[music]

Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. In the new biography of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson, there is a story about a friend of Musk locking Musk's phone in a hotel safe one night, with only the friend having the combination code, so Musk couldn't tweet anything destructive in the middle of the night. Later in that passage, there is a quote from Musk saying, "I've shot myself in the foot so often I ought to buy some Kevlar boots."

That story is intertwined with the idea of an impulse control delay feature for Twitter that apparently Musk thinks might be a useful tool for himself as well as ordinary Twitter users. That's just one small anecdote from the 600-plus page book, already a New York Times bestseller, simply called Elon Musk. The author, Walter Isaacson, has also written biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, and Jennifer Doudna.

He's written other books as well, been the CEO of CNN and the Aspen Institute and editor-in-chief of Time magazine. The book grapples with Musk as the richest person in the world who created Tesla and SpaceX and other things, and now owns Twitter, and according to the book, is both very concerned about the implications of artificial intelligence for the future of humanity, but is also interested in using your tweets and mine, every tweet ever, to help train AI programs so he can make more money.

He's quoted in the book saying, "It's a monetization opportunity." Of course, there's Elon Musk, the right-winger, who has unleashed much more hate speech and disinformation on Twitter by loosening the rules since he bought it, and the book grapples with how to assess Musk's epic inventiveness with what Isaacson calls his callousness, his recklessness, his bad behavior. He even calls him an A blank hole. Walter Isaacson joins us now. Hi, Walter. Welcome back to WNYC.

Walter Isaacson: It's great to be back with you, Brian, and I didn't know it was your birthday. I would have celebrated.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. You have this psychological playground metaphor for why Musk wanted to own Twitter, wanting to own the playground because he was bullied on the playground when he was a kid. How literally do you mean that about him?

Walter Isaacson: Well, I think that's one of the reasons. I mean it literally. As a kid, he was so socially awkward. He said he had Asperger's, he was scrawny, and so he got beaten up all the time in the school playground. The scars were particularly bad ones when he went in the hospital for almost a week, and then his father made him stand erect in front of his father, while his father called him a loser and berated him and said it was his fault and he was stupid and took the side of the person who beat him up.

Many people around him say he had the chance to buy the ultimate playground, which is Twitter, and that's one of the reasons he did it. I, of course, think there were other reasons, including the fact that he had started a company called X.com more than 20 years ago that morphed into PayPal, but he wanted it to be a payments platform connected to a social network. He said to me when he was suddenly buying up shares of Twitter, "Twitter will be an accelerant. It will be like the booster that allows me to do what we should have done with X.com."

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned his father, who you also describe as an adventurer and wheeler dealer, always on the lookout for the next opportunity. Sounds familiar. Is Elon Musk an outsized chip off the old block?

Walter Isaacson: His mother, Maye, who, as you'll see from the book, obviously divorced the father pretty soon after they were married, said, here's the theme of the book, that Elon has to fight to not become his father. You see the struggle through the book, almost like Luke Skywalker fighting the dark side of the force and Darth Vader's memories. What happens is he has a father who's very mercurial; goes from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde, but also has a fingertip feel for engineering and for material properties.

These things are writ large, maybe one or two orders of magnitude greater, and everything that Musk does from being the most inventive person when it comes to making rocket ships, he sent up more satellites and tunnels to orbit this year than every other entity, country combined, four times as much. He brought us into the era of electric vehicles, but he has this dark demon mode side, as Grimes his girlfriend calls it, that causes him to tweet outrageous things, and it's weird that you have to hold both these things in your head.

Brian Lehrer: That childhood and that playground that you talk about literally and metaphorically were in South Africa. Musk is 52, so for his entire childhood he was a white South African during the apartheid era. I don't see the word apartheid or the name Mandela, for example, in the index. You do say his grandfather moved there from Canada in 1950, which you do reference as the apartheid era.

Jill Lepore's review of your book in The New Yorker calls you a principled biographer, but wonders why in addition to focusing on the emotional pain Musk endured as a kid, you didn't give much context at all about his life as a white kid in South Africa or his family's relationship to the horrors going on around him. Did you not find it relevant-- Go ahead.

Walter Isaacson: Actually, there's apartheid in the book. I'm not sure the indexer caught it, but he goes to anti-apartheid concerts, including one where they get off the train, and there's a guy with a knife sticking out of his head, and they have to step across the pools of blood and that blood is sticky on the soles of their shoes. His father, who is a very weird person, as we've already established, did run, as I say, as part of the city council in Pretoria as the anti-apartheid ticket.

That said, his father has very deep demons. Also, I spent a couple pages on his maternal grandfather, Haldeman, who was a daredevil stunt pilot, went around the world totally adventuresome, but also, when living in Canada, was part of this technocracy movement. I quote some of the anti-semitic things that the party that Haldeman belonged to said. A lot of these things are ingrained into him.

Of course, he was only four when his grandfather died. He runs away from South Africa so he doesn't have to join the military, goes to Canada, and then the US. Some of those things are there partly because it did help shape him.

Brian Lehrer: You described Musk's interest in owning Twitter as motivated, at least in part, by a desire to combat what he called the woke mind virus. When the word woke is thought of like that by Musk and others, it often has to do with their belief that there is too much racial sensitivity. See DeSantis Cameron. Is there some South Africa born white racial resentment in Elon Musk that you see, or is that not the right context to find it in your opinion?

Walter Isaacson: I think the woke mind virus that he reacts against, and, of course, you know in your show that the word woke is such a weird word, I wish we weren't using it anymore, but it was partly because his oldest surviving child who he had named after a character in the X-Men comics, he loves that letter, transitioned, became Jenna, rejected him and his last name.

He got his head around the transitioning of Jenna, but she became so fervently left wing that she hated capitalism, refused to speak to him, and changed her last name, moved away from the country, and that, along with many other things, caused him to view that the progressive ideology at her private school in Los Angeles had infected her in a way.

He becomes, in my mind, too much of a one of those alt-right, it's hard to say conservative, because it's not where I grew up conservative, but one of these conspiracy-minded alt-rights that hates this notion of the progressive ideology that he thinks turned his daughter against him. Also, he paid one year because he exercised stock options more tax than anybody has ever paid in history in any country, but he was attacked by Elizabeth Warren and a lot of people for not paying enough taxes, and he gets very prickly.

I find it a very unattractive thing because to me, in the old days, whether it's political correctness or wokeness, there was a real upside to it, which is that you were sensitive to whether it be any person, especially marginalized people.

Brian Lehrer: Is there a misogynist or other gender-oriented aspect to his resentment of wokeness?

Walter Isaacson: He has a very complex personal life, as you know, and he's never been accused of being abusive or misogynist and his companies tend to be run by women. Gwynne Shotwell has run SpaceX for more than 20 years and Linda Yaccarino is now at X.com, formerly Twitter, and Shivon Zilis is running Neuralink, but also he was a sperm donor and IVF donor for Shivon when she wanted to have children. I'm much more of a storyteller. I'm going to have to let readers get their head around those type of things.

Brian Lehrer: On him being a sperm donor, I didn't know about how Musk is reproducing until this book, but he looks like a personal eugenicist. I don't know if you use that word, but can you describe that aspect of his life as a biological father and what he's after there?

Walter Isaacson: Yes, I wouldn't use a term like that. He believes everybody around the world that a low birth rate is actually more of a problem than a high birth rate. He's always urging people to have more kids. He certainly practices what he preaches.

Brian Lehrer: With respect to who he is sperm donating to or why he is sperm donating his own sperm, there's something in the book about him wanting to propagate the world with more smart people. No?

Walter Isaacson: Yes, I think that, but he's also urged a whole lot of people, including people around the world. Shivon Zilis, interesting character in the book, is very into artificial intelligence, research, and investing. She's the one who made that choice and asked him. Once again, I think I try to tell the stories really in a forthright way, especially some of the things we haven't talked about, like his ability to do rocket ships and cars and artificial intelligence. I don't know in him that he's saying only smart people should reproduce. He certainly has never said that to me, and almost the opposite.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some phone calls for Walter Isaacson. Any question you have about Elon Musk or Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. One place where some of the politics intersects with some of the science, I guess, is a quote from the book. Musk also ties the woke mind virus, as he sees it, as a potential impediment to a main goal of his, which is helping humanity establish itself as a multi-planetary civilization. Can you describe his interest in that in general and the relationship he sees between that and so-called woke politics?

Walter Isaacson: I think he's had, ever since he was a kid, and the scrawny kid beaten up and having no friends and sitting in the corner of the library reading sci-fi and comic books, three overriding missions that he felt almost as a Captain Underpants epic superhero sense of himself as sometimes happens when you're a beaten up lonely kid. Those are to make humans multi-planetary.

That comes from this belief that human consciousness is a fragile thing. Now, we don't know that consciousness exists anywhere else in the universe. We've never established it anywhere else. He believes that's because human or conscious beings have never gone to other planets. Eventually, they get destroyed. He was able to create SpaceX with this vision of creating a way that we could first get to the Space Station because, by the way, NASA and Boeing had given up sending Americans to orbit from the United States.

When the space shuttle is decommissioned 12, 14 years ago, we are not able to get our astronauts up, but SpaceX has been doing it dozens and dozens of times and relanding the boosters so that they can be used and reused. That's one of his main missions. The second main mission is sustainable energy on this planet. That's why he pushed when General Motors and Ford had totally gotten out of the electric vehicle business 15, 20 years ago.

He took Tesla through the edge of bankruptcy and funded himself and became the company that's now making this year more than a million electric vehicles tied to solar roofs, tied to power packs. The third, from having read Isaac Asimov perhaps once too often, is he's always been worried that artificial intelligence or our robots could turn on us. He's creating artificial intelligence, he hopes, that will have certain guardrails and will be real-world artificial intelligence, will be able to look at video data, not just these large language models, generative predictive text type chatbots.

Brian Lehrer: I guess he's not a climate change denier. You have that as one of the potential existential threats to humanity that-

Walter Isaacson: For sure. No, he is definitely not--

Brian Lehrer: -causes him to want to be bi-planetary.

Walter Isaacson: Oh, no, no. He's got really weird politics that sometimes make me cringe. Ever since he, I guess, came from Canada down to Silicon Valley, University of Pennsylvania, he did first, he's really cared about the notion of sustainable energy. Not just climate, but all the things bad that can happen if you're dependent on the extraction of carbon-based fuels.

He realizes that it's not just creating electric vehicles that are bad. It's finding really good new ways to enhance, say, lithium so that you don't have to do the mining problem and ways to make solar roofs, which he, of course, I think is the biggest producer privately of solar roofs and connect them to Powerwall so you can have storage. That's one of his three missions. It's basically because he believes that this planet is very fragile. Now, that doesn't excuse some of his wacky politics, but I would not put climate denial amongst his wacky politics.

Brian Lehrer: Right. I guess from what you were just describing, we shouldn't see his company SpaceX as just an ego trip beyond the atmosphere or another way to make money.

Walter Isaacson: No. He is not like Bezos [unintelligible 00:16:58], and he hasn't shot himself up, has no desire to be a space tourist. I think that if you want to make money, one of the last things you would do is start a rocket company. All of his friends tried to intervene when he was young, showing him rockets blowing up. Now, it is somewhat astonishing the accomplishments of the Falcon rockets of SpaceX because no other country, no other company has been able to make rockets that shoot things into orbit and then land upright and can be reused.

This year he'll send more payload into orbit for the US government, for intelligence agencies, foreign countries, as well as his own communication satellites. He'll send more than every other country and company combined. Not only that, it'll be four times what every other company and country has done. We have to keep our [unintelligible 00:18:00]. We're not very good at not avoiding binary judgment, but you got to keep contradictory things in your mind of the engineering success he's had from his focus and the cringe-worthy, problematic spoutings he does on politics and Twitter.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Let's see, is Philippe in-- Philippe is not ready yet. Let me ask you this question. Let's see. I'm looking at X right now to see if we're getting tweets on this topic. Well, meanwhile I'll ask, is he running Twitter into the ground?

Walter Isaacson: It's interesting because, to me, by making it more toxic and not making it the type of thing that you and I would with our anointed blue checks in the old days would have polite conversations about, he's making it more toxic by having people who are fringe and sometimes very hateful and worse yet sometimes get amplified on Twitter. That has driven away advertisers, quite understandably. Whether it's 40% or 60%, advertising is down.

He has added a lot of features to X.com, including being able to post video, being able to do live-streaming, and most importantly, being able to be paid for content, have subscribers, if you are just a creator of videos or poems or music, you can get paid. That's part of his vision. He's moving it away from being advertising-driven to being user-revenue driven, which means that he probably will be cash flow positive by the end of the year, but he has destroyed that, I guess, playground of those of us in the intellectual-- I guess we shouldn't call ourselves intellectuals, but those of us who liked the sweet conversations of tweets and old-fashioned little blue birds, that's been run into the ground, yes.

Brian Lehrer: We were talking at the beginning of the conversation about Musk's childhood in South Africa, and I see a caller on the board who I didn't expect. We had a summer intern, a student intern this summer named Brandon, whose next stop after working with us has been to go to South Africa for some study abroad. His father is calling in from Brooklyn. Philippe in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. It looks like you want to say something about Brandon.

Philippe: It's just coincidence. Morning, Brian. You have to understand, you are one of our heroes. Brandon grew up on Brian Lehrer Show. I'm reading. Interestingly, you mentioned Jill Lepore. That was a required reading and spreading Jill Lepore's books to his teachers, et cetera, et cetera. It's all interesting times. When she would laugh in your show, I almost called in at that time, but then I said, "No, let's listen to the other segment." It's just a pure coincidence actually that your summer intern who applied to be your intern without telling us, by the way.

He just wanted to surprise us when he got it. It was wonderful to let you have that greater influence after he'd been listening to you all his life. The question I have though for Mr. Isaacson. I love his books, and I think he's done some wonderful ones. It's interesting, of course, he always has to do these great billionaires and someone has to write the books and do them well, so I praise him for that.

The problem with Elon Musk that I want to ask him about and see a parallel there, is what we tend to do in the United States, which is, we put billionaires in pedestals, we put people who are smart regardless of what their other ideas are up in pedestals, and they become heroes, and we worship them. I look at the parallel between Elon Musk and someone like Charles Lindbergh, who they've taken on the impossible.

When Lindbergh did his flight and all that, people thought, "Oh, it's impossible. Nobody will be able to do it." Then Elon Musk with the rockets and some of the other things. You mentioned the eugenics thoughts before, and I go, "Yes, there's some things there." You look at Elon Musk and his impulsive ideas. You look at what he is done with ask and the need to control and spread certain ideas that I think is hurtful to us as a nation. A lot of times we just see it as, he's a billionaire, they're so super smart.

They can do no wrong, and if they do something like present ideas or even Elon Musk with his tendency to say, "I don't care." I look at that David Faber interview on CNBC, and he specifically said with some of the ideas and some of the stuff, he just wants the right to be able to say anything, and he doesn't care how it impacts us. Money is not an issue for him. He could lose a few billion as long as he gets his ideas out there.

He has so much, he could just say, "I don't care." I think that's unhealthy as a nation when we tend to look at these individuals. You could even throw Donald Trump in there. Billionaire, oh, he's got so much money, he must be great.

Brian Lehrer: That's part of his path to success. Philippe, thank you very much for such a deep take. Obviously, Walter, been thinking about questions related to Elon Musk pretty deeply. Worthy of a parent of a Brian Lehrer Show intern, I might say. What about his central point there that Americans tend to put people like that on a pedestal?

Walter Isaacson: That's what I try not to do in this book. I think with Elon Musk, people either think he is a villain or a hero, and boy, it is such a divide. There are these fervent fans and then fervent enemies. We're not very good as a society to get our heads around a Shakespeare type character, which is molded out of faults, as Shakespeare says at the end of Measure for Measure. We tend to want to say hero or villain.

I try very hard, and you can certainly see it in the book, to show the dark side that's a cautionary tale. You do not want to be this way, but I also try to show how is it that he was able to get us into electric vehicles, he was able to deal with AI, and he was able to deal with space travel. I think in terms of only canonizing billionaires, I'm not sure I'm going to cop a plea to that. My last book was Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of CRISPR, the gene editing technology. She's about the nicest person you'll ever meet, and I doubt she's anywhere near being a billionaire.

What I have tried to do, especially in the books about contemporary people, were to say, "Who has really affected our world much more than all the politicians that we yammer about all the time?" There have really been three great revolutions of our time. One, spearheaded by people like Steve Jobs who brought us into the era of friendly computers, songs in our pockets, smartphones in an app economy. Then Jennifer Doudna who brings us into a life sciences revolution where we can edit our own genes.

Then Elon Musk, for better or worse, brings us into a revived era of space travel and into the era of electric vehicles. I don't think that it's simply billionaires. It's people who are disruptive. If you are disruptive, you're going to do disruptive things that people hate. Other than Jennifer Doudna, she doesn't do that much, but Steve Jobs was not exactly canonized by everybody before he died either.

I try to show that we used to be a nation of risk-takers and disruptors. Whether you came over on the Mayflower or you came across the Rio Grande, there was some risk-taking in our blood. Yet now we flinch and have a lot more referees and regulators than risk-takers, but also not having the right guardrails, you get the tweets of people like Elon Musk who I think are destructive. I got to believe the reader is smart enough and sophisticated enough to be able to hold all those things in mind as I tell you the story and ride alongside him and you see the light and dark intertwined.

Brian Lehrer: One more question from a listener, and it looks like this is about the process of writing the book. Terrence in Port Chester, you're on WNYC with Walter Isaacson. Hi, Terrence.

Terrence: Hello. Good morning, Brian, and good morning, Walter. Walter, I'm looking right now at your Steve Jobs book. I'm amazed copyright was 2011, and it seems like I just read it a while ago. I enjoyed that Steve Jobs biography that you did. It's unbelievable. I also am looking at another book that I have. It's written by Ashlee Vance. She did a biography of Elon Musk. Now that you did one, I'll have to buy that one definitely because I can see what you did with Steve Jobs.

Walter, I'm just curious, how do you as a writer go about approaching a person and saying, "Hey, I want to write about you"? What's their reaction? How do they allow you, and how much do they allow you to write about them?

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Terrence. Let me tack a question onto that question and then this will be the last one, and you can respond to both. Listeners may not know Musk gave you two years of a lot of access to him. I think he's very suspicious of the media generally, yet he trusted you enough to help inform a biography with all that access. To that question and to Terrence's question, if you would.

Walter Isaacson: Sure. When I did Steve Jobs, I had done Ben Franklin and Albert Einstein, and I happened to run across Jobs often enough in my old job at Time magazine. He said, "Do me next." My first reaction is, "Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, you, whatever." I said, "I'll do you in 30 years when you retire." Then somebody said, "If you're going to do Steve, you got to do him now." I said, "I didn't know he had cancer." He said, "No, he's keeping it secret, but he called you the day after the diagnosis."

I thought it was really important to get by his side. When it was Musk, we had somebody who's on the Tesla board, was also on the Aspen Institute board where I worked, put us together. I realized, this is before he bought Twitter, so he wasn't as quite as controversial. I thought, "Man, this is great. A dude making rocket ships and electric cars and batteries. This will be fun. Technology."

We talked for more than an hour. I said, "Here is the thing. I don't want to do this based on 5 or 10 or even 15 interviews. I want two years where week after week I get to be right by your side in every meeting, nothing off limits, and just sitting there watching you operate." He surprised me because he has this epic sense and he is transparent. He said, "Okay, done." I said, "Here's the other part of the deal. You have no control over the book. You don't get to read it in advance. I'm not even going to send it to you in advance."

In fact, even now, I don't know if he's read it. He said, "Okay." I think if we're looking for his motive, it's still that scrawny, insecure kid who thinks of himself as Captain Underpants and Captain X and a superhero, and wanting to show how transparent he could be. I tried to make it, it's a very lots of short chapters where he is leaping from subject to subject.

From how to fix a valve leak in a raptor engine, to how to deal with his girlfriends, Grimes and others, and show the frenetic nature of his life. He never, other than a few classified briefings where he'd kick me out of the room from the US intelligence agencies, he never put anything off limits. I tried to get out of the way of the story. I tried to just have a mantra that I have right here above my desk, which is let me tell you a story because I had this mentor in New Orleans here who said that two types of people come out of the South; preachers and storytellers. He said, for heaven's sake, be a storyteller. You are able to be up close and watch things. Let other people be preaching about it.

Brian Lehrer: Walter Isaacson's latest biography is of Elon Musk. It's simply called Elon Musk. Walter, thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Walter Isaacson: Hey, Brian. Thank you. Your show is always awesome. Thanks.

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.