Thank you so much. Um, when I was in the fifth grade, I don't want to hear this story again, at the Isidore Newman School, Walter Isaacson was the president of the student body. And uh, if you'd asked, if you'd shown any of the teachers or administrators then the picture of us on stage now, they had looked at Walter and said, 'Yeah, that's about right.' And they had looked at me and said, 'There's no chance.' Yeah, right, right, right. That's exactly what they would have said. Um, and they were wrong. And the Isidore Newman School, which started out in 1903 as a manual training center for Jewish orphans, uh, and it has gone on to be a factory for All-Pro quarterbacks in the NFL, uh, but in between has generated a couple of writers. Well, it was good that Eli and Peyton went there because Michael and I didn't have to worry about who were the famous Newman grads. We were like a footnote, also from Newman. But uh, but there's, there'll be a New Orleans theme a bit to this, I think, this conversation. And very, you know, oddly and coincidentally, you're publishing this book about Elon Musk three weeks before I publish a book with Sam Bankman-Fried. We both had wild rides with a rogue character. We both have a lot of explaining to do. Yeah, exactly. When did you figure out your character was going rogue? Let's talk about that. But you know, so let's, this is, this is mainly, this is your debutante party, not mine. And uh, and I wanted to, so the, the book, this thing landed on my doorstep three and a half days ago, and I have now, I read it, but I had to read it fast. I had thought very much about how to frame a conversation. I finished it this morning. Um, I was blown away. Thank you. I was blown away. And let me see if I can articulate why I was blown away. It's, it's, I, it is, I think, my favorite of your books. Uh, I think if you, one way I judge my writing is like Olympic dives. It's like not just quality of the execution, but degree of difficulty. Like, but yeah, if it's a triple flip with a splash, it's better than if it's a, you know, just jumping in and it doesn't splash. And uh, and the degree of difficulty was extremely high. And it was, it was obvious to me over the last few years when we've spoken that the degree of difficulty for you was high. And you know, and I thought, let me just find, when I got, I got to a page when I thought, yeah, that's why the degree of difficulty is high. Uh, but there's a page in here, here it is right here. There's a picture, and in this picture of Elon Musk going into Twitter is Walter Isaacson. You're there. You're a fly on the wall. And you, you've had living subjects before. People have been saying, 'Oh, this is hard for you because you don't...' Your first biography was about Kissinger. Yeah, I know. So tell me about it. Yeah, but, but, but you, you, the fly, your participation really in his life for the last few years changed the tenor of the book. And I'm going to let you speak eventually. Okay, give me just a sec. I'm perfectly happy. Okay, you just, but I'm giving you a little break here, and then it's going to be your show. But the thing that was so interesting to me, because it's a problem that I've had to grapple with, is that we live in a, we live now, right now, in a world of instant judgment. Yeah, we live in a world where people celebrate their own quick judgments, uh, snap judgments. Mob, mob sentiment forms very quickly. It's very hard to preserve uh, an absence of judgment, a feeling of an absence of judgment. And you have a character about whom the world is judgmental. There isn't anybody in this room, on the planet, who doesn't have an opinion about Elon Musk. And you, who may know him better than anybody in the world now, managed to write 600 pages, and I actually don't know exactly what you think of him. I learned all kinds of things about him, but you've written a Rorschach test that people are going to come to it, and they're going to have, your readers are going to have such a range of response to it because you've just laid him out beautifully.
Well, you know, it was that way with Steve Jobs too. I mean, some people, they'd finish the book, I remember being here, and they'd come up afterwards and they'd say, 'I finished your book,' and I could look at it and they could say, 'I hate Steve Jobs,' or 'I love Steve Jobs.' And what you do, and what some of us do from Louisiana, is say, 'Just let me tell you a story,' and you make it a narrative story, and you make it really colorful, and the people can form their own judgments from it. Now, in the end, I think you're going to, anybody will have pretty strong reactions and a lot of judgments, but I do try to get out of the way of what is an amazing story. There's a wonderful T. Harry Williams, you and I grew up with, the first great biography either of us read, of Huey Long. It just begins with a paragraph of Huey Long going down to South Louisiana, where it's Catholic, and saying on the stump, because he's from North Louisiana, 'Oh, and then I had to hook up our horse and take my Catholic grandmother to church.' And one of his campaign managers afterward says, 'Hey, you never told us you had a Catholic grandmother.' He said, 'Hell, we didn't even have a horse.' And you just get that anecdote and you laugh, but T. Harry Williams lets you build your own: is this a rogue? Is this a liar? Is this... And I really tried to do that with Musk.
Yeah, you, and you did do it with him. Uh, the, hey, we're, I want to follow the Louisiana thread, but I want to come back to it later. Okay. I want to know, um, I want to know the story sort of behind the book, like how this happens and how your relationship with him develops. So just tell us a little bit how you come to Elon Musk as a subject.
Yeah, I, I was kicking around for some ideas, and a mutual friend of Musk's and mine, uh, said, 'You really got to do...' Who is that? Antonio Gracias. He's on the board of Tesla, and he was on the board of the Aspen Institute. So, uh, nice guy, and he said, 'You got to do Musk.' I said, 'Well, I'll talk to him.' And one day, one afternoon, we were actually out in Sag Harbor and had a 90-minute conversation with him. We got on the phone, and I said, 'If I do this book, I don't want to do it based on five or 10 interviews or 20 interviews. I just want to be by your side, as you saw in that picture, just watching you day and night at breakfast—well, he doesn't eat breakfast, but lunch, dinner, late night, walking the factory lines.' And the other criteria is you have no control over the book. Nothing's off. You have no control. You don't get to read it. And he's probably still has, he read it yet? I don't know. He says jokingly, 'Walter told me I couldn't read it.' So, uh, not that I trust everything, but uh, at least he pretends he hasn't read it.
Right. So, so, so when the subject is first suggested to you, Elon Musk, what is your instant...
So I'm thinking, man, that's a great idea. Here's a person, because I love technology, creativity, people who break rules and innovate, right? You know, the 'think different' type thing. And here's a guy who brought us into the era of electric vehicles, had just had Tesla go almost bankrupt at the beginning of 2019, but then become, uh, more valuable than all the other car companies in the world combined, a million cars, brings us into the era of solar roofs with batteries, the only person who can shoot off rockets and get things to orbit and have the boosters land. Is that true? He's the only one who's done that? Nobody, China hasn't done it, the US hasn't done it, Boeing hasn't done it. He's the only person who's been able to do reusable rockets. He's put up 5,000 satellites, recreated the, uh, internet in low Earth orbit. And I said, man, this is everything. And then about a year into riding along with him, everything's going well. I say, man, you know, this has been a pretty good year. You're the richest person on Earth, you're Time's Person of the Year, you've done all these things. Uh, you're going to relax? And he said that he was secretly buying shares of Twitter. I went, oh, this is not going to end well, this movie. And so that's the pivot point.
Yeah. So, but I want you to back up because, because you don't know this person. You, you're introduced to him, you tell him your terms, he accepts the terms. Yeah. Where does the relationship go then? How do you start to enter into his life?
I don't fill his silences. I'm a quiet observer.
Physically, where are you? Physically, you're teaching a class at, at Tulane?
No, but one week or two, I got a lot of my students here, so a round of applause for all my Tulane students. And your son is going to go to Tulane, which we like too. So, uh, you probably haven't told Tabitha that, right? I reveal we have a son who's a junior, he hasn't decided. Um, so, uh, what I do is I'm always by his side taking notes, and I try very carefully just to be the observer. I definitely don't fill his silences. He almost doesn't notice me by the end because he gets into demon mode sometimes, where he is just a total jerk. Um, actually, there's a technical term that begins with a... but he is like, and it's like, I'm sitting there, how can you... And I was worried about the Heisenberg principle, that my observation would change the subject. But you know, people said, 'I wish that was the case,' but he's just as brutal when you're watching as any other time. And so about a week or so per month, I would just go and I'd say, 'Where are you?' wherever he is, and he would say, 'I'm at the Gig... I'm at Boca Chica, in the tip of Texas, at the Starship launch pad.' I'd go there, I'd have a little overnight bag because you never knew where you're going. And for about a week, you know, he'd say late at night, he'd say, 'Okay, we, we, we got to get to Fremont in California,' and he had a plane, obviously, and I would just tag along. And after about a week or 10 days, I'd straggle back to New Orleans, shower, change clothes, teach the classes, and then go back out again.
And what was his attitude toward you from the beginning? Like, how did he handle you?
He's not, he is very, he, he talks about being on the autism spectrum, Asperger's he calls it, and he is very unaware of other people around him and makes no emotional connection. So I could just be sitting there or walking the factory line with him, and he wouldn't do things like, 'Oh, here, let me show you this,' whatever. He would, uh, just be doing his work, and I'd be standing there.
And you should, so you, you could just, you could move into his life and it didn't...
Totally at the time. I mean, he had, I knew more about him than he knew about him. Yeah, no, uh, including he was then, um, having children with both Grimes and Shivon, right? And I was in the midst of that.
Let's pause it. You know, this is it. This, I don't want to just skip over this because I'm trying to get rapidly back to the factory. We get, we can get to the rockets and the cars and the Boring Company and all that, but it's, his love life is spectacular. I mean, it's an amazing thing. And, and it's even more amazing to me that all of his past loves seem to be, or almost all of them seem to be, wide open in talking to you about him.
Oh, especially, yeah, his wives in particular.
Did he say to everybody, 'Just talk to this guy'?
I guess because they all, nobody said no. Nobody...
There's not what, there isn't that surprised me in the story, there's no sense of other people's fear of him in talking to you.
No, they say, including his mother, his brother, they all just...
His father, yeah, we'll get there at some point. Yeah, but, uh, all of his relationships with women are drama-driven turmoil because he, as, um, Grimes says, as Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, says, he had such a traumatic childhood that he associates love with trauma and drama. And so he's always stirring up drama. So the minute he's in love, he's in drama. Amber Heard type thing, I mean, Amber being one of them, and who I talked to. And, uh, but the only one who I, I just really liked, who was perfect for him, was Talulah Riley, clearly. Uh, married her twice. And the problem is she just wasn't storm and dr...
Right. Is the pattern that he would fall dramatically in love and then after a couple of months get bored? That's what, that's what it kind of read like.
No, because he keeps recycling back to, uh, he creates the first couple of months over and over. Yeah, but there's always a turmoil, tumultuous breakup, you know, huge. Look, I know he wasn't noticing me because I was there for huge loud fights.
Right. Yeah. So, so, so you're moving in, you're moving, you get to his life, you get to a point where you're in his life invisible.
Well, you know, even when we're down in Boca Chica, which is the most interesting place, you know, which is this tip of Texas place where they have the launch pad for... So he has the only home he has because his daughter rejected him because he's a billionaire, and so he sold all of his houses, has a two-bedroom home there, and I had an Airstream trailer right there. And I don't know if you've stayed in an Airstream for four or five days, but it's kind of fun. And, uh, you just, uh, sort of watch.
Do, at any point, did he ask you what you were doing, or why you were doing it, or could you do it this way, or could you leave this out?
No, he never did. And I had to talk to my wife, uh, about some sensitive things, amongst them children under the age of 17 without their permission, if it was something bad other than he was letting you... You had to, you had to be the filter because he wasn't. In some ways they were calling me sometimes too, right? The other one was I was careful and maybe went a little too far, but he doesn't seem to be mad about it, about inside information. In other words, I knew because I was in the meeting when he secretly decided that they're going to build a $25,000 cheap global car that's going to transform Tesla, and they're also going to do it on the same platform as a robotaxi. I was worried. And likewise, about four months ago, he decided to use artificial intelligence to totally revise how they're doing self-driving. So it's done by imitating humans through video learning as opposed to swallowing the lines of... Yeah, swapping the lines of code. Yeah, you're right. And I'm thinking, all right, that's maybe proprietary information. I did quietly check with a couple people at Tesla about, you know, how much trouble that could be, and they shrugged. They said, 'He let you in the meeting.'
Was there stuff in the book that would move stock prices?
It did. Oh, it did, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I won't go too deep in that, but, uh, Tesla went way up.
Oh, no, when the book came out.
Oh, oh, because of the global, the global car, which they think is huge, as like a, you know, there's so much news, a fire hose of news in the book.
That's the most amazing thing. Did you see the New York Post today?
I haven't finished it yet, like two pages. I said, I didn't know I'd written all that.
Um, all right, I'm not going to worry this to death about you and him, but it, it's an interesting subject to me that it's, there's, there's a little bit of an undercurrent of criticism of both you and me with our subjects this time round, um, uh, that the price of having access, the price of being so close, and it's a really interesting topic. Is it? I mean, I wanted to, I mean, I, it's an interesting topic to, to, I, I find it a problematic topic, but I'm curious what you think of this kind of line of criticism.
Well, it comes only from journalists, by the way, who don't have access.
They don't have access, but that's... but who, who actually, journalists who no one would want to hang around with, which doesn't include you. It may, but, um...
One of the things that I had to keep in mind is it isn't about him or what he thinks.
Right. The reader is your only client.
That's right. This paragraph goes in because it's going to help the reader, or you never say, 'How is this person going to react?' But for me it was kind of easy because this guy just didn't seem to care.
He wouldn't care. He wouldn't care. I don't think he cares now, right?
And so I knew, actually, I don't want to lie, I want to say this, there was a part of me that said, okay, he may go ballistic. What's, what's it going to be like when he's like sicking his fanboys on Twitter on me? But I, I thought, okay, I don't need to be his friend or whatever the rest. So I kept trying to say, it's only about the reader, it's only about the reader. And I never felt that he was going to kick me out because of what I was doing.
Uh, so it was not like writing about even Steve Jobs, who really you had emotional connection, he really cared, etc.
This guy didn't seem to care. Like, all right, now we're going to go, you know, to whatever.
I think that he actually loved... he said, 'I love pain.' I thought, well, that I can inflict some of that. Yeah, yeah. Uh, he said, you know, in my childhood it was all psychological pain, my father.
He was, uh, sent to wilderness camp, you know, when he was a young kid in South Africa, and he gets beaten up because he's scrawny and socially awkward, put it mildly. And, uh, but the second time he goes, a few years later, he's grown up a bit, he, you know, he said, 'I just learned to punch people really hard in the nose, even if they were beating me up,' and that helped, which is a metaphor for everything he does, including on, uh, X and things. But he gets beaten up once on the playground so badly at school, pushed down the concrete steps with his brother there, and they smash his face, and he says he was in the hospital for a week, I think it was probably four or five days. He gets home and he has to stand in front of his father for 90 minutes, who is a Jekyll and Hyde character who's gone into dark mode and berates Elon for being stupid, for being a weakling, and takes the side of the person who beat him up. So the demons from that and the feeling, and his parents were split, and he was, you know, being raised by this father, the feelings of love and the person protecting me causes me pain, is what every single one of his ex-wives and girlfriends says is the key to him.
And how does he respond to that analysis?
He starts to get very teary-eyed. The only times it's hard to get him to talk is when you say, 'Let's talk about your father again,' and boy, he goes really silent, and sometimes he tears up. The interesting thing that I learned, and I first learned it on the Times-Picayune when I was a journalist down in New Orleans, is if somebody goes silent, most of us want to fill the silences. We want to say something. It's like, you wait 30 seconds, you got to say something. He would go silent, and I would outlast him for four minutes or so. That's a really long time. And then suddenly, in a monotone, as if I were not there, he would just drone on. And his, uh, both, um, Justine, his first wife, and Talulah said late at night, when he had so much pressure on him, everything was going bankrupt, the rockets going, he's energized by the pain, but he's also vomiting in the bathroom, and Talulah's holding his head, and said when that happened, he would channel things his father said to him. So that's the key to the demons in his head.
I'm not saying anything. We sit here silently. Do you stop talking? Well, so, so, um, how do you think of this? I mean, you open the book with his childhood, and it's shocking. The, the, the childhood is shocking. It's a slap in the face to the reader almost. Um, you do this for a reason, do you think? Like, you remove that childhood, or you make it a more, more like our childhoods, a happy childhood.
You know what's interesting about our childhoods, because we grew up in a very magical place with parents that were really smart and nice and everything else, is I sometimes wonder whether having a lot of demons from childhood gives you a lot of drive. You and I, with all due respect to both of us, are basically observers in this world of people doing really weird and wild things. We're not trying to fix anything. We're not trying to blow things up. I've never tried to get a rocket to Mars. And the question is, do you have to be demon-driven to want to change? I look at every one of my characters: Einstein, growing up Jewish in Germany, not, not happy. Uh, Leonardo, he's growing up illegitimate, his father won't legitimate him, gay, left-handed, distracted, and he goes from the village of Vinci to Florence, and has, even to his deathbed, he's still doing the deluge drawings, he's still tormented. And I go down now, Steve Jobs, adopted and actually rejected by the, or not accepted by the first adopted family, you know, feels abandoned but chosen. Uh, so as Obama says in his memoirs, I think every successful person is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of his father, and in his case, he said, it's both.
Well, that's true of Elon, but this, so this is the ingredient, the necessary unhappiness.
Well, I don't know, you and I had these happy childhoods and we didn't amount to much.
It's true, but it, it's what it is. It's true that you and I don't have the impulse to change the world. We, we are more comfortable, like Hawthorne writes about, being the detached observer.
That's right. That's completely true. Uh, so, so with this, this, talk about a little bit of how Elon Musk escapes this.
Like, well, he runs away at 17, like everybody. Ben Franklin runs away at 17. Einstein runs away at 17, right? You and I went down to, you know, some part, party or something, and, uh, Einstein's running away, his palms are sweating.
Uh, and he escapes by leaving South Africa, which has been very violent, uh, and, um, comes to Canada at first with about $4,000, and eventually goes to Silicon Valley after going to Penn, uh, and starts a couple of companies. One is Zip2, which is like Google Maps but before that, and the other is a really, really interesting one, x.com. And it was a financial payments app that also has a social network attached. It becomes PayPal. They oust him. He wants to keep it called x.com, and he wants it to be an everything app, right? This is what drives him 22 years later to buy Twitter, turn it into x.com, and make it a payments app.
At what point in his career or life do people start saying, this is a really unusual person who's going to do really unusual things?
Um, I think I couldn't figure that out from the story. Yeah, I think his first two companies, which are Zip2 and then what we'll call PayPal, both are successful, and they both make him, you can probably remember the numbers, like a hundred million or so, which is a lot of money. Yeah. And instead of buying an island or buying a yacht, he wants to keep putting his chips on the table. Right. So with all the PayPal mafia that he's having a fight with, he decides he wants to send a rocket to Mars. And they keep saying, 'What, what are you talking about?' He says, 'Well, if we don't become a spacefaring civilization, human consciousness may die out.' And they say, 'Hey, bro, you, you...' This, this is where he becomes different from everybody.
Correct. And this is where everybody, Peter Thiel, I talked to him, and Reid Hoffman, that whole PayPal mafia, they say suddenly once he had a couple hundred million, he decides to put it all in to trying to get a rocket to Mars. So this is a different risk profile than most people.
Peter Thiel said that most great entrepreneurs know how to calculate risk. Yeah. And he said Musk is different. He's addicted to risk. Yeah, that's the difference, that he's willing, that the, the, the next thing is as valuable as what he... Exactly. And, uh, he wants to always up the game. Yeah. And now he's still doing it. I mean, he didn't have to buy Twitter, and now after buying...
Let's talk about that a little bit, just since it's, it's, it's the, it's the shocking turn the book, the story, the life story takes, the business story takes. Up to then, everything he's doing is actually kind of, it's, it's about moving people through space. It's Tesla, it's his rockets, it's his...
Yeah. Grand epic missions. A guy who had read superhero comics too often, and they, 'I'm going to bring us into the era of sustainable energy and space travel.'
Help me understand why anybody would want to buy Twitter.
Well, I, you know, because I watched this from the side. Yeah, there are about four or five reasons, uh, that I think he wanted to buy Twitter, and I've talked to him about all of them, and he even discusses them in the book. One was an insight Kathy had, which is he was beaten up all the time in the playground, always being bullied, right? And the world's great playground is Twitter, and he can own it and be the bully.
And be the bully, and he is.
