Walter Isaacson on the volatile Elon Musk September 10, 2023 Biographer Walter Isaacson, who shadowed Elon Musk for two years, describes the volatility, the childhood scars and the « demon mode » that he says drive both Musk's breakthroughs and his blow-ups.
Biographer Walter Isaacson, who shadowed Elon Musk for two years, describes the volatility, the childhood scars and the « demon mode » that he says drive both Musk's breakthroughs and his blow-ups.
Transcript CBS anchor
To some, he's a visionary. To others, he's a petulant and sometimes petty billionaire. Whatever your opinion of Elon Musk, chances are you have one. And as our David Pogue reports, a new biography is sure to inflame passions for and against.
You may love Elon Musk, or you may despise him. Let's start with the richest and stupidest
CBS anchor
man in the world, Elon Musk.
But you have to admit, he's interesting.
I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?
You just have to say, I want to talk to you about Elon Musk. And boom. People love talking.
Walter Isaacson has written biographies of Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs. And this coming week, our sister company, Simon and Schuster, will publish his biography of Elon Musk. What kind of access did you get to write the book?
I said, I want to be by your side for two or three years. I want to be in every meeting. And he said, fine.
There's no single Elon Musk. He has many personalities.
Yeah, exactly. Almost multiple personalities. And you can watch him go from being very giddy and funny to being deeply in engineering mode. And then suddenly the dark cloud happened. It's almost like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Isaacson writes that Musk's volatility stems from a brutal childhood in South Africa with his abusive father, Errol.
Everything's related to the traumas and the drives of childhood. It made him adventurous. It made him so that he felt more comfortable with drama.
I did not have a sort of happy childhood, to be frank. It was quite, quite rough.
But it has left deep scars on him. The way his father treated him when he was bullied on the schoolyard, when his face was pounded into the concrete steps and his father took the side of the person who beat him up instead of Elon. Earl must said, I raised him to be tough. So Errol Musk doesn't make a whole lot of apologies.
By age 31, Musk had founded and sold two software companies, making him a multimillionaire. One of them was PayPal. With that money, he founded SpaceX. So we are here at the SpaceX Rocket Factory. How would you say this differs from what we would see at Boeing?
Everybody here is willing to take risks and they know how to move fast. When Musk and I would walk along this corridor and he would see People being a bit lethargic or not enough people. He'd say, where's everybody get this moving. This needs to be done by tonight. That would never happen in Boeing.
He feels there's an urgency for humans to become multi planetary, to get to Mars. And he feels there could be a cross crisis on Earth, something could happen, and we need to be a multi planetary species.
If you're the employee, your blood's gotta run cold when he comes by your station.
You know, there are people who really try to avoid eye contact because he can be brutal. He can get really mad, he can unload on people.
I'm actually making history tonight as the first person with Asperger's to host snl, or at least the first to admit it.
Musk is open about his Asperger's syndrome, but he believes that expressing empathy with his employees will only slow things down.
He'd say to me, yeah, I don't have as much empathy. I'm not like you. I don't want the person in front of me just to love me. I gotta get this mission done.
Tesla engineer
Sometimes it's not easy. You have to put some personal things aside. But ultimately the reward's worth it.
If anyone's learned how to get along with Musk, it's Tesla's design chief, Franz von Holzhausen. He's been at Tesla for 15 years, shaping every Tesla model, including the radically designed stainless steel cybertruck.
Tesla engineer
It's something where we can put the frame on the outside of the vehicle too. It really conveys toughness. It's bulletproof.
Let's say I'm Elon and I'm saying we have to do it this way, and you, based on your entire career and wisdom, disagree.
Tesla engineer
There's moments where you agree to disagree, but ultimately it's Elon's company. He's the Boss.
These days, SpaceX and Tesla aren't Musk's only projects. There's his brain implant company, a tunneling operation, Tesla's solar roof division, and a new artificial intelligence company. Tesla is also developing a humanoid robot designed to do our dirty work for us. And then there's Starlink, a constellation of 5,000 satellites that can bring an Internet signal to the entire planet, including remote regions and disaster areas. Last year, Musk shipped thousands of Starlink terminals to help the Ukrainian military at no charge. But when he believed that Ukraine was going on the offensive, attacking Russian ships in Crimea last September, Isaacson says that Musk shut off their service there.
Musk felt that would lead to World War three. And so, on his own, he decommissioned Starlink along the Crimean coast.
In fact, as Isaacson has now acknowledged, that's not quite what happened. Starlink wasn't running in that region in the first place. But when Ukraine asked Starlink for service there, Musk did decline to activate it. So how does Elon feel about having this much global power?
You know, he says to me, how am I in the middle of this? But frankly, he loves it. He loves drama, he loves being the epic hero. I think it is a little bit dangerous because he loves it too much.
But when it comes to controversy, it would be hard to top Musk's purchase of Twitter last year for $44 billion. He immediately fired over 80% of the employees, reinstated Donald Trump's account, and loosened the rules against hate speech and misinformation.
It won't be perfect, but I think we wanted to really have, like said, the perception and reality that speech is as free as reasonably possible.
In July, he changed Twitter's name to X.
He loves the letter X. It's mysterious to him. There's SpaceX. There was X.com, his first payments company, that becomes PayPal, which is. His son has a name that looks like a druid auto generated password, but they call him X. I mean, it's
just X, the letter X and then the ae is like pronounced ash.
Musk has had 11 children with three women. Isaacson's book reveals that Musk's ex girlfriend, musician Claire Boucher, whose stage name is Grimes, had a new baby boy last year. His full name is Techno Mechanicus Musk. Of course, Musk has never been a typical CEO.
I mean, it's legal, right? Totally legal. Okay.
He's smoked marijuana on camera, he's challenged Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match. And he's frequently in trouble with the government whose regulations he despises generally.
You know, government should, I think, just try to get out of the way and, and not impede progress.
If you ask him what the biggest problem facing America these days is, that we're too risk averse. We have too many referees and not enough doers. And that's why we don't build high speed trains or rockets that can get to orbit.
Already. The US government hires SpaceX to carry our astronauts into orbit, contracts with Starlink to connect our military, and plans to pay Tesla to to open its network of electric car charging stations to all drivers. But in a recent New Yorker article, journalist Ronan Farrow writes that the US Is becoming dependent on Musk, even as he's becoming more erratic. Elon Musk has behaved erratically at times, talking about his loneliness, his sadness, the fact that there have been questions about his psychopharmacology and public reports about the Tesla board being concerned about his Ambien use. Ketamine use. The Ketamine use. But whatever his eccentricities, Elon Musk really has changed the world. Tesla's success triggered a global shift to electric cars.
And SpaceX has now conducted 261 successful launches in a row for a fraction of the traditional cost to taxpayers. In large part, that's because the company figured out how to land its boosters after each launch and reuse them. Do you admire him?
A biographer has to show the light and the dark strands, and you've got to be critical of the dark strands. You've got to be admiring of the light strands. But then the toughest thing is to show how they intertwine.
And how about his legacy? Do you think we'll be talking about Elon Musk 100 years after he's gone?
He brought us into the era of electric vehicles. When GM and Ford had given up, he said, yes, we can shoot astronauts into orbit when NASA had decommissioned the space shuttle. So 100 years from now, we'll still be baffled in some ways about how dark he could be, but we'll say, yeah, yeah, he put his finger on the surface of history and the ripples came out.