Walter Isaacson

The triumphs, turmoil and trajectory of the man who is remaking our future…..this week on Firing Line.

 

Liftoff of the Falcon 9 and crew Dragon. Go NASA, Go SpaceX…

 

From SpaceX, Elon Musk’s pioneering company in private space exploration, to Tesla… 

 

Musk: There was a time when electric cars seemed very stupid. And it wasn’t that long ago.

 

…to ventures in solar panels, AI, even chips in human brains…

 

Musk: He is not actually using a keyboard, he is moving the cursor with his mind 

 

…and his recent takeover of Twitter, Elon Musk is widely regarded as both a visionary disrupter, and sometimes just plain disruptive.

 

ISAACSON: There’s something slightly unnerving about that. But also, I think we need a little bit of an injection of that in the American psyche 

 

Best-selling biographer Walter Isaacson spent two years inside Musk’s universe. Isaacson, who has also chronicled the likes of Leonardo DaVinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs, is out with a new biography examining how Musk became so powerful, and the inner demons and convictions that drive him.

 

ISAACSON: The absolute intense person is what’s getting his rocket launched. It also makes him a very difficult character. 

 

As Musk’s control of technology continues to expand, so does his geopolitical influence….

 

ISAACSON: He has to decide whether to allow the drone attack by the submarines to work against the Russian fleet in Crimea.

 

…what does author, journalist, and professor Walter Isaacson say now?

 

‘Firing Line’ with Margaret Hoover is made possible in part by: Robert Granieri, Stephens Inc. Vanessa and Henry Cornell, The Fairweather Foundation, The Tepper Foundation, The Asness Family Foundation, Kathleen and Andrew McKenna Through The McKenna Family Foundation, Charles R. Schwab and by The Rosalind P. Walter Foundation and Damon Button.

 

INTERVIEW

 

HOOVER: Walter Isaacson, welcome to Firing Line. 

ISAACSON: Thank you, Margaret. Great to be here. 

HOOVER: You spent two years shadowing Elon Musk. In 680 pages, you set out to answer the question, could he have been more chill and still be the one launching us towards Mars and an electric vehicle future? What’s your answer to that question now? 

ISAACSON: You know, you got to take Elon Musk, the whole cloth. The absolute intense person is what’s getting his rockets launched. It also makes him a very difficult character. But if you had a chill Elon Musk, a restrained Elon Musk, we’d all probably like being around him a bit more sometimes, but I don’t think he’d be the one shooting the rockets to Mars or getting us into the electric vehicle future. 

HOOVER: You agreed to become Elon’s biographer at a high moment for him, before he went on to purchase Twitter and become a more controversial figure.

ISAACSON: Yeah.

HOOVER: He had vast success with SpaceX. He had also achieved vast success in the production of Teslas. As you reflect on the other disruptors in human history that you have chronicled, how does Elon Musk stack up? 

ISAACSON: I think if we look at the current modern era, there are three people who are really changing the way the 21st century will be. First was Steve Jobs, who brought us to the era of friendly computers, CRISPR, which means we can change our genetic makeup, design our children. Huge. And Elon Musk is the one to bring us into the era of electric vehicles, renewed space travel, a new form of Internet and low-Earth orbit, and artificial intelligence that’s not just chat bots, but self-driving cars and robots. 

HOOVER: When you described Jobs’s unique ability to just drive people towards an impossible conclusion how does Elon’s focus and drive and vision compare? 

ISAACSON: They’re very similar in that they both drove people crazy. They drove them to distraction, but they drove people to do things that they thought were impossible. And so if you look at Boeing, Boeing got a contract to send astronauts to the space station and cargo around the same time as SpaceX. They haven’t done a test flight yet. But when I walked around the launch pads, and it’d be Friday night at 10pm and people weren’t working that hard, he’d demand a surge. And people work all weekend. He’d fly 100 people in, just because he felt that the fierce intensity was necessary to push us forward. 

HOOVER: Do you admire him? 

ISAACSON: I do think that we’ve been a nation that always took some risks, always did some great innovations. Whether you came here on the Mayflower or you came across the Rio Grande, it was risk taking to be an American. Now we’ve become a country that’s filled with more referees than risk takers, more regulators than people who are innovators. More people saying, ‘Oh, you probably ought to not try that.’ So what I admire of him, is he’s pushing the bounds. He’s questioning every rule, questioning every regulation. There’s something slightly unnerving about that. But also, I think we need a little bit of an injection of that in the American psyche today. 

ELON’S CHILDHOOD

HOOVER: You place Elon, the man, in the context of his childhood. He had a challenging childhood in South Africa, a father who was certainly emotionally and verbally abusive, summer camps, chock full of bullying, and growing up also with Asperger’s. How do you think about how all of these elements fused together to propel his drive as an adult? 

ISAACSON: It’s so interesting to look at him as a kid: socially awkward, beaten up all the time. And one day he gets beaten up in the playground of his school and has to go to the hospital, his face is so disfigured. But those scars were minor compared to the psychological scars that came from his father, who made him stand in front of him after that beating and the father berated Elon, said it was his fault, took the side of the guy who beat him up. And so you have this lonely kid sitting there in the corner of bookstores reading science fiction and comic books and imagining himself as an epic hero, but also with these demons dancing in his head. We all got, probably, some demons. The question is, can you harness those demons or do those demons kind of haunt you the rest of your life? And I show in Elon’s case, it’s both. 

MARS

HOOVER: In just a few years, Musk went from being kicked out of PayPal to creating SpaceX. 

ISAACSON: Right. 

HOOVER: This company introduced reusable rockets, sent astronauts to the International Space Station, and has pioneered a commercial space sector. Do you expect, when it’s all said and done, he will see fulfilled his vision to have Mars colonized? 

ISAACSON: Yes. I think at some point. He’s very good at turning the impossible into the just very late. So it’s not going to be as fast as he wants. It’ll probably be 20 years. But one of the amazing things, there was a meeting each week called Mars Colonizer. It was about, what are we going to wear when we get to Mars? How are we going to self-govern? What will the robots… and I’m going, ‘wait a minute, these people are seriously sitting around talking about what we’re supposed to wear when we get to Mars?’ But it’s that sense of focusing on the far horizon that I think keeps him mission driven. 

HOOVER: But explain the reason to colonize Mars and the reason to get there. 

ISAACSON: I think he had three reasons when he decided he was going to make a mission of going to Mars. One was this notion that human consciousness is a very fragile thing in the universe and that it could be snuffed out. Asteroids could hit us. Civilization could decline. Why is it we’ve never met intelligent life from other places? Well, maybe they got wiped out before they could become multi-planetary. Therefore, he says, humans have to be multi-planetary. And also, it was just a sense of adventure. This is a kid who loves sci-fi and he’s wondering, wait a minute, we went to the moon and then we quit having adventures. What’s that all about? 

HOOVER: In 1973, William F. Buckley Jr., on the original Firing Line, hosted Alan Shepard, who was the first American in space. Listen to how they discussed space exploration. 

BUCKLEY: Now, what I’m asking you really is, is there a nexus between the spirit of individual adventure and the resources of the state? You did need Ferdinand and Isabella, or so it was generally assumed during the 15th century, in order to finance that particular expedition. Is it your notion or is it your idea that great adventures of this kind in the 20th century have got to be socialized adventures rather than individual ones? 

SHEPARD: Oh, I really think so when one assumes what the total cost of these things are going to be. I think as long as you’re talking in terms of something which is pushing the boundaries of the limits of men and machine, then I think that you’re probably going to have to use – 

BUCKLEY: The resources of the state. 

SHEPARD: – large funds and the resources of the state and government to do it, yes.

HOOVER: What’s remarkable to me about Buckley and Shepard talking there is that I think Buckley would be beyond delighted and surprised that the cost of the space program didn’t have to be socialized by the government, that space innovation is being driven by an individual in the private sector.

ISAACSON: You know, without debating William F. Buckley from afar, it’s always a bit more complex. There are public-private partnerships where you have to have some government missions and some government funding, but it’s really great to have private contractors take some of the risk as well. And I think we got– it was President Obama who decided, no, we’re not going to just make it NASA only. We’re going to have these private contractors get fixed-cost contracts. And that’s a partnership that might work. 

HOOVER: But because the government had stopped innovating, and individuals were doing the innovating, right?

ISAACSON: I do think that government and some of the big government contractors got sort of the hardening of the arteries. They were unable– And Boeing has still been unable, even though it got a contract with, for a NASA rocket. 

HOOVER: …to get to the space station. 

ISAACSON: They still haven’t even launched a test flight to the space station that’s worked –

HOOVER: Well, to your point, you write about what General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said about Elon Musk. He said, ‘Elon Musk symbolizes the combination of the civil and military cooperation and teamwork that makes the United States the most powerful country in space.’ 

ISAACSON: And that’s it. There is a civil-military cooperation, a private sector-government cooperation, and that includes Tesla. It includes electric vehicles. It includes space travel. So these things can’t be all government. It gets a bit sclerotic when that happens. And it can’t be just the private sector. And sometimes in this day and age, we’re not very good at saying, okay, there’s going to be a blend. 

HOOVER: Well, the blend happened because of the innovation of an individual. 

ISAACSON: Absolutely. I think Elon Musk has done something with SpaceX that no country and no company has been able to do, which is to launch a rocket and send things into orbit and then have the rocket land and be reused. China hasn’t done it. Russia hasn’t done it. The US hasn’t done it. Boeing hasn’t done it. And I think that’s the key to the commercial and adventuresome space travel we want. 

STARLINK AND UKRAINE

HOOVER: There can be a downside if there’s an individual who has so much power that a private citizen could have outsized influence perhaps in a geopolitical conflict. There is a much discussed passage in the book that involves Ukraine’s request to utilize SpaceX StarLink satellites to enable a Ukrainian drone attack against the Russian fleet. 

ISAACSON: So that night, he has to decide whether to allow the drone attack by the submarines to work against the Russian fleet in Crimea. And he decides, no. He fears it would lead to a nuclear retaliation, maybe. And so as I was talking to him, I just asked questions, I said, have you talked to General Mark Milley? Have you talked to the US government? And indeed, he did. And eventually he gives up control of some of the Starlinks. He creates this new thing called Star Shield, which is a military version. He sells it to the US government and now the government gets to decide. So I think that’s a good resolution. 

HOOVER: That’s probably where we should have been in the first place. 

ISAACSON: Right. And it would have been good if the US government satellites had worked, if the ViaSat satellites had worked. His was the only one that worked. At one point. Musk figures it out, ‘Man, I shouldn’t be in the middle of this war.’ And he says to me, ‘We created StarLink so people could watch Netflix and chill and play video games. Why am I in this war?’ And so you see this evolution where he finally becomes a contractor so the US government can take control of these things. And it took a while. But you’re right, no individual should be able to decide on a given night, ‘let me figure out whether we should allow this attack or not.’ It’s probably best done by the government. And that’s why he’s now selling these to the US government. And the US government gets to decide. 

TWITTER

HOOVER: Elon Musk purports to be a defender of free speech. 

ISAACSON: Mm. Hmm.

HOOVER: And you describe in your book how living up to that principle has turned out to be far more nuanced and complicated than perhaps even he anticipated.

ISAACSON: Right. He says, ‘More free speech is better. We want more free speech.’ And the question, even his more libertarian friends would say, yeah, but there’s a difference between allowing some of this speech and then amplifying it. So you maybe have to be more careful that hate speech or misinformation should not be amplified. And so I think it’s much more complex than Musk thought. And he’s kind of feeling his way, but he doesn’t have a great feel for some of these emotional sides. 

HOOVER: Well, from your book you write, quote, “Musk had an intuitive feel for engineering issues, but his neural nets have trouble when dealing with human feelings, which made his Twitter purchase such a problem. He thought it was a technology company when in fact it was an advertising medium based on human emotions and relationships.” 

ISAACSON: Absolutely. 

HOOVER: Is he going to redirect his focus back to the things he has an intuitive feeling for? 

ISAACSON: He focuses serially on things. I think his focus now will turn to artificial intelligence, to Optimus the robot, to trying to get self-driving, eventually, to work. And there’ll be less of a focus on the platform known as X now. 

HOOVER: Anti-Semitism on X has surged since Musk took over and previously-banned far right figures have been allowed to return. He’s repeatedly denied reports of hate speech rising on the platform, and he even threatened to sue researchers who documented it. He’s publicly lashed out at the Anti-Defamation League. He falsely accused the Jewish human rights group of driving down ad revenue. I know you don’t believe that he’s an anti-Semite, but how do you explain his behavior related to blaming the ADL? How do you understand that? 

ISAACSON: I think the reason advertising went way down, 40% or more, is not the ADL, which called for a pause for a while, or not these other groups that did it. It’s because it’s become an environment at times that any normal advertiser trying to get brand awareness doesn’t want to be in this toxic stew. So I think it’s wrong to blame it on the ADL. He’s wrong to do that. 

HOOVER: Why does he do it? 

ISAACSON: Why does he blame it? He blamed it for a while on anybody who was advocating a boycott of Twitter, which is obviously hypocritical. If you believe in free speech, you should be able to call for a boycott, as the ADL called for a pause at one point. 

HOOVER: Do you think he’ll be able to turn Twitter into a company that, like his others, have ups and downs, but ultimately are successes? 

ISAACSON: Well, I think what you’ve seen is he’s made it a less friendly environment for advertising, which is really going to hurt his revenue. On the other hand, he’s added features pretty fast: the ability to post videos, the ability to have subscribers, the ability to pay for content. And so I think he will shift it from being mainly an advertising medium, which he doesn’t have a good feel for, to being a place where people post content or people get paid and it’s going to be more contentious. Will it survive financially? I think it will, but it will not be as successful as it would have been had he also kept that good environment for advertisers. 

HOOVER: You dedicate a full chapter in your book to Tesla’s relationship with China and its opening a factory in Shanghai. China ultimately changed its longstanding policy with Tesla by agreeing not to have a joint venture in the production of Teslas. Why do you think that Xi Jinping made an exception for Tesla that it hadn’t in any other case? 

ISAACSON: You know, I thought there would be no way that China would change its rules and allow an auto manufacturing facility, especially a high tech one, to be done without it being a joint venture. And Musk said, I’m not going to do a joint venture. And over and over, he went there. And I think Xi Jinping or the leaders in China thought, well, it’ll be better to have the manufacturing plant here, and they change the rules for him. 

HOOVER: So does he, I mean, do you think he’s aware as an individual citizen who’s been on the cutting edge of these new technologies, but also somebody who’s now playing in geopolitics, does he have a role as an American patriot to think about deepening ties to China? 

ISAACSON: I think he feels deeply patriotic and he cares about innovation and growth in the United States. And like many business leaders, he kind of feels that we have to balance confronting and competing with China, but also finding areas of cooperation. He has said that we’ve become a little bit too provocative and confrontational with China, and he thinks, as do, you know, Tim Cook or Bob Iger and others, that a more workable relationship makes sense. 

HOOVER: For the bottom line, for sure. He criticizes the U.S. government’s wokeness in instances of censorship. And he chooses not to criticize China for its censorship. He’s said there are two sides to the Uighur problem, a problem which the U.S. government characterizes as a genocide. How do you explain someone who can advocate against censorship in our country but is far less vocal about China’s approach to its citizens and their freedoms? 

ISAACSON: I think it’s partly business related. He’s got a big factory there. He sells there. And he told Bari Weiss, who was publicizing what was called the Twitter files, and he says, ‘yeah, I’ve got business interests there.’ So I report that. 

HOOVER: So he’s not a human rights advocate writ large, is, like, sort of the, the most generous conclusion I can draw from that. 

ISAACSON: Yeah. I don’t think that he is a human rights advocate writ large. 

HOOVER: Yeah. I mean, the Chinese government that he’s working with is promulgating what we call a genocide. So there aren’t two sides of that. 

ISAACSON: Yeah. And I mean, and our government has mixed relationships with China, and so do most businesses. 

CONSPIRACY THEORIES

HOOVER: Yeah. But he hasn’t thought deeply about it, is what it seems to me is the case. You describe how Musk is somebody who continually and increasingly gets drawn into, quote, the rabbit holes of conspiracy theories. In recent months Musk has claimed that Jewish billionaire George Soros hates humanity; he’s promoted conspiracy theories that blame the cardiac arrest suffered by LeBron James’ son on COVID 19 vaccines. How is it that the world’s richest man and a figure who is on the leading edge of renewable energy and of artificial intelligence and of space exploration, so often appears susceptible to the most outlandish conspiracy theories?

ISAACSON: Well, he would argue – I wouldn’t, but he would – that it was Twitter and the US government that said you shouldn’t question lockdowns, that’s it’s a conspiracy theory that it doesn’t work, or that it’s a conspiracy to say mask mandates are a bad idea, or to suppress the Barrington Declaration, or to say it might have been a lab leak from China. For him, it was, hey, we’ve suppressed free speech and maybe tamped down some things that we should have discussed–

HOOVER: So it’s a contrarian nature.

ISAACSON: He’s a contrarian. I’m not trying to apologize– I mean look–

HOOVER: So you think the flirtation with conspiracy theories actually comes from the same place that his contrarian questioning of authority comes from? 

ISAACSON: Yeah. I think that it’s the extreme version of being a contrarian, of resisting authority, of saying they’re telling us this, but we should question it. And that leads him to some feelings about everything from COVID lockdowns to mask mandates to lab leaks, and then sometimes even further, to things that I would never go near, but he likes having these all sides turmoil. 

HOOVER: You also write about his– you chronicle his political evolution from somebody who supported Obama to somebody who now is questioning mask mandates, questioning lockdowns, is very in line with sort of a right wing, libertarian, sort of red-pill Silicon Valley crowd. He urged– 

ISAACSON: I think that’s a good description, which is not– People say has become more conservative. He’s become part of that sort of populist, maybe libertarian, somewhat right-wing  questioning-authority type. 

HOOVER: He encouraged all his followers in 2022 to vote for Republicans. Do you think there’s a chance that in 2024, in a Biden-Trump matchup, he would actually support Trump? 

ISAACSON: I don’t think he likes Trump at all. He calls him a con man, reminds him of his father. I think that he feels pretty strongly that we should move to a new generation in both parties. 

HOOVER: You write about Musk’s conviction that the fate of civilization rests on his shoulders. He tells his employees at Tesla that if Tesla fails, the climate is doomed. If SpaceX fails, humanity will never become multi-planetary. But you also say many of Musk’s most laughable assertions also contain a kernel of truth. When you look back, when we look back, or when humanity looks back in a hundred years at Musk’s legacy, do you think history will prove his sense of self importance right? 

ISAACSON: Well, I think it’s an epic sense of self-importance, obviously inflated at times, but he does it almost half jokingly. But when history looks back, it will look at Ford and GM giving up on electric vehicles 15, 20 years ago, crushing the Chevy Volt and deciding not to do it. It will look at NASA giving up on going to the moon, not being able to send astronauts into space. So if you say which individual has done more to move us into the era of electric vehicles with solar roofs and battery packs, or move us into the era of space travel, he probably ranks, probably number one in terms of individuals having those impacts on history. 

HOOVER: Walter Isaacson, thank you for joining me. 

ISAACSON: Thank you, Margaret.