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

You're the only person on Earth that followed Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for years and years, so what did you learn? This is going to be a fun ride. Walter Isaacson, one of the greatest biography writers ever, whose work allows all of us to learn from some of the greatest minds in history. And all the people I've written about who are disruptors, they tend to have had demons driving them. But for Elon Musk, it was particularly brutal. A scrawny kid on the autism spectrum, no friends, beaten up quite often. But the scars from that were minor compared to what happened when he went home. It took traveling around with Elon for two years, morning, noon, and night, before I could get him to open up about his father. And then it started coming out. Everything from his hardwiring to a psychologically abusive father helped make somebody who's addicted to drama. He was at Twitter headquarters, he decides they should get rid of one of the server farms. And the engineers say, "We can't do it." Fire s. And then Christmas Eve, Elon forces his way into the server facility with a set of wire cutters and cuts the cable to the server. It drove the teams crazy, but it drove them to do things they didn't think they could do. Because Musk spends 80% of his hardcore mental energy on. But is he happy? How did Steve Jobs change you? When he was dying, I was in his backyard with him and he says, "I regret." Imagine that. You could follow Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for years and years and years and years. Imagine what you would learn. Imagine what you would see. Imagine the value that you would take from that experience of following two of the greatest world-shifting entrepreneurs that have ever lived. Well, the man that sits in front of me today was given that privilege. He got to follow Steve Jobs until the day that he died, and he got to follow Elon Musk for years and years and years in order to write down what he saw and share that information with you. If you've ever wondered what it takes to be a genius, what it takes to change the world, what the cost is, the sacrifice, how to make decisions, how to think, and what motivates these world-changing entrepreneurs, in the next hour and a half, you find out. And before this episode starts, I want to make a deal with you. About 58% of you that watch this podcast frequently haven't yet hit the subscribe button. If you enjoy what we do here, here's the deal that I want to make with you. If you hit that subscribe button, I promise you that we will keep making the show better in every single way. And we have huge plans to turn this into more of a documentary-style conversation where we work incredibly hard to bring in footage of the things we're talking about to give you greater context and greater meaning. So if you hit the subscribe button, I promise you that we will deliver an even greater version of this show. I hope you choose to come along on this journey. Enjoy this [Music] episode.

Walter, you have a tremendous amount of insight from following and studying some of the world's greatest minds, but also from a tremendously successful career of your own as a CEO and as a business person. For anybody that doesn't know, who are the individuals that you've been able to follow and study and had unique, exclusive access to?

It was mainly Steve Jobs, who brought us into the digital revolution with everything from friendly computers to a thousand songs in our pocket. And I spent about two years at his side doing a biography of him. And then Jennifer Doudna, who I think brought us into the life sciences revolution because she and her colleagues, uh, helped invent CRISPR, this tool that can edit our own DNA, which is like, whoa, that's transformative. And so I spent a lot of time at her Berkeley lab and learning how to edit human genes. And then after that, the next logical choice seemed to be Elon Musk, bringing us into the era of space travel, electric vehicles, artificial intelligence. And surprisingly, when I talked to him, uh, he had read a couple of my books. He said, "I said, I just want to do this not based on five or 10 interviews, but based on staying by your side for two years, watching you morning, noon, and night, whenever I want." He went, "Okay." And then I said, "But by the way, I'm not going to show you the book in advance. You get no control over it." He went, "Okay." I thought, alright, this is going to be a fun ride.

Were you surprised?

Uh, I was a little bit surprised. But if you know Musk, he has sort of a little superhero complex. He thinks of himself playing big roles on the world stage. And he loves to be transparent. And I kind of suspected he would want to have this. Uh, there was a mutual friend who helped broker the deal. And the friend said, "You know, he, he wants a biography. I think he sees himself in the same trajectory as a Steve Jobs or Jennifer Doudna."

And why did you want to do it?

I wanted to do somebody who was taking us back into the era of space travel because I'm enough to be one of those geeks who remember the countdown of 10, 9, 8, and you hold your breath and they launch from Cape Canaveral. Uh, also, I believe very much sustainable energy is important to the planet, which means not just electric vehicles, but solar roofs and Powerwalls and the things he's doing. I also tend to think that he's a great engineer. He understands, uh, physical engineering. He doesn't understand human emotions very well, which is why he was better off with Tesla and SpaceX and not, uh, buying Twitter. Uh, but I wanted to understand the, uh, pioneering work that was being done. He's the only person who can get astronauts from the US into orbit. You know, NASA can no longer do it. Boeing can't do it. So how come, how did he make those rockets work?

And with Steve Jobs, what was the, um, access that you were given to him?

Oh, I stayed, I stayed in his guest house right, uh, in his backyard for off and on for a couple of years. It wasn't quite the access I got to Elon Musk. With Steve Jobs, it might be one week every couple of months I'd spend, uh, with him. With Musk, it was three or four weeks per month. Sometimes. Steve Jobs was interesting, but he was mainly interested in the beautiful design and conceptualizing of products. And so we'd spend a lot of time in Johnny Ive's, uh, wonderful design studio at Apple headquarters, where Steve would spend the afternoon hour after hour walking around, even looking at things like the European plug for, uh, a charger and how it was going to be different from the American plug, but how curved. You know, he just cared about God being in the details of each design. Musk cares a lot more about executing the design through manufacturing and assembly lines. Musk spends about 80% of his hardcore mental energy designing the machines that make the machines. In other words, the Raptor engines or the battery cells or the Teslas. And so a lot of the time I spent with him was on assembly lines.

When I sit here with CEOs or successful people, um, I always start with their childhood because I think it provides an important context as to the people that they are. It's almost like their child. You're like a biographer. You know, it begins in childhood.

Well, I mean, you're the, the king of biography. So I had no idea that that's where it's meant to start. 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?

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, uh, childhoods in which they were misfits. Starting with Leonardo da Vinci, who I wrote about. He grew up in a small village. Uh, 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 had no friends, and he was beaten up quite often. But the scars from that were minor compared to, uh, 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, uh, 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.

Do you find that that's nearly always the case? That 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 had to speak to Michael Jordan's greatness coming from the same place that his dark side came from. 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 do 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 fall." And indeed, that's what you're talking about, whether it's Michael Jordan, a Kobe, or Elon Musk.

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

Yes. Uh, he doesn't speak to his father anymore, of course. And, uh, it's a very brutal relationship. But I spoke to his father, and, 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 and 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're 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 two minutes, three 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 had two children by a young woman that he had raised as a stepdaughter. And so that really messed up Elon's mind.

Elon's father raised a stepdaughter and then 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, uh, good things in childhood. He was at times successful, at times less so. Errol is his father. Errol is the father. But he also instilled some of these demons. So it's the most complex relationship. Now, 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, Elon's case, it's both.

And what did you learn, if anything, from speaking to Elon's father?

I learned that he was like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the Stevenson thing, and novel. In other words, he could be a brilliant doctor, but then he'd snap into these demon-like modes, 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 Errol Musk himself says. Yes, I go through these things.

Well, guess what? You see that in Elon Musk. 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?

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 they, you know, his father gave him a motorcycle when he was 11 or 12 years old and drive, you know, going around. He would, uh, almost free-range 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 these 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 his. I'd be there at night, they'd be doing a solar roof installation at midnight, and Musk would be in, you know, hyperdrive, getting all the equipment and telling people what to do. Because Musk loves to be hands-on. And I'd watch Lil 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 in down in South Texas at the launch pad behind it and having drinks in their fire pits. And Elon is there with his mother, May, 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 them behind a tree." And it was his way of saying, "I'm going to let X continue to do that." And May Musk said, "I think it's one generation of risk-takers 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.

And I, 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, he was taking care of him, had to then go and get a job, which left Elon at home alone.

Right, right. That's what I'm saying. He was pretty much home. His 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, May Musk 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. 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?

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 were 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 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.

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?

It's not a one-to-one correlation. As people sometimes when they're arguing with me, they say, "Oh, look, there are people with really bad childhoods who become totally near to wells and, you know, never amount to anything. They're people with really wonderful childhoods who are very, very driven." I think though, it's a, 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.

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

Yeah, even in South Africa and at boy 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, uh, for, uh, college admissions tests. But he had an intense focus. So when he focused on something, you know, 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 you know, 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 that, or engineering problems. And I, I heard that when he discovered the computer, that was another example of that insane focus. He taught himself to code in a. I mean, he grew up at that time that I can remember, and you can't, where computers suddenly pop up. MH. You can have your own computer. And that's one of the things Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and, uh, brought us to, which is, oh, a computer, you can actually plug in and have it home and code on. Well, he got one and taught himself C++ and I think, uh, maybe, uh, Python, Pascal. And at age 12 or 13, coded his own video game called Blaster, which he published. And he becomes addicted to two things: one is computers, and two is video games.

Did, did, um, you, you spoke to his mother quite a lot? Yeah, still do. She's very much around. What did she think of him at that age, when he's 11, 12? Did they, did she think he was a genius?

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, and I think she still feels he's a genius.

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

No. Um, there are 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 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? 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, uh, volt, uh, 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.

Do you think it's a trauma response of sorts?

It's a trauma response. It's also, and the book is got a lot, you know, of, uh, 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 the geek-like way, on certain engineering or mathematical or coding issues. I think everything from his hardwiring to his childhood and upbringing helped make somebody who's addicted to turmoil, who has a maniacal intensity of focus, and also has multiple personality mood swings.

He ends up leaving South Africa and studies physics and business at the same time. And I was, 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, 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. 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.

Yes. You know, first principle thinking is key. That doesn't know. And first principle 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 a way to do things." But you, 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. It doesn't work. And on the plane fight home, he says, "Let me go to first principle thinking." Exactly. How much is the cost of each material in a rocket? How much is the, 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 principle 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 him, "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, of the principles of physics that make that true are."

When he's pursuing first principles, what is he trying to get around and past that that frustrates him?

Regulations, rules, people who won't take risks. He says that, you know, 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," than we have people willing to shoot up 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.

Was Steve Jobs the same in that regard?

Steve Jobs was not focused on hardware engineering in the same way Woz 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, like, 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. Um, he wrote an ad for Apple, and it had pictures of Einstein and other disruptive intellects. And it said, "Here's to the misfits. Here's to the crazy ones. 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's way of thinking, and it also describes Elon Musk.

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?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's like 20, 30 times in the book. It's just. And he goes, "Bist." Like, I'll tell you a fun one, which is just last Christmas. You know, not too long ago, he was at Twitter headquarters. And he looks at all the engineering things, and they have three server farms, uh, for, uh, 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 or whatever." And he says, "Now, you're not going back to first principal linking." If you look at this anyway, he decides they should get rid of the servers in Sacramento. Well, they say, "Fine, but that'll take six months because." And he said, "No, you can do it in six weeks." And the engineer, 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 it 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 that. 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 there by four of them on the plane. They rent a truck, a sort of what we call a U-Haul truck, a rental truck. And they go to the server facility. And they, the guard there is like, "Flummoxed." It's Christmas Eve, and they're forcing their way in. And they're looking at the servers. And one of the engineers say, "Well, you know, we can't take them out because we need engineers to take off these elevated floors, you know, those floor tiles where people." And Musk turns to his bodyguard and says, "Do you got a pocket knife?" The guy goes, "Yeah." 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 them in the U-Haul truck. And this is Musk just. And by the way, it's typical of Musk because it works fine for a few days. Then you can see the service getting a bit degraded. But then eventually it comes back. And he says, "You got to take risks. If, if you're not sort of causing 20% of the problems from the risk you take, you're not taking enough risk." But there it is. And they got rid of that server farm in Sacramento.

What happens to the people that Musk works with when they see that case study? That in that moment, he, 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 the 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. There's another scene in the book where on a late Friday night, he's down in the South Tip of Texas where they have the launch pad for Starbase. And it's a Friday night after 10 p.m. And he looks at the launch pad area, says, "Why are there only three or four people working?" And this poor guy, Andy Krabs, nice, tall, you know, Southern young engineer, says, "Well, it's a Friday night, and we don't have any launches scheduled." And Musk goes dark on them 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 the surge." And they fly people in. People are sleeping on the ground on the floors to do this surge. And Andy Krabs 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 recognized, coming up after the speech. It's Andy Krabs. 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."

Interesting. The, um, you know, the acquisition of Twitter. Twitter was a very, from, you know, think about where it's based and how it was run and all the things we've come to learn about the company and its sort of political leanings. It was very much the antithesis of the Musk approach. And he had become over the past three or four years, he's edged from being what I would call a center-left, uh, 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, uh, mindset that he sees in colleges and in schools. Multiple reasons, which I go through in the book. What's the most important reason?

Well, the most personal reason is he had, uh, five older children, teenagers, uh, 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, where you live. Sometimes 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.

You say that it caused him a tremendous amount of pain that Xavier transitioned and is now a woman. How do you know that it caused him pain?

Well, he said so. And he, 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, uh, his daughter rejecting him." Not transitioning, but just totally rejecting him. Other than the death of his first child through 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.

Going back to when he acquired Twitter, um, I, as a great fan of what Elon has achieved in the service that he's sort of served to 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, bingo, really important other things.

100%. You were, you were there, right? At the time. I was there. So I'm sitting here just, uh, open Giga Texas, which is the largest factory manufacturing things, that's a Tesla factory in Austin, Texas, on the mezzanine. The factory is 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 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, his, we're all like his friends, three or four friends. It's 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?" And 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. You've been through all these before. It's an advertising medium. It's supposed to gather eyeball calls for advertisers in a friendly environment. And that's not Elon's specialty. So I think it was, was then and is now, both a distraction and does not play to his strengths.

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?

I think that it probably hurts his reputation, especially among more progressive people. It obviously has hurt, which means it probably has hurt Tesla sales. Esra 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, 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 10 times more controversial, which is not great if you're just trying to do a mass market car sales.

When he went into Twitter, one of the, um, the very alarming things that he did was, there were 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."

Absolutely. I mean, I was there. I walked in with, I, it was there that 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 a two-way, 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, you know, 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. He says, "Psychological safety? Blank. That. You know, 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 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.

Do you believe, I often speak to large organizations that have cultural problems, they, they're not innovative, they're being eroded away by, um, new market entrants, etcetera. 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, big. I've often wondered, then I saw this Elon Musk approach to turning culture around, where you basically let off a grenade in the building. Totally. Do you believe there's merit in that approach?

Yes, but I also believe there's a big old downside. And like everything with Elon Musk, including the shooting off of 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 did. 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 Krabs, 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, uh, 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 5:00 and make cocktails for all the writers. There was a roast beef carving 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 a glorious when it happened. Then I went to CNN. And for a while, the Gulf War, we 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 of firing like Elon Musk could, 80% of the people. So sometimes CNN was one of those big old battleships, as you said, lots of people working there. It probably needed a more disruptive leader than I was.

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.

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 healthcare 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, get 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 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, you know, Steve Jobs or Bill Gates in the early days of Microsoft, or Bezos in the early days of Amazon, or Musk, you know, basically 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 arch, which is "Just know thyself." And you got to know, here's my approach, and here's where I feel most comfortable.

Interesting, cuz I was just about to ask you which approach you think is generally more effective. But, you know, for me, I couldn't do the all-in jerk, you know, the 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 he would say that to you.

He would say, "You all," he called it velvet gloves, I guess. A matter of fact, he said, "People like yourself, when you ran companies, you had velvet gloves on, and you were 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, uh, uh, tolerating B players and coddling them." So I, you know, 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.

Have to make the right team. And when I ran CNN, 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, um, 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.

Both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk did. What was their view on being liked as a leader? 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, uh, 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.

Did you agree with him? Yeah, I agree. I think I ran Time magazine just fine. We can ask other people. But, uh, uh, but with CNN, I sat there worrying about, I won't name names, but these anchors on CNN who truly, uh, 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 hero in of my book, The Codebreaker, 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 pipets 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 in 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.

But do Elon's employees like him? Elon's employees generally, uh, will walk through a wall for him. Those who have survived, whether it be Gwen Shotwell, who is a president of SpaceX, or people, uh, at Mark Junco, 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.

Sounds like they either love him or leave. Yeah. And as I say, sometimes with Andy Grove, 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, um, hired to run, uh, 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, uh, at the launch pad or the factory. And they'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 5:00 p.m.

Does he believe it when he says that? And to typically people believe it when they hear it. 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. 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. We've got to. If we don't do this, we'll never get humanity to tomorrow. We'll never get the world to electric vehicles. I totally think he believes it.

Why does he care so much about Mars? He believes in spacefaring. In other words, we have to be space adventurers for two or three reasons. One is he believes that human consciousness is rare and maybe unique. They nowhere else in the universe do we know that there's consciousness. And why? Because if consciousness existed somewhere else, it, it probably never became multiplanetary before the planet it was on got destroyed. There's not something you and I wake up worrying about. But it's a kid there, 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 in 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, if you decide you want to be the richest person on Earth, you know, step one isn't start a rocket company. So I think he believes in the mission.

And do you think that he's at all scared that he might not get there in his lifetime? 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, you know, two or three times, like 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.

As someone like Elon that thinks in terms of first principles when he's trying doing those calculations about how 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. Now, he makes fun of his tech bros who are sitting there with longevity, uh, plans of how they're going to live to be much longer. Uh, and no, he does not care enough about his health. For a, he's very, he's overweight now. For a while, a year ago, he decided to go on an intermittent fasting diet and also was using whatever those drugs are called, you know, the diet weight loss drugs. Yeah, 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, uh, expert, but this does not seem like the healthiest way to either lose weight or remain healthy.

Does that seem like a bit of a contradiction to you in some respects? That he's not, 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, he's fanatic on many, many things. But, uh, getting on the treadmill and taking care of himself is not one of them.

Did you ever see him exercise while you were with him? 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 trainers. And every now and then I'd be just sitting in that house day in and day out and 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.

How would you characterize his mental health? Incredibly mercurial. What does that mean? 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 has 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, and the book wrestles with him with this, and 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? In the time that you observed him, in the years that you were with him, were you ever concerned about him? 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, 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, you know, 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 asked, 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.

With all these, um, great leaders, there's a word you use throughout, which is the word team. Um, the definition of the word company is group of people. How do they go about hiring great people? 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, the first few years of SpaceX and Tesla, he interviewed everybody, uh, 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 Gwen Shotwell, who for more than 20 years has helped run SpaceX, and Mark Junco, 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, uh, 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, Ed K.U., Tim Cook team. Musk is not as much of a superstar building team, but he does get hardcore, dedicated leaders to work for him.

And do they both think that the team is the most important thing, hiring great people? 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 Mueller, there's Drew Baglino, there's some people. But it's not as if he has a big team in place as easily. Uh, he's a little bit more the total boss. And, uh, he'll not try to run everything, but he'll focus manically on specific things. And he does not delegate, 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.

What are the, um, principles of success or leadership that both Steve and Elon share? 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 track home in California. And there's a fence. And he made me look at the back of the fence, which faced scrub. 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 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's 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.

What, what was their, um, 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. 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, involves the unknown and taking a risk.

How do they keep their cultures to be pro-risk and, um, to stop them getting complacent with their success? 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, uh, change from, uh, carbon fiber to stainless steel on a particular compound. Or we can't do Cybertruck because Cybertruck is too edgy and it's made of stainless steel and it's 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 being 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 resisted him on the amount of servers you need at, uh, 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.

Do, do you think they're somewhat delusional, these people? 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, geeks' way of saying delusional. Meaning, uh, you can wish something and think hard enough on something and try to make it happen. And often at work with Jobs, he'd say, you got to shave 10 seconds off the boot-up time. And they'd 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 10, 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. You talked kind of about it. 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, you always. 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. The, the reason he's setting deadlines, even though he knows sometimes they might might not be hit, is because it speeds up the team. Yeah, he says, you, 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 he, his team calls 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 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 Tesla solar, uh, pan, 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, 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.

Is he happy? 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, uh, Talulah Riley, who lives here, who 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, are you ever happy at what you've achieved? He said, no. I'm like a video game addict. When I get to 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 Polyopia.

Is that common amongst the great leaders that you've studied? No. It, um, was 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. They 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, uh, 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 if there's a particular tradeoff there. But I know Musk would say, yeah, I could be on a yacht somewhere, but that's not what I want.

Do you think Jeff and, uh, Steve? Do you think Elon likes Jeff? I think they're competitors. And there are two chapters in the book called Bezos and Musk, where they compete, compete for a pad at Cape Canaveral, the story pad 39A, with they get into big disputes and lawsuits over satellite levels. Musk says, if, 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. Uh, 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, 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 went cause Musk to go ballistic. But since then, he hasn't gone ballistic on Bezos, and that got resolved.

How did Steve Jobs change you? 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's 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. And specifically, Elon spending that time with him. Yeah, you know, I, 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 four, almost 40 years. And, you know, 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 you write about in the book, this five-step approach that Elon takes towards sort of 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? 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, 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, uh, 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 Musk said is when you try to automate processes that you should have deleted, you're not going to do it. But it's, it's that 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 hold-up, if there's something that's a, a piece of, you know, strip around the headlight or, uh, wiring in the Raptor engine that's causing a hold-up 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. And people write, he makes people write their on the parts of the rocket that they're responsible for. 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, uh, cost down by 80%? And if you don't think you can do it, your name is on that mission. Then step aside. You know, we're not going to tolerate people who can't be on the mission.

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You mentioned your own family and your own, um, relationships. Last question is about Elon's love life. You know, now Elon loves drama and turmoil, right? That's from childhood. He associates it with childhood in love. And whether it's at Twitter or 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 is legendary, uh, 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 Talulah Riley, whom he was married to, uh, 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. But he seems to have a longing to be with somebody. He seems to have, 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, uh, some, he has a child, uh, who's autistic and, you know, needs a minder generally. I mean, enough so, uh, that he's still a very wise, uh, 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 Cybertruck 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.

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 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? Knowing your mission and knowing yourself. I, 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, uh, in life. And it's not getting humanity to Mars. It's not the grandest of all missions. But, uh, I think if you know yourself and what you value, then the happiness follows.

And what is your mission? My mission is that there's certain things that inspire us, that make us aim higher, and make us better. And as a, 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.

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 both 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, yeah, 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, you have to assemble the parts of an Elon or a Steve Jobs or a Jennifer and take from them, um, 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 detailed, in-depth of insight and understanding and storytelling, which is so unbelievably captivating, as this one that's written on Elon Musk. So it's, um, it's a must-read for everybody, regardless of what discipline or pursuit you're in. I think it's just an absolute 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.

Wow, it's a huge honor to get to meet you and an actual pleasure, too. Thank you. Quick one. I discovered a product which has changed my life called Eight Sleep. This product, Eight Sleep, which are a sponsor of this podcast, has been a revelation in my life because the Eight Sleep Pod cover, which is basically a fitted sheet that goes over your mattress, controls the temperature of your bed throughout the night. And it follows nature's natural rhythm. It starts cool, gets colder while you go into different phases of sleep, and then heats up slightly as you wake up in the morning, which is effectively guiding you to have a deeper, more restorative sleep. I genuinely think of all the things that we would include in health and fitness, I think sleep now is the, the most important factor. The thing that I'm thinking about most often, every single day when I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is I check my sleep. And I use that information to determine how to proceed in that day, how hard to work out, how many meetings to have, what I need to cancel, what time I need to get to bed. So to celebrate them being a new podcast sponsor, I always want to get a discount for you guys. And I've got one. Go to eightsleep.com, which is E I G H T sleep.com/st. And if you do that, you'll save $150 on the Pod cover that I have on my bed, the one I'm talking about. Grab your Pod cover, send me a DM and let me know how you get on. Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We've discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done. So I've linked that episode in the description below. I know you'll enjoy it. [Music]