tesla solar roof tiles. And he’d say, “You have 24 hours to redo this house.” They’d say, “Well, that’s nuts.” But he’d be there at midnight on top of the roof himself, with little X playing on the cables down below. And he would use it as a forcing function. It drove the teams crazy, but it drove them to do things they didn’t think they could do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is he happy?

The Price of Success

WALTER ISAACSON: No, he’s somebody who not only is not usually happy, but he doesn’t value happiness. If you said, what are the top 10 things you want in life? I don’t think happiness, pleasure, calmness, sweetness going to the beach. None of those would be in the top 10.

He, Tallulah Riley, who lives here, was married to him, the English actress, great English actress. She said, “He’s not the type who can stop and savor or smell the flowers. He doesn’t want to sit back and be content and be happy.”

And I asked him about it. I said, “Okay, you ever happy at what you’ve achieved?” He said, “No. I’m like a video game addict. When I get to one level of the game and I’ve succeeded, all I can think about is moving to the next level of the game, be it Elden Ring or Polytopia.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is that common amongst the great leaders that you’ve studied?

WALTER ISAACSON: No. It was definitely true of Steve Jobs, who, having built the great computers, suddenly says, “I want a thousand songs in my pocket.” And then when he has the iPod, it’s so successful. And all he does is worry about the fact that something bad could happen.

And he says, “Well, what if people, the brain dead people who make cell phones realize they could put music on cell phones? Then we’d be out of business.” So he starts working on the iPhone and the iPod team says, “Well, that’s going to cannibalize us. That’s going to hurt our business.” He said, “We have to be able to cannibalize ourselves or other people will eat us for lunch.”

And likewise, Musk is always pushing for the next thing as opposed to happiness. Is that true of everybody? No. I mean, Jeff Bezos has the biggest yacht you can imagine and more vacation homes. And he’s happier, I think. I mean, he likes to savor his success.

It’s also true that his space company, Blue Origin, hasn’t yet gotten anybody into orbit. I don’t know there’s a particular trade off there. But I know Musk would say, “Yeah, I could be on a yacht somewhere, but that’s not what I want.”

The Bezos-Musk Dynamic

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think Jeff and Steve, do you think Elon likes Jeff?

WALTER ISAACSON: I think they’re competitors. And there’s two chapters in the book called “Bezos and Musk” where they compete, compete for a pad at Cape Canaveral, the storied pad 39A, where they get into big disputes and lawsuits over satellite levels.

Musk says, “But I want Bezos to succeed, I want him to be driving us into space because the more do it, the better. I wish he would get out of his hot tub and off his yacht more often so that Blue Origin could be more successful.” So that’s not exactly a compliment.

They don’t hang out together. But I know that Musk respects Bezos. Bezos once tried to patent the concept of a self landing, a booster rocket that could land upright and be reused, which Musk was already working on. And the idea that Bezos would try to patent the idea caused Musk to go ballistic. But since then, he hasn’t gone ballistic on Bezos, and that got resolved.

Personal Transformation Through Biography

STEVEN BARTLETT: How did Steve Jobs change you?

WALTER ISAACSON: I think that Steve and all the people I’ve written about caused me to think more about what’s the larger mission and to care about even things people couldn’t see, as I said, like the circuit board inside the Mac.

And you always know whether you’re cutting corners when you’re writing a book, doing a podcast, starting a company and being honest with yourself about that is, you know, I admire deeply Steve Jobs passion for beauty, his passion for the product.

And all of them felt they weren’t trying to make the most money or build the most valuable company, although they did. Apple becomes that, you know, Tesla becomes that. They become the richest people, but they’re doing it not for a passion for profits, but a passion for the product.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And specifically Elon, spending that time with him.

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, you know, I go back to the “know thyself.” I can admire Musk. I can respect what he does. I also know it’s the price he pays for his success is a price that I think is too high for me.

Meaning I’m not going to be that rough on the people around me. I’ve been married more than almost 40 years and I care about this balance of work and life and other things. Musk doesn’t care about that.

So I know that each of us has to decide how do we do the balances that make us feel the most comfortable. And I watch Elon and can admire his intensity, but also know the downsides of it.

And then in a more complex way, which is what the book is about, understand how the downsides, and you said this at the very beginning of the show, the downsides and bad traits are so interwoven with the good traits that you can’t disentangle the fabric.

The Algorithm: Musk’s Five-Step Approach

STEVEN BARTLETT: The algorithm you write about in the book, this five step approach that Elon takes towards product development, when I read about it, it kind of just seems like more of the same Elon, which is like this sense of urgency, speeding things up and caring a lot about the small stuff. Is that your characterization of the algorithm? And what is the algorithm?

WALTER ISAACSON: Well, the algorithm goes back to what you called first principles, which is step one of the algorithm. Is question every rule, question every requirement. Somebody says we need to have a felt pad between the battery and the chassis. And you say, “Why?” And they say, “Well, it’s a regulation or it’s a rule.” And you say, “Who made that rule? Who made that? Does it really work? Bring me the person, the name of the person who actually made it, and let me grill that person to see if there’s a physics reason that has to happen.”

And so that’s step one in the algorithm. And step two is Steve Jobs step, which is simplify. Even on the iPod, when Steve made it, it’s like, “I want to be able to get to any song with only three clicks. I don’t want a whole lot of buttons. I don’t want a manual.” And they eventually make the most beautiful, simple thing that comes, the iPhone, after a while. Intuitive. Nobody has to read the manual for how to use an iPhone.

So step two is simplify. Then you speed up the processes and final step is automate. And the problem must said is when you try to automate processes that you should have deleted, you’re not going to do it.

But it’s not just the algorithm. It’s the algorithmic way of thinking, which is the manufacturing matters as much as the design of the product. So he puts his engineers and designers with their desks facing the assembly line so every hour they can watch if there’s a holdup, if there’s something that’s a piece of strip around the headlight or wiring in the Raptor engine that’s causing a holdup in the manufacturing process. The engineers and designers can see it every hour.

Which is why he doesn’t do what most automakers now do, which is send something off and outsource all the manufacturing. He’s got to watch it happen.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And people write. He makes people write their name on the parts of the rocket that they’re responsible for.

WALTER ISAACSON: Yeah, and you got to. It’s like, “Who’s in charge? Who’s in charge of this valve? And who’s in charge of the cost of this valve? And who’s going to get this valve to be cost down by 80%?” And if you don’t think you can do it, your name is on that mission. Then step aside. We’re not going to tolerate people who can’t be on the mission.

Love, Drama, and Relationships

STEVEN BARTLETT: You mentioned your own family and your own relationships. Last question is about Elon’s love life.

WALTER ISAACSON: You know Elon loves drama and turmoil, right? That’s from childhood. He associates it with childhood and love. And whether it’s at Twitter or at SpaceX or Tesla, he’s always surging and wants drama.

Well, for better or worse, I would say for worse. His emotional, personal love life tends to be that way. He likes drama and fighting and intensity in his relationships. Of the people he’s been with, most have had this fiery intensity to them. From his first wife, Justine, all the way through Amber Heard, who I think legendary in the intensity, shall we say, of the relationships. And to some extent, Grimes.

Now, there have been a couple of exceptions. One of whom I mentioned is Tallulah Riley, whom he was married to English actress. And she’s great and loving and calm and was a calming influence and was the best thing to happen to him, in my opinion, when it came to romance.

But he always valued the intensity. And she rightly knew herself and said, “This is amazing and I really love everything happening, but this is not who I am. I want to be back in a more calm environment.” And eventually she leaves and comes back to England.

So with his own children, his lovers, his wives, there is the same intensity that’s baked into everything he does.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But he seems to have a longing to be with somebody. He seems to be.

WALTER ISAACSON: He’s always afraid of being alone. He said that he was so lonely as a child, that his biggest fear is being alone. He always loves having one of his children. I mean, down at the rocket launch, there’s Griffin, there’s X.

He was. So he has a child who’s autistic and, you know, needs a minder generally. I mean, enough so that he’s still a very wise teenager and even asks things like, “Why doesn’t the future look like the future dad?” Which is one of the things that spurs Elon into making cybertrucks so futuristic.

So he always likes having some of his children around him. He always likes having a companion, but that doesn’t mean he likes calmness.

The Mission of Storytelling

STEVEN BARTLETT: So interesting. We have a closing tradition on this podcast, where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re going to be leaving the question for and the question that’s been left for you. With all you know about the nature of what it is to live a happy, successful life, what do you think is the single most important characteristic? To be happy and or to be successful?

WALTER ISAACSON: Knowing your mission and knowing yourself. I mean, maybe that’s two things, but it took me a while to know myself, meaning what I was good at as a leader and what I didn’t want to be good at. But also I know the mission that I’m trying to do in life, and it’s not getting humanity to Mars. It’s not the grandest of all missions, But I think if you know yourself and what you value, then the happiness follows.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what is your mission?

WALTER ISAACSON: My mission is that there are certain things that inspire us, that make us aim higher and make us better. And as a journalist, as a writer, and now as a biographer and historian, I like to tell the stories about people who moved us, who rippled the surface of history. And from those lessons, we all, in a smaller way, can be on a journey that’s not just about ourselves.

When I speak to my college students, there’s always graduation speakers that say, “Follow your passion.” And I say, “No, it’s not about your stupid little passion. It’s about connecting your passion to something higher than yourself.” So figure out what that mission is for you.

And I do it through storytelling. Now, storytelling isn’t as elevated as rocket building or automaking, but it is. The oldest, most venerable, valuable way we have of passing on values is telling stories. Whether it’s around the first campfire ever built or whether it’s Homer doing it in the Odyssey or the Bible with a great opening sentence “In the beginning,” comma, telling us these stories.

I think there’s a role in society for storytellers that try to make us better.

A Remarkable Service to Humanity

STEVEN BARTLETT: Well, you have very much taken on that role in a remarkable way. I very rarely pre-order or pre-save books, ever. But based on the books you’ve written previously, this was one of the books that I bought on both audiobook and physically, and it far exceeded my expectations because of the depth and detail you go into these people.

This is not a surface level from a distance audit or analysis or deconstruction of these individuals. It is as if you are living in their mind and writing from the place of their mind. And for someone like me, who I think of myself at the start of my career, that wants to do great things, knowing everything about these individuals that you’ve covered allows me to pick and choose elements that will get me closer towards my own version of happiness and success.

And I think “know thyself” is such an important thing when you read these books, because you have to assemble the parts of an Elon or a Steve Jobs or a Jennifer and take from them to complete your own little jigsaw piece. And we’re all our own individual shapes.

There’ll probably never be a book ever that comes close to the detail and depth of insight and understanding and storytelling, which is so unbelievably captivating as this one that’s written on Elon Musk. So it’s a must read for everybody, regardless of what discipline or pursuit you’re in. I think it’s just an absolutely fascinating read about trauma, about humanity, about humans, and about what it takes to reach the very top.

So, Walter, thank you for the service to humanity that you’ve done by the work that you do. It’s a huge honor to get to meet you today.

WALTER ISAACSON: Wow. It’s a huge honor to get to meet you. And an actual pleasure too.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you.

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