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Want to understand exactly how interest rate rises will impact your mortgage or how New York City gets fresh produce Or exactly what on earth was going on over at FTX before the whole thing collapsed twice a week We sit down with the perfect guests to answer these sort of questions and understand what's going on with the biggest stories in finance Economics business and market. I'm Tracy all the way and I'm Joe Wysendall and we are the hosts of Bloomberg's all-bots podcast Look us up wherever you get your podcast the all-bots podcast from Bloomberg King story from Alpine News Network homeowners totally enchanted needed to consolidate their debt They called Alpine credits in a flash and Alpine credit superhero appeared in their kitchen using Tada getesus She consolidated their debt into one low monthly payment. She then used her powers to make the dirty dishes disappear forever Own your home need alone. Alpine credits can help Alpine credits. We're home. I'm Melissa
Jeltsen host of the what happened to her podcast We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Burchmore story a case the police rode off as a suicide in a snowstorm Her family never bought it and the man they suspected wore a badge You never know who that devil is because we're in disguise sometimes it's a police uniform And you can get access to all episodes a hundred percent ad-free with an iHeart true crime plus subscription Exclusively on Apple podcasts available only to iHeart true crime plus subscribers So don't wait head to Apple podcasts search for iHeart true crime plus and subscribe today There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself Get worse with Kyle brew is not one of those podcasts So if you're interested in getting thinner going to therapy starting peptides and boundaries taking supplements making your better getting closure Then I would humbly recommend other podcasts if you're interested in black male love bombing cloning yourself or getting revenge Then we've got a little something something for a dastardly individual like you listen to get worse with Kyle I already have Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Walter Isaacson welcome to the builders my new series of interviews Featuring the most consequential minds shaping our future our series starts with Elon Musk
But in anticipation we're rearing our critically acclaimed show on Musk in this feed the show originally aired in December of 2023 it has four episodes of backstories from the years I spent following Elon while writing his biography Give it a listen then stay tuned for the builders. I think you'll like it So he's at Twitter the night before Christmas Eve December 23rd and they've got three server farms And if they keep them going it's gonna be a few million dollars each year He says let's get rid of the Sacramento one and people have been working at Twitter a long time engineers He hasn't yet fired them they say no you can't pull out those servers It'll take six months to move those out of Sacramento and their rules and regulations I know demon mode's about to strike they would try to argue with him on it and finally he just goes really angry and leaves The next day Christmas Eve is on his plane flying from
San Francisco to Austin bringing these two cousins and as they're flying over you know Nevada one of them says why don't we just take those servers out ourselves and bus goes into Getty mode and turns the plane around Goes right to Sacramento. They get to the server facility It's the afternoon of Christmas Eve so nobody's really working and it's a facility has servers of other companies as well So it's hard to get into but being mosque he just finds somebody and makes them let them in and he says We're gonna take these servers out and they say we can't you have you need an electrician open the floorboard and somebody to cut off the cables It's somebody who can handle the dollies Must turn to his security guards that you got a pocket knife and he takes off the floorboard himself He just prides it open from a vent then he gets a pair of pliers I think they had gotten it home depot and he cuts the cable to the servers and waits and nothing happened It's fine So they start in a frenzy moving these servers out on racks on dollies into this rental truck and it proves to everybody That yes, you can do it. You said it was gonna take six months
It took us six hours and we got a third of a move So guess the proof people he's hardcore and he's intense and then he has Ron DeSantis an answer present and there's no backup servers There's no caching so the service Twitter goes down for 20 minutes or more and he says well I guess it was a mistake taking those servers out But like a lot of things it's not clear. This was a total mistake or totally brilliant and for me It's a metaphor He tends to take risks and he tends to leave rubble in his wake When Walter Isaacson set out to write a biography of Elon Musk he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure certainly a visionary Maybe genius at Tesla and SpaceX must get attracted some of the most brilliant engineering minds of our time to his side His relentless vision and exacting standards had driven those companies beyond what many people thought possible But Isaacson quickly came to see what everyone else close to Musk already knew working with him came with the cost Musk's management style included utter derision for work-life balance
A belief that any camaraderie at work only weakened employees judgment a lack of empathy so pronounced that must might tear someone down in front of everyone Just because things have gotten too calm for his comfort and then instantly forget about it He was also busy seemingly squandering his legacy by the day on Twitter And of course buying Twitter swapping out his lofty ambitions of interplanetary colonization and combating climate change for blue check policies and content moderation All while getting wrapped up in a battle with what he called the quote won't combined virus I'm Evan Radliff and on this episode of on Musk with Walter Isaacson We write shotgun as Isaacson encounters the darker parts of Elon the earthward pole that threatens to ground his highest aspirations episode two demons Alright, we're ready There are moments in the book where he is just reaming out someone It's sometimes hard to tell the ones where you're there and you're not because you have such comprehensive access information that you can paint scenes That you didn't actually witness through these various eyes
Did you personally witness those things absolutely all the time and I was stunned because I thought for the Heisenberg principle that if something's being Observed it's going to change its velocity or its position And I thought by being the room he wasn't going to read somebody out and people were amazed the people around him that he was just As tough and as bad and as much of an asshole or as much of a genius when I was around that it did not calm him down Did not keep him from going into demon mode Some of the targets on who Musk trained his fury were people who'd gone the furthest for him like one executive named Brian Dow who'd been a Hero of one of Musk's so-called surges. That's when Musk brings everybody into the office for days or weeks of insane hours to hit some target He's deemed crucial back in 2017 when Musk went into total fury about the battery factory in Nevada and live there for about three months And you've got to speed up this battery line. He brings in this guy Brian Dow is a can-do person. Yes boss We can get rid of this machine. Yes boss. We can do it
He was so eager to help and then I was there sitting in Musk's little house when he calls up Brian down Says I'm moving you to run the solar roof division. It's like I can do it. I can do it chief Now the solar roof division was a must project that hadn't paid off so well The basic idea was that instead of retrofitting solar panels on houses They would make the roof tiles themselves into solar panels Musk had invested in and then had Tesla buy a solar roof company started by his cousins not the cousins on the airplane But the other cousins there were some accusations of nepotism swirling around Musk as you might imagine Anyway, Musk is trying to turn Tesla into an electric energy everything company batteries cars solar roofs But the solar roofs are not getting installed fast enough to scale the business. He's burned through three executives there already In comes Brian Dow, Debokachika where Isaac's in is lurking nearby in his air stream trailer And one day Musk became driven by the fact that they had to install solar roofs faster Just like the assembly line for the car or the rocket he says how can we speed up this step this step this step and finally he says
Alright, we're gonna do the roofs of my house and these other little track tones down in the south tip of Texas And Dow is up in I think Seattle or wherever he was based and it's his birthday But Musk said okay, I need you back down in Boca Chica things aren't going well and he abandoned his family But he misses the connection in Houston has to get a car and drive six hours gets there late at night It was another surge the task to get the time it took to install one roof down from three or four days to just 24 hours So Dow is leading his team of fellow designer engineers and roofers to meet the challenge And I remember one day it must have been 105 in the shade and there was no shade And these roofers are working and they have to get it done within 24 hours Musk goes on over to this little subdivision by about nine at night And there's big industrial lighting and cables and there's 12 people scrambling on the roof And he climbs this rickety ladder to the top of the roof and I of course have to climb up with him You know standing on the peak of this roof clinging on for dear life as these people are scurrying around and as always
Elon has his little son acts who was then about two years old and he's just starting the title on the ground Amid all the cables and the lights and the moving equipment and I'm petrified for him I'm petrified for myself and there's Elon standing at the peak of the roof saying why do we need four fasteners for each of the roof tiles Couldn't it be done with two and they say well if a hurricane comes and he's like, okay He would be the strength of the winds. Here's how much it would take it's looking at the wiring and how it works and trying to simplify it And there's somebody there who's supervising and must get furious because he believes that every person working on a solar roof team Should be on the roof installing it and if you're not installing it with your own hands You're not really gonna understand what the problems are and this guy is saying well, you know, I've done many roofs I've watched it says how many of you actually installed with your own hands? Well, none. I'm a designer I knew that was gonna be one of those triggers and for about an hour Standing on that roof on the roof and then finally we come down on the ladder and we're standing next to the house and it continues for another 30 minutes
He's reaming this guy out and finally says to brian dau that he had to be fired We came back a couple days later and there's another house they're doing and then yet another house And remember once it was so hot that people were fainting they were throwing up and yet they worked all day to install it within 24 hours And finally musk is satisfied But not until he fires brian dau the guy in charge of the division as well as many of the people who were helping do the roofs And brian talks to me afterwards and says I tried so hard. I was so eager. He knew I would walk through walls with him And yet he fired me and that's the type of toughness that I don't Find you know easy to stomach. It really really turned me off when I was watching it But I tried to describe it and also the fact that after he kept pushing he was able to get them to do a solar roof Per day even after that by the way solar roofs still not scalable after the vomiting and the passing out and the firing
It didn't really matter. The goal musk had set of 24 hours to install the roof didn't move the needle At least not by silicon valley standards and isakson returns again and again to these episodes Trying to tease out what they mean for the people involved in them and as you'll see in the book Not only did I report those I think in the full fury of it all. I'm not sugarcoating I also went back to the people who got totally reamed out I'd go back a day later and sometimes six months later Say what did you learn? Like why couldn't you take it and there's a scene in the book of a friday night at star base where he just reams out this wonderful Southern guy Andy crabs for not having enough people working Just choose them up left right and center and then like dr. Jekyll and mr Hide a few weeks later. He doesn't even remember it and he promotes and he but then it keeps happening so Andy leaves
Recently I was in los angeles and I'm signing books at the la times book event. I see coming over for me Say that's handy. I said and he says I think I'm gonna go back to spacex I've had the choice of being burned out or being bored. I decided I'd rather be burned out on such a mission That's amazing Because the one that stuck with me was the guy who was thought to have caused one of the failed launches or crashes because he had like turned a nut in on the rocket and That had disrupted something and musk actually publicly said it was him And then he quit and then musk was sort of good riddance He wasn't that great of an engineer and then you sort of in that section by saying it turned out It was not the turning of the nut it wasn't him. I know I try to show both the fierce urgency of these things at musk feels and that without this crazed urgency You wouldn't have gotten tesla lines working as well But I also sometimes show where it was just awful the way he did these things and it happened on the tesla assembly line
Where somebody who's totally innocent, you know, must then fires him and that brings up the question that so many people ask in the book is Is it worthwhile? Do you make that trade off and by the end of the book? I kind of pretty clearly say no You don't really make that trade off that getting the bars done excuse being a total asshole But I want the reader to see it in action And right after the break musk manages to create a truly unique level of thanksgiving drama as we get into just what makes this guy tick Eating well shouldn't be complicated But somehow it turns into recipes prep clean up and half your sunday gone factor solves all that These are fresh ready to eat meals designed by dieticians delivered to your door and ready in just minutes No prep no cleanup no excuses and it's not just about convenience You're getting real food balanced nutrition and zero artificial stuff meals that up you stay on track for all of your goals without the grind of doing it All yourself grilled chicken roasted veggies steak plates postibles
They taste like something you get in a restaurant, but they come out of your microwave in two minutes flat If time costs a refer to been holding you back from eating better factor just took those off the table right now Get up to $90 off and free shipping hurry this offer won't last long go to factor meals.ca and use code fit That's up to $90 off and free shipping but only with the code fit at factor meals.ca Factor Canada's number one meal delivery service Breaking story from Alpine new whose network homeowners totally enchanted needed to consolidate their debt They called Alpine credits in a flash and Alpine credit superhero appeared in their kitchen using telekinesis She consolidated their debt into one low monthly payment She then used her powers to make the dirty dishes disappear forever own your home need alone. Alpine credits can help alpine credits We're home. We're gonna prove I'm Melissa jeltsen and in my new podcast what happened to her I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety stories of survival
The only difference between me and her frankly was a little bit of luck because by all rights I should be dead Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her right like she has so much evidence These stories all start in the same place with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her that didn't protect her that didn't see her No childhood ever experience that and we were babies She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year Never know who that devil is because we're in disguise Sometimes it's a collision before listen to what happened to her on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself Get worse with Kyle brew is not one of those podcasts So if you're interested in getting thinner going to therapy starting peptide setting boundaries taking supplements making you're better getting closure Then I would humbly recommend other podcasts But if you're interested in blackmail love bombing cloning yourself or getting revenge then we've got a little something something for a dastardly individual like you Take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far fake a back injury get the spray tan up your alcohol consumption
Only women should be allowed to have guns. Go on. Go on. Go on. Listen. It's already over
I'm all about lying if it's something that really happened the next time a bear is running at you You just calmly stop what you're doing you look the bear in the eye and you say this isn't you do not preserve relationships You don't need them you only need one thing and that's the get worse podcast listen to get worse with Kyle brew on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts There's a personal aspect which I have experienced myself as a reporter because I tend to spend time around Relatively unpleasant people and the stuff that I write about but the moment that you have to experience him reaming someone out him yelling him being an asshole You know, it's not all the time, but what kind of persona do you go into in that moment?
I mean, this is not something I assume you would choose in your life to be around people who were behaving in this way Yeah, and there's some people who love conflict they go to world wrestling, you know matches and stuff and I'm the opposite I don't like seeing people fight and be really mean so at those moments. I kind of shrink back a bit I try to be a bit invisible and then there were a lot of personal things that had to figure out whether to put in the book Especially when it came to his complex relationship with women and the women who were the mother of his children Right before Thanksgiving of 2022 Claire Boucher the performance artist knows Brian is in the hospital with a surrogate who's having their child But in the same hospital chavon zealous who runs noralink is having twins that are from elon as a sperm donor And they don't know that the other is actually in the same hospital even though they know each other They don't know they're both having kids of elons at the same time This is complicated emotionally and elon flies off right at Thanksgiving and says I've got a crisis happening with one of the engines
They were building and I have to go focus on now. It's like Thanksgiving Friday You don't have to focus on it But it was like rocket engines were simpler to him than human emotions after the book is published You can go on x or twitter and see grimes posting and chavon posting and how they're all mad about this scene in the book But I felt that that was all key to understanding the turmoil right around the time he's trying to get starship launched Right around the time he's getting this new huge factory done in austin that he loves drama that he lives for turmoil And that the personal side is in turmoil as well and I kind of felt you had to know it all To understand what was swirling around him and inside him as he's doing all this For isaacson musts approach to life seem rooted in his upbringing What he describes in the beginning of the book as a violent childhood with an alternately neglectful and cruel father at what point in your Reporting did you sort of start to get those stories and understand that you were going to use those stories as a way into understanding sort of the psychology behind his
Work elon musk had never really talked about his childhood or about the difficult relationship with his father And there'd been profiles of him and rolling stone in which he says there's something I just can't say and uh So I knew there was a key there and so I kept pushing gently month after month Tell me about your dad tell me about your childhood. Tell me about being beaten up any go silent Stony faced and I'd stay silent. I'd try to outlast him occasionally. Give me a little something and then finally on the tenth attempt at the conversation We're flying somewhere actually and I just said tell me about your father and tears came to his eyes And then it started to tumble out After that I was able to get more and more and of course from his brother kenbel and from his father Who I talked to and from his mother who said the danger for elon is that he becomes his father And so that's how that theme developed, but it wasn't something I could do in one two three or four interviews It was really a year into the reporting that slowly that door began to open
Well, I think that makes a big difference to me at least in how you read the book in a way knowing that because I think he has A difficult and in some ways horrible father You start out with these scenes of violence and him being believed in different ways And it feels different to me to know that on day one he didn't say to you Let me explain myself to you. The reason I'm a jerk is because I had this difficult upbringing rather than that being something that you pulled out of him I sometimes think and this will sound a bit arrogant that I understand him better than he understands him He'll tell me I've got emotions buried under concrete and I didn't blast through them But I slowly slowly bore through them and dug through them and yes It's a lot about the demons of childhood. It's also about being wired differently, which is complicated I mean he says he has asperger's which isn't even used in medical realm that much anymore He doesn't have very good input output signals for human emotions And that means he was socially awkward and beaten up as a kid all the time
And since the book came out one of the things that surprises me is how many people come up to me I'll say one of them Andrew Yang because he did it on his podcast But certain tv hosts who say I have a kid with asperger's And what I have to do is I keep my arm around him at all times when we're on baseball games or out somewhere And I say look the person in the eye when he ends you the popcorn and do this And then I realize that Musk's father instead of putting his arm around him and helping him said you're stupid You're a loser. You deserve to be beaten up and That doesn't excuse all of Musk's behavior And sometimes we confuse explaining something with excusing it. I think it's important to explain it I want to know here that this is all pretty tricky territory For one thing asperger's as Walter notes is an outdated diagnostic term for one form of autism spectrum disorder But it's a term that some people still use to self identify including Musk And asd in general and what people call asperger specifically are both frequently misunderstood Someone having trouble with social cues obviously does not mean they lack empathy
But challenges with social interactions can sometimes be confused for narcissism and vice versa part of what I wanted to know from isakson Was how he tried to navigate this territory when it came to musk and his previous subject Steve jobs I was also struck by the contrast between the jobs book and this book because jobs also you describe has the lack of empathy like that's something that comes up in the jobs book a few times but his ex-girlfriend identifies it as Narcissistic personality disorder and she says something like I realized that telling him to be less self-centered was like telling a blind man to see And by the way, this is true of Toulillariley the second wife of Elon Musk and it's true of Grimes He's like no, sometimes you just can't tell must to be a different way because that is the way he's wired Or you look at some of the great disruptors. I mean Bill Gates early days of Microsoft No empathy, you know Jeff Bezos could be that way and it is such a delicate issue because I feel like you're careful to say He says that he has asperger's and it's not your job
I believe to challenge that and but in this case it makes a difference whether he's right in terms of the explanation versus the excuse He has never been diagnosed but his mother said oh yeah He definitely has asperger's and his brother Campbell says it and one of the things that has happened since the jobs book to now Is we start using terms like neurodivergent as opposed to chalk or as opposed to trying to slap a broad label like asperger's Musk knows he goes into multiple personalities and almost forgets what he has done uh when he's dark depressed or when he's as Grimes puts it in demon mode or when he gets back into just being engineering mode personality There are times when he's friendly and joking in times when he's insirational and times when he's laser focused like an engineer in the monotone With a specific problem and he also has talked to both me and the people around him about being bipolar It would be useful with all of these Semi-awareness if he would go to a doctor get analyzed get treatment
But as he says these things are buried under layers of concrete and I don't want to blast through them So when you started connecting with the family and you end up talking to his father and From a journalistic point of view This seems like a very difficult character to be entangled with in terms of like his connection to the truth But also his beliefs. How do you sort of manage that relationship? Well, I'm still in contact with aral musk who's not really in contact with elon elon doesn't take his emails doesn't speak to him But aral musk is a really good engineer has a real feel for the physical properties of everything from you know mica to steel He's also somebody who has been successful at times even once owned a Rolls Royce in south africa and built a Wilderness camp with his kids and at times goes through this dr. Jekyll to mr High transition and has lost a whole lot of money. He's a fabulous which means he fabricates things I mean he makes himself the hero of some of his own adventures on the other hand He understands that his own son has many of these traits and he'll say what I ask him about
Taking the side of the person to beat up elon. He'll say well elon deserve that or elon was stupid And he will say I applied a very strict authoritarian attitude towards elon And he does that with other people as well So in Unraveling the mystery and the enigma inside of musk you start by peeling back the layers They come from his father and you keep in mind his mother's admonition to be which is that the danger for elon is that he becomes his father It's interesting that she says that because there's also this other side which is he has a very supportive mother So he it's not just the father and without becoming too much of an armchair psychologist I guess because he's got these let's just say unusual relationships with women over time And he's got this supportive mother. What's the decision to sort of ground it more in the in the bad father than in the in the good mother?
Well, the mother is a wonderful character throughout the book But both with her with me the mother and with elon they're attracted to dramatic relationships And may will say of her son that he can't relax and smell the flowers He's always attracted to the storm to the drama and may Who I really like she hasn't been in life very good at relationships She's attracted to people who cause problems and so too is it with elon You know his first wife a truly stormy relationship But they thrived on fighting all the time and he said there's just something about the flame I'm always attracted to the flame and drama and relationships and I ask him why and I ask to lulae a second wife why and Tula says there he was growing up with his father and his father is mentally torturing him and somehow you internalize storm and drama with your childhood nurturing
that's probably overthinking it because Kimball his brother, you know, he's much more stable in his relationships and in his ability to show empathy Whereas musk he would see some calm. He'd see some calm on a factory line or at a launchpad And he'd be unhappy. He'd say I've got to stir things up Up next twitter and whether musk did ever turn his demon mode on isexen Eating well shouldn't be complicated, but somehow it turns into recipes prep clean up and half your sundae gone Factor solves all that these are fresh ready to eat meals designed by dieticians delivered to your door and ready in just minutes No prep no cleanup no excuses and it's not just about convenience You're getting real food balanced nutrition and zero artificial stuff meals that up you stay on track for all of your goals without the grind of doing it All yourself grilled chicken roasted veggies steak plates postibles They taste like something you get in a restaurant, but they come out of your microwave in two minutes flat
If time costs are refered have been holding you back from eating better factor just took those off the table right now get up to $90 off and free shipping hurry this offer won't last long go to factor meals.ca and use code fit That's up to $90 off and free shipping but only with the code fit at factor meals.ca Factor Canada's number one meal delivery service breaking story from alpine news network homeowners Tony and Janet needed to consolidate their debt They called alpine credits in a flash and alpine credit superhero appeared in their kitchen using telekinesis She consolidated their debt into one low monthly payment. She then used her powers to make the dirty dishes disappear forever Own your home need alone alpine credits can help alpine credits We're home. We're gonna prove. I'm Melissa jeltzen and in my new podcast what happened to her I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety stories of survival The only difference between me and her frankly was a little bit of luck because by all rights
I should be dead cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her right like she has so much evidence These stories all start in the same place with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her that didn't protect her That didn't see her no titles. Whatever it's doing so and we were babies She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year You never know who that devil is because where he describes Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to what happened to her on the iHeartRadio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself Get worse with Kyle brew is not one of those podcasts So if you're interested in getting thinner going to therapy starting peptide setting boundaries taking supplements making you're better getting closure Then I would humbly recommend other podcasts But if you're interested in blackmail love bombing cloning yourself or getting revenge then we've got a little something something for a Dastardly individual like you take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far Fake a back injury get this right hand up your alcohol consumption only women should be allowed to have gotten Kill him. Kill him. Kill him. Listen. It's already over
I'm all about lying if it's something that really happened the next time a bear is running at you You just calmly stop what you're doing you look the bear in the eye and you say this isn't you Do not preserve relationships. You don't need them You only need one thing and that's the get worse podcast Listen to get worse with Kyle brew on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts In April of 2022 when he's kicking around the idea of buying twitter He's starting to buy the stock and he's going a bit dark on management thinking maybe i'll make a hostile offer It was a day he opened the gigataxes factory amazing big event And he goes out to dinner that weekend at a club called a Persian very quiet and private in an upstairs room And it's him his artistic son Saxon his young Three-year-old x grimes comes in a little bit late may musk she's at the dinner and it's myself and a couple of other people I'm asking why are you thinking about in twitter and in my own mind i'm thinking that's a bad idea
But i'm just asking and then everybody else is chiming in like why do you really want it and what do you do with it? And at some point he says to griffin One of his teenagers to use twitter said no dad none of my friends use twitter and may musk you know his mother says Well, I use twitter i'm thinking okay. This may be an indication of the demographic uh that they're heading towards And everybody is trying to nudge him away from going down this path really hurting this reputation But sucking up his time of trying to fix twitter and all of this keeps coming out of the dinner by the end of the dinner i realize okay He's gonna go there so now isex and has a subject on his hands who isn't just an innovator A silicon valley darling with some libertarian flecked politics now He's got someone gearing up to fight a war over free speech and right wing censorship on twitter where he's about to try and manifest his original x.com platform vision When i first started working on the elon musk book
He was very well known but not quite as controversial He wasn't quite as toxic or as canonized Then the twitter deal happens and that changes things it really increases by at least two orders of magnitude how controversial he is and also how famous he is So suddenly the narrative becomes much more of a roller coaster So it's good for the book, but there were parts of it that i kind of wish uh, hey He was a calmer personality, but he says i got to keep in mind that the mission is getting the mars Is not absolutely caring about the psychological Pleasures and safeties of everybody i can remember the time he walked into twitter Headquaters right before he had officially acquired it and they're telling him what a nurturing place it is to work And they're saying you know we've got quiet rooms and we have mental health days often We have yoga studios so people can stay in balance and then they say and we really value Psychological safety and must sort of had that raspy laugh and he says psychological safety. That's our enemy
That's an impediment. We have to have a fierce sense of urgency We aren't aiming for psychological safety The other reason musk gives for buying twitter one that he seems to get a lot of play for in some corners of the world Is that he's fighting against quote-unquote wokeness musk has his own term for it when he talks about anti-woke mind virus he uses that phrase and That really touches on things that have become you know third rails in society in terms of how they're discussed I'm curious how you kind of engaged with that idea with him I mean he's a somebody who grew up in apartheid south africa So obviously like his views on race and other societal issues are gonna be colored by that Like what does he mean when he says something like that?
Well, the way I engage with it and you see it in the book is I question it I say why are you following this particular conspiracy and I'll even talk about Occam's razor Which is the simplest explanation might be the best one instead of thinking there's a vast conspiracy of drug makers and COVID vaccines or people trying to lock down so they control government or any of these things that he goes to I'm not that way. I'm not conspiratorial and I find that anti political correctness and wokeness It's a little hard for me to explain because my head's not there You know, I think sometimes what we call being woke is being polite and sensitive to other people's feelings And I'll ask him about that as I understand you've got a daughter who transitioned Why do people care about pronouns and he'll say things when he's in a more rational mood of Why don't mind people using pronouns, but it gouges my eyes out when I see it too much. I'm going why what's the problem?
but it's when he's in his dark moods this eats away at him and I describe his political evolution from being an obama supporter to being supporting Bobby Kennedy than ronda santis people who are worried about wokeness or worried about conspiracy theories And I never try to excuse it in the book. I don't excuse the rabbit hole going down these rabbit holes of conspiracy I do try to explain it from his childhood from his father whatever and then I'll tell a story about a particularly Horrible tweet he did like prosecute fauci or my pronouns I mean just in a few words as able to attack transgender pronouns and Anthony fauci and I talk about his father having said all these sort of things and him being in a hotbox room and twitter And he's going dark and giddy and one of the people in the room starts joking about fauci and pronouns And until you read the book
I think critics can have a difficulty saying is he explaining it or is he excusing it? But if you read that anecdote or that story you're not going to say waltzer excused it You're going to see the rawness that's there sometimes in the one musk Muskins purging twitter employees based on their relative quote hard cornness when twitter's finally down to a quarter of its previous size He's created the ultimate test for his delete delete delete management algorithm And it's a hardcore small cadre and that cadre of people you now see it at twitter he whittled down 80 percent of the staff But it's a very hardcore cadre that will march through walls for him And I think he tests people he drives them there, but also drives him to do things they didn't think they could do Did he ever turn his anger on you?
Did you experience demon mode directed at you as you describe it? Everybody told me he was going to turn demon mode on me the people who worked for him Bless grimes and his former wives they'd all say he's going to happen to you And if there's one small mystery I can't quite figure out why it never did happen to me But I didn't fill the silences when he went dark and he went silent. I would just sit there When he would say something provocative, I just ask a question And I don't think I did anything that would have triggered that demon mode But I must say as I watched it get triggered by people around me I always said at some point this is going to happen to me where he tells me i'm stupid or whatever like he did to some other people Uh who worked with him. I didn't really want it to happen, but in the back of my mind I knew if it did it would be a pretty good passage in the book and I waited I waited and I was pretty clear having launched him after the first few months I knew what brought on the storm. I knew the type of things that would just set him off
And sometimes I'd see it happen. I'd see it happen on an assembly line where some Poor young worker there's a scene in the book where musk is saying did you design this process here? And the young guy can't figure out what he's talking about. I said what do you mean design it what process and you could tell musk was about to go ballistic And he does and he fires a guy for no real reason And I watched over and over again must get triggered by people Giving opinions that backed up by data or not understanding what he was saying or trying to make excuses Isaacson did find a few people who always seem to dodge musk's flame thrower mark jian kosa The california surfer type who was a key spacex engineer and gwen shot well the president of spacex for the last 20 years I also watched people like mark ogwin and I learned how they did it which wasn't being a yes person It was just slowly and methodically making factual arguments and when musk made a decision say fine I get it but then presenting them over and over again with more facts and saying all right We're gonna try it that way, but here's what we learned when we tested it this morning
Because there are people who've been there almost 20 years at spacex or tesla Who have never really been the object of his flame throwing personality But as a few people in the book said yo l raw if it was in charge of moderation to twitter yo l told me over and over again those first few weeks how he had learned to deal with musk how it worked out fine And he said I know these type of people he basically saying I know boss is that can turn into assholes all of a sudden I've dealt with this before and then finally yo l doesn't get fired. He doesn't get reamed out He finally says it's just too much. I'm leaving it's time for me to go It kind of highlights this aspect I think if you only hear about the incidents where musk mistreats people he's an asshole He doesn't have any empathy you kind of wonder why would anyone work for him over and over again?
He would do things like force a surge to stack a rocket on a launch pad even though there was no rush to do it Or force a surge at one of the manufacturing plants And people would go through hell for about a week to do it and it was exhausting and a few would fall by the wayside And a couple would quit and then decided I'd rather be burned out than bored And so he's able to get those 20 percent of the people in any workforce Who are totally inspired by somebody always in battle and he gets a very lean team That's willing to put up with him being cold and angry for those amazing moments where they feel like they're changing the world In the next episode of on musk we turn our lens on isakson and his process teasing out exactly how he wrote this behemoth biography How he resists hot takes even as he's surrounded by them and I we started out what was going on with this supposed musk family emerald mine I mean, it's just so brutal. They hate each other. He said i'm just a middle-class kid trying to build a company and when people do things at sock
I've got to tell them it sucks and if i'm too collegial we'll never get things done Well, I thought that was gonna be the end of all my access and I had violated what he may have thought was just a private comment But there were moments as the book was finishing where I get up in the morning and just turn on my phone Is it still there was it like a rocket ship did it blow up? On musk with walter isakson is a production of colitis coke and iheart this show is based on the writing and reporting of walter isakson It's hosted by me evan ratliff produced by lizzy jacobs assisted production from serena chow mixing and sound design by rick quan Thomas walsh to the engineering from iheart podcasts the executive producers arctatrina novell and alley perry for colitis coke It was executive produced by mangas shetega door with an assist from osmolition coastos linos and k-dosborne special thanks to bob pitman connell bern will pierce in niki eator karry liberman nathan otoski aligavin and the folks at wno Who let us use their beautiful studio in new Orleans if you like stories about writers in their process Check out my other show the long-form podcast if you want a story about a different south african programmer who became one of the world's biggest criminals
You could check out my book the mastermind and for more shows from colitis coke be sure to visit colitis coke dot nyc Thanks so much for listening. I'm melissa jeltzen host of the what happened to her podcast We're kicking off the season with the sander birchmore story a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm her family Never bought it and the man they suspected war a badge You never know who that devil is because he's wearing disguise sometimes it's a police uniform and you can get access to all episodes Adfree with an iheart true crime plus subscription Exclusively on apple podcast available only to iheart true crime plus subscribers So don't wait head to apple podcast search for iheart true crime plus and subscribe today There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself Get worse with kyle prue is not one of those podcasts So if you're interested in getting thinner going to therapy starting peptide setting boundaries taking supplements making you're better getting closure Then I would humbly recommend other podcasts if you're interested in black male love bon and cloning yourself or getting revenge
Then we've got a little something something for a dastardly individual like you Listen to get worse with kyle prue on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts In 1986 a man named scott maclum was killed in broad daylight Police quickly found their suspect prosecutors convicted him but now almost 40 years later. I'm reexamining this case I really didn't believe any of it was real and i was like well they're gonna figure out this is not me They're gonna do their police job. That's the wrong man been in prison this whole time Listen to examine the backfire effect on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts If anyone wanted to commit a murder up here would be the greatest place in the world to hide the body But someone will find it He acted friendly he talked friendly he sounded friendly They won't knew that I did the scary bookie stuff and this is maybe she'll find out where this girl is I saw him bomb back in their bow Listen to the devil's quarry season two and the bone valley feed on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or ever you get your podcasts