Transcripts For CSPAN3 Walter 20240703

Id be surprised if. If you havent already seen him on tv in the past few days or or read a bit about his new book because, well, hes been everywhere and for good reason. The release of another biography by Walter Isaacson has become an event in itself. Hes staked out a wellearned reputation as the preeminent biographer of geniuses and whether hes writing about brilliant people from from long ago, like leonardo da vinci, Benjamin Franklin and albert einstein, or more contemporary, innovative figures of our age, like steve jobs, jennifer, Jennifer Doudna or henry kissinger. You can bet the result will be a fascinating, revealing, comprehensive and vividly told book. Walters take on elon musk is certainly all that and the story turned out to be even more than walter bargained for when he set out a couple of years ago to do the biography. Back then, walter thought hed be writing mainly about moscows technological trailblazer, a leader in the fields of electric vehicles and private space exploration. Then came musks impulsive purchase of twitter and his central role in providing ukraine with satellite communiques and links during the war with russia. And the questions and controversies about musk only grew. All of which has enhanced the timeliness and importance of walters indepth portrait of musk and of the demons that drive him now, predictably. Walter himself has come in for some criticism about what he decided to put in the book or leave out, or the extent to which he refrains from judging musk. Legitimate questions have been raised about both the risks and advantages of access journalism and and about how far a biographer should go in offering personal opinions about the person that hes writing about in public appearances. So far, walter has certainly not shied away from addressing such matters. And im sure he he wont this evening. But i also know that if you read musk biography, which i encourage all of you to do, if you havent already, youll find it presents a full account not only of musks influential and consequential achievement, but also his dark, mercurial and offensive sides. And then you can make your own judgments about musk, which is what walter has intended. In conversation with walter this evening wont be Michael Duffy Opinions Editor at large at the washington post, where hes been for nearly five years. Before that, he spent several decades with Time Magazine and various positions as a correspondent and editor. So ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Walter Isaacson and mike duffy. Mean the life of. Start. Hi michael. Came all the way from missoula. Well, some events matter. This is one. Yes, youre welcome. Thank you for coming. And thank you, walter, for coming. Thank you. Were here to talk about the new elon musk book by walter. This is an important one. Sorry, ill get used to it. Ive read this book. I love it. I, i dont know. I didnt know very much about elon musk when i started reading it. Now i feel like i know a great deal. Its hard for me to imagine Going Forward without having read it now that ive read it. So i recommend it. Walter, talk to us first about your arrangement with musk, how it happened, how you found out that it happened, and whether your relationship with him about writing the book changed over the course of writing it. You know, i always like doing people who are pushing the edge of innovation and elon musk. He was bringing us into the era of electric vehicles and he was bringing us into the era of space travel again, space adventure. I thought, well, thats really cool. And we had a mutual friend and put us together on the phone and we talked about an hour and a half. And i said, look, id love to do this, but not based on interviews. I want to be by your side. I want to spend weeks on end. You know, just living in the airstream trailer down in boca chica, texas, near his launch pad, a walk in the factory lines with it. He said, fine, you can be with me all the time. Nothings off limits, really. And i said, the other thing is no control over the book. You dont even im not even going to send it to you first. I dont even know if hes read it now. And he said, fine. I said, okay, thats pretty amazing. And because he controls things. And i went back with kathy, we were visiting somebody and we went to the main house because we were houseguests and a Little Cottage and after a while i said, my god, youre doing it. I said, what do you mean . He said, well, he just tweeted out and it was like in the middle of the conversation. He tweeted out, i was going to do it. So i said, well, i guess im on for the ride. And did that relationship stay the same in that, or was it still the same . Really interesting. Yeah. He has never asked to see the book. He never pushed, pressured anything. And he just didnt. I thought id be subject it would be the heisenberg principle. By observing him, it would change him. But all of his material moods, his, you know, in spirit, all things that are dark, things they all were in full. And he never seemed to notice me. I mean, i would just always be by his side. He never tried to spin or do anything. Sometimes wed sit in the Conference Room after meetings and thered be a break and sit there for 15, 20 minutes, half of it in silence. And then he would Start Talking in a monotone, telling me about his childhood and telling me about other things. The biographies you written before franklin einstein, kissinger do nut jobs . Did any of them prepare you for this . Well, you subject steve jobs and a little bit like that, somebody really strong willed, had a reality distortion field, as does mask somebody that just meaning that he drove people to do things that they were sure were impossible and he drove them crazy. But then they eventually were able to do it. And he had a strong will with steve jobs. He had been taught by his guru in india to just stare without blinking and say, dont be afraid, you can do it. And so even early on, when was he and Steve Wozniak are trying to do the original apple, too . Was i cant code it, you know, by the weekend he said we have to code it fast. We got to get back to the apple farm work and henson, they are the company they found and finally was said to me. He just stared without blinking and said, dont be afraid, you can do it. I got so freaked out. I did it over and over again, even to the end with a guy named a guy who runs corning glass. Linda weeks jobs wanted a really beautiful piece of glass for the iphone he was thinking of and described it. And linda weeks said, maybe we used to do a formula for gorilla glass and jobs said, i want this much by october. And we said, well, theres no way weve not started it. And weeks said to me, he just stared at me without blinking and said, dont be afraid, youre going to do it anyway. Thats the reality distortion field. Take elon musk. One order of magnitude up. He just was always pushing people driving them crazy, but driving them to do things they didnt think they could do and had the stair to. He definitely has the stair, but hes mercurial. Much more than steve jobs was and he can be really cold. Elon musk and he can be nasty at times and he could also be giddy and funny and inspiring, but the weirdness is he would shift moods almost on a dime and you could see it. I remember once walking at the launch pad down in south texas where theyre doing the biggest movable object ever made by humans, which is starship. And it was a particularly late friday night, and there were a couple of people working on the pad, and all of a sudden i see his face. His girlfriend, claire bouchet, known as grimes, says, you can just see it come right across his face and suddenly got into what she calls demon mode and just started berating andy krebs, who was working that side, saying, where is everybody . You know, we need to have, you know, dozens of people working 24 on tuesday. Yeah. And he said is a friday night. We dont have any launches scheduled and he just got so mad. He just and then he said, i want to sort. And by the next day, there were 200 people flying in from cape canaveral, los angeles. And for a week, they worked around the clock to stop the rocket, even though they didnt need to. But he wanted that first urgency. Okay. The next question is a statement. His father. Oh, yeah. Yikes. Discuss his father. When elon was young, he was scrawny. He was socially awkward, and he got beaten up all the time, especially they would send him off to these wilderness camps and they would have to kids would beat him up with the food he was way. Finally he said, i learned to punch people in the nose, which you still see today. And even though they beat me up, at least id punch them in the nose and theyd think twice. Once he got pushed down the steps of his school, this is not like sidwell the school. This is in pretoria, south africa. And they push him down the steps, concrete steps, and pummel his face. And hes in the hospital for four or five days. His brother campbell says you couldnt recognize when he gets home. He has to stand in front of his father for an hour and a half. And his father just berates him and tells him hes stupid, hes weak, hell never mount anything and takes the side of the kid who beat him up. So those scars from childhood dancing in his head. Still he goes really silent when the subject of his father comes up and then eventually starts talking in a monotone about the pain he still feels. And if his worst relationship is with his father, he has this a very unusually close relationship with campbell, the brother you just mentioned. He has a very close relationship with campbell, who says, im the one who got the empathy gene in the family. And, you know, campbell is true. I mean, and this is somewhat complex to talk about, but out of this book, one of the things that surprised me is that because musk doesnt have that what youd call incoming recep for Human Emotions or outgoing doesnt have the antenna he calls himself aspergers, which, you know, is a broad name, but it makes him so he doesnt have a good face, a callous person who can be very intense with you, but has that lack of receptors of emotion, whereas Campbell Campbells the opposite. I mean, campbells always hugging and things. And so theyre almost joined at the hip, although they fight really badly. And when they first started their First Company together, they once fought on the floor until campbell had his ear bitten off almost and had to go get stitches. And everybody else is kind of appalled. They said, dont worry, their brother, they just do that. At one point, a sad part in the book after 2018, campbell, which is the worst year of musks elon musk life, he goes into almost production. Hell, weve talked about the tailspin. He even talks to people about whether hes bipolar, all the problems. He talks about he made up. And campbell sells all of his stuff gives up his business, takes all of his money out of his bank account to keep tesla afloat. And then afterwards, he says, okay, i need money for my restaurant business. And at first, elon wont do it, says its not going to work. And campbell doesnt speak to him for six months and finally says, i didnt want to lose my brother. So we started speaking again. And eventually you learn helped london. They reconciled, but he only gave him five of the 10 million. As i remember. He didnt give my i. Im glad you read the book. I havent read it yet. Okay. 5 million. So much easier interviewing someone who has tried bullying between brothers. Okay. So the first several hundred pages of this book are about his childhood. And then walter turns to space x and tesla. So well take these in order because theyre just too much fun. Musks starts building rockets. How come . You know, he had made a lot of money on his first two companies and he said, i dont like to try to enjoy my money. I dont put my chips back on the table. I want to do something big. Hes driving on the long island expressway with a friend and he says, man, we went to the moon 50 years ago. Lets say, and now were were going to go next one. We go to mars. And he looks on the website of nasa. Theres no plans even to go back to the moon. And hes appalled. He said, you know, were a nation and the u. S. Because he had immigrated here of people who took risks to get here, you know, whether they came on the mayflower or they came across a real grand river, these are people who are risk takers and weve lost the ability to take risk. So he decides hes going to do a mission to mars. Now, there are many reasons. One is this incredibly elevated reason. If somebody i think you read too much sci fi comic books as a lonely child in the corner of the bookstore, which is that if were not a multiplanetary species, eventually something will happen in the light of human consciousness will be lost. And we dont know if theres any other consciousness in the universe. We have to do it. I used to think that was like the type of pep talks you give to teams or the podcast or something, but he would intone it over and over again. The importance of being a space faring species. And i came to believe he was honest and he believed it. He also thought in venture that we have to have adventure back. And he said theres nothing grander than traveling to other planets. And he was able to build at first hes going to try to buy a rocket from russia or something. And thats a really funny couple of scenes in the book where he goes to russia and theyre spending on him in and on the way back he goes to first principles, which is how much of the material in a rocket costs, how much of the fuel cost. And we can get it 90 cheaper if we can do it this way. And he decides to build his own rockets and they start eventually. They have three of them blow up his first attempt, but eventually he has now sent more mass into orbit than every other country and every other company combined. So if saving human consciousness was the rationale behind space x . Yeah. Whats the reason for tesla . He had three great goals coming out of that corner of the bookstore, which was not as well led as politics and prose. And it was sort of dark thing. And he would read the sci fi sections he had three Great Missions in life that he especially in college, he focuses on. One is making a subspace ferrying civilization to a sustainable energy. Basically batteries, solar roofs, power packs and of course electric vehicles. At this point in the early 2004 General Motors, everybody gotten out of the electric vehicle. Theyre crushing this every bolt because they want to just get rid of it. And hes saying, no, weve got to do it. And the third one, which you can get to later, is he reads Isaac Asimovs robot series and he says, we have to have safe Artificial Intelligence, otherwise our robots will turn upon us. These are not the things i worried about in college and growing up in new orleans, not causing my palms to sweat. But okay, so the book is, among other things, something of an Industrial Engineering handbook. And you think, oh, that sounds really dull. Its anything but an example is he so he reengineer is how we build rockets. But more significantly, perhaps he re engineers, how we build cars. You know, in america we got out of the habit of manufacture our own stuff. We outsourced it all over. And you can see what its done to our politics. When he first was creating tesla with Martin Abbott and others by top earning the original roadster, had the batteries made in japan. They were being shipped to thailand. Some former barbecue pit factory to make them into battery packs, eventually shipped to england where they were put in lotus taxis and the panels came from france. They were shipped back to the us anyway. It was a mess. And he said, if you dont manufacture your what you design, you cant innovate. Your designers have to be right next to the assembly line. And so he spends more time walking the factory floor and figuring out the assembly line. And so he brings it all inhouse else. And he at that point, i think 70 of the intellectual property of Car Companies had been outsourced, and now hes got it. So its a car most made in america, most made in his own factories. What the emotional . Emotional high point of this engineering handbook, which is really one of my favorite parts of the book, comes when hes up musk is up against it, and he has he makes a promise wittingly or unwittingly, to produce five or 5000 cars a week. How does he do it . Well, theres an enormous number of short sellers in 2018. This is what i said was a hell period. He had people betting against tesla stock and the only way he was going to survive, he felt he did did the calculation. You had to get to 5000 cars a week. They short sellers had drones flying over the factory counting with the to Assembly Lines could do they had inside information they were going nuts. Its the most shorted stock in history and they figured out correctly that those two Assembly Lines could not do 5000 cars a week and it would take a year to build another factory. And hes a military history addict. And he remembers in World War Two that they used to build fighter jets in the parking lots in Southern California because they had to do it. So fast. So he looks at the parking lot and he says within a week, i want a test. That would be three times the size of this room. And were going to build a Third Assembly line. And of course, this is not exactly legal. I mean, hes always breaking rules and regulations, but there was a small thing in the law in california. You could put up a temporary ten to do auto repair. It was like for a muffler shop, he said they can fine us later. They build this huge tent. They dont even have an ability to do an assembly line. But they take an old Conveyor Belt and put it on a slope and theyre able to hit 5000 cars a week. And tesla becomes the most valuable car company in the world. And the slope is because the Conveyor Belt wouldnt otherwise work. Right . Its how they move car move the cars down and it was when he just lived on the factory floor that whole time and really, really went bonkers. I mean, theres a phrase kimble uses and some of his friends use, which is called open loop warning, which means youre not getting feedback. Youre like an unguided missile. And add to that here, criticize. You can hear credits or you can hear nothing. And hes in a trade. So they were doing openly warning and this is when he really people think hes bad now on twitter and other things this is when he tweets at some british cave diver is a pedophile. This is when he says, im taking tesla private in. The saudis are going to give me enough money and funding is secured. All these things are ongoing lawsuit, you know, and it was this hell, hell year for him, i have to say that as a reader, i felt like 25 hell years sometimes, especially in that period. And hes still in 20, beginning of 2019. He wants he forces them to do an Autonomous Vehicle that will drive on its own because he thinks thats going to be the next big thing. Lets talk a little bit about his unusual personalities. This is a book that is replete with tales of recklessness, personal recklessness, professional recklessness. Where does that come from, in your view . You use the phrase his personalities, which is good because its plural and like his father, who was a jekyll and hyde character, wed go into dark mode and almost not remember when he came back to being, you know, a sweet dr. Jekyll or musk goes to quick personality, changes and its he even talked about multiple personalities. You can call it a disorder, but it is who he is. And therell be times when hes just laughing like crazy and showing monty python sketch of silly walks and then figuring out how to translate those silly walks into optimus a robot so that it, you know, its engineered the right way and then hell be very inspirational that if we dont work all night, humanity wont get to mars. But then he goes to mr. Hyde and the darkness hits, right . Yeah. I was amazed how many times he played that. If you dont do this today, were never it. Well never get. We will never be a multiplanetary species. If you dont work all night and, you know, i go to so many people and he grabs a guy, he reamed out on the launch pad down in south texas. Lucas hughes, who didnt quite know the cost of every material of a component. And some of them leave, some stay in a couple. Milan kovac, a wonderful guy. You know, they leave and then goes to a much gentler place and then comes back and said, i had a choice between being burned out or bored and i decided to be burned out on a mission with elon. That jekyll and hyde thing does come through. You cant read this book without concluding that his mind was, as you noted, shaped by Science Fiction novels and lots and lots of gaming. Video. Yeah, video gaming. People havent talked about that enough. He is a total addict to things like whitopia. He stayed up all night when elden ring. Is there anybody young enough to know what elden ring is and hey, theres somebody whos an elden ring fan. Youre cool. So elden ring comes out. He is gone to hawaii with. Natasha bassett, a australian actor, but then he has to meet grimes in vancouver. I mean, its in the middle of the most Emotional Turmoil. And elden ring comes out and he stays up all night playing elden ring on 530 and then right after that, he sends out a message. I made an offer and that was when he announced that he was going to go hostile on twitter. So video games, he learns a lot from power topia, including, as campbell said, empathy is not your friend right now. You and i dont believe that. But its like empathy can hurt you and allies arent right. Exactly. Some weird pathology in there that he picked up. He did not pick up one of the killers of dippolito video, which i call front minimization, which is you dont have to fight everybody at once. Of course, theres a name for that. Even more personally, he told you that he was a fool for love. What did he mean . You know, he associates love his brother says, and so does amber. Heard a for those of you who remember johnny depp trial as a person whos somewhat dramatic and they went out for about a year and they broke up right at 2018, right when his father, erol, was having a child with errols person. He had raises a stepdaughter. So this is an Emotional Turmoil to break up with amber, his father following a child with somebody he thought was his stepsister. And to the production house. But almost everybody he is married had gone out with. Its there for the drama. Justin, his first wife, they just would fight. Theyd go to bookstores. I keep going. Politics and prose, a shout out. But this was keplers in palo alto and theyre getting huge fights. And i think amber was said to me, you know, hes a fool for love. And he associate drama with love. If things are calm and the only really calm relationship he had was with this wonderful person, tallulah riley, who he married twice. But she she was just a calming influence. And he would say, you know, in campbell would say it would have been great because but instead, hes including grimes, which is a really great, fun, good person. She can be dramatic much as he wants to populate other planets. Hes done a pretty good job of populating this one. Yeah, he actually i mean, but its a weird i mean, no, everything is Mission Driven and you think, okay, thats wacky. Then you think, okay, its wacky and its earnest. Which is he believe the declining birth rate is going to be harm to human consciousness. How many of us wake up in the morning worrying about that . But he truly and this is why he feels hes always telling his friends, youve got to have more children. He pays. I wont get in this too much. But for the ivf treatment of friends and relatives because he wants everybody to have children. Talk to us a little bit about ellen shift from i found myself calling him ellen. Im sure thats a bad habit being an obama supporter to a to a trump backer was that just more convenient . Did he know the political shift in the past two years is obviously he been pretty sharp. Now, as i say, there are many ellen. So therell be times when theyll be talking in the afternoon and police a day. Hell say, we need a party of the center, we need more moderates. We should support independents in this country. But late at night, hes pushing those buttons. Not so much conservative, but what you would call sort of the populist right out of viewpoint that we see in europe, we see here, its starts about three years ago. First of all, with covid and covid lockdowns and the restrictions. And he believed that the lockdowns were too onerous. And it was so he pushed back on that. Secondly, he got attacked by a lot of democrats. And from california assemblywoman to Elizabeth Warren and at one point then he had because of some stock options, he exercised. Elizabeth warren said billionaires. Hes a billionaire avoiding taxes and he had paid more taxes than anybody in history had ever paid to any government to fight because he had exercise the stock option. And he just bristled as if hes on the playground and wants to punch people in the nose. And then thirdly, in the most delicate part of it is his eldest surviving child. He had a child that was a died an infancy, was named after his favorite character in the xmen comics, xavier and about. At age 16, shed transit oceans to being genoa. And so its taxing of the tax. You know, people in the family, hey, im transitioning. Im now a girl, im named gina. But dont tell my dad. Well, yeah, okay. He gets his head around that. Everybody in the family says, okay, because he loves his children so much, but she becomes very left wing and now mentally and hates all rich people, billionaires goes to court to change her name and to make sure that she has, as she puts it, in the filing, nothing whatsoever to do with him ever again. This causes him such pain and he has to lash out a bit. And he, billy gives that at cross roads. When she went to school, some of you may know los angeles that the woke mind virus and the progressive illness there made her hate capitalism and hate her father. And so all these things are jangling together. And the fact that he loves twitter, hes addicted to twitter, hes doing really dumb tweets late at night about pedophile cave divers. And he has this money in his pocket because he exercised the options and what what product do i like . I like twitter. And so he starts buying it. Kathy and i talked about i give kathy some of the credit and a couple other people close to him, which is whenever he went dark, it brought him back to the playground. The playground where he was beaten up and now he had the chance to own the worlds playground. He moves faster than my questions do. Its great. I was it was at this point i was going to say and that brings us to twitter. Okay. Yeah, right. Youre reading my question. So things are going well for him in the end. Is that his life at this time, all the companies are firing literally on all cylinders is everything is kind of go cylinders. These are electric. Theyre firing on all engines, Raptor Engines, electric motors. Ed, to the end. Ed to the end. And yet he makes this jump. What is the temptation here for him . What . Why is twitter, you know, its such a one of the things about that you talked about and it was when i was hanging around with him, following himself and he had just become times person of the year. Hed become the richest person on the planet. Tesla had made a million cars that year. Itd become the most valuable car company after this whole production thing. He had launched that previous six months, 33 rockets into orbit and landed them upright so he could reuse the rocket, something that still no company, not nasa, not boeing, not true or country or russia or china can do. And i said, man, you know, and im thinking is great for the book. Its ending on a high. And he says, i was not made for the calm. I sail into the storm. Ive got to put my chips back on the table and every Single Person close to him, says the times he is most uncomfortable when hes just unnerved is when everythings going well and the times that he is most energized is when all hell is breaking loose on all sorts of front. And tallulah would say, id go at night. He would stay up when things are going really bad and the stress and id have to hold his head as he vomited and he would channel phrases that his father and one said to him. But then during the day he was energized back the fight. And so in that period, say early 2022, when things are going well, he cant leave well enough alone. And yet the events of that period are this is a difficult portion of the book to read in part because you realize he cannot engineer a platform that is made of Human Emotion and opinion. Oh, its not only in general, he is such a good material science engineer. He can look at the valve of a Raptor Engine and say it shouldnt be engaged now. We should do it in this. Our stainless steel for the cybertruck he does not have a fingertip feel for a Human Emotions. As i said, he doesnt have those antenna, doesnt have the receptors. And tom asked him, hey, what are you thinking . And he said, well, twitter, they have not improved the product. I think you cant do video, you cant do payments. And its an problem. And im thinking as i write in the book, its not an engineer in product, its a advertising medium that gathers people with Human Emotions. And if it doesnt work and the other reason he wanted to buy twitter to get back to that is when he had done his second company, xcom. It was a huge success. It was a company that allowed you to do payments, other people and form a social network to do it. And it gets morphed into paypal and, then they get rid of them. Even though he was the founder of one of the companies and they change the name from xcor to paypal and they just make it a payment system, which we all use. But its not the everything app. And he told me when i was asking them about, why are you doing twitter it . Its my chance to show and to use twitter as the booster rocket to do what we should have done 20 years ago with dexcom. Okay. So at this point, youre are you almost lets say pick a time in 2020 to november 2022, youve march hes peaked in a lot of ways or what appears to be peak and yet youre now now covering a really different so in april is when gigafactory opened meaning the big factory in texas hes there at gigafactory we now know its a tesla. Its a larger factory in the world making tesla are 100 other great things have happened starship has finally been stacked and that april is when hes been buying twitter stock and he decides to go rogue. They want him on the board. And were standing were sitting on the mezzanine watching the factory about to be opened and of looking at the factory about to be opened. Campbell is saying to him his friends can and antonio, why are you doing twitter and hes deciding that he needs control of twitter, even though this whole factory and that night we went to a place called the pershing in austin, his son griffin is there. His another of his sons, a delightful kid named saxon, whos autistic. I mean, you know, seriously, but very wise. And to keep sending his mother may is there, grimes is there, campbell. And theyre all saying, dont by twitter, you dont get it. Why would you want this . Hes even asking his kids and its, oh, dad, we dont use twitter. And, you know, jackson thinks its really stupid. And he says, why doesnt the future look like the future . Hes saying, why is the only person there is like twitter is may his mother, which have been a demographic signal, but thats when from there is when he flies to hawaii. As i said, to larry ellison. And then vancouver. And this guy suddenly is on this rush. And i try to write the book from that point on. When you read the book, you say, man, kind of like its really short. And in boris like three or four page chapters because how do i capture the frenetic ness of april through the present launching the rockets, taking over twitter, whatever, where every day hes doing five or six things. When the twitter board accepts his offer, which he made, i made an offer, he goes down to boca chica, this tiny spit of a town in south texas and decides that night that theyre going to figure out why theres a methane leak. And for 2 hours, everybody in the room is like you just by twitter. This is like the biggest deal in the or theyve just accept you got everybody in the world is talking about this and all he does is focus on the methane there i was there for the trip down there. Yes. Yes. I was not there in vancouver. Okay. Talk to us about the ukraine starling story. Whats the lesson of that . And what is the lesson for the United States . You know, the lesson is that when russia invades ukraine, ukraine has the command and control. They have to communicate with their troops. The russians are able to hack viasat, the commercial satellite. Theyre able to hack all the military, all satellites go down except starlink, which is elon musk. So that night, providing internet, providing internet, but also communications between the troops. And they would have been crushed. And so the link but federoff the vice minister sending text message saying were going to get we need starlink and his comic book superhero he had six of us kick in all night for three or four nights. All the text message hes sending hundreds and then thousands of free starlink dishes and services which basically, as as federoff says, with the vice versa, saves ukraine. They would have been that then what happens is a few months later im actually had been him for a week and im at a my Old High School Football Game in the bleachers because its arch mannings game, you know, and hes about to go to university of texas. So Jonathan Martin wants to get so we all go and the phone quivering and its elon and he says theyre going to you. Theyre using starlink to launch a sneak attack on the russian fleet in crimea. And your first question is, well, i did go and he says going to cause world war three, i got really mean says i know russian doctrine they will retaliate with Nuclear Weapons so what are you doing . He says were not going to allow it. We deny it. Were not going to allow it. And i wrote that he turned it off that night. Later, i had to correct it, which is it had been geofence and they were asking him to turn it on and they didnt know was turned off. They had using it to launch his attack. And so secretly it had been geofence. And you see all the messages that night, not only in crimea but in the donbass, because hes also deciding to by day provide it but turn it off so they cant do offensive things. So hes he said what im saying is not offensive. My family lives in that village, the russia its just high pitched night in which he ends up not allowing starlink to be used for the sneak attack and the subs wash ashore. Now, this causes, of course when my book comes out, this, how could he not enable it . Why didnt he let them do it . And even i do say, you know, at one point, have you talked to general mark milley . Have you talked to jake sullivan, National Security . But im saying it really partly as a question. But as we sometimes joke it to bits of socratic, like, why do you have this much power and shouldnt you . Because and he says, yes, hes been talking to them and he finally it resolves itself rather well. I think. Which is he ends up deciding to give up and to sell control of a certain number of starlink satellites and services and even make a military version of it called star shield that he is now selling out right to the u. S. Government. And its intelligence agencies. So u. S. Officials get to decide how the starlink is enabled to be used by the ukraine ukrainians. I think starlink and twitter, the questions obvious, is it good for this much power to be in the hands . No, no, its not. And thats why i think its good that finally says were going to give up this power. I must say, the only time i dont know the exact sequence of when did mike molly know when it was enabled. Not because the times he would kick me out of the room. And the only questions he wouldnt answer is when it was classified information and he was having a classified conversation. And i would have to go. So thats still to be determined that thing. And but theres a larger question to you should he have so much power . No, probably not. But there should be somebody else who can get american communicate, send satellites into orbit. Do you know our main u. S. Intelligence satellites . Boeing cant get them up. Nasa cant get up to high earth orbit. Only the super heavy Starship Falcon rockets can. Likewise, hes the only person whos making starlink work. And when they tried to do like coast to coast charging ev charging networks, it didnt really work. And now General Motors and ford, hes opened up his own charging networks instead of the sort of public ones. I mean, ask one more and then ill take some questions from the audience as the book went on. Walter, i got the sense that you were growing more and more impatient with him, or at least lack of selfcontrol. Did i imagine that. I found it really difficult and i tried to convey it in the book in very vivid terms. You know, i dont preach. I dont. Heres what you think. Im going to leave it to you to figure out what to think. But by the hes doing amazing things. Hes getting starship launch. Hes starting an Artificial Intelligence company. Hes doing full selfdriving through Machine Learning with billions of frames. But hes also somewhat unhinged and uncontrolled and shooting himself and saying things, especially posting things on x or twitter and its something that is so impulsive and so immature in a way. One of his friends, antonio garcia, said, we were traveling and he was i just had to try to stop him from doing these tweets. And i took his phone and put it in the hotel safe and punch in a code and then left. And then at three in the morning, musk Hotel Security to get in a phone out. So i am i mean, i try not to be too judgment. Ive been criticized for not being too judgmental. But boy, you can read this book and youre going to see boom, boom, boom, all these things that happened. And you can make your judgment, but clearly, the unhinged posting things i think are self of and he when i ask him he yeah. If i have one regret is i keep shooting myself in the foot i should buy kevlar boots because i keep, you know, shooting myself and stabbing myself and the follow up is like, well, why do you keep doing it . But he says this is who i am and this is the larger of the book. Im sorry to do that, which is what musk thats control what a musk with an impulse control with a what . A musk that you could say, okay, temper that with a tempered musk be as successful as a musk unbound and we have that here in washington. You can call it the Richard Holbrooke phenomenon. Whatever it may be, people who are really strong and driven and drive people nuts, can you pull out the dark strands and say what a musk and and still be getting the rockets into orbit . And the answer is no, you dont have to be a jerk or a or whatever, but you have to look at every individual light and dark as a tightly woven fabric. And by understanding them, that doesnt mean you sympathize. That doesnt mean you excuse, but its really helpful to understand these people. One of the questions relation is do you think hes a force for good in the end and does he believe in democracy as something worth fighting for . Yes, he talked about democracy a lot. Hes a force for good in many ways. We have to remember that the entire electric Vehicle Movement ground to a halt in the early 2000. Nobody was going that way more than any other person on this planet. He has done. If you care about climate, if you care about the environment to make solar roads, powerpack, batteries and then teslas, he has now made 5 million tesla in the last six months. Hes done a million. This is by an order of magnitude more than all other american Car Companies that are not going. So hes a force for good to getting us into the age where were not going to be doing a mine and burn fuels for our cars. Secondly, hes a force for good of being able get us into space again. We hadnt gone we hadnt astronauts into orbit since the Space Shuttle 12 years ago decommission us. Thats a force for good. Then you get to the democracy. Question no. I dont think hes handling twitter well. I think all social media, facebook, twitter, x, whatever undermine democracy. He can it can be a really good force for good but at the moment dont hes opened the aperture to more fringe speech, which you can argue. Yeah, more free speech he believes is good for democracy. But amplifying hate speech, which sometimes happens on twitter or amplifying misinformation, thats a big danger to democracy. Im sorry. Im going on. No, its okay. Well, there are a couple of questions here about how would you describe it. Basic, the most important difference between jobs and musk. I think each deserves a separate biography because there are three great innovators of our time thats bringing us into a new age. I mean, theyre more gates and bezos, but its jobs who brought us in the era Friendly Computers and phones, smartphones and a thousand times in our pocket and everything else. Theres Jennifer Doudna of the code breaker, my last book that figured out with her team and her colleagues how to make a tool that will edit our genes, which means you can design your babies. Thats a big deal. And thirdly, mask is somebody up there changing the way we live our jobs and mask both had an absolute power. And i think jobs had a more spiritual feel for both beauty and the design product. And i daphna, a deep spiritual feel for connecting with Human Emotions. He said, we know how to make peoples hearts sing. I dont think anyone has that feel for Human Emotions. What woman would you like to write . A big biography about next . Who would i like to write about next . What female would you like to write . Well, id say were off the record. Except for cspan here. Its a kind of, for instance, question. Im telling you something im chewing on, but dont tell priscilla im mutual editor at simon schuster. Secrets safe with you. There is one person in the real transformation of science. At the beginning of the 20th century that hasnt gotten her due. And shes the person who figured out that basically chemistry and physics are the same. Its all about electrons going around in an atom. Its all about radiation and what is radiation . Its all about figuring out the periodic chart. And how do you fill it in for that reason. And nobody has written a scientific, authoritative biography of marie curie, and she also has an awesome personal life. Friends of einstein and her husband, paul, who has been pierre curie, helps her in the lab, but make sure she wins a nobel prize. Shes the only person to win two nobels, one in chemistry, one in physics. He gets weakened by radiation and killed by a streetcar, and she starts having an affair with one of his students. So when she wins a second nobel prize, its a huge scandal. They tell her not to come to accept. She goes and accepts and she says she doesnt say this to the nobel. If i had been a man, you wouldnt have said that. Just go right to the screenplay. Dont bother with the play. Yeah, i may write about, you know, somebody else. What has writing this book taught you as a historian . Yeah. Its given me this greater appreciation for the shakespeare line at the end of measure for measure, which is even the best or molded out of faults. And in our day and age of snap judgments and cable shout shows and people on talk radio, everybodys either a hero or a villain. But the shakespeare teaches us that we are a tapestry with as i see the metaphor, many threads and we are very bad in this day and age and elan mask is the litmus test which is so many people either totally revere or cant stand them, or somebody out there always telling me i have a tesla and i love my tesla, but im embarrassed because its elon musk. So we have to be able to once again understand not only nuance is, but that sometimes comes a darkness and somebody is something you can really decry. But you have to understand. And it may be that admire but have to understand that people are more complex that its not the cartoon heroes and villains that are cable tv. They just turn people into Walter Isaacson. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking him for coming. That went fast. I dont know. Dr. Ben