On with Kara Swisher - Walter Isaacson Is Writing the Book (Literally) on Elon Musk

Episode Date: March 13, 2023

Does Kara ever get sick of talking about Elon Musk? That’s a question Nayeema asks today, and they both agree: as exhausting as he can be, Elon is a defining force in business, media and innovation. So today we turn to the titan’s biographer: Walter Isaacson. He’s written the book on everyone from Leonardo da Vinci to Steve Jobs, and is now deep in the Elon Files.  Taped in front of a live audience at the New Orleans Book Festival, Kara and Isaacson discuss whether Elon is driven primarily by narcissism or mission (aka the “prick to productivity ratio”), how Elon does and doesn’t compare to Steve Jobs, and how Isaacson approaches his job as a biographer of some of the world's biggest personalities, both alive and dead. Questions? Comments? Email us at [e-mail] or find us on Twitter @karaswisher and @nayeema. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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set, grow. Go to ConstantContact.ca and start your free trial today. Go to ConstantContact.ca for your free trial. ConstantContact.ca Hi, everyone from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is the future mayor of Snailbrook, Texas. Yes, I'll be evicting Elon from his own little company town when I take power. Just kidding. That would be impossible. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. And I'm Naima Raza. We have to work on your evil laughter. I'm not very evil. You want to be like the guy in Inspector Gadget with

the cat. There you go. Don't you want to live in Elon's company town? I heard that the tax rate is glorious. He's like building his own version of Disneyland, but 100% less fun. Yeah, you called it Pottersville, like the film. I did. I did. Yeah. I spent some time filming in Bastrop, and it's a beautiful place with wonderful people, and I'm very sorry. I did an animal rescue series there. Wonderful people saving animals. Some of them are a little concerned, but you know, whatever. Elon's arrived to save people from taxes and rent. I like economic developments, and Texas is a fine place for him to go to. It's fine. Anyway, I wish we could get away from the topic, but our guest today is Walter Isaacson. The biographer has written the book on everyone from Leonardo da Vinci to Steve Jobs, and is now writing one on Elon Musk. Yeah. You're about to

jump on a flight to New Orleans to the book festival to interview him there. And you last saw him at the Waverly Inn, right? Donald Trump's least favorite restaurant in New York. Oh, yeah. We had dinner when he was sort of in the early stages of writing his book on Elon Musk. What did you learn? Nothing I can say on the record. What did you not learn in that conversation that you want to learn from this one? You know, I think Elon's a very heady person, and I think he was in the heady version of that at that moment. That Walter was in the heady version of that. Yeah, because it's exciting. I mean, he did the Steve Jobs book, and he either does very dead people like Ben Franklin. Very dead people. Or he does current

people like he did Jennifer Doudna. And then he did one on innovators, which was women innovators, which I thought was quite a good book. And then he did one on innovators, which was women innovators, which I thought was quite a good book. And then he did Steve. And so, you know, you could argue that Elon is the Steve Jobs of this day. I would not do that. In fact, I just said that to someone who's no Steve Jobs. But he certainly, in terms of the cars and the rockets, is really inspirational. Yes. When you say he was in the heady part, you mean the heady part, he was accumulating research, not writing? Or you mean he was in Elon's? No, I don't think he's an athrall.

He's a reporter. Yeah. No, I think, you know, it's just it's very exciting to travel around with someone like this who's a constant tsunami of activity and chaos. He's a chaos monkey. And so, you know, when you have full access like that and the person's confiding in you and, you know, when you do books like this, you do form relationships with the people you're writing because you spend so much time with them. But it has its pluses and minuses. For people who don't know, Kara is working on her long awaited memoir. I'm not talking to anybody. You already know, you got the text and the receipts. But did you ever think about doing

a biography on someone like Elon? No, I don't. You've done company, you did AOL. I did AOL. And I had to spend a lot of time with those executives. And at one point, you know, they always try to, like, control you, which is really irritating, and try to get you not to write things. And it's a struggle. And at one point, I had interviewed so many people. And Steve Case was withholding for the first part of it. He was cooperative, but withholding for sure, because he was in control of the information. And then I had interviewed so many people.

He said something. I go, no, actually, this is what happened. And he goes, you don't need me anymore, do you? And I said, I never did. But no, I really don't need you now. And he's a very canny person about, and I have a lot of regard for him. But you just are captive of these people. Of course.

And you don't want to be too nice to them. But you don't want to be, you know, too nice to them. But you don't want to be unnecessarily mean. Yeah. But it's going to be hard in this case. You know, it's going to be hard if he hugs him too hard. He's going to look like a suck up. And if he's too mean, it's not fair, right? It's just how do you separate the man from his accomplishments?

Yeah. Or how do you make sense of it? I think that's the thing. We're all watching this kind of tsunami of Elon. There's probably a lot about his background, about his childhood. I'm guessing there's probably quite a bit about that. And we'll learn a lot. Yeah. I'm excited. He's a very, speaking of canny people, he's very canny. And so not everybody liked his jobs biography, including a lot of people close to jobs. But anyways, Elon is not winning any friends in this past week.

Just in recent days, in addition to announcing his potential township for Boring Company and Tesla employees, Elon got twitchy fingers on Twitter, attacking a disabled Twitter employee, Haraldur Thorlifson, before he had to walk that back. And then he also lent his 100 million plus followers to some retweets of January 6th denial. So just give us a rundown of what Elon has done this week, Kara. Well, this guy is a very well regarded entrepreneur from Iceland. I remember when they bought this company, it's a design company. He's got muscular dystrophy, by the way, my brother has muscular dystrophy. So I was particularly irritated. He essentially said he's a lazy person, how Elon said this guy is, and he had no idea what he was talking about. And this guy can't reach HR. There's no HR or PR function, whatever. So he did it over Twitter.

And so then Elon, without any information, started trashing him, saying, you don't work. And if you're so sick, how can you tweet this out? Well, my brother has muscular dystrophy. And he can type with his fingers. He's a very good Twitterer, your brother. Yeah, he is. And so he just was full of ignorance and bile and lack of information. And then he had to walk it back. A lawyer probably

called him. There's only lawyers and enablers around him now. Lawyers and enablers. Sounds like the worst party. Or enabling lawyers. I don't know. He's also the worst target you can go after. I mean, he's the nicest guy. He is. He's like Mr. World. I just watched a little video of him and he comes on and he's on the video and he says, he's in a wheelchair and he says, if you'd like to give a standing ovation, that's allowed. And then he goes on to say, my name is Harald Thorlifson. I hope I pronounced that right. And he's just such a likable guy. I mean, this guy took his Twitter payment and salary so he could pay more taxes to Iceland. Yeah, he's a very generous and charitable person. person, just the polar opposite. And one of the things

that was irritating is one, he didn't have the information. Two, when he apologized, he's like, oh, we apologize. I'm like, he apologized for legal reasons and for financial reasons. And that's not an apology. And then meanwhile, he was doing all this election and stuff, attacking the cop who died. And, you know, 10 very conservative Republicans said this was an insurrection and this guy's out on some limb, you know, that even Jenna Ellis had to come back from forcibly. So, I mean, literally 10 Republican senators said this was insane, this Tucker Carlson thing. Yeah. He's coming after everyone, employees, the media. He's an angry man. Angry man. I know this is an average

week for Elon, but does it mean that you'll go into this interview with Walter Isaacson more mad than usual? No, not at all. No, I just, I'm disappointed. I mean, I know that's what parents say when I'm not mad, I'm disappointed. That's how I feel. And it's, there's so much potential here. Someone just texted me, oh, he's mellowed. I'm like, no, he hasn't. This bad part has taken over. And there's, I'm not going to say a good part, but there's an inspirational part and an innovative part and an entrepreneurial part that I wish would come back because this guy, you know, Mr. Hyde, don't love him. Do you think that Walter has an opportunity to make a dent as someone who is so close into him? I imagine Elon will read this biography. Maybe he'll be reminded of himself.

He'll turn on Walter. He'll turn on Walter. Alec Gibney is working on this close into him. I imagine Elon will read this biography. Maybe he'll be reminded of himself. He'll turn on Walter. He'll turn on Walter. Alec Gibney is working on this documentary about him. This is a documentary filmmaker who did the Theranos docs, amongst others, including Enron and Going Clear. Elon's already said that Gibney's doc is a hit piece. He turns on everybody.

There's nobody he won't turn on. And so unless he gets some help, and I wish he would, that's, you know, though he has to insert himself into every ridiculous drama known to man. But I want to know why. And I think Gal Walter might yield that. So let's see. By the way, last question.

Do you ever get sick of talking about Elon? No, because he's a very important figure. People say that. And I'm like, no, no, no. He's involved in defense. He's involved in space, in innovation, in cars. No. He's Thomas Edison of the day.

So no. He's becoming one of those stories that no one will escape. Like, there are no, it's like, we're going to get the biography, the documentary, the feature film. There's no hiding. There's no hiding. I think that's enough of an Elon catch-up. Have a good flight.

Thank you. We'll take a quick break. And when we're back, we'll be in New Orleans with the interview. This is like teleportation. scammer. What do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter. These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale.

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I want to start first. You've written a biography of Kissinger, Ben Franklin. It's interesting, because you go from live people to dead people rather interestingly. Yeah, I figure out why. I mean, after I did Kissinger and dealing with him, I said, okay, next time I'm going to do somebody who's been dead for 200 years. Yeah, yeah. I did Ben Franklin. I do Franklin and Einstein.

And your friend Steve Jobs was... Yeah, he. I did Ben Franklin. I do Franklin and Einstein. And your friend, Steve Jobs, who was... Yeah, he wasn't my friend, but okay. Well, he said, do me next. Yes, okay. Is that how he said it? That's kind of strange. And I'm like, okay, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, you? Did he really say do me?

Yeah, yeah, well... Okay, doesn't sound like the Steve Jobs I know, but... Well, after I did him, I decided somebody had been dead 500 years, went back to Leonardo. And then, of course, he then did die. And then you did the innovators, a group of hackers, how they created the digital revolution. Leonardo da Vinci, he's definitely dead.

And then you did Jennifer Doudna and gene editing, who I've interviewed, who did CRISPR. So tell us how you happened upon doing Elon Musk's, what is it, biography? Yeah, it's a biography, and it's because he's the most interesting person around today. And I happened upon it well before he thought of buying Twitter, and I thought, okay, he's doing two of the most interesting things you could possibly do. He's bringing us into the era of sustainable energy with electric vehicles, solar, and battery storage. And he's bringing us back after for 10 years,

America has not been able to send anybody into orbit. He has been able to send humans into orbit and bringing us into a new era of space exploration. I said, well, this is the most interesting person around. So how did you approach him? What was the approach? It was kind of interesting. We have a mutual, I'll say friend, Antonio Gracius. He's on the board. He's a long-time advisor.

He was on the board a long time, and a crown fellow of the Aspen Institute. And he said, you probably ought to think about doing Elon Musk. And I said, yeah. I mean, I love space travel. I love, you know, climate and electrification. And he said, well, I'll arrange a phone conversation with you. So I was at a friend's house saying a summer weekend,

and we had this conversation. And it goes on for more than an hour. Yeah, he can talk. Yeah. No, I was the one talking. And I said, yeah, I said, you know, I'd love to, I think I'd love to do it, but you have no control. It's going to be biography.

It's going to be mine. I want you to open up, et cetera. He said, yeah, I think, I think let's, let's just do it. And I said, that sounds good. He said, well, can I tell people? I said, yeah, I think let's just do it. And I said, that sounds good. He said, well, can I tell people? I said, yeah, I guess so. So I went from our little part of the guest cottage into the main house. And the people go, oh, my God. I said, what happened? He said, we're just getting all these emails that you're doing Elon Musk. And he had put it on Twitter as he was speaking to me. And I was like, my agent is there, and, you know.

Yeah. And all these people getting emails, like, 20 minutes later. Right. That he had tweeted out, Walter Isaacson's writing this book. Yeah, he's got a little problem with impulse control. But we'll get into that in a second. I obviously know him. I've interviewed him dozens of times.

Dozens, yeah. And in public. And you have an awkward relationship with him. Today I do. Yeah. Yes. I don't appreciate someone tweeting homophobic, misogynist, and other things, racially insensitive things, continually. And ultimately, it did break down our relationship.

But I did have great admiration for the inspirational part of what he was doing. Absolutely. So you started doing that, and then you spent then you'd been spending how many hours with him? I'd travel around with him quite a bit of time in Austin. I love going to Starbase, which, as you know, is a place at the very, very southern tip of Texas, near Brownsville, but nothing else, and Boca Chica. And you stay in Airstream Trailers,

and they have the launch pad for what will be the largest movable object ever made by humans, which is Starship, which he hopes eventually will go to Mars. So I spent a lot of time down there, and some time in Fremont, California, and in... Which is where Tesla is. Yeah, Tesla is Silicon Valley.

And then down in Los Angeles, which is where both the SpaceX headquarters and the design studio is. I said, here's the way I want to do it. I don't want to just write a biography based on 10 interviews or 20 interviews. I just want to shatter you the whole time. I want to be in every meeting. I want to, you know, watch you go up and down the assembly line at Fremont or the rocket assembly line at Hawthorne, California. And he just lets me be there as a shadow. And so it's almost like Boswell got to do with Dr. Johnson. I think I've had more access than anybody we know to the most interesting person possible. I've had more access than anybody we know to the most interesting person possible have had more access than anybody's

ever had to a biography subject is that a surprise to you that he gave you such a i mean he's an enormous narcissist you understand that so i can see why he would like walter isaacson following him around i i think that's a little i mean i don't think that what drives him is narcissism. Okay, tell me. I think that this is going to sound... Actually, you'll probably get it and believe it. He is driven by a sense of mission, and there are three or four missions, some of which are just so ethereal, such as humans have to be a multi-planetary species

because consciousness will die out if we don't become multi-planetary before the window closes on this planet. I really, I mean, at first I thought this is something that people say in inspirational pep talks to their employees or in podcasts to Joe Rogan, but it's not something you... He believes that. He also believes in sustainability and that

we have to move to the era of electric vehicles. And you have to remember when he started, even 2007, 2008, GM had killed the electric car. Every other company had killed electric cars. And he said, if we don't do it, we'll never get to the era of sustainable energy. Absolutely. I think he's not driven by, what do you call it, narcissism. I don't think he's driven by money. That's true. But I do agree with you. He doesn't have much more impulse control than most people we know. Well, I want to get to that in a minute because it's moved into, curdled into cruelty, actually, in a lot of ways. And we'll get to it. I feel when you attack someone with muscular dystrophy inaccurately to your millions of followers, it's cruel. It becomes cruel, the power. But we'll get to that in a second, because I want to talk

about the actual things that are inspirational. First, Tesla, which I met him when he was at x.com, and this was a payments company. But before that, I met him when he was at X.com, and this was a payments company. But before that, I met him when he had essentially a Yellow Pages that he was running. Zip 2. Zip 2, right. He made a little bit of money from that, not a lot. And I think he was pushed out,

like a lot of these entrepreneurs. Yeah, like Steve Jobs, like a lot of people, you start a company, and then you get eased out, either by the funders, the venture capitalists who think you need adult supervision, or because he's the most intense, hardcore character there is. And so he'll stay up till 4 a.m. making everybody work and then play video games till 6 a.m. and then think people who are not still there standing with him aren't serious. Sure. He was a little calmer then, as I recall, but nonetheless, he had done these series of things. X.com was competing

with PayPal, and then he went on to start Tesla, or not to start, someone else had started Tesla. He got involved. Yeah, well, he was originally, I mean, they were all co-founders in the sense that Martin Eberhardt and Mark Toppening had the idea for the company, but no funding and hadn't really got it going. He's been the driver. There's no question. Yeah, Musk brings in the funding. They bring in two or three other people. Musk brings in J.B. Straubel, who you know. So one of the interesting things about companies is the argument over who is really the founder.

And you even have that with Paul Allen and Bill Gates. You have it with, to some extent, Wozniak. Yeah, exactly. And so in any company that's successful, people think it was their company. And they're all sincere. So he did this. He was the driver, so to to speak in a car company he

really was the one that pushed it through yeah and the reason i was attracted to him is because everybody else was doing an idiotic dating service or a laundry service for he was doing things with physical well not just that that were difficult and inspirational and so it was unusual i always used to joke that san francisco was full of of entrepreneurs helping young people have assisted living. So San Francisco was assisted. But also, go back to Peter Thiel and say something nice. The famous line of Peter Thiel, which you can say, which is, they promised us flying cars, and what we got was 140 characters.

That's the only interesting thing Peter Thiel has said. But that's true. It wasn't something, it was unusual. They were not doing, and it was very hard and possibly failure. So that's what was attractive to me, was someone actually taking on a real problem. The degree of difficulty. And it wasn't just a digital thing. It wasn't just software.

It's not something you could do in your basement or your garage or your garage or your dorm room. He was making rocket ships and cars. Cars, right, exactly, which was very inspirational and unusual at the time. And there's more people that have gotten into all these various things and made investments. Name one. Well, there's lots of people I know who made satellite investments, I'm just saying. But nobody has done these two together, 100%. There's no question.

What's really hard is to sort out the visionary from what's happening now, and we're going to get into that in a second. But so he starts this company. I know you want to say- But keep a pin in that, because vision without execution is hallucination. Yes, absolutely. The question that you've got to get to with Elon Musk is he was able to execute. He built the factories. 100%. 100%. And i recall there were ups and downs at one point when i interviewed him um he had gotten so upset uh that tesla was going to go out of business um and i i it was unusual for someone to say to me is if i don't succeed humanity will die

and i was like and what's even more unusual is that he believed that. He did. Well, which I thought was a little bit over his skis on that one. And I kept calling him. And when the Trump administration came in, when he was going to that meeting with all the tech people, he's like, I can convince him not to be anti-immigrant. I can convince him not to be racist. And I was like, well, Jesus, I'm glad you're here. But I feel like you were not. That's why we're journalists and they're players in the arena, though.

So he moved on from Tesla and then moved to SpaceX and other things. Now, today, you're in the middle of this. That's what you were thinking the book was going to be about, correct? And you're delving into his history, correct? Yeah, I mean we start uh the book with this astonishingly difficult childhood in south africa with a father who is darth vader and who still is still alive but still haunts elon every day and still is darth vader from what i can

tell yeah has it made the transition to nice Darth Vader, correct? Correct. And as Elon's mother says, you know, the story of the life is to make sure he doesn't turn out to be like his dad. Uh-huh. So it's what haunts and moves him. Yeah. In many ways.

But look, rule one of biographers of important people, and don't take this in a gender or sexist way, but it's all about dad. Einstein, when his father has gone bankrupt doing electricity. Ben Franklin with his father runs away. Jennifer Doudna even, inspired by a father. Doudna even, inspired by a father. Barack Obama's sentence in his memoir that he begins, that every successful man is either trying to make up for the sins of his father or live up to the expectations. And that explains me. So when you're starting a biography, and sometimes it's the mother too, but the mother, am I going to get in trouble here, tends to be more loving. I mean, tends to be more unconditional loving in the cases of powerful people. And Steve Jobs had it doubly because he had a biological father and an adoptive father, and they were both haunting him.

So when you think about this, I don't know what you do in cases of lesbians, but I won't ask you. My kids seem to be doing rather well um so uh julia prosser who's the publicist here keeps giving me hand signals like stop stop stop please don't go there so so so you're gonna you're gonna one of the things that's worrisome to maybe some people is that it excuses behavior, that this troubled, angry child grows up to, and this is why. You know, the problem with a biographer is you explain a behavior, and you can explain it either troubled childhood,

you can explain it by what I'll call the hard wiring. As he says, he has Asperger's, there are people wired different ways. And Steve Jobs was wired differently. And sometimes that means your ability to show empathy is, I mean, especially if you look at somebody with autism spectrum things, they're different. So you explain all that. And then I will probably have people saying to me, oh, you tried to excuse the fact that he was mean to this person. And I said, well, I'm trying to explain the fact. Because

we're all human. And when you understand somebody better, I just think that makes all of our lives more interesting. Well, let's talk about Steve Jobs and the comparison. Because one thing you told CNBC recently was that Elon shares- I told whom? CNBC. Well, let's talk about Steve Jobs and the comparison, because one thing you told CNBC recently was that Elon shares a trait. I told whom? CNBC. Oh, CNBC, yeah. Yes, I've been tracking you very closely, Walter.

He shares the traits of being, quote, unemotional with Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, both of whom I think are much more emotional, actually. Yeah, emotional is not the... Talk about the traits serves people day-to-day versus their legacy. Any differences? Talk about the traits serves people day to day versus their legacy. Any differences? I think with Steve Jobs, for example, the book sort of begins and ends with Wozniak saying to me, the big question you have to ask is, did he have to be so mean to people?

Could he have been kinder and gentler to people? And at the end, I asked Woz the answer, what he thinks. He said, well, if I'd run Apple, I would have been much kinder to everybody. Everybody would have gotten stock options. It would have been like family. And then he pauses and he says, but if I'd run Apple, we probably would never have done the Macintosh and not gotten it out. And Steve Jobs, when I asked him that question, he said, where you come from, I think he thought I came from New York or something, but not New Orleans. But he said, people like you wear velvet gloves and

you talk politely. But if somebody screws up, I got to say it sucks. I've got to be the mean person. And this is what Musk says as well, which. People like me want to be kind to the person in front of them. They never want to insult them. Whereas that may make you feel good and it may make the person in front of you, but it's kind to one person instead of kind to the enterprise or kind to the mission. And so you screw up doing the mission right and the enterprise right because you're trying to be so nice to individuals and elon musk does not have intuitively the empathy gene to care that much whether the person in front of him likes him or thinks you know he is he's just a rough character when it comes to empathy okay of course the person wants to save humanity hates people, then, is what you're saying.

You know, that's true of Albert Einstein. It's true of, I mean... Well, Thomas Edison was a well-known asshole, but go ahead. Henry Ford. I mean, I think that there are people who care about saving humanity, and there are people who care very much

about the people around them or people they meet. And no, it's not a Venn diagram where the overlap is a lot. So when you think about Jobs and the comparison, talk about the difference in doing these biographies. You spend an enormous amount of time with Jobs, and then he died. He was sick when you were... So he had a much i think he

had a little more perspective on his life i definitely noticed a softening of him and not in a soft way but a reflective way i would say yeah he was much more reflective but not softer when he came back from the first transplant right in memphis everybody thought okay we're going to get a kinder and gentler steve because Ive and Phil Schiller and Camo. These are people at Apple. He's telling them everything they've done sucks. I mean, you saw that a lot. He was just rough on people.

Now, I don't defend being rough on people. I'm actually trying to be very nice to people, but I'm never going to invent the iPod. I'm never going to send somebody to Mars. So it's indulgent to be nice to people, but I'm never going to invent the iPod. I'm never going to send somebody to Mars. So it's indulgent to be nice to people, but you shouldn't take pride in that if you're not doing, you know, getting something accomplished.

You know, I call it, I have a thing called a prick to productivity ratio with people in Silicon Valley. And if you're a giant prick, you've got to be, you can use it anytime, but you have to be very productive in order to be that much of a prick. People used to come up to me and say, after I talked about Steve Jobs, and I'd say, you know, that whole thing about if somebody's work sucks,

I have to tell them it sucks. And they'd come up to me and say, I'm just like Steve Jobs. I'd go, yeah, okay, tell me how. He says, because if any of my employees do something and it's not great, I just tell them it sucks. I said, have you ever invented the iPod? Have you ever created the iPhone? And that is basically the prick to productivity ratio.

Yes, yes, so they're just prick, all prick. So when you, I know all of them, by the way, just so you know, I've covered them all for many decades now. She's writing a memoir. Is it going to be pricks who have known decades now. If she's writing a memoir, is it going to be Pricks Who Have Known Me? No, it's actually a great title. Maybe I'll just call it

Pricks Who Have Known. Right now, I'm thinking of calling it Burn Book, but we'll see. Oh, yeah. So when you're thinking about when you wrote about him, what's the... When you look at that book now, how do you feel about it what did you get right what did you get wrong on steve yeah the steve jobs book i think i got right the fingertip

genius he had in connecting design to technology right and that at the end of his life he told me you got to do leonardoci next. I go, why? He said, because what you write about is people can connect the arts to the sciences. That was his big thing. It was. And Leonardo and Vitruvian Man, you know, the naked guy doing Jumpin' Jackson, the Circle and Square. Which I believe is known by Bill Gates, but go ahead.

Well, yeah, no, not quite. But anyway, that, I think, is why, you know, Bill Gates was here a couple days ago. And Bill Gates is much more brilliant in terms of coding and analysis than Steve Jobs was. But Bill Gates invents the Zune and Steve Jobs invents the iPod. You're probably one of 12 people in this room who even remember what the Zune was. I still have my Zune. The Zune was an MP4 player

that looked like it was designed in a basement in Uzbekistan by blind people. Right, yes. It was ugly. I will tell you a very brief, funny story. Walt Mossberg brought, who was my partner for many years, brought the Zune to Steve Jobs, and it was square it was

this weird shitty brown color i don't know what else that's what it looked like poop and so um and and walt started to hand it to him and jobs because he was ridiculously dramatic over dramatic he started to hand it him and jobs went like this oh like that like i cannot touch this this is so and you know the steve levy counterpart was when steve gives the ipod to bill gates and bill gates just goes into a zone and just tries to grok the whole thing which he couldn't take his take his eyes off of by the way by the way he did call the ipod bill gates to me and walt uh he said it trivial. It was just a hard drive in a white box. That's what he said to us. He said it was trivial.

And so I said, well, it was so easy. Why didn't you do it? By the way, I'm going to tell you something that Bill Gates said here, because it connects to both Steve and Elon Musk. Bill Gates, the night before last, at the end of the interview, I was asking him about artificial intelligence and open AI. And he started talking about how last September they brought it to him. He said, well, that's no good.

And I won't be impressed until I can get a five on the AP biology exam. They bring it back to him and he gets a five. He says, I'm now back at microsoft such as ask me back i'm doing product reviews of connecting ai to security ai to you know communicate all of our things we do and so you've seen it how bill gates would sit there at product review meetings going like that he's back in the microsoft offices doing product review meetings going like that. He's back in the Microsoft offices doing product review meetings on how to connect AI, because they, of course,

have the rights to chat GPT from OpenAI. Now, who started OpenAI? Elon Musk. Elon Musk. With Sam Altman, with many people. And Sam Altman, they split. And there is going to be such a rivalry there. Well, there's going to be a rivalry,

and there's sort of an arms race going on, a little bit sloppy. I'm a little bit worried about how quickly they're rolling this stuff out without safety measures, but that's what they did with the Internet, so why not try it again, because that worked out so well. So let's go into the comparison. What would Steve Jobs think about Elon?

As you know, Elon Musk went to go visit Apple about a month and a half ago, and they both have a control sense that you've got to control things from end to end. Whether it's Tesla, they have to control the anode and the cathode of the battery, and the rolling of the anode and the cathode of the battery and the rolling of the battery and the making of the battery pack and the manufacturing and whatever. And Steve Jobs, too, had that feeling that, say, the iPhone, you have to control the iTunes store, you have to control the content, you have to have the iOS software, and you have to have the hardware. Unlike Bill Gates, who's quite happy to make the DOS and Windows operating system and license it to Compaq and HP and Dell and everything. So the end-to-end control is the common thread that they have.

The one big difference, and this is your friend Larry Ellison, who's only been on two. He's also not my friend, but go ahead. Really? None of these people are my friend. I cover them. Larry and I don't hang out on the weekend. Ellison has only been on two boards, Apple and Tesla. And I said, what's the difference?

He said, what Musk gets is that if you want to be innovative day after day, you have to do the manufacturing yourself. You can't outsource it and say the iPhone will be built in China and that you have to be on the factory line every day. And so what Musk says is that the machine is difficult to make, meaning the car, the rocket, whatever. But much more important is the machine that builds the machine. Sure. How to design the factory. And Steve Jobs never went to China, never walked the assembly lines. That was Tim Cook's job.

Whereas Musk, if you ask me, what's the most surprising thing? It's the amount of time he spends on the assembly lines, not in product, just reviews meeting or finance meeting. But what would steve jobs think of elon musk what would steve jobs first you help me because you know i mean i'll try to think through while you're answering i think he would have abhorred him abhorred him why um jazz hands in a way that's that's pointless and cruel who jazz hands look at me the look at me the obsession with looking at himself even through uh casual cruelty i don't think that was steve jobs in any way

yeah um i don't know that steve jobs if you said what are the top 10 qualities you respect in a person would have niceness as one of the top 10. No, not necessarily, but not cruelty. It's very different. Yeah, you'll have to read the book. The cruelty is a simple thing to slap on, but I think it's more complex. All right, let's slap it on then. Paul Pelosi gets beaten up. Elon Musk immediately, it just took over Twitter,

decides to tweet and comment on a trope that it was a gay love spat and kind of blamed Paul Pelosi for it. It was abhorrent. Yeah, that was a really, really bad thing to say. I don't feel Steve Jobs would have done that. Ever. Yeah, okay. That's, really bad thing to say. I don't feel Steve Jobs would have done that. Ever. Yeah, okay.

That's not cruel from your perspective? It was a really, really bad, yeah, it was, and it was wrong, and it was factually inaccurate. No, I mean, it was factually inaccurate. Often he is. He's frequently wrong, but never in doubt. And I, well, and then he deletes it. I mean, he's, I think he's very impulsive. And yes, there's not a filter that most people have, which is what you would call the kindness filter

or the lack of cruelty filter sometimes. Why does it keep going on? So you get there and suddenly he buys Twitter. What happened there? Because I, listen, this was always part of Elon's makeup. 90% was fascinating. 10% was needlessly cruel, juvenile, and meme-oriented, right? Also.

I'm sorry, of what? Meme-oriented, just memes. Like a 12-year-old boy on perpetual. You mean Twitter in general was that way? His behaviors, his little jokes, et cetera, et cetera. One time we were in a meeting with someone very important, and he would only talk through a monkey, a stuffed monkey that he had next to him, to the person.

Stuff like that. By the way, you're saying what is true is he's the most interesting character around today. I just thought it was bizarre. I didn't think that was interesting. I am absolutely fascinated by somebody who is this interesting, this intense, has been this unbelievably successful right and i don't mean in making money although he is the richest person on the planet but i mean in

getting rockets to orbit when i get it i had this argument with mark benioff he's like there's two sides to every coin i said people aren't coins they are are much more. There's a million sides to every facet of personality. But 10% of them was like this, what you're seeing on Twitter, all these outbursts, often not very nice, often scathing to people, like he did with the Icelandic entrepreneur. And then he was wrong again.

He insulted this guy. You know about this, Holly. And then took it back back because probably legal and financial issues all of a sudden were presented to him it was a very id response what that was 10 of him now it's 90 as far as i can tell and the 10 that the other part is gone um what has happened over the ownership of twitter what have you seen when you're covering that? Well, I think you'll be surprised at what he is doing and wants to do with Twitter. On the surface, you can say everything about this dumb tweet. And yeah, I'm not going to defend any

Paul Pelosi tweet, and he probably wouldn't today. But if you start at the beginning of his career, as you did, let's say, well, not the pure beginning, but x.com, and wanting to have a social network with a financial system connected to it. Yep, that's the goal. And that's, I mean, what I'm trying to do is, I mean, if you want, we can just talk about every tweet he did and should he have done that tweet. No, I don't want to, but it's a pattern. But if you want to look at the big goal, it's disrupting the banking industry, as he did with

the thing that became PayPal, but then he left and it didn't do it. If you connect banking and finance, and just in our lives, say journalism and creation of content and writing and Substack and others, if you make it so there's easy digital payments and that people who make content can be rewarded in a simpler way and you connect that to a social network, that will be as transformative as anything that's happened online since the invention of social networks. Well, it's already happened in China.

You know there's... Right. And WeChat... This is not a new fresh idea that they're doing. No, no. I mean, Noah was sending rocket ships to Mars. I mean, that's 100 years ago. Well, that is fresh.

Actually, I would call that fresh. But go ahead. No, I'm not saying... But nobody here is doing that. Right. I'm not saying, but nobody here is doing that. Right, right. And if you take a notion that content, and you try to merge WeChat, Substack, PayPal, Venmo, Twitter, banks, and put it all together. Yes. You have transformed not just what you do online,

you've transformed your life, which is how do I get rewarded for the content I create? These are the bigger ideas that I think people almost get distracted from when they say, why did he tweet about Paul Pelosi? Why did he then? Why does he, why doesn't he? Part of me is like, just get to work and shut the up. And you and I would more be that way. But he's not that way.

Right. But why do that? Why shoot yourself constantly in the foot? I would think that if you asked him this past New Year's Eve, as his brother did, you know, what do you regret? He said, well, I kind of regret shooting myself in the foot all the time. Yeah. Why does he do it? He has a gun, apparently, that goes off all the time and he's out of feet. And his foot is in the way. Right, right. So are people... No, I mean, you know,

does he shoot himself in the foot a lot? Yeah. Yeah. Does he know he does that? Yeah. Why does he keep doing it? Read the book. Okay, all right. We'll be back in a minute. Thumbtack presents the ins and outs of caring for your home. Out. Uncertainty. Self-doubt. Stressing about not knowing where to start. In. Plans and guides that make it easy to get home projects done. Out. Word art. Sorry, we have laugh lovers. In. Knowing what to do, when to do it,

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the people at SpaceX, the people. And he has very strong, very loyal loyal hardcore people around him and at twitter he found i mean this was a huge divergence of corporate or company culture and you've seen it in silicon valley there's one extreme where everybody has yoga and mental health days. Yes, I get that. And he wants a hardcore group posse around him, and he feels he can do more. That means he's rough and has a hardcore group of people around him. Sure. They push back often. Does he get bad news often enough? Well, I would say it probably would be more useful if he got more people saying,

don't aim that at your foot right away. However, because he barrels through these things, he has been able to do things that nobody else has been able to do. That kind of sounds like the plot of the movie where Drew Barrymore lights everybody on fire, fire starter, which is, oh, well, she's got a lot of powers and she does blow up everything,

but hey, she's talented. I didn't see the movie. Yeah, okay. It doesn't end well. Okay, well, this movie, we'll see. We'll see. I mean, people getting into all the... One of the things I worry about is enablers. I think a lot this movie, we'll see. We'll see. People getting into it. One of the things I worry about is enablers. I think a lot of these, not just Elon, there's enablers that

grow up around these very wealthy people. You know, Steve Jobs, one of the most interesting stories. Did not have a lot of enablers. Correct. And Steve Jobs, early on, when he had the original Macintosh, he was very much Elon Musk-like. I want a hardcore team. We're going to put a pirate flag on top of the building. You remember you wrote about it? Yes. I always find the world's richest people acting like they're pirates kind of vaguely ridiculous. But go ahead. Well, it's better to be a pirate than to join the Navy.

Yet they're not pirates. But go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. So every year, they secretly, amongst that group, gave an award to the person who best stood up to Steve Jobs. What you may like is the first three years, it was won by women each time.

Of course. Deb Coleman. Not a surprise. Joanna. What was her name? Joanna. Yeah, I know who it is. And one other.

And what was particularly interesting is every one of them, when Steve Jobs eventually found out, but every one of them he promoted. That is an important task of leadership. That is correct. Is to have somebody around you who stands up and says, you know, don't go king crazy. Just because you think you're the king, don't go crazy on it. Do, you know, and you could probably go down the list of everybody I've written about and say, do they have enough people to push back on? Yeah.

So I find that absolutely true. Steve Jobs was very willing to accept criticism and liked it, actually. And I think that Musk does that a lot more than people think really because always at meetings will say and look i can find a lot of all guys mostly guys sitting around laughing at his jokes that's what i see and i think you'll see something different in the book um i hope to but i think there's a lot of violent agreement with him and head shaking in many ways on the little stuff they argue with him, but the main stuff, not so much. Like what main stuff?

Well, you know. Should you tweet about Paul Pelosi? No, no, but that shows some character flaws that I think you have to. I'm just using that as an example because there have been dozens of them. Okay, radar in the car. Should the car have radar? Sure. There's a lot of pushback on back and forth on that,

and sometimes he's creating new programs to do it. Sure, sure. But let me say, I think I'm one of the people who did push back on Elon a lot, and a very friendly one because I really do have a lot of regard for him. And when I didn't, I actually... How did you push back? Lots of different, like, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? You know, lots of different like what are you doing why are you doing this you know stuff like that why are you doing it this way the covid thing we used you

know when he was being really quite tone deaf around covid initially you know we had an argument um all kinds of stuff was right well i a million people died so you know i feel like no i'm mad but covid was a complex thing. A hundred percent. It just was... And the question of whether there should have been lockdowns is complex. That's correct. He was certain.

I was like, we don't know yet. And I feel like... Anyway, I'm not going to get into this. I do agree that he sometimes has a higher degree of certainty than I have, and maybe you have. Without information, because he was giving me all kinds of information. I kept calling him Dr. Musk, and he wouldn't stop. But that that's okay i just felt like it was like someone who didn't know what they were talking about just never stopping and sometimes people like me i didn't know what i was talking about well that's i got covid wrong but i get that so the the last question i want

to ask is when you think about that um you know we're gonna get going to get to Ben Franklin, sort of the friendly dudes? No, we're not talking about Ben Franklin. He's dead. Hey, you know, he's wonderful. He goes in the Philadelphia... You wrote that 109 years ago, so I don't really care about that. But please buy it, everybody. Please buy the book and buy them all together, along with... There's going to be a package with the Elon Musk book. When is the book release date?

We have to see what happens, like, you know, Starship going into space, things you know starship going into space things him going into space yeah you know your your other billionaire friends are all sending themselves in space he never thought of doing that for himself yeah but he did tell me that he he wanted he wanted to send you into space probably um he he said he wanted to uh die on mars just not on landing which was a very adorable thing to say. But no, the reason he didn't talk to me is I didn't even push back on something. He misread a quote or one of his enablers did. And he just wrote me a note saying, you're an asshole. And

I'm like, go fuck yourself. And that was the end of that. That seems like, you know. Well, it's ridiculous. That's the type of exchange that doesn't surprise me. Yeah. But he doesn't want to listen to people who disagree with him. In any case, we can argue about that. I'm excited to read your book. Thank you. But the last question, has he threatened to cut you off? Because I think he's going to cut you at some point.

That's my prediction. Look, I'm just shadowing him. I mean, I don't feel that I'm a participant in this game at the moment. Last time I was on stage like this yesterday was with Brian Green. And one of the most amazing things in this cosmos is that there are particles that are entangled. And by observing them, you change their position. Heisenberg to Schrodinger, et cetera. My role is not to be engaged with him.

My role is to watch, take notes, and tell the story. And the story is this awesome, epic, complex story. So it's not about, does he like me? I don't care if he likes me. This is not what it's about. It's about having a ringside seat into the most interesting, and you'll admit that. Sure is. The most interesting person on the planet right now, doing the most interesting things and driving people crazy in the process and i'm just there to tell a narrative story that helps you understand it it explains why things happened and there'll be people say oh you explained it so you're justifying this

you're gonna get a lot of that. I'm going to get a lot. Probably from me. Yeah, probably from you. But hopefully you'll finish your memoirs before you get mad at my book. I will make some determinations about these people in my book. You'll know what I think.

Right, but you're different from that. I mean, you are somebody who is paid and adored to have strong opinions about these things. I just come from a different background. I worked for the Times-Picayune. I went there. I covered the story. I reported the story. People didn't pay me to have my opinions on it. They paid me to get the narrative right. I had a mentor here as a writer, meaning he was my mentor, Walker Percy, the really great novelist.

And coming out of... At one point, I talked to him, and I was saying, hey, you booked a moviegoer. I was like 15. You're trying to teach me something, or is there something in there I'm missing? What is it about? He said, well, there are two types of people come out of Louisiana, preachers and storytellers. He said, if I have to be a

storyteller, the world's got too many preachers. And so I don't try to preach in the book. All right, I have one final question, just one single answer. Is Elon Steve Jobs or is he Howard Hughes? Oh, he's Steve Jobs, but I mean in the sense that, I mean, I'm not totally an expert on Howard Hughes, but I'm not sure everything will work. Great strides in aviation. What? Great strides in aviation. Okay, okay, okay. Steve Jobs, who I, as you know, enormously respect, he transformed things with the iPhone. Our whole lives are transformed. And making the first computer you could take out of a box, plug it in.

I think that Musk, by actually dealing in the hard things, which is physical things, will be more transformative. Interesting. We'll leave it at that. Very good to know that Steve Jobs never asked you to do him, Cara. That was weird. I know, that was funny. The whole doing him thing was weird. I know, he didn't get it either. He was sort of perplexed and the whole crowd was,

I shouldn't have done that to him, but there I was. What could I do? I loved it. It works great. It was very funny. You two disagreed about whether narcissism or mission is Elon's primary motivation. Yeah, we did.

I don't think mission's not there. And I don't think he thinks narcissism isn't there. And he said that in the interview. I just think it's what you give people an allowance for, right? How much do you let them get away with because they behave a certain way? Let me start first saying, Walter and I, and he wanted me to say this too, is we really like each other. We've known each other for many years. And we've debated about a lot of things. It was interesting because he and I have been texting about this topic, because it's really hard to know where the person stops and the visionary begins.

And that's, I think, where we part ways. I really appreciated his line, vision without execution, it's hallucination. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, you have this prick to productivity ratio. I subscribe. I called it the difficulty to competence ratio. It's like the Barney Stinson hot crazy dating ratio for anyone who watched How I Met Your Mother. But ultimately, you guys were fighting about whether the ends

justify the means. I think that's another way to put it. I think you're down. I mean, we wouldn't have electricity if Ben Franklin wasn't such an asshole. I don't think that's true. I think the best parts of Elon Musk and Ben Franklin are not these darker parts.

And I know you can't pull them apart, but you can a little bit. And to tolerate them is the problem. And then who gets tolerated? How will the book on Elon be written? I don't mean Isaacson's book. I mean the wrong view of history, you know, a hundred years from now. I mean, in hundreds of years, he'll be seen as a Ben Franklin-like character, an Edison-like character. And so probably a lot will be lost, although I think we now talk a lot more about Henry Ford and his, you know, anti-like character. And so probably a lot will be lost, although I think we now talk a lot more about Henry Ford and his anti-Semitism. We talk about a lot of these people. Yeah, we talk, and then Thomas Jefferson gets a rethink. You can credit many of his accomplishments,

but you can't leave out the darker parts. Though I wonder, it seems like the pendulum is shifting, right? Like right now, there has been a backlash against Me Too. There's been a backlash against every time there's, Nicole Hannah-Jones said this once to me. I was like, I love that, which was every time there's a revolution, there's a retraction. Yeah, 100%.

And I think what I'd like a lot of these people to realize, and I suspect his book is going to seem a lot tougher. It'll be interesting to see how Elon reacts to it because there are stories that are not good. And so I don't think he's a let the chips fall where they may kind of fella. So we'll see. The price you pay for a Walter Isaacson biography, which people want, Steve Jobs wanted, Elon wants, Elon wanted to tweet about it right away, is that you have to give up control. But then,

you know, you have your own megaphone of 130 million plus and counting people who you can just tell them that was all lies. Even though he cooperated for a full year, but we'll see. I don't know. We'll see. It'll be interesting. I think one of the reasons I think that Elon was attracted to him is because he did the Jobs biography and he styles himself as that's his aspiration to be the Steve Jobs, the new Steve Jobs. And I don't think he's reached it. Elizabeth Holmes loved to style herself literally as Steve Jobs. Yeah, that's the outfits.

Yeah. Paul Pelosi, you said it's a stand-in for a lot of examples, and it's an example you've used a lot. Do you think it's the best example of his worst behavior? I do, because taking it down. No, I think it's all collectively. Versus Yoel Roth or versus other? Yoel Roth, I think, is one that was really, this guy worked loyally for him and stayed.

And the minute he left, disagreeing with him over a number of things, he turned on him and turned his followers on him and put him in personal danger. You know, I think it's all part of a whole. Look, nothing's changed. He just did it to this guy in Iceland. The same thing that he did to Paul Pelosi. So where's the learning here? If he took it down, why did he do it again? And so I think Yoel Roth, and I wish I had talked to Walter about this,

because I suspect he knows exactly as I know what happened and has to depict it in the way it happened. And that had to do with pedophiles, the same things that obsessed this guy. Yeah, same thing with the cave guy. Yeah, cave guy. It's not new. It's just a preponderance. The ratio, as you said, it went from 10% asshole to 90% asshole overnight.

Same theme, different people. I wonder if Elon will be able to read the same material and see himself looking good as opposed to bad. I suspect Walter is a camera. Walter is a storyteller and a camera. And some things, when you take pictures, you're like, oh, wow, I don't look so good. And I don't think, I think everybody sees what they want to see in the mirror.

And I think people see what they want to see in the mirror. And when the camera shows what you actually are, it's hard for people, all of us. And you see your childhood self, too. I mean, that's the other thing. As you said, it's hard for people. All of us. And you see your childhood self, too. I mean, that's the other thing. Like you said, the book starts with the Darth Vader dad, right? And can he be Luke Skywalker?

Or is Elon Darth Vader? I don't know. Who's Darth Vader here? Right? I don't know. Did he call him Darth Vader? Did he call him demonic? You know, there's a lot of words he used that were not kind. And continues to be, I think.

It's all about dads, he said. But some of these successful kind and continues to be, I think. It's all about dads, he said. But some of these successful people presumably had good dads, I think, because you had a good dad. I did. He was around for five years and was very loving. That's all I remember from him. So, you know, it wasn't enough, but people imprint on certain things. And I think one of the reasons I'm the way I am is because of him. And you obviously had a longer relationship with your dad.

Yeah. am is because of him. And you obviously had a longer relationship with your dad. Yeah. And I'm the way I am because of my dad, because all of us daughters pursue something international, like the things we care about, the causes we care about, and the way we are is because of my dad. And my dad was also very funny because he was very professional. So at the end of a phone call, you'd be like, love you. And he'd be like, love you, thank you, and then hang up on you. Thank you. All right. As my dad would say, love you. Thank you. Want to read us out, Karen, before we hang up? Yes, absolutely. Today's show was produced by Naeem Araza, Blake Neshek, Christian Castro-Rossell, and Raffaella Seward. Special thanks to Hayley

Milliken. And thank you so much to the New Orleans Book Festival, which is held at Tulane University, which is beautiful. And thanks to all the people there. It's run by Walter and Cheryl Landreau. And all the people there were wonderful. And at the end, we all had crawfish, which was delicious. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan. Our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get a free copy of my memoir, No, You Don't, which will not be called Pricks Who Have Known Me, but it a free copy of my memoir, No You Don't, which will not be called Pricks Who Have Known Me, but it will be implied. If not, don't shoot yourself in the foot. You only have two. Elon apparently has a million. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for

On With Kara Swisher and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On With Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more. Bang, bang.