America recently celebrated the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And if your timeline is anything like mine, you saw a deluge, a bukkake of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin greatness porn. How amazing these guys were, how great these guys were, how without their greatness, America would not be what it is today. It's a way of thinking about history that isn't new. Back in 1840, the influential historian Thomas Carlyle wrote, 'The history of what man has accomplished in this world is at bottom the history of the great men.' All things that we see standing accomplished in the world are properly the outer material result of thoughts that dwelt in the great men sent into the world. TL;DR: dudes rock. And this perspective has informed how Americans were taught their history for years. The history of America was basically the biographies of Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, and JFK. Boom, done. God bless America. Support the troops. Don't forget to tip your bar and wait staff. But if you just read those books, you would probably walk away thinking that civilization was moved forward only by single individuals and that those individuals weren't... They were good men.
But there's a whole different approach to history which started becoming more dominant in the 1970s and the 1980s that gives more credit to social and structural forces and collective action, aka a bunch of people working together to get a desired result to benefit humanity. So yes, Abraham Lincoln was important to ending slavery, but the abolitionist movement had been working on it since the previous century. Yes, FDR passed the New Deal, but that was the final chapter of a fight that started decades earlier with farmer protests in the late 1800s and labor activism in the early 1900s. You could even argue that the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire in 1911 was a more important origin story of the New Deal than the election of FDR. But even if there might be more nuance and complexity to those kinds of historical narratives, there's still a huge temptation to explain history through the influence of powerful people, mainly men. I'm talking about Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, GW, Bezos, Musk, Beast. It's simple. It's easy. But is it true? To talk more about this, I sat down with one of the most famous biographers out there right now, Mr. Walter Isaacson. His books have mostly focused on singular individuals who have made a big impact in the tradition of this great man style of history. His first book was literally called The Wise Men, and he has written biographies of Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and also a woman, biochemist Jennifer Doudna. Shout out to the ladies. But unlike many of his predecessors, Walter will both highlight the accomplishments of people and also call them out. So I sat down with Walter Isaacson to talk about why he thinks biographies are important. If you don't want to understand humans in their complexity, go on social media. Don't read biographies. Why those books aren't in and of themselves enough to really understand history.
I do think we biographers distort history a little.
And I asked him about some of the psychos that he has spent a lot of time with and written about. Hey, you wrote a biography about Henry Kissinger. Do you think he's in hell? Uh, he didn't have an answer, but I think we know. We know.
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Have you heard these rumors about Apple employees who make the Apple devices? They don't let any of their children use it.
Oh, well, Steve Jobs told me that he wouldn't let it. I remember sitting around Steve's kitchen table, which is where they ate dinner. And the rule was no devices. No, it was right after the iPhone was really big, but both iPads and iPhones, no way.
Hey, when I read that, what was the subtext? Did he at any point say that it's about addiction?
No, it's basically about attention, and either you're in the moment or you're on your phone. He also is not a believer in social media, which is, if you look at the things Apple did, it's amazing. But then you can look at a few things it did not do. It thought of creating a social media network back in the days when MySpace was around and Facebook, and MySpace was a little bit dedicated to music, that's how it began as a social network. And there were people at Apple who said, 'Let's do our own social network. We've got iTunes, we've got the iPod.' And he was not a big believer in social media. He thought it would be disconnecting to people.
Was there any reason why he didn't end up doing the car? That was something that was also being...
The car was hard, and they haven't done it yet. His one reason he wanted to is, as a biographer, you know, it's all about dad. His father was a car mechanic, or his adoptive father, but that was his father. And they would sit in the garage and repair old cars and do the designing and help redo the finishing until they finally had to move the cars out so he could start Apple in that garage. But he was always interested in cars, especially the design of cars. I think had he lived, he would have done three things, four things. One is he would have done a car. Number two, he would have done television, let's say, not like Apple TV, which still is not that grand of a product, but he would have made watching TV as simple as getting a song on your iPod. You'd say, 'I want to watch The Late Show,' and you would just say it to your TV and it would pop up. You didn't have to say, 'Are you subscribing to Netflix? Do you know if it's on CBS? Is it on Amazon Prime?'
Sure. Minority Report meets the Jetsons. Just yell at the TV. Yeah. And then what was number three?
And number three, well, actually three and four. There's a car, TV, camera. Now, Bill Atkinson, who I think just died, one of the brilliant people at Apple, he always thought the camera could be much, much better and it could capture a hundred or so images in a millisecond and then use an algorithm to put it together, right? And you now kind of have that on the iPhone. So that finally happens. And then the more arcane one is he wanted to just disrupt the textbook market. He said there's no reason that certain publishers who are trying to get their textbooks approved in both Texas and Massachusetts and have to do... He said textbooks should all be digital. They should all be on the iPad and they should all be very inexpensive.
Your books, you love to focus on singular visionaries. Is that true?
I like people who are creative and imaginative. People say I write about geniuses. Well, it's not just smart people. Smart people are a dime a dozen. They generally don't amount to much. But people who can do, as Steve Jobs would say, think different, you know, who think out of the box, they're the ones who make the imaginative leaps. I also like to write about people who stand at the intersection of technology and the humanities. Talked about user interfaces. Yeah. If you're going to be great at user interfaces, you got to be somebody who has a feel for humans, not just the technology.
There's a subtext that I could really feel when I read both Jobs and when I read Musk. The subtext that I took away from it as a reader is that these guys are just built different than you and I. It almost creates the narrative that there is this myth that history is built by people that are these singular heroic figures. Do you think that's a myth?
Well, I do think we biographers distort history a little by emphasizing the role singular individuals do. I wrote a couple of books. They don't sell as well as biographies, but one called The Innovators, which was after I did Steve Jobs. I said, you know, I made it seem like one guy went into a garage, had a light bulb moment, and the digital age happened. So it was about the teams of people that built Intel, that even built Apple or Microsoft, because it's not... it's, you know, creativity is a team sport. It's a collaborative effort. Yeah. So you can't make it just seem like singular individuals. But one of my very first books was on Henry Kissinger. And the very first line I wrote in the very first book was a quote from Kissinger that he said off the record to a correspondent once covering his Middle East shuttles. He said, 'When I was an academic, I used to think history was made by big forces. Now I see what a difference individuals make.' And so I think part of biography is to say, yeah, individuals can make a difference.
I've read both Jobs and Musk, and you definitely focus on the achievements. The costs are there, but oftentimes it feels like they're there to provide context to the achievements. Is that fair?
Well, I look at the cost that they paid for their achievements. And I remember Elon Musk saying to me, because I would ask him, 'You've got no empathy. You don't seem to, you know, care about other people's feelings.' And he said, 'Well, empathy is not your friend when you're trying to get to Mars, when you're trying to get to the era of electric vehicles.' He said, 'You had the luxury of maybe having a whole lot of empathy, but,' he said, 'it was basically a vanity on your part.' He was saying this to me because it wasn't that you just cared about other people's feelings. You wanted them to like you, and you cared too much whether they liked you, and that's why you weren't good at running CNN, he told me.
Yeah. He said, 'Because you should have just fired everybody. You shouldn't have given a damn about their feelings.' And I started thinking, and I'll write a bit about it in the Musk book, what is the price you are willing to pay?
Did that hurt your feelings?
Did that hurt my feelings?
Yeah. When he basically said that.
No, it had the odious smell of truth to it. And so, you know, I'm self-aware enough to know that it made me think that's true, but what price would I want to pay in my life in order to maybe have made CNN more radical more quickly? And I thought, this is not who I am. I'm not built to be a disruptive creative person who screws everybody else over. And it means I'm not going to be great, but I'm going to have enough empathy to be able to write about people who are great. And so the role I play in life is I write about people who are crazier than me.
I think this conversation is about subtext. You open the Elon Musk book with two quotes. Let's take a look at them. Again, you don't have a ton of pictures in your book, but I've read them. Size eight font. 'To anyone I've offended, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Do you think I was going to also be a chill, normal dude?' This is from his SNL monologue. And then of course, this is from the beginning of the Jobs book as well. But this was a very famous quote by Steve Jobs: 'The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.' You also reuse this quote at the end of the Musk book as well. You evoke that language. But the subtext that I'm hearing is, hey, the bad stuff is the price of admission to get the good stuff.
It's not the price of admission. It's the reality of the human. And sometimes you have to take a person as a whole. Shakespeare understands how to do this. His heroes, they have dark strands. Henry V kills all the French prisoners that he has. Just kills them. They leave that out of the movie. And even the villains have backstories. Shylock, Iago. We're not very good in the age of, you know, postings on X and cable TV of knowing that the dark sides and the light sides coexist, whether it's in Thomas Jefferson, Elon Musk, whatever it may be. The complicated thing is not to say, well, Elon had some really, really dark strands in him, and he's got some amazing things like he could look at the Raptor engine and say, 'Here's how we have to change that heat shield,' and he would get that into orbit. The complicated thing is not to separate those two strands but to show, and this was your question, that actually you don't get one without the other. They are interwoven. Now you may say, well, that's bad. You shouldn't say that. But it's true.
I think you set this up in the book with this idea of Elon Musk hinged versus unhinged. What would happen? Would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as Musk unbound? Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles without accepting all aspects of him? Hinged and unhinged. This is the big convo around Elon and Kanye.
Hey, to get the great music, you got to be a little unhinged. To get Falcon 9 all the way up there, you got to be... you got to deal with the unhinged aspect of him.
Let's go to the next quote. How it's all interwoven. You say, 'Do the audaciousness and hubris that drive him to attempt epic feats excuse his bad behavior?' The answer is no. Of course not. But it's also important to understand how the strands are woven together, sometimes tightly. It can be hard to remove the dark ones without unraveling the whole cloth. Do you really believe that?
Totally true, and totally true of Musk. And look at him now. He is the only person who can reliably get tonnage into orbit, get astronauts to the space station, reliably make electric vehicles, and it's partly because he's unhinged at times. He does absolute... and it's partly because he's unfiltered. You know that quote you read about, you know, what it'd be nice to think of a Musk with a filter. That's his brother, the one who got the empathy gene, Kimbal Musk.
You're talking about Kimbal Musk.
Yeah. Who, when Starship is first being launched and we're just marveling at it, he said, 'I could just wish I could put a filter on his Twitter. I could take away his phone.'
You've brought this up in interviews. People who are driven by demons get stuff done.
He would not be who he was in terms of the enterprises if he hadn't had the deficit of the empathy gene. It's your quote. I actually try to be nice to people, but I'm never going to invent the iPod. I'm never going to send somebody to Mars.
That's true. I mean, look, you talked about how it offends me. I thought Musk was right when he said, you know, you don't want to offend people. And I think, okay, that's true. And I'm going to lead a pretty fulfilled life. I mean, it's a good way to lead the life, which is being nice to other people, making their lives happier. But I got to know I'm never going to get a rocket into orbit. I'm never going to invent the iPod, the iPad, the Tesla. Do you think sometimes people may read your books and get the wrong message from it?
I had friends that did this with Scarface. They love Scarface. I'm like, you have... he's the bad guy. Don't you understand?
That's right. There was a cover story to Wired magazine right after the Steve Jobs biography came out, and it was titled, 'Do You Have to Be an Asshole?' And people were taking the wrong message from the book. They'd come up to me and say, 'I'm just like Steve Jobs.' So, what do you mean? 'So if somebody does something that sucks, I'd tell them it sucks.' You know, and I said, 'Wait a minute. Have you ever invented the iPod? Have you ever invented the iPhone? Maybe you don't have a right even to think of doing that.' And by the way, that's not the way you should be leading your life. And I think people... and I say my books are not how-to books. You're not supposed to read the Elon Musk book and say, 'I'm going to go around being like Elon Musk.' A, you can't because you don't have some of the genius he has. And B, that's not... you're supposed to be yourself. I'm just telling you, here's a really interesting guy and you can learn some lessons, but it's not a how-to book.
What are some of the lessons that you're trying to live?
Well, one of the lessons in a lot of my books is the power of pure curiosity, the power of reality distortion, the ability to take risks, to bet the farm, as Steve Jobs said, or take risks. Yeah, Elon in the book over and over again talks about we used to be a nation of risk-takers. Now we're a nation of regulators and lawyers who tell you you can't do that. So you have to have passion. You have to care that beauty matters. All these things are lessons in my book. But it isn't a lesson that you have to be an asshole.
One of the things in a question that...
Well, and let me modify that a bit too. I don't want people to go away thinking that I think, especially with Steve Jobs, that he was an asshole because he was rough and tough on people. He could be mean to the person making the smoothie at the Whole Foods store and he could be mean to people in the office, but he wasn't an asshole. He truly understood and had a spiritual feel for human desires, and that's what made him great. Musk goes into demon mode, which is what Grimes calls it. Yeah. And he can be a real asshole in demon mode, but that doesn't mean that you totally just say, 'Oh, asshole,' and you put it in a category. You say, 'Okay, there are times he could be a real asshole, but there are times he could be real inspiring.'
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I think we have some healthy disagreements here, but here's something that I think we both, you and I, agree on. You can't become a billionaire without being an asshole. Do you agree with that statement?
I don't know. I'd have to look at the data points. I mean, are there... I mean, there are people... there are not that many people who have become billionaires who aren't driven. And being driven means you're going to drive over people at times. I wouldn't say they're all assholes, but I'm saying at times they can be assholes.
Do you see it as almost like an indictment on the system at large that the system incentivizes that behavior? In order to win, you have to win.
Our system incentivizes drive. It incentivizes a drive that runs over people at times. Of course, it disincentivizes that. If you screw it up and you mess around with people too badly, you're going to be a failure.
Is the price worth the admission?
Right. And for me, the answer is no. As I say in the Musk book, and for me personally, the answer is no. Now for society at large, you have really... let's take the auto industry. You've had very nice people running the auto industry. You can look at Ford, GM, you can look at Mary Barra, whatever. Have they in any way been able to break the mold and get us to the era of electric vehicles? No. There are very good people, nice people who've run Boeing and run many companies. Is it worth the price for society to have moved into the era of electric vehicles? Is it worth the price to society to have gotten back into space and be able to get our own astronauts back from the space station?
I mean, is the cost worth the admission? He supported the AfD, a Nazi-adjacent right party in Germany? That's fucking crazy. After calling USAID a viper's nest of radical left Marxists who hate America, he oversaw its destruction, which last year alone has been estimated to have caused the deaths of over a quarter million adults and over half a million children. Who knows what that death toll will be in the years to come. And most recently, I don't know if you saw this on Twitter, he went on to cheer racist mobs in the UK who are setting immigrants' homes on fire. I don't know if all of this is worth it to colonize Mars.
Yeah, I think you... that's a good argument to make that maybe society at large, maybe society is better off without Elon Musk. You could make that argument. It takes me 600 pages to make the argument more complex and to say it ain't all that simple. But if somebody like you just comes to me and says, 'Look at all those tweets he did and how horrible, and cutting USAID, society would be better off without an Elon Musk.' So you can read my book and you can come to that valid judgment, or you can read my book and say it's more complicated.
