You might not know it from his recent comments, but there was a time in the late-1990s when Elon Musk was a fan of Bill Gates and Microsoft.
During his tenure at PayPal, Musk once challenged its then-chief technology officer, Max Levchin, to a literal arm-wrestling match in a bid to get the company’s engineers to adopt Windows NT over Unix.
Musk prevailed in the contest, and ultimately won the operating system argument, as well, recounts Walter Isaacson in his new biography of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO and X (Twitter) owner. But the anecdote raises a larger question.
“Levchin had trouble knowing what to make of Musk. Was his arm-wrestling gambit serious?” Isaacson writes. “Were his bouts of maniacal intensity punctuated by goofball humor and game-playing calculated or crazed?”
That’s the fundamental question at the heart of the book, and of Musk’s career and life. It’s a key question for many of us, given Musk’s role as one of the most influential people in the world, and it’s our first topic on this special episode of the GeekWire Podcast, with Isaacson as our guest.
Among other subjects, Isaacson discusses Musk’s role in some of the world’s most vital infrastructure, including SpaceX’s Starlink satellites (yes, we talk about his Ukraine-Crimea correction); compares Musk’s approach to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos; addresses Musk’s outlook for artificial intelligence and space travel; and outlines the key issues that could determine Musk’s legacy.
Listen above, or subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. Continue reading for an edited transcript.
Calculated or crazed?
Todd Bishop: Early in your book about Elon Musk, you paraphrase the technology executive Max Levchin, asking what seems to be the defining question of Elon Musk’s career and life, “Were his bouts of maniacal intensity, punctuated by goofball humor and game playing, calculated or crazed?” What can you say to that after spending two years with Elon Musk, and writing more than 600 pages about him?
Walter Isaacson: I think the answer is that he’s actually crazed. He’s one of the crazy ones, as Steve Jobs would say. Crazy enough to think he can change the world.
He’s got so many personalities, too. He can switch from being a goofball, sophomore humor laughing at fart jokes, and then go dark, and just be pretty maniacal. And I don’t think it’s calculated. In fact, at times I don’t think he can help himself.
His father, Errol, said that about himself, about Errol. Which is, “At times I’d just go dark.” And you cannot help yourself from going into one of these moods, like Jekyll and Hyde. So Elon Musk is calculated about a lot of things, but not about his mood swings.
Structuring the book
TB: One of the things that struck me was the way that you structured this book. It was actually very easy for me to follow as a reader, both in the printed book and in the audio book. Because the chapters are segmented as mini-stories with very straightforward chapter titles that give you a sense for exactly what’s happening. “Starlink, 2015 to 2018,” just as one example. Talk me through the way that you structured this book. Was it a function of the fact that there was so much going on in his life?
Isaacson: Absolutely. It’s such a chaotic, crazed life. He’s juggling six, seven balls at all one time, not to mention 10 children or something at all one time. And so I wanted to keep it chronological. All my books are that way.
From the very beginning, it’s you start, and you watch somebody grow, you watch somebody change. But if you’re doing a chronology with Elon Musk, you have to jump around. Because one day he’ll be dealing with Starship, the next day he’ll be trying to make sure video can upload on Twitter, or ripping out the servers on Twitter.
And I wanted to keep it in a way that you felt it was driven by narrative stories. I’m not trying to preach at you, I’m going to let each reader understand Musk and try to know what to make of Musk. But I do it through, I hope, bite-sized stories. Somebody said it was like a 600-page book for the TikTok generation.
TB: It does strike me that in some ways, it does match the way that we consume content these days.
Isaacson: And the way Elon leads his life, let’s say.
TB: What does it say about the future of society that we are living and consuming in these bite-sized chunks? I mean, you’ve been able to write biographies of some of the deepest thinkers in history. How do you feel about all this?
Isaacson: Well, it’s why I tried to do something that’s a bit unusual, which is a 600-page book. Which means we go real deep. We go real deep into the algorithm for how to make a factory floor work well, or how to make the Raptor engine under Starship work. But I do it in a way that it’s digestible, and it’s fast-paced.
So I’m trying to square two things, the notion of doing a serious, deep book about all the both engineering, and psychological, and personal and business things of Elon Musk, but also making it so that it, I hope, moves along real briskly.
Starlink and Elon Musk’s power
TB: One of the key topics for us here at GeekWire in your book is Starlink. This is the SpaceX subsidiary venture that operates a vast satellite, low earth orbit network of satellites for internet connectivity. One of the reasons it’s an important topic for us is because they are developed here in the Seattle area, where we are. It raises the issue of Elon Musk’s control of things far beyond his own ventures, throughout this book. Ukraine is a great example. How should people feel about this crazed person controlling so much vital infrastructure, from Twitter to Starlink and beyond?
Isaacson: It’s a really good question, and there are multiple layers of it that I deal with in the book. First of all, it’s like why does he have so much power? Should he have so much power? He’s able in the book to determine where you’re going to geofence Starlink, so it’s not available within a hundred kilometers of the Crimean coast.
Or even as you see the text messages in the book with the Ukrainian minister, he’s doing it in the Donbas region of Ukraine on the fly. And even he says to me, “How did I get in this war? I made this so we could watch Netflix and chill. And play video games. And now I’m in the middle of a war.”
So I think even he realizes that maybe he’s got a lot of power. And eventually he talks to Jake Sullivan, our national security advisor, and Mark Millie of the joint chiefs of staff, and they figure out a way to transfer control over some of the Starlink satellites and services to the US military, so Musk isn’t on the fly deciding where in the Donbas is it going to be considered offensive or defensive, and where to geofence it.
But there’s a larger question, which is how come when Russia invaded Ukraine … ViaSat got totally hacked. It doesn’t work. So does every other communication sound. There is no communication satellite working except for Starlink by Elon Musk. And why is it that our government hasn’t been able to do it? You live in Seattle, you’re watching Starlink being done there, but why hasn’t Boeing been able to lift satellites into either high earth or low earth orbit the way that Musk has?
Once again in Seattle you have Amazon and Kuiper, but they’re not launching satellites. So there’s some theme in the book, which is not only does he create products like this, but he learns to manufacture them. Or he manufactures them at scale. He’s made close to 5,000 of these Starlink satellites.
And so the one reason he has a lot of control in this world is, he’s the only entity who can get American astronauts up to the space station from the US. And the only one who can shoot off a rocket, put satellites in orbit, and then have the booster land upright and be reused. No other country has done that.
And I’m not trying to hype him, I’m just trying to say that a lot of the things he’s done has worked. And why is it that NASA, and why some of our big corporations, why are they so sclerotic? Maybe so risk-averse that they haven’t been able to replicate some of these things?
TB: To your point, Amazon has Project Kuiper. This is a competing satellite venture, but they have not yet put satellites into orbit. Bill Gates in the book tells you, makes a very accurate reference to the Teledesic company that he backed. And of course, part of the issue there was the technology wasn’t quite yet ready, but certainly Jeff Bezos and Amazon have the wherewithal to do this, and they have not yet. It seems that this maniacal, all-over-the-place approach is working. It’s getting results in many ways. What is it about his personality that actually produces these results?
“Now we have more regulators than risk-takers … more referees than doers, and that’s maybe why we haven’t gotten back to the Moon.”
Walter Isaacson
Isaacson: Well, he’s driven almost in a maniacal way. I remember walking once in Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas where the Starship launch pad is, and it was a Friday night at 10:00 PM and there are only a couple people working on the pad because there’s no launches scheduled, and he goes ballistic. He says, “Why aren’t there more people working?” I’m thinking to myself, “It’s 10:00 PM on a Friday night and you don’t have any lunches scheduled.” But he orders up a surge and he just reams out Andy Krebs, who was in charge of the launch pad site, and he said, “I want a hundred, maybe 200 people here by tomorrow or the next day, and in one week I want to take Starship and stack it.” No particular reason, except he felt that there needed to be a fierce sense of urgency. That was a year ago. I mean a year before Starship is even going to launch, but that maniacal fierce urgency is what gets things done.
And I went back to Andy Krebs like, “Whoa, why did he do that?” Andy said, “And some people just quit when these things happen.” A lot of people are gone from base that I remember from two years ago, but a lot of people stay because they buy into the mission. There’s a lot of reasons why he gets things done.
I have in the book something called the Algorithm, which you may have read, in which it’s a five-step process that begins with question every requirement. And everybody else whether they’re bureaucrats or referees or regulators are saying, “No, no, we actually can’t do that. It’s against this regulation. It’s against this rule.”
He breaks rules, and sometimes it means there’s flaming debris left in his wake, or he is in trouble. But we’ve always been a nation of risk-takers, and that’s why we got to the moon 50 years ago. Now we have more regulators than risk-takers. We have more referees than doers, and that’s maybe why we haven’t gotten back to the Moon.
Starlink and Crimea
TB: Your book has been in the news a lot over the past week as excerpts have come out. One of the excerpts that came out was about the attempted Ukrainian attack on Russia in Crimea, and there was a correction that came out on that. Having read that section of the book and then watched the coverage of the correction that was made, it strikes me that perhaps the larger message is getting lost.
Isaacson: Yeah, the larger message is that he said to me, “I’m not going to allow Starlink to be used.” And I made a mistake in thinking he turned it off that night. Later he said, “No, no, no. It had already been so that it wasn’t turned on, but I made the decision that night to reaffirmed that policy, not to turn it on.” And so the larger question is, should he be making those decisions and why is he the one in the position to do so? I was very upfront as soon as I realized, because he had told me that night, he said, “I’m not allowing it to be used.” I made an interpretation, which was that he had shut it off that night, and then he told me, “Oh, no, no, no. It was already shut off, but they were begging me to turn it on, and I said, “Got it.” Made a correction.
TB: The bigger message is he does not want Starlink or his assets, or his donations, from SpaceX to be used [for offensive miltary purposes]. It was intended for the defense of Ukraine, and that to me is part of the answer to whether people should be OK with this maniacal person having so much control. I think a lot of the concern out there is that perhaps he doesn’t have any real values underneath all of this, and this, to me, is an example of the fact that yes, he does have values under that. Am I interpreting that correctly?
Isaacson: Well, he certainly felt it should not be used for offensive purposes, that it was there to be used to help defend Ukraine. He also believed that World War III could start. He’s very apocalyptic, as you know. … So he thought it could lead to a nuclear war. I think maybe that was too apocalyptic and overstating it, but that was what motivated him. It’s a little bit more complex though than he thinks. I mean, because he says, “Okay, I don’t want it to be used for offensive purposes only defensive.” Well, the Ukrainians, as you can see from the encrypted text messages that are printed in the book, they consider Crimea to be part of their territory.
And likewise on the Donbas, you have Vice Minister Fedorov saying to him, “You’ve geofenced off this village. This is my home village. This is where my relatives live. This is not an offensive move for us to take it. This is our territory.” So in some ways, he is driven by both apocalyptic senses of preventing world war and by saying it should only be used for defense, not offense, which he had put in the terms of conditions. But I think it gets more complicated than that, which is why I’m glad he turned control over a lot of it, at least a certain set of the Starlink satellites, to the US military that can now make those decisions.
Parallels to Gates and Jobs
TB: I want to talk a little bit about Bill Gates for a moment here. This was, I think, the laugh out loud line of the book for anyone who has ever worked with Bill Gates at Microsoft, that was Bill Gates’ statement to you. He said of Elon Musk, “Once he’d heard, I’d shorted the stock,” referring to Tesla stock, which is an anecdote you tell in the book, “he was super mean to me, but he’s super mean to so many people, so you can’t take it too personally.” I cannot tell you how many thousands of people have said that about Bill Gates himself over the years. I don’t know whether Bill Gates has gotten older and more evolved or whether Elon Musk is just a new brand of asshole. But I read that quote and I just laughed out loud.
Isaacson: Well, I want the GeekWire listeners and yourself to think about, okay, to what extent are these people, Bill Gates, your friend Jeff Bezos, Musk, they can be rough on people and you’ve got to not take it personally and maybe sometimes, whether it’s Gates in the early Microsoft days, or Musk, they have a vision of humanity, but they’re not exactly humane to the people sitting around them, but they feel it’s part of their sense of mission.
They’ve got to ride things hard. Do you have to be that way? I don’t really justify people being too rough on other people, but I do want people to read the book and say, “Is this part of the whole cloth of the person?” And maybe you can be upset and think bad of him because he’s such a jerk to people, but you also understand that it’s part and parcel of what makes him drive people.
TB: I remember talking to people when Bill Gates retired from Microsoft, and part of the thesis there was that the “Fear of Bill” would put people on a whole other level. If you were going to go into a review with Bill Gates, you prepared. You had to be on your game, and part of it was fear, simple fear. Is that the way things operate with the people around Elon Musk, as well?
Isaacson: You walk the assembly lines with Musk, and there are some people who are very eager to engage with them to say, “Here’s how we’re going to make this better.” And there are a lot of people averting their eyes, trying to get into the shadows, trying not to be in the line of fire, and if there’s a weakness, I mean, there are many weaknesses to Musk, or many criticisms I would have. One of them is he doesn’t get negative feedback well enough. He doesn’t encourage it. He sometimes bites people’s head off when they say no or disagree.
And people around him who are really smart, Mark Juncosa knows how to give him bad news. Gwynne Shotwell knows how to deal with something where he is going to have to get more facts to be turned around. At Tesla, obviously you have Franz von Holzhausen, Lars Moravy, Drew Baglino. They know how to deal with him, but a lot of people don’t know how to deal with him.
TB: Another parallel that struck me to one of your best known biographies, of Steve Jobs, was the way that Musk understands design and engineering and the way they work together. Tell us about that.
Isaacson: Musk cares not only about the design of a product, and not only about the engineering of the product, but the manufacturing of the product. So, he makes his design engineers, like himself, have their desks next to the assembly line, whether it’s the assembly line at Hawthorne for SpaceX or the one in Fremont or Austin for Tesla, and that’s why he doesn’t like offshoring the manufacturing.
We lost that ability in this country to manufacture things for ourselves for a while, Musk has turned that around a bit because he wants the instant feedback that his designers will get when something holds up an assembly line, because they’ve made it too complex, the design.
And to me, that’s one of the little secrets of his success, even now, as he’s building the $25,000 next-generation vehicle. He was going to do it in a factory and will do it in a factory in Mexico, but he said to me, “I’ve changed a bit. We’re going to do the first assembly line in Austin, because I can’t get all of my designers and all of my engineers to move down to Mexico and sit by the assembly line, so we want to design the assembly line while we’re designing the product, and we’re going to do it in Austin.”
TB: When you look at that and you think about all these folks that you’ve written biographies about, where does Elon Musk fit in the pantheon of Walter Isaacson personalities that you’ve studied over the years? Is he closer to one than the other?
Isaacson: Well, he’s certainly a disruptor, and that’s what I tend to write about. People say, “You write about smart people.” I say, “No, no, smart people are a dime a dozen. They often don’t amount to much.” What matters is somebody who, like Steve Jobs says, thinks different. And that means thinking out of the box, disrupting, questioning every rule and regulation, shooting off a rocket when you’re not sure if it’s going to work, and seeing where the debris lands and figuring it out.
So, in the long run, you’ll see, in my mind, at least three or four or five people in this day and generation who, 50 years from now, will be remembered for changing things. Steve Jobs will be remembered for bringing us into the era of friendly, personal computers and then putting it in our pocket and giving us smartphones and an app economy. Changes the world, changes the world of music even.
Jennifer Doudna, one of the great people I wrote about in my last book, “The Code Breaker,” she brings us into the era of life sciences engineering by helping to invent the tool called CRISPR that allows us to edit our DNA. 50 years from now, we’re still going to be reeling from the ramifications of that.
Elon Musk has brought us into the era of electric vehicles, solar roofs, space travel and adventures and exploration again, and also dealing with AI, so I think they will be remembered along with some other people. Bill Gates bringing us into the era of software being king and personal computers, and of course, Jeff Bezos is somebody who, when I was at Time magazine, we made him person of the year in 1999, and everybody said we were crazy. It was ridiculous, the internet bubble was bursting, he was going to be forgotten in a year. And I said, “Nope, just like Sears and Roebuck, they’re going to be remembered a century from now because he’s changing the way we live.”
TB: You wrote what amounted to a mini biography of Bezos in the introduction to a book of Bezos’s memos, effectively. Have you thought about expanding that into your next book or one of your future books?
Isaacson: Well, he’s a great topic, so is Bill Gates. They’re both great topics and there are topics like artificial intelligence that are interesting now. I must say, and my wife has made me promise to keep it this way, I should take a breath, we should take a vacation. I don’t need to launch onto another book.
And I will say that sometimes when I’ve dealt with a very tumultuous character, after Henry Kissinger, I said, “All right, I’m going to do somebody who’s been dead for 200 years,” and did Ben Franklin. After Steve Jobs, I said, “I’m going to do somebody who’s been dead 500 years after him,” and I did Leonardo da Vinci. At the moment my head space is I should go back into the wayback machine, but we’ll see.
Elon Musk’s concerns about AI
TB: You mentioned AI, and I do want to touch on that before we close here. The thread from Larry Page to Elon Musk, to OpenAI, to Sam Altman, to Microsoft that is woven throughout your book and throughout the story of what’s happening right now with ChatGPT and the commercialization of this technology is just extraordinary. Larry Page inadvertently kind of caused all this, if you go back and read what you wrote.
Isaacson: Elon Musk is the richest couch-surfer I’ve ever met, meaning, he doesn’t like to stay in hotels when he doesn’t have to. He doesn’t have a whole bunch of homes, so he used to stay at Larry Page’s house. They were really, really tight.
And then Musk met Demis Hassabis who you know ran DeepMind. And Musk gets worried because Demis frightens him and says, “This could be danger to humanity if it gets unleashed in the wrong way.” So, Musk invests a little bit in DeepMind, gets very serious about it, and then one night, hears that Google, Larry Page, is about to try to buy DeepMind.
There’s a scene in the book in which Musk and somebody else go upstairs from some party and get into a closet where they can have some quiet and try to convince Demis not to sell DeepMind to Google. And it becomes such a problem that I don’t think Larry Page and Elon Musk speak to each other anymore.
And so then, when that happens and DeepMind gets sold to Google, Elon starts working with Sam Altman and says, “Let’s do OpenAI, let’s have a competitor.” Well, you can read in the book the ups and downs about that one, but eventually Musk decide he’s got to do it on his own at Tesla, breaks with Sam Altman, and then he calls me just a few months ago, just as I’m finishing touches on the book and said, “You got another chapter, here it is. You got to come to Austin.” I said, “What’s that?”
And I sat in the backyard with Shivon Zilis, one of his friends, who’s a mother of a couple of his children, and he said, “AI, I’m going to have to start an AI company because I’m worried about it, I’m worried about what Google and Microsoft are going to do.” And he went through it, you can read it in the book, the blueprint he has for dealing with both AI in terms of generative large language models, but also AI in terms of real world AI, artificial general intelligence of Optimus, a robot who will be able to process video data and walk across a factory floor, or FSD 12, which is the full self-driving machine learning system he now has that learns to drive by watching how other humans have done so, so that’s the next chapter.
TB: One of the main reasons that he decided to do this was his disillusionment with OpenAI and Sam Altman’s decision to create a commercial arm and to partner with Microsoft and it’s just striking how this chain of events has led to where he is today. One of the things you point out is that while Google and Microsoft certainly have vast troves of data from their search engines, Elon Musk is no slouch in this regard when you look at all the data that he has from Twitter, or X, as it’s now known, in addition to Tesla and the self-driving cars.
Isaacson: Eight million frames of video from Tesla cars in a week. Twitter, the hive mind of humanity, X, all that, every tweet, every day. I asked him when we were talking about X.AI, his artificial intelligence company, did he buy Twitter with that in mind, knowing that he was going to get this enormous data feed, because right after he bought Twitter and took it over, I was there sitting in the conference room when he’s cutting off the API, cutting off access to the feed because he’s worrying it’s being scraped up by Microsoft and Google in order to train their data, and so, it was a bit of a controversy as he’s sort of blocking that. Well, he did it because he thought it was valuable data for AI training. I said, “Did you think of that when you first made an offer for Twitter?” He said, “No.” Here in Louisiana where I’m from, we call it lagniappe, which means something extra gets thrown in that you weren’t really expecting. But soon as he bought Twitter, he realized, man, that’s a bit of lagniappe.
Elon Musk and his legacy
TB: Walter, where are you after all of this? Clearly this is a fascinating character, an extraordinary person who you’ve just written a biography about. What are your key takeaways and what did you learn along the way about Elon Musk?
Isaacson: Well, I had to deal with multiple Elon Musks. There’s not one Elon Musk. … I hate it when people say, “Did you like him?” Well first of all that’s an anodyne type of adjective for Elon Musk. Secondly, there are multiple times in multiple personalities, and you just have to say, “Boy, I love being around him at this point, but boy, it was pretty scary at this point.” What I learned is how the demons that were instilled in him in childhood, dark demons dancing in his head, some of them he’s been able to channel into drives. Drives that drive people crazy, but drive them to do things they didn’t think they could do.
And some of them are still dark demons, and they cause him to do things that are cruel and unkind to other people or to tweet things that just harmful. And I want to be able to say, “Here are the dark threads, and boy, we don’t like them and we should get rid of them, and here’s the amazing channeling of the drive that does good things.” But in the end, I learned that those were pretty interwoven, and I kind of end the book the way Shakespeare ends Measure to Measure, which is, even the best are molded out of faults. And he is indeed molded out of faults.
TB: Is the determination of his story ultimately going to be whether or not he and or SpaceX make it to Mars?
Isaacson: I think there’ll be three or four things that’ll determine his legacy. One is he already has brought us into the era of electric vehicles when Ford and GM and so many others were crushing the Chevy Bolts or whatever. Secondly, he’s brought us into the era of reusable rockets, so we can send up thousands of satellites, recreate the internet in low earth orbit, and once again, after 10, 12 years, get US astronauts from Cape Canaveral into orbit.
“… a talent for turning the impossible into the merely much later than he thought it would be.”
Walter Isaacson
So those are legacies that have happened already. I think the three big ones, maybe four, that could happen is, as you say, getting Starship not only launched into space, but eventually on a mission that takes at least cargo and perhaps humans to Mars. He thinks it’ll be in 10 years. I suspect much longer than that. Elon Musk has a talent for turning the impossible into the merely much later than he thought it would be.
I also think that if he cracks the code on autopilot, on full self-driving, autonomous driving, not just the way Waymo is doing it with maps and circumscribed into certain areas, but to say, “I can learn from humans how to drive and drive anywhere on the planet better than any human.” That’s transformative. That’ll happen, if it does 5, 6, 7, 8 years. He always says it’s a year or two, but triple that and maybe you’ve got it. That means it doesn’t just change how we drive, it even changes the notion of car ownership. You won’t really have to own a car. You just summon the car when you need it, it appears right away, it takes you where you want to go, you get out, and it goes and picks up somebody else.
I think doing that and conquering real world AI so that you have Optimus the robot, which can also autonomously navigate the real world, that could change the nature of work in ways we haven’t yet fathomed. We always think technology is going to put people out of work, cut the number of jobs. It never really is the case. Self-service elevators or ATM machines may have disrupted things, but it hasn’t reduced the total amount of employment. Autonomous robots could be a game changer, and we’re going to have to learn how to deal with that if it happens five to 10 years from now.
“Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson, published by Simon & Schuster, is available wherever books are sold.
Podcast audio edited and produced by Curt Milton.
