You're the only person on earth that

followed Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for

years and years. So,

what did you learn?

This is going to be a fun ride.

Walter Isaacson.

One of the greatest biography writers

ever.

Whose work allows all of us to learn

from some of the greatest minds in

history.

And all the people I've written about

who are disruptors, they tend to have

had demons driving them. But for Elon

Musk, it was particularly brutal. They

scrawny kid on the autism spectrum, no

friends, beaten up quite often. But the

scars from that were minor compared to

what happened when he went home. It took

traveling around with Elon for 2 years,

morning, noon, and night before I could

get him to open up about his father. And

then it started coming out. Everything

from his hardwiring to his

psychologically abusive father helped

make somebody who's addicted to drama.

He was at Twitter headquarters. He

decides they should get rid of one of

the server farms. And the engineers say,

"We can't do it." He fires them. And

then Christmas Eve, Elon forces his way

into the server facility with a set of

wire cutters and cuts the cable to the

server. It drove the teams crazy, but it

drove them to do things they didn't

think they could do it because Musk

spends 80% of his hardcore mental energy

on

But is he happy?

How did Steve Jobs change you?

When he was dying, I was in his backyard

with him and he says, "I regret

Imagine that you could follow Steve Jobs

and Elon Musk for years and years and

years and years.

Imagine what you would learn.

Imagine what you would see.

Imagine the value that you would take

from that experience of following two of

the greatest world-shifting

entrepreneurs that have ever lived.

Well, the man that sits in front of me

today was given that privilege. He got

to follow Steve Jobs until the day that

he died and he got to follow Elon Musk

for years and years and years in order

to write down what he saw and share that

information with you. If you've ever

wondered what it takes to be a genius,

what it takes to change the world, what

the cost is, the sacrifice, how to make

decisions, how to think, and how and

what motivates these world-changing

entrepreneurs.

In the next hour and a half,

you find out.

And before this episode starts, I want

to make a deal with you. About 58% of

you that watch this podcast frequently

haven't yet hit the subscribe button. If

you enjoy what we do here, here's the

deal that I want to make with you. If

you hit that subscribe button, I promise

you that we will keep making this show

better in every single way and we have

huge plans to turn this into more of a

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conversation where we work incredibly

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context and greater meaning. So, if you

hit the subscribe button, I promise you

that we will deliver an even greater

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I hope you choose to come along on this

journey. Enjoy this episode.

Walter, you have a tremendous amount of

insight from following and studying some

of the world's greatest minds, but also

from a tremendously successful career of

your own as a CEO and as a business

person. For anybody that doesn't know,

who are the individuals that you've been

able to follow and study and had unique

exclusive access to?

It was mainly Steve Jobs who brought us

into the digital revolution with

everything from friendly computers to a

thousand songs in our pocket and I spent

about two years at his side doing a

biography of him and then Jennifer

Doudna who I think brought us into the

life sciences revolution because she and

her colleagues helped invent CRISPR this

tool that can edit our own DNA which is

like whoa that's transformative and so I

spent a lot of time at her Berkeley lab

and learning how to edit human genes and

then after that the next logical choice

seemed to be Elon Musk bringing us into

the era of space travel electric

vehicles artificial intelligence and

surprisingly when I talked to him

he had read a couple of my books he said

I said I just want to do this not based

on five or 10 interviews but based on

staying by your side for two years

watching you morning noon and night

whenever I want he went okay and then I

said but by the way I'm not going to

show you the book in advance you get no

control over it he went okay and I

thought all right this is going to be a

fun ride

Were you surprised?

I I was a little bit surprised but if

you know Musk he has sort of a little

superhero complex and he thinks of

himself playing big roles on the world

stage and he loves to be transparent

and I kind of suspected he would want to

have this

there was a mutual friend who helped

broker the deal and the friend said you

know he he wants a biography I think he

sees himself in the same trajectory as a

Steve Jobs or a Jennifer Doudna

And why did you want to do it?

I wanted to do somebody who's taking us

back into the era of space travel

because I'm old enough to be one of

those geeks who remember the countdown

of 10 9 8 and you hold your breath and

they'd launch from Cape Canaveral also I

believe very much sustainable energy is

important to the planet which means not

just electric vehicles but solar roofs

and power walls and the things he's

doing. I also tend to think that he's a

great engineer. He understands

uh physical engineering. He doesn't

understand human emotions very well,

which is why he was better off with

Tesla and SpaceX and not uh buying

Twitter.

Uh but I wanted to understand the uh

pioneering work that was being done.

He's the only person who can get

astronauts from the US into orbit, you

know, NASA can no longer do it. Boeing

can't do it. So, how come? How did he

make those rockets work?

And with Steve Jobs, what was the um

access that you were given to him?

Oh, I stayed almost I stayed in his

guesthouse, right,

uh in his backyard for off and on for a

couple of years. It wasn't quite the

access I got to Elon Musk. With Steve

Jobs, it might be 1 week every couple of

months I'd spend uh with him. With Musk,

it was

three or four weeks per month sometimes.

Steve Jobs was

interesting, but he was mainly

interested in the beautiful design and

conceptualizing of products. And so,

we'd spend a lot of time in Jony Ive's

uh wonderful design studio at Apple

headquarters, where Steve would spend

the afternoon

hour after hour walking around even

looking at things like

the European plug for a uh a charger and

how it was going to be different from

the American plug, but how curved, you

know, he just cared about God being in

the details of each design.

Musk cares a lot more about executing

the design through manufacturing and

assembly line. Musk spends about 80% of

his hardcore mental energy designing the

machines that make the machines. In

other words, the Raptor engines or the

battery cells, or the Teslas. And so, a

lot of the time I spent with him was

on assembly lines.

When I sit here with CEOs or successful

people, um I always start with their

childhood because I think it provides an

important context as to the people that

they are. It's almost like their

childhood

a biographer. You know it begins in

childhood.

Well, I mean, you're the the king of

biography, so I had no idea that that's

where it's meant to start. It just seems

like the most obvious place because it's

the foundation of people, and those

fingerprints seem to remain on them as

adults. When you look at Elon's

childhood, do you spot things that are

the reason he is the man he is today?

Absolutely. But, let me step back and

talk about almost all the people I've

written about who are disruptors.

They tend to have had uh

childhoods in which they were misfits.

Uh starting with Leonardo da Vinci, who

I wrote about. He grew up in a small

village. Uh he was left-handed,

illegitimate. His father didn't

legitimate him. He was gay. He was

distracted. And so, he has demons

driving him as he runs away from the

village of Vinci to go to Florence. Uh

and you can go all the way through.

Albert Einstein, growing up Jewish in

Germany. Steve Jobs, having been adopted

and adoptive family didn't take to him,

and he moves on to another one.

For Elon Musk, it was particularly

brutal. He grew up in South Africa as a

scrawny kid on the autism spectrum. So,

he had no social input-output skills. He

was uh no friends.

And he was beaten up quite often. But,

the scars from that were minor compared

to uh what happened when he went home.

After being beaten up once, he was in

the hospital for 4 days.

But, he gets home, and his father makes

him stand in front of him

uh for 2 hours while the father tells

him he's a loser and that it was his

fault and takes the side of the kid who

beat up Elon. And so, it's one of the

oldest tropes in mythology, which is the

aspiring young superhero fighting the

dark side of the force and finding out

Darth Vader is his father, having to

overcome those demons. I think most of

us, I mean, you have a very interesting

background yourself from Botswana to

Manchester to here in London. I think

most of us have things that drive us and

sometimes there's some demons from

childhood. But the question is whether

you harness those demons or those demons

harness you. And in Elon Musk's case,

the answer is both.

Do you find that that's nearly always

the case? That that those demons create

both your

As Tim Grover said to me, Tim Grover was

the coach for Michael Jordan, Kobe, and

he speaks to everybody having a dark

side and a light side and they have a

two-way relationship with each other.

They typically come from the same place.

So, he'd speak to Michael Jordan's

greatness coming from the same place

that his

dark side came from.

And you've just described the entire

theme of the Elon Musk book, which is

darkness and lightness woven together,

each coming from the same place,

sometimes driving people crazy,

sometimes driving them to do things they

didn't think they'd be able to do.

And you want to take out the dark

strands of Elon Musk, see, demon mode as

his girlfriend Grimes calls it, where he

just

truly gets cold and in a very bad place.

But if you take out those strands, maybe

you don't have Elon Musk at the end

because the dark and the light all come

from the same roots.

Shakespeare, as usual, said it best.

Even the best are molded out of faults.

And indeed, that's what you're talking

about, whether it's Michael Jordan or

Kobe or Elon Musk.

What does Elon think of his father?

Did you speak to him directly about him?

Yes. Uh he doesn't speak to his father

anymore, of course. And uh it's very

brutal relationship.

Yeah, but I spoke to his father and

yeah, for quite a long time.

And still he's in contact with me.

It took a year of traveling around with

Elon Musk before I could get him to open

up about his father. And that's why a

biography done the way Boswell did with

Dr. Johnson and in a much smaller way I

tried to do with Elon Musk or Steve Jobs

is important because you're not just

doing a few interviews. You're just with

them day in day out. And after a year,

every now and then they'd say, "Tell me

about your childhood. Tell me about your

dad." And he'd just stare blankly and be

not wanting to speak.

And then one day, we're actually on his

plane flying to California from Texas.

And once again, I just it was very

quiet. Finally I said, "Tell me about

your dad." It was about the 20th time

I'd asked him.

He must have been silent for 2 minutes,

3 minutes. I didn't say a word. And then

it started coming out, the stories of

childhood.

And so

yeah, he's still rattled by the memory

of his father

has had two children by

uh young woman that he had raised as a

stepdaughter.

And so that really messed up Elon's

mind.

Elon's father raised a stepdaughter and

then had two kids with

The stepdaughter, yes. And so

there's

uh and he's talked about it. Errol Musk

also is an astonishingly good engineer

who gave many uh good things in

childhood. He was at times successful,

at times less so.

Errol is his father?

Errol is the father.

But he also instilled some of these

demons. So it's the most complex

relationship. Now Barack Obama begins

one of his memoirs by saying, "I think

every successful man is either trying to

live up to the expectations of his

father or live down the sins of his

father." And

Obama says, "In my case it's both."

Well, in Elon's case it's both.

And what did you learn if anything from

speaking to Elon's father?

I learned that he was

like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in the

Stevenson thing and

novel.

In other words,

he could be a brilliant doctor, but then

he'd snap into these demon-like modes

and Mr. Hyde and hardly remember when he

would snap back out and became Dr.

Jekyll, hardly remember what happened.

And that multiple personality was very

much what Errol Musk himself says, "Yes,

I go through these things." Well, guess

what? You see that in Elon Musk.

Based on what you saw in some of the

resilient leaders that you've followed,

if your job was to create a really

resilient child,

what would you do to the child?

You know, that's such an interesting

question and those of us who have

children in this day and age,

I think we can't help but coddling them

too much.

I watched the way Elon was raised in

South Africa where they, you know, his

father gave him a motorcycle when he was

11 or 12 years old and driving, you

know, going around. He would

almost free range be that way. Elon

would, he could walk or go everywhere he

wanted, get beaten up. Uh

And his parents weren't hovering.

Well, likewise, I watch Elon, who has 10

surviving children,

and Elon is deeply committed to those

children. He's almost obsessed by them.

And yet, especially with little X, I

don't know if you've seen the 3-year-old

kid who is always in the pictures with

Elon. Like you'll see a picture of Elon

at the F1.

He's always holding his

I I'd be there at night. They'd be doing

a solar roof installation at midnight.

And Musk would be in, you know,

hyperdrive,

getting all the equipment and telling

people what to do, cuz Musk loved to be

hands-on. And I'd watch little X playing

amid the cables and heavy equipment. And

my instincts are like, go grab this kid

and make sure he's safe.

But,

I think that Musk, I remember when they

shot off Starship, this largest rocket

ever, for the first test, which went

well for about 3 minutes. And

afterwards,

we're sitting in down in South Texas at

the launch pad behind it, and having

drinks in their fire pit. And Elon is

there with his mother, May, his

girlfriend, Grimes, and little X. And X

is playing in a fire pit, just putting

things in and putting

And my instincts are, go grab the kid.

And Musk says to me, "When I was a kid,

they used to say, 'Don't play with

matches.' So, I got a box of matches,

and I played with them behind a tree."

And it was his wife saying, "I'm going

to let X continue to do that." And May

Musk said, "I think it's one generation

of risk-takers training the next." So,

maybe we should allow our kids to be a

little bit more risk-taking as opposed

to hovering the way my wife and I do.

And I I was reading in your book about

how when Elon's parents got a divorce

when he was young, that meant that

Elon's mother, who was taking care of

him, had to then go and get a job, which

left Elon at home alone.

Right, right. That's what I'm saying. He

was pretty much home alone cuz his

mother had three jobs at times.

And she's a great person.

But she wasn't somebody who doted and

worried every moment of the day. And so

she was often not around and divorced

from his father. At one point he lost

as a very young teenager decides to move

back in with his father. Which is

psychologically

uh even now Maye Musk says I

why did he do that? And

Kimbal, his brother, says he associates

pain with love.

And

Elon Musk says to me,

adversity

shaped me. It made me who I am.

So there's a part of Elon Musk that

loves drama and

rushing into the fire.

He associates pain with love. From your

observations, do you believe that

regardless of whether it's healthy or

not, we tend to seek out the

environment of our childhood when we're

older because familiarity is almost

sometimes seems to be more important to

us than

whether it's healthy.

You know, that's a brilliant

observation, which is

cuz certainly with Elon Musk

he's almost always trying to recreate

the drama, the turmoil of his childhood

in apartheid South Africa, seeing people

killed and

uh having an abusive, psychologically

abusive father.

And I think we're all different. I'm

personally somebody who had a pretty

nice childhood. My parents are the

sweetest, nicest, smartest people I've

ever known.

And I grew up in New Orleans and still

go back there, still live with about

eight blocks from where I was born and

see the kids I went to kindergarten with

and I love going back to that magical,

we call it the green trees of our

childhood.

Uh but it's also why I'm not driven

I'm not as

a disruptor the way Jobs and Musk are.

I'm a little bit more suited to being

amused and watching disruptors. So,

my role is a little bit more as an

observer. You've been both. You've been

an observer on this podcast or on TV,

but you're also a person in the arena by

starting companies. I was in the arena

quite a while. I ran CNN during the Gulf

War and it was a pretty intense thing to

do.

But in some ways I'm not as suited to

running into fire and turmoil as Elon

Musk is and when the time came and the

Gulf War was over, I decided I'd rather

write books and

uh

have a

go back to New Orleans.

So, do you you did touch on this

earlier, but I just it just came back to

mind again. Do you think that these

individuals who are most able to deal

with running into the fire are those

that were raised in the fire?

It's not a one-to-one correlation

as people sometimes when they're

arguing with me, they'll say, "Oh look,

there are people with really bad

childhoods who become totally

ne'er-do-wells and you know, never

amount to anything." And there are

people with really wonderful childhoods

who are very, very driven.

I think though it's a it may not be a

one-to-one correlation, but it's

certainly a non-zero correlation that

having something to prove coming out of

childhood and having demons to harness

tends to drive you a bit more.

One of the things that surprised me in

your book was that you said

Elon was a good student, but not

fantastic.

Yeah, even in South Africa and at boy's

school

and then when he goes to college his

SATs are fine, but you know, they're not

all 800s which is the scale we use in

the US

uh

for

uh college admissions test.

But he had an intense focus. So when he

focused on something

you know, he would be awesomely smart.

Problem is he doesn't like things that

don't interest him. So when he had to

learn Afrikaans in school and you know,

he flunks it or when he has to learn

certain things

uh

but when it came to engineering,

especially material science, he could

focus like a laser on and I mean that

figuratively, but on the properties of

materials that are engineering problems.

And I I heard that when he discovered

the computer that was another example of

that.

That insane focus. He taught himself to

code in a couple of days.

Sure. I mean he

he grew up at that time that I can

remember and you can't

where computer suddenly pop up. You can

have your own computer. And that's one

of the things Steve Jobs and Bill Gates

and

uh brought us to which is oh, a computer

you can actually plug in and have at

home and code on.

Well, he got one and taught himself C++

and I think uh

maybe uh Python uh Pascal

and

at age 12 or 13 coded his own video game

called Blastar which he published. And

he becomes addicted to two things. One

is computers and two is video games.

Did did did um you you spoke to his

mother quite a lot.

Yeah, I still do. She's uh very much

around.

What did she think of him at that age

when he's 11, 12? Did they did she think

he was a genius?

Yes. She uh for better or worse

uh

was not a doting mother, was not

somebody hovering all the time, but was

a when Elon was five or six years old,

she decided he was a genius and used to

fight with the schools when the schools

would sometimes say, "He's not doing

well in school and he'd be distracted.

He's always looking out of the window

and staring blankly." And she would say,

"Because he's a genius and you're not

challenging him enough." And I think she

still feels he's a genius.

Do you think if someone wanted to be

like Elon Musk, they could choose to be?

No. Um

there's certain

types of curiosity and drive that we can

will ourselves to being. I've written

about Benjamin Franklin, for example.

Benjamin Franklin was very wise, but

he's probably not the smartest of the

founders and I don't mean that in a

disparaging way, but you have Hamilton

and Jefferson and people who are really

brilliant. What you have in Franklin is

somebody who's purely curious, always

open to new ideas and unbelievably

observant. Well, we can all push

ourselves to be that way more. But can

we push ourselves to be Einstein? And

no, we can't. And for Musk, he has a

certain intensity

that I think that even if you drank 50

cups of coffee and you know, you put an

electric volt

prod in the back of your head,

that focus and maniacal intensity and

sense of urgency is something that's not

instilled in most of us.

Do you think it's a trauma response of

sorts?

It's a trauma response. It's also and

the book is

got a lot, you know, of pa- you know,

it's

you can't have a one-sentence, here's

why, but you start in childhood with the

trauma.

You also start with a guy who's on the

autism spectrum. Talks about having

Asperger's as he calls it.

And that means he doesn't have good

input-output signals for emotional You

don't have good emotional human

receptors.

But he does have

this

intense

focus, almost in a geek-like way,

on certain engineering or mathematical

or coding issues. I think everything

from his hard wiring to his childhood

and upbringing

help make somebody who's addicted to

turmoil,

who has a maniacal intensity of focus,

and also has multiple personality mood

swings.

He ends up leaving South Africa and

studies uh physics and business at the

same time. And I was I thought it was so

fascinating that the reason why he took

up business, which is quite rare for

someone to do physics and business, I

think.

He said he didn't want to

end up working for somebody who studied

business

uh and didn't understand the science.

And he felt that if he didn't understand

the business side, he'd end up having to

work for somebody else.

It's almost the first evidence of like,

well, not the first evidence, but it's

again evidence of his first principle

thinking. In play?

Yes. You know, first principle thinking

is key to who he is.

someone that doesn't know?

And first principles thinking is

whenever you're faced with a problem,

you just go back to the very basic

physics of it. Not all the rules and

regulations and not all the metaphors

you may have saying here's the way to do

things.

But you you first off say there no

rules,

there's no regulations,

there's no protocols except for the laws

of physics. Everything else is just a

recommendation. And to give you a

concrete example, when he decides that

he wants to send people into space as a

young guy, at first he goes to Russia to

see if he can buy used rockets.

And they jack him around. It doesn't

work. And on the plane flight home, he

says, "Let me go to first principles

thinking. Exactly how much is the cost

of each material in a rocket? How much

is the uh Inconel? How much is the

carbon fiber? How much is the fuel?"

And then

"How much is the total cost of a rocket

compared to the cost of each of the

components?" And that's first principles

thinking, which is I get it. If I can I

know the material cost, but if I can

reduce by a factor of 10 the

manufacturing cost, then I can make a

rocket. And so somebody will tell him,

"Hey, we need to have this patch or this

piece of felt in the bottom of a Tesla."

And he'd say, "Tell me what the physics

of of the principles of physics that

make that true are."

When he's pursuing first principles,

what is he trying to get around and past

that frustrates him?

Regulations, rules, people who won't

take risks.

He says that, you know, the US was a

nation of risk takers. Whether you came

on the Mayflower, you came across the

Rio Grande, or you came from Eastern

Europe fleeing oppression.

Your family took risks. But now we've

got more regulators than we have risk

takers. We have more regu- forees and

people building guardrails and lawyers

telling you that's probably not a good

idea than we have people willing to

shoot up a rocket.

And

I think by going back to first

principles,

he wants to be able to

not only calculate risk, but take risk

more than most people would.

Was Steve Jobs the same in that regard?

Steve Jobs was not focused on hardware

engineering in the same way Wozniak was,

his partner.

Uh but yes, Jobs

had a particular phrase, very famous

now, which was think different. And when

Steve Jobs went back to Apple after his

So I sort of like Sam Altman, you know,

come and go, come and go. It took Steve

Jobs a decade, not a weekend, to do it.

Um he wrote an ad uh

for Apple.

And it had pictures of Einstein and

other disruptive intellectuals. And it

said, "Here's to the Here's to the crazy

ones, the misfits, the rebels, the round

pegs in the square hole, the ones who

think different." And then it ends by

saying, "Because the people who are

crazy enough to think they can change

the world

are the ones who do."

And that was Steve Jobs's way of

thinking, and it also describes Elon

Musk.

Have you seen moments yourself when you

were following him where he was

confronted by someone who had a default

to telling him why things couldn't

happen and why they couldn't be done?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, there's like 20,

30 times in the book. It's just And he

goes, "Well, I said I'll tell you a fun

one,

which is just last Christmas, you know,

not too long ago.

He was at Twitter headquarters,

and he looks at all the engineering

things, and they have three server farms

uh for for uh one in Portland, one in

Sacramento, and one I think in Atlanta.

And he does the calculus in his head,

and he said, "We don't really need three

different redundant server farms." And

the engineers say, "Well, yes, we do,

because we need backups, and we need

caching, or whatever." And he says, "No,

you're not going back to first

principles thinking. If you look at

this,

anyway, he decides they should get rid

of the servers in Sacramento. Well, they

say, "Fine, but that'll take 6 months,

because

and he said, "No, you can do it in 6

weeks." And the engineers and I'm

sitting there in the meeting and he's

getting really dark and they don't know

how to deal with him cuz this is like a

month after he took over Twitter. So,

they don't know this dude. They're

saying, "Well, no, I'm sorry, Elon, we

can't do it in that." And he said, "You

can do it in 6 weeks." And by the end of

the meeting said, "You can do it in 6

days." He gets really dark.

And he decides he's going to fire them,

but it's December 23rd.

So, it's like 2 days before Christmas.

He does fire them, but the next day,

Christmas Eve, he's flying from San

Francisco to Austin, Texas to go home

for Christmas. He's with two young

cousins on the plane who are engineers.

And one of them says, "Why don't we just

take those servers out ourselves?" Elon

Musk makes a U-turn in his airplane,

tells the pilot to go to Sacramento.

They were already over Nevada. They

land. He rents They're like four of them

on the plane. They rent a truck, a sort

of what we call a U-Haul truck, a rental

truck. And they go to the server

facility and they

the guard there is like flummoxed. It's

Christmas Eve and they're forcing their

way in. And they're looking at the

servers and one of the engineers says,

"Well, you know, we can't take them out

cuz we need engineers to take off these

elevated floors, you know, those floor

tiles where people sit."

And Musk turns to his bodyguard and

says, "Do you have got a pocket knife?"

The guy goes, "Yeah." And he takes a

pocket knife and pulls up one of the

vents, rips up the floor thing, goes

underneath the floor panel with a set of

wire cutters that he got from Home Depot

and cuts the cable to the servers. And

they start moving them out and put them

in the U-Haul truck. And this is Musk

just And by the way, it's typical of

Musk cuz it works fine for a few days.

Then you can see the servers getting a

bit degraded, but then eventually it

comes back. And he says, "You got to

take rest, if if you're not sort of

causing 20% of the problems in the rest

you take, you're not taking enough

rest."

But there it is, and they got rid of

that server farm in Sacramento.

What happens to the people that Musk

works with when they see that case study

that in that moment he when he presented

that he they could do it in 6 weeks and

it turns out he was right that it could

be done quicker. Is that what sort of

galvanizes the team?

Totally. And about 20 to 30% of the

people who work with him can go march

through fire with him that way and

realize what he can do. But it's why 80%

of the people who worked at Twitter when

he took it over are gone.

But

it's tough to work with him. There's

another scene in the book where

on a late Friday night he's down in the

southern tip of Texas where they have

the launchpad for Starbase.

And it's a Friday night after 10:00 p.m.

and he looks at the launchpad area says,

"Why are there only three or four people

working?"

And this poor guy Andy Crab, nice, tall,

you know, southern young engineer says,

"Well, it's a Friday night and we don't

have any launches scheduled." And Musk

goes dark on him and says,

"I want tomorrow 100 people working. I

want them to come from California,

Florida, get them in here and we're

going to stack this rocket even though

we're not planning to launch anytime

soon, but we're going to have what's

called a surge." And they fly people in

and people are sleeping on the ground on

the floors

to do this surge.

And Andy Crab survives it and does

pretty well, but eventually

he quits. He says, "Man, I'm having a

kid. I just can't keep going through

these things with Elon." And so that's

in the book. About 3 weeks ago I was in

Los Angeles and

talking about the book and I see this

tall guy I recognize coming up after the

speech. It's Andy Crab. I said, "What's

happened?" He said, "Well, as you know,

I quit and I came back to Los Angeles

and I got a much easier job, but I

decided I'd rather be burned out than

bored, and I've asked Elon if I could

come back cuz I don't want to miss

working for SpaceX."

It's very interesting. The um

you know, the the acquisition of Twitter

Twitter was a very from

you know, you think about where it's

based and how it was run and all the

things you've come to learn about the

company and its sort of political

leanings. It was very much the

antithesis of the Musk approach.

Totally. And he had become

over the past three or four years, he's

edged from being what I would call a

center-left

uh somebody who donated to Obama and

voted for Biden

uh to somebody who has become, I think,

far too

worked up about what he calls the woke

mind virus, you know, the progressive

uh

mindset that he sees in colleges and in

schools. Multiple reasons which I go

through in the book.

What's the most important reason?

Well, the most personal reason

is he had uh

uh five older children, teenagers, uh

surviving. One died in infancy. And the

oldest of them was named Xavier after

his favorite

uh character in the X-Men comics.

And Xavier transitions the and sends a

note about 3 years ago saying,

"I'm transitioning. My name is now

Jenna, and don't tell my father."

Now, he gets his head around the fact

that she transitioned, and he loves her,

but she becomes very anti-capitalist,

very woke, hates all billionaires,

thinks capitalism is theft, and rejects

him, and changes her last name. And this

causes him an enormous amount of pain

and he partly blames it on Los Angeles

where you live sometimes. There's this

very progressive school she went to

called Crossroads.

And that was one of about seven or eight

factors that led to this political

evolution

where he felt the progressive left was

overdoing COVID lockdowns, was overdoing

gender ideology questions. In some ways

it echoed his father who was also

somewhat conspiratorial in his thinking

and didn't believe in vaccines or Dr.

Fauci or and it's a weird evolution that

we still see reverberating in the waters

of Twitter today.

You say that it caused him a tremendous

amount of pain that Xavier transitioned

and is now a woman.

How do you know that it caused him pain?

Well, he's said so and he

he's easy to read even though he doesn't

read people's emotions well.

I mean he will say nothing cause has

caused me more pain. He says this

outright than uh his daughter rejecting

him. Not transitioning but just totally

rejecting him other than the death of

his first child through

an infancy. His first child died.

And he gets very dark and

you know, you talk to his sister, you

talk to his brother, his brother's wife.

They say that's the thing that's caused

him enormous personal pain and he says

so.

Going back to when he acquired Twitter,

um

I as a

great fan of what Elon has achieved and

the service that he's sort of served to

humanity with some of these companies

like Tesla and SpaceX, I

was really hoping he didn't buy the

company because I thought it would just

be a great distraction from

Bingo.

really important other things.

100%.

You were you were there, right? At the

time.

I was there. So, I'm sitting here just

opened Giga Texas, which is the largest

factory manufacturing things. It's a

Tesla factory in Austin, Texas. We're on

the mezzanine. The factory's not even

open yet.

I guess this is April 2022.

And he tells me that he still needs more

drama in his life. He can't accept the

fact that he's now become the richest

person on Earth. He's person of the year

for Financial Times and Time. He's sent

up 33 rockets that year that landed

safely and were reused.

And yet, he says, "Okay, I'm buying

Twitter."

And his brother, his son Griffin, his

uh we're all less his friends, three or

four friends, is like,

"Is this a good idea? Aren't you going

to be distracted?"

And everybody is sort of trying to talk

him out of it. I'm not cuz I'm just

taking notes. I'm just the observer.

But I'm thinking, "Boy, this is a bad

idea." Not simply cuz it'll be a

distraction, but because

you don't have uh I'm thinking of Musk,

he doesn't have

emotional human emotional awareness.

And so, I asked him,

"Why are you doing it?" And he said,

"Well, it's a product problem. They need

better engineering. They haven't

put any new features in. They don't have

emotion video. So, it's an engineering

challenge." I'm thinking, "No, Twitter's

not an engineering product. You've been

through all these before.

It's an advertising medium. It's

supposed to gather eyeballs for

advertisers

in a friendly environment. And that's

not

Elon's specialty.

So, I think it was

was then and is now both a distraction

and does not play to his strengths.

Did you see it at any point

and do you believe it will hurt

the trajectory of Tesla and SpaceX in

any way?

That acquisition.

I think that it probably hurt his

reputation, especially among more

progressive people. It obviously has

hurt,

which means it probably has hurt Tesla's

sales.

As for SpaceX, I don't think it matters

too much. He

has been able to be intensely focused,

including I mean, just today, while

we're taping this, I think he's

doing the

40th launch this year of the Falcon 9,

sending up 20 more Starlink satellites.

He launched Starship and got it all the

way into space, the all 33 Raptor

engines working. And he's down there

intensely focused. So, I think SpaceX is

okay. I think Tesla will be okay, but

it'd be better off if he won't

if A, he won't distracted by Twitter,

and B, if his reputation hadn't become

10 times more controversial, which is

not great if you're just trying to do a

mass market car sales.

When he went into Twitter, one of the

the very alarming things that he did was

there was rumors that he called everyone

up to the top floor and said, "This is

going to be the new company culture. If

you don't like it,

Absolutely. I mean, I was there. I

walked in with I was I was there that

the day before he took over. He marches

in.

And I think there's a whole chapter in

the book almost in the

rapid change in corporate culture that

happened, something you're very familiar

with from companies you've dealt with,

which is a two way two extremes of doing

a company. One was the way Twitter was,

which is nurturing and sweet and having

yoga rooms and artisanal coffee bars.

And when Musk walks in, they're showing

him how we have quiet spaces for people

who need, you know, to get their mental

energy restored. And they said, "We

value psychological safety." And Musk

looked at me and kind of did his raspy

laugh. He says, "Psychological safety

blank, they know, screw that."

"An urgent intensity

is our operating principle.

Psychological safety is our enemy." And

so he turns it into a hardcore all-in

environment where you have to say, "I'm

all in. You're going to work 24/7, some

weekends, cuz you're all in."

And he said, "I want a team that's 20%

of the size, but that's

an order of magnitude more intense and

more all in." And you've probably seen

companies with your own eyes who are

very nurturing, and you've seen

companies in which everybody's doing a

hardcore all-in hackathon on a Saturday

night,

and he's in the latter camp.

Do you believe often speak to large

organizations that have cultural

problems? They they're not innovative,

they're being eroded away by

new market entrants, etc. And the

problem they have is they can't turn the

ship around quickly enough

before the innovation takes them out.

Big companies that have 50,000 people

big out

I I've often want cuz then I saw this

Elon Musk approach to turn in culture

around where you basically let off a

grenade in the building.

Totally.

Do you believe there's merit in that?

That approach?

Yes, but I also believe there's a big

old downside and like everything with

Elon Musk, including the shooting off of

the rockets, you get amazing things

happen, but also

rubble in the wake and damage in the

wake and personal damage. Uh

At Tesla, he did that once as a guy,

John McNeill in the book who was

president of Tesla, another couple of

people today. They all say it, which is

maybe that's the price you have to pay

if you want to be this disruptive.

But is it a price that I want to pay?

The answer is no. And maybe it's too

high of a price causing so much

emotional

turmoil. But there are people, including

the guy Andy Krebs I told you about who

wants to go back to work at SpaceX

who like the challenge, who like the

emotional turmoil.

I ran Time magazine.

It was the good old days. And it was

about as wonderful of an environment,

even you would be in the clouds thinking

about in the 1990s. We were rolling in

money before the disruption of the

internet takes away the idea of a

general interest paper magazine.

And we had there was a drinks cart that

would come around every day at 5:00 and

make cocktails for all the writers.

There was a roast beef carvery cart in

the evening. There were

town cars that would take you out to

your weekend houses. It was totally

great. And that environment needed to be

disrupted,

but it was a glorious when it happened.

Then I went to CNN.

And for a while the Gulf War were you

know exactly what we're doing. But once

the Gulf War was over, CNN needed deep

disruption and I was not very good at

being a disruptive leader at firing like

Elon Musk could 80% of the people.

So sometimes, CNN was one of those big

old battleships with as you said, lots

of people working there.

It probably needed a more disruptive

leader than I was.

So interesting. So do you think that

there's a certain type of cultural

approach that suits suits a certain type

of company, Especially as we look at the

world of AI and robotics and how things

are going to be accelerating so quickly

in technology, it seems to be the case

that companies are going to need to

disrupt themselves faster than ever if

you believe some of the forecasts about

the future that people like Ray Kurzweil

posit.

Yeah. And not only you it used to be

tech companies would have to be

disruptive. But now if you're an

insurance company, if you're a law firm,

you know, if you're a bank,

the disruption is going to happen.

Uh if you're a healthcare company, so

yeah, we're going to have to be

disruptive.

That doesn't necessarily mean an all-in

intense hackathon work all weekend

culture is necessary. I think it's great

to have corporate cultures

in both sides. It's like return to work

after COVID. I'm not sure there's

exactly one answer. There's some

companies that say, "You know what?

Remote working gets us really good

people who uh can do better things."

And there are other people who say, "No,

I got to have my people back in the

office."

I think it's good to experiment or not

just experiment, but to have

alternatives. Some people work better in

some environments, some in others.

And you could also ask the question not

just about corporate environments, but

about corporate leaders, which is what

you discussed most of the time.

Some corporate leaders have got to be,

uh you know, Steve Jobs-like or Bill

Gates in the early days of Microsoft or

Bezos in the early days of Amazon or

Musk,

you know,

basically at times. And uh

but then some corporate leaders, like

Jennifer Doudna or even a Ben Franklin,

lead by being collaborative and

inspiring and nice. And I think the

advice any CEO needs is the oldest piece

of advice on this planet maybe for

humans, which is on the Oracle of Delphi

arch, which is just know thyself. And

you got to know, here's my approach and

here's where I feel most comfortable.

Interesting, cuz I was just about to ask

you which approach you think is

generally more effective, but

But you know, for me

I couldn't do the all-in

jerk

or you know, the

asshole-like approach.

And there were times I needed to do

that. And Jobs, Steve Jobs would say to

me it's why you were never quite as

good. But I also think that

that to you?

Yeah, he would say, you all he called it

velvet gloves. I don't know I guess he

meant it when he said people like

yourself, when you ran companies, you

had velvet gloves on and you always

trying to make people feel comfortable.

He said for me, I got to make them feel

uncomfortable. I have to make them feel

challenged. Yeah, I don't have the

luxury. I don't have the luxury of uh

uh I tolerating B players and coddling

them.

So,

I you know, I know what type I am, but

I think at times you can create a very

creative place where people feel very

comfortable

and it allows great creativity to

flourish. But I think you have to

sometimes say

we got to be hardcore here. We're being

challenged.

I would also say it's not just about the

leader. It's about the leadership team.

If you're going to make a good company,

you have to make the right team. And

when I ran CNN and Time, I realized

maybe I was a little bit too velvet

gloved as Steve Jobs would say. But I

made sure in my leadership team, there

were people who had iron fists and could

take

Intel, a great company when it was

founded and leadership team. You had to

have Andy Grove you had to have Bob

Noyce, who was the nicest

friendliest CEO ever. He

put his desk in the middle of the room

and just loved, you know, people. You

had to have somebody like Gordon Moore

of Moore's law, who was a visionary. But

you also they have to bring in Andy

Grove

who is really tough and gets the

microchips out the door. And so every

leadership team needs to have

the hammer as well as the inspiring nice

guy.

Both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk today,

what was their view on being liked as a

leader?

Both of them told me

that that could be

a failing. That that could be a

weakness.

Which is if you try too hard to be

liked,

you're not going to be disruptive

enough.

And

Musk even said empathy and collegiality

can be your enemy.

And

Jobs told me, "You think you're very

empathetic and you care about other

people's feelings. But sometimes you

take it too far

and you do it out of vanity.

You want people to like you. You care

too much about whether the people

working with you love you."

And he said, "That's not the way to

create a disruptive organization."

Did you agree with him?

Yeah. I agree. I think I ran Time

magazine just fine. You can ask other

people, but uh

uh but with CNN,

I sat there worrying about I won't name

names, but these anchors on CNN who

truly

uh were problematic, and yet I wanted

them all to like me, and I was probably

not tough enough.

But I also finally got to the know

thyself, which is, "All right, this is

not the job for me

because

I'm better off

trying to inspire teams that are

friendly and collegial. The way Jennifer

Doudna, the heroine of my book The Code

Breaker, the one who helped invent

CRISPR technology,

in her lab and in her companies, if

they're going to hire somebody new, even

a graduate student to be in, you know,

working with the pipettes and the test

tubes,

they make sure the whole team meets that

person. And then they all discuss, will

this person fit in well?

Whereas, and that's a culture that I can

relate to.

But in Elon Musk says, no.

I remember him yelling at some of his

finance people who were friendly with

some of the engineers

and said, no, collegiality is your

enemy. You do not want them to like you.

You're there to challenge them. If they

like you too much, you're not doing your

job.

But do Elon's employees like him?

Elon's employees generally

uh will walk through a wall for him,

those who have survived, whether be

Gwynne Shotwell or

uh who is a president of SpaceX or

people uh at Mark Junge Toussaint, the

people at Tesla like Drew Baglino or

Franz von Holzhausen. But he burns out

people pretty fast. So, if

he's in an organization, after a few

years, maybe 20%

are totally loyal and survive,

but he's not afraid of burning people

out and having them leave.

Sounds like they either love him or

leave.

Yeah, and as I say, sometimes with Andy

Krebs,

they love him, but then they leave, but

then they come back. Some people

truly want the challenge. As Steve Jobs

said to

Sculley, the guy he uh hired to run

uh

Apple for a while, who It was at Pepsi.

He said, "Do you want to make sugar

water the rest of your life, or do you

want to change the world?"

And I've seen Musk talk to the people at

SpaceX

late at night, maybe midnight, where

they're all still working uh at the

launchpad of the factory.

And he'll say, "I know how hard you're

working,

but this is the most exciting job you

could possibly have. It's the most

exciting, important job on Earth, which

is getting people to Mars. Whatever is

the second most exciting, you can't even

think of it what it is, because this is

by far the most exciting thing you could

be doing." And there are people who buy

into that. And I could sit there

watching the moon rise over the Gulf of

Mexico and him saying that,

and I could see why people buy into

that. I could also see why some people

say, "I'd rather have a wife and kids

and get off Friday night at 5:00 p.m."

Does he believe it when he says that?

And And do typically people believe it

when they hear it?

When he first say said to me that he had

three missions, to get humanity to Mars,

to have sustainable energy on this

planet, and to make robots safe, I

thought it was a type of pontification

you do on podcasts like this one, or pep

talks for your team.

But then I'd hear him say it over and

over again. And I'd hear him say it

almost to himself as he walked around

and saw something bad. He said, "We'll

never get to Mars. We'll never get And

almost staring into the distance

sometimes, he said, "We've got to get to

Mars. You know, we've got to If we don't

do this, we'll never get humanity to

Mars. We'll never

get the world to electric vehicles."

I totally think he believes it.

Why does he care so much about Mars?

He believes

in spacefaring. In other words, we have

to be space adventures for two or three

reasons.

One is he believes that human

consciousness

is rare and maybe unique. There's

nowhere else in the universe do we know

that there's consciousness. And why?

Because if consciousness existed

somewhere else

it probably never became multi-planetary

before the planet it was on got

destroyed. It's not something you and I

wake up worrying about, but it's a kid.

As a 15-year-old, he's worried about the

extinguishing of human consciousness if

something happens to our planet.

Secondly, he says it's the great

adventure.

We wake up every morning, we got all

sorts of problems to worry about. There

are more problems in

Ukraine to the Middle East to Congress

to, you know, whatever it may be in

Whitehall at the moment.

But we have to have our vision set on

some things that inspire us. That are

truly make humans what they are. And

there's nothing more inspiring than the

notion of being an adventure, of going

to new frontiers. And the greatest new

frontier

is space.

So, I think those are the reasons. It's

not because he wants to make money.

If you If you decide you want to be the

richest person on Earth,

you know, step one isn't start a rocket

company.

So, I think he believes in the mission.

And do you think that he's

at all scared that he might not get

there in his lifetime?

Yeah, I think that he wakes up all the

time calculating that he's 50, whatever,

two or three years old.

That maybe he's got 30 years.

Not that he necessarily wants to go to

Mars.

But he wants a mission to Mars. And he

believes it'll be within 10 years.

But he's always wrong

by

you know, two or three times I How fast

self-driving will come to be. How fast

the Cybertruck will be made. How fast

we'll get to Mars.

I think in 30 years, there will be

missions to Mars. I think in 10 years,

it's unlikely. And I think that's the

spread that he's worried about.

As someone like Elon that thinks in

terms of first principles, when he's

trying to doing those calculations about

how long he's got left to live and the

development of SpaceX and rockets and

trying to correlate whether trying to

figure out if he'll get there in his

lifetime, does he not then look at his

health and go, "Well, one way to extend

the amount of time I have on Earth is to

really obsess about my health." From

everything I've read, he doesn't seem

particularly interested in his health.

No, he makes fun of his tech bros who

are sitting there with longevity uh

plans of how they're going to live to be

much longer.

Uh and no, he does not care enough about

his health.

For a He's very He's overweight now. For

a while, a year ago, he decided

to go on an intermittent fasting diet

and also was using whatever those drugs

are called, you know, the

The diet

weight loss drugs.

Yeah, those weight loss drugs.

And I remember being with him one

morning. He I could only have one meal a

day cuz of this. And we went to

something called the Palo Alto Creamery,

I think it's called, some diner and Lil

X was with us.

And Musk ordered a double bacon

cheeseburger with sweet potato fries and

an Oreo chocolate chip milkshake

and said, "Okay, it's my one meal of the

day." And I'm thinking,

I'm not a

diet uh expert, but this does not seem

like the healthiest way to either lose

weight or remain healthy.

Does that seem like a bit of a

contradiction to you in some respects

that he's

He's not He's crazy. I mean, then, yeah.

But he's not I mean, I look at say Sam

Altman. Sam Altman is very disciplined

in both exercise and diet. Uh Jeff Bezos

is not that way. Elon's not that way.

You know, you're probably pretty good at

diet and exercise, you know, me?

I tried pretty hard, but I'm not quite

as good. Elon's

at the side where he's

he's fanatic on many many things, but

uh getting on the treadmill and taking

care of himself is not one of them.

Did you ever see him exercise while you

were with him?

He has only one home now because when

his daughter transitioned, it became

very anti-capitalist.

He thought that if selling all five of

his pretty nice homes, he would just

live very frugally and that would please

her, which didn't work. But he's got

this two-bedroom house in

a town in South Texas where Starbase is.

And there's a little room that has one

of those cross-trainers.

And every now and then, I'd be just

sitting in that house day in and day

out. He'd say, "Maybe I should use that

more. I don't use it that much."

I've never seen him say, "Well, I've got

to go to the gym." He doesn't

meditate, do yoga, swim, or do things

that would both clear your mind and

relax your body.

How would you characterize his mental

health?

Incredibly mercurial.

What does that mean?

Means that

he goes through multiple phases,

personalities. And there will be times

when he's perfectly cheerful, inspiring,

sometimes funny,

sometimes focused on engineering.

There'll be times when he gets into a

very

what Grimes calls demon mode and

he says he's probably bipolar.

He's never been diagnosed, but he uses

some medication that's been prescribed.

And so,

he will get into these mood swings where

he can be manic and depressive and

bipolar.

And so, his mental health is not great.

The difficult question in the book

wrestles with him

with this

and you said at the beginning, smart

thing you said at the beginning of this

show,

was to what extent is that woven into

who he is, and do those strands also

cause him

to have the drives?

In the time that you observed him in the

the years that you were with him,

were you ever concerned about him?

Yeah.

I mean, there are times when he would go

into what I would almost

feel was a tailspin. And even times

before I knew him,

like 2018, he goes into total meltdown.

He's

almost catatonic, lying on the floor of

the factory in Fremont, Texas, and the

people who work with him can't rouse him

cuz he's in a, you know, catatonic

state. He's sending off horrible tweets

back then, calling some cave diver a

pedophile, or saying he's going to take

Tesla private. And you see that recur

every now and then, even this past

month.

He hasn't been, as far as I know, in any

bad catatonic state, but he'll get into

a dark mood late at night and do tweets

that are conspiratorial and dark and

self-destructive.

At Christmas,

he was with his brother and some other

relatives, and they all sit around

talking. This is the day after the

server

uh farm anecdote I told you about.

And they ask, "What do you regret most

this year?"

And he says, "I regret the fact that

every now and then I start shooting

myself in the foot or stabbing myself in

the thigh that he gets into these

periods.

With all these um great leaders that

that there's a word you use throughout

which is the word team. I'm the

definition of the word company is group

of people. How do they go about hiring

great people?

With Musk,

he says that you always look first for

the right attitude.

Skills,

knowledge,

they can all be acquired. But a change

in attitude requires a brain transplant.

So, you make sure they have an all-in

hardcore

attitude.

Early on, first few years of SpaceX and

Tesla, he interviewed everybody

uh that they were hiring.

He's built a good team, but an unstable

one. People come and go more often. But

there are people like Gwynne Shotwell

who for more than 20 years has helped

run SpaceX

and Mark Junge who's been probably the

chief technology officer there.

Likewise, you have a pretty stable team

at Tesla.

Steve Jobs was

a specialist at building teams.

When he was dying,

uh I was in his backyard with him

and I asked him, "What's the best

product you ever made?" And I thought

he'd say

the iPhone or maybe the Mac.

He said, "Well, building those products

is hard, but what's really important is

building a team that will continue to

build products. So, the best thing I did

was the team at App."

And that's the Jony Ive, Phil Schiller,

Eddy Cue,

uh Tim Cook team. Musk is not

as much of a superstar building teams,

but he does get hardcore dedicated

leaders to work for him.

And do they both think that the team is

the most important thing, hiring great

people.

I would say that

Jobs definitely thought that. I think

Musk, if you ask him, would say he

thinks that. But, one of the things he

hasn't done perfectly is

if he left Tesla, you know, there's Tom

Zhu, there's uh Drew Baglino, there's

some people,

but it's not as if

he has a big team in place as easily.

Uh so,

it's he's a little bit more

the total boss. And uh

he'll not try to run everything, but

he'll focus maniacally on specific

things.

And he does not dele- I guess the best

way to say it is he doesn't delegate

authority as easily as

I think other leaders do.

On the flip side of that,

his maniacal intensity to detail

uh means that, unlike Boeing, he knows

how to get rockets into orbit.

What are the um principles of successful

leadership that both Steve and Elon

share?

First of all, a passion. Musk had a

passion for beauty and even the beauty

of the parts unseen. I remember when I

was first working

with Steve Jobs, he had the same Steve

would take me around the backyard of his

house where he grew up in a small tract

home in California.

And there was a fence, and he made me

look at the back of the fence which

faced scrubland. He said, "My dad said

we had to make the back of the fence

just as beautiful as the front of the

fence." And Steve said to his father,

"Why? Nobody'll see it. Nobody will

know."

And he said, "Yes, but you will know. If

you have a passion for perfection,

you'll care even about the beauty of the

parts unseen." And so, both Steve Jobs

and Elon Musk cared more about details

than your average CEO. They cared in

Jobs' case

how the chips on the circuit board in

the original Macintosh looked and

whether the circuit board itself was

beautiful even though nobody would ever

see it. It was in a sealed case.

And Musk the night he

the Twitter board accepted his offer he

spends 2 hours in

the tiny town in South Texas going over

a valve in the Raptor engines on the

Starship and why it was leaking and

there was a methane leak.

And just became involved in the details.

And both of them felt

that if you have a passion and intensity

on the details

the rest will follow more easily.

What what was their approach to kind of

link to that? Their approach to

experimentation. It's something that I'm

actually obsessed with

conducting as many experiments we

possibly can in the shortest amount of

time we can to get information back.

Yeah, one of the things that Musk is

successful

because of is his ability to iterate, to

take risks, to conduct experiments.

Twice now he's launched Starship, which

as I say is by far the biggest rocket

ever made. And both times you saw

stories the next day saying Musk

launches rocket and explodes. Well, he

thinks both those were a success because

he says if you're not failing 20% of the

time, you're not risking enough. And so

each of those are

attempts to figure out, to take a risk,

shoot something off and see what goes

wrong and then to fix it. If you have a

risk-averse culture like NASA or Boeing

or Lockheed or

others

you're not experimenting enough.

And

the experiment and by definition an

experiment involves the unknown and

taking a risk.

How do they keep their cultures to be

pro-risk and

um to stop them getting complacent with

their success?

Well, I don't think Musk has a problem

with complacency because he's so intense

and hardcore

that the minute

uh you know, I've watched so many

meetings where

even at Twitter where somebody says, "We

can't do this. We can't take away the

blue checks. We can't uh change from uh

carbon fiber to stainless steel on a

particular compound. Or we can't do

Cybertruck cuz Cybertruck is too edgy

and it's made of stainless steel and it

is frightening to look at and it'll

scare people."

And he'll just

either run roughshod over them or fire

them

or push them to realize, "Yeah, let's

make Cybertruck look very futuristic and

let's make it totally out of stainless

steel. And let's have the stainless

steel be an exoskeleton so you don't

have to have internal chassis as much."

These are wild out-of-the-box things.

And they resisted him on Cybertruck.

They resisted him on Starship. They

resisted him

on

even some of the battery changes he's

made or things.

But or resist him on the amount of

servers you need at uh Twitter or the

rules for engagement on Twitter.

I think sometimes it doesn't work. I

think Twitter

is

kind of toxic in places cuz he thought

you could get rid of the moderation

teams and do it through an algorithm.

But he pushes things

80% of which succeed. It means there's a

lot of rubble in the wake, though.

Do you Do you think that someone

delusional, these people?

I think they're crazy and

as Jobs would say, crazy enough to think

they can change the world and thus they

become the ones who do.

Delusional, the phrase they used for

Steve

was reality distortion field, which is

just a

geek geek's way of saying delusional.

Meaning uh

you can wish something and think hard

enough on something

and try to make it happen. And often it

worked. With Jobs, he'd say

you got to shave 10 seconds off the boot

up time. And they'd say, that's reality,

can't be done. And he'd say, he'd stare

without blinking, something his guru had

taught him in India. He'd say, don't be

afraid, you can do it. And they would

bend reality and 80% of the time he'd

get it done. Sometimes it didn't work.

He tried it on his cancer.

It didn't work.

Uh he made he just tried to will it

away.

Likewise with Musk.

Full self-driving. I mean, for the past

10 8 years he's always said it's only a

year away. We're going to get there.

Well, that's reality distortion.

He's driven his team to go further with

machine learning on full self-driving

than most companies.

But it's also a reality distortion that

hasn't yet paid off.

Deadlines. You talked kind of about it

there.

That's the same thing, which is

being delusional about deadlines, but

they're forcing functions.

As

Musk himself said when I was talking to

him once, I said, deadlines, man, you

always He says, yes, but I'm a

specialist at turning the impossible

into the merely very late. So, he misses

deadlines, but he tends to eventually

deliver.

The The reason he's setting deadlines,

even though he knows sometimes they

might not be hit is because it speeds up

the team.

Yeah, he says you a all in intensity,

a hardcore intensity is our operating

principle.

And you're not going to have that

without deadlines. I remember so many

times they were what he his team calls

surges.

I'd see it happen almost every month in

a different field. He'd say, "All right,

we have to stack this rocket by Friday."

And they'd say, "You know, no, it's

going to take months." No, it needs to

be stacked by Friday. And they'd work

around the clock and do it. And then a

few weeks later he'd be on a

house where they were putting a Tesla

solar

uh pan- solar roof tiles.

And he'd say, "You have 24 hours to redo

this house." They'd say, "Well, that's

nuts."

But he'd be there at midnight on top of

the roof.

Himself.

Himself. With a little ax playing on the

cables down below. And he would use it

as a forcing function.

It drove the teams crazy, but it drove

them to do things they didn't think they

could do.

Is he happy?

No. He's somebody who not only is not

usually happy,

but he doesn't value happiness. If you

said, "What are the top 10 things you

want in life?"

I don't think happiness,

pleasure,

calmness, sweetness,

going to the beach, none of those would

be in the top 10.

He

uh Talulah Riley who lives here, who was

married to him, the English actress,

great English actress,

she said,

"He's not the type who can stop and

savor

or smell the flowers. He doesn't want to

sit back and be content and be happy."

And I asked him about I said, "Okay,

were you ever happy of what you've

achieved?" He said, "No, I'm like a

video game addict.

When I get to one level of the game and

I've succeeded, all I can think about is

moving to the next level of the game, be

it Elden Ring or Polytopia."