Science Friday - Diving Into Elon Musk’s Mind

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

There’s a name that’s hard to escape these days, particularly if you’re in the technology world—Elon Musk. He’s involved with Tesla electric cars, home solar and battery installations, SpaceX rockets, Starlink satellites, and the company that once was known as Twitter. Woven through his array of enterprises is a mix of technical savvy, confident ego, and sometimes impulsive decision-making.Biographer Walter Isaacson has tried to sort through the competing influences behind the entrepreneur and his mercurial behavior in a recent book titled simply Elon Musk. He joins Ira to talk about the business magnate’s origins, his management style, and the incessant appetite for risk and drama that drives his successes—and, sometimes, his dramatic failures. To stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters. Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

Biographer Walter Isaacson followed Elon Musk for two years, from successes at Tesla to a failed rocket launch. And that was a metaphor for Elon Musk. He does amazing things, but leaves a lot of hot rubble in the wake. It's Monday, October 30th, but deep inside, it's Science Friday. I'm Cyfry producer Charles Bergquist. Admire him or despise him, it's hard to escape hearing about the entrepreneur Elon Musk. Ira Flato talks with his biographer, Waller. Walter Isaacson, who's profiled other people, he calls disruptors, from Apple's Steve Jobs to CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Dowdna. Isaacson talks about what he believes really makes Musk tick.

About 17 years ago, way back in 2006, I had a guest on the show, an entrepreneur, an engineer, struggling to get recognition for a new idea, a spaceship, not made by NASA, but a private company, a radical idea in its day with a radical man behind it. The company was called SpaceX, and the engineer, not quite a household name, Elon Musk. Elon, is there a barrier for the privatization of space? I don't think there is a barrier in the sense of there being, say, some law against it or something like that. There's a barrier of execution, which I think has not been exceeded. It is extremely difficult to do. There's a reason why there's an idiomatic expression about something being very difficult being, you know, or something being easy and not being rocket science.

It is really difficult, and it's a problem which is both a problem of technical execution and business execution, and nobody's really been able to solve that yet, and we're aspiring to do so with SpaceX, but it's really up to us. I think if we fail, it's our fault, not anyone else's. Elon Musk, a lot has changed in those 17 years, and since then, Musk, his trials and tribulations are constantly in the news. And while Elon no longer answers the phone one we call, he's been very busy starting businesses. There's the Tesla electric cars, the home solar and battery installations, the SpaceX rockets, which have become hugely successful since he got the sci-fri bump, of course. Sure. The boring company is seeking to build underground passageways, neuralink, an implantable device in the brain, X, the company once known as Twitter, an optimist, a robot.

And woven throughout it all is a mix of technical savvy, confident ego, and sometimes impulsive decision-making and harsh treatment of his staff. And while I had a brief visit with Elon in his rocket lab more than a decade ago, biographer Walter Isaacson spent two years with the Mercurial, inventor and has tried to sort through the competing influences behind Elon Musk in a biography of the same name. Walter is the former CEO of the Aspen Institute, also former chair of CNN, editor of time, and now are a prolific author, Professor of History at Tulane University and author of Elon Musk. Welcome back to Science Friday, Walter. It's great to be back with you, Ira. Nice to have you. Walter, I've got to say that the Elon we talked to 17 years ago in that clip, seems to have more from a quiet, almost differential. Please pay attention to my ideas, Guy,

to the hard-hitting, ego-driven futurist of today. And I'm wondering, did you have preconceived notions about Musk? And did they change as you spent two years with him? Absolutely. And one of the things about that clip is there's certain things that haven't changed, is understanding that if you're going to get rockets into orbit and more amazingly, get things into orbit and then reland the rockets and reuse them. It's a question of both execution and a business model. And nowadays, Boeing can't do that. China and Russia and the U.S. can't reland rockets and reuse them.

So execution was the key to, I think, his success in the space business. My preconception when I went in almost three years ago, I said, okay, a guy building rockets and bringing us into the air of electric vehicles, and solar roofs and power walls. This will be interesting in terms of technology and pushing the boundaries of science. It was really part of a trilogy. I had done Steve Jobs to show how we got into the age

of the personal digital revolution. And then Jennifer Dowdna in the era of gene editing and life sciences. And this seemed like it was going to be about, you know, rockets and electric cars. But of course, it certainly changed over the past three years as he got more involved and more and more things. And his, let us politely say, mercurial personality distracted from some of the science and technology he was doing.

Why was he so distracted? That personality is so changeable in him. And he says, I'm built for a storm. I'm built for surges. And when I started writing the book, he had been person of the year at time that year and the financial times. and was enormously successful, but he said, this unnerves me. I'm the type of person who, when I'm playing a video game, can't stop. I've got to move to the next level of the game.

And there was an odd disquieting sense to him. And he said it came back to his childhood. I mean, his childhood was tumultuous in South Africa, a father who was psychologically brutal to him in ways. He was a kid who had no friends and was beaten up all the time. And then his father would take the side of the people who beat him up. Tullo L. Riley, his second wife, I think, told me, you know, he associates turmoil and drama with childhood and with love. And so I just think he's always got to surge into the next level,

even when it's self-destructive. So he's always looking to create drama if it doesn't exist. You know, his brother, Kimball said those exact words, that he's a drama. I'm a magnet. And I think that propensity to drama is connected to a desire to take risks. I mean, what of his birthday parties have the picture in the book? They have a blind knife thrower, throwing at a target, and Musk stands there with a pink balloon between his legs and his crotch. Now, there's no upside to taking that risk and sort of a downside, but he said, I'm

addicted to risk. This is Science Friday from WNNIC Studios. And that's why he takes a risk with a disruptive kind of technology that no one else will take a risk on. You're right. You can't be that disruptive without taking risk. And I remember we were standing at the high bay down in the south tip of Texas where he's trying to launch starship. And he said, we used to be a nation of risk takers. He was looking to the Rio Grande. He said, you know, people come to this country, whether they came on the Mayflower or across the

Grand. They love taking risks, and that's why we were so innovative. We said nowadays, we've become a country, a society, with more referees than risk takers, you know, more regulators than doers. And so I think pushing the risk is why he is able to get rockets in the space, but also when I was down there for that starship launch in April, he got it into space, the biggest rocket ever made. But after three minutes, it blew up, and there was hot rubble in its wake. And that was a metaphor for Elon Musk. He does amazing things, but leaves a lot of hot rubble in the wake. And the drama of that, too, right? Absolutely. And that, it was so odd. It was on a Monday that they were doing the countdown for the attempt. And at T-minus 14, he looks, and there's a couple of problems with some leaky vans.

valves. He just shakes his head. And Shana Diaz is the launch director. She stops the count out. Elon flies off to an ad conference in Miami right after that, meets Linda Yakorino, who was the ad sales director at NBC Universal, almost impulsively hires her on the spot, knowing she is what he needs at Twitter, now X, and then gets back just in time for 5 a.m. for a Thursday launch of Starship. And once again, got down to T-minus. 20, and there's a couple, they're 33 engines, as you know, on the booster for Starship. And two of them aren't seeming that well off. But this time he nods and says, let's take the risk. And what happens is, though the rocket that gets his face and one that also blows up, like the

first three rockets he had launched 20 years earlier. You speak of the drama, but you also speak about how driven he was, not only driving himself, but driving his employees to the point that they were rebelling against him sometimes. Yeah, it's very hard to work for him, but those who do are all in, they're hardcore. And it's interesting, because I over and over again in the book, show him reaming somebody out or having some problem. And then I'll go back to that person, And a month later, two months later, say, okay, what did you do? Did you survive? Did you leave? Why? Many of them left. And one of them in particular, which I'll give you an example, late on a Friday night at Starbase, a year ago, well before they're going to launch Starship. Musk is wandering the factory line, and then we go to the launch pad. And there are only a few people working on the launch pad.

And there's a poor guy, Andy Krebs, who was in charge of that launch pad. And Musk reams him out. out. And Andy Krebs is like, wait, it's Friday night at 10 p.m. when we don't have a launch schedule. And he says, no, we have to be hardcore all in. And we'll never get to Mars. And so after a while, Andy knows how to deal with it. And he actually gets promoted. And then about a year later, he's like, all right, I'm burned out. And he finally leaves. But I saw him a few weeks ago. I happened to be on book tour in Los Angeles. And Andy Krebs walks up to me. I said, what's happening? He said, I have a choice of being burned out or being bored, and now I'm bored, and I think I want to go back to SpaceX. So it's an interesting dynamic of when you push people like Steve Jobs did, to do

things they thought drove them crazy, but then they end up also doing things they thought were impossible. Yeah, and I'm glad you brought Steve Jobs up, someone else you have written about, and also Jennifer Dowdner, who I would guess these two are contemporaries. How would you you compare them? I mean, let's say Steve Jobs. I mean, who was also a disruptor? Steve Jobs was a disruptor and he had a reality distortion field, which meant when people said something was impossible, he would sometimes stare at him without blinking and say, don't be afraid. You can do it. And he said about me, he said, you know, you care a lot about empathy. You want to be really sweet to all the people around you. And sometimes that's selfish because

it's merely because you want people to like you. And sometimes you lose sight of the enterprise because you're so eager to have people like it. And I thought back and said, yeah, maybe that's why I wasn't very good when I was running CNN. I was too eager to be liked and I was not disruptive enough. Well, Elon Musk is the same way. He runs roughshod over people a lot of the time.

But he also inspires them and makes them understand why the higher mission might be worth it. with Jennifer Dowdna, who I just adore, she was different because she's very collegial. Anytime somebody was thinking of joining her lab, everybody else in the lab had to meet them to say, do we like this person? Well, this person fit in. And so there are different ways of being a great leader. You can be like Jennifer Dowdena and very collegial. You can be all in and hardcore, like Musk and jobs. When you write biographies, you don't say, here's the right answer. you kind of say, let me tell you a story, and then you let people figure out for themselves.

How does that relate to what I want to be? We've heard a lot about, as you say, about the rough side of Elon Musk, but I've been following his speeches and statements over the years. And when you look at those statements, when he's sort of not really preaching, when he's sort of more thoughtful, he seems to have his heart in the right place. And I mean by that, he wants to make our energy green and sustainable. He wants to make sure we have a place to go on Mars when we use up the Earth. I mean, there seems to be a conflict between what's in his heart and what comes out of his mouth sometimes. Well, when I say he's mercurial, another way to say it is he really does have multiple personalities.

And you can be with him in the day or in an evening, and he'll be really inspirational. And he's got three great missions in life that he picked up reading comic books and sci-fi in the corner of the library when he was a kid without friends and very lonely. And as you say, one of them is to make us multi-planetary. We have to be space adventurers again. Second is to have sustainable energy to keep this planet okay, not just with electric vehicles, but solar roofs and power walls. And the third is to make sure our robots don't turn on us.

He probably read Isaac Asimov's robot stories once too often, but it was we have to make sure AI is beneficial, not harmful to humanity. And so these become his great missions. And when he's in a mission-driven inspirational mode, he can be great. But there are times when he gets resentful or dark or sometimes conspiratorial. And people know around him, you almost just have to wait out what those moods. Grimes, his girlfriend, calls him demon mode. And you just wait until the storm passes.

You mentioned those two out of three ideal. and you mentioned the third one is AI artificial intelligence. Is he working heavily on that? I know he's got the robot and he's got the super chips he's building for the car. Are those part of the idea? Yes. At the end of the book, right after the Starship and Twitter and everything else, he says, come on back to Austin.

I've got to spend some time with you and not on the telephone. It's got to be done in person. And he's over at the house of Chavon Zillis, who's a mother of two of his children, but runs Neurilink, which is the company that is in now this month gotten permission to implant chips and human trials so that our brainways can connect to our computers. He believes that's part of making artificial intelligence safe, which is having an alignment between our will and consciousness and that of the processing power of computers. Also, as you said, the dojo chip, which will prove.

process visual information and try to create artificial intelligence for real world use, like self-driving cars and robots, not just large language models that do predictive tech so you can chatbot things. So that's his new company called XAI, and it's to compete with chat GPT and Microsoft and Google, to try to make sure we have artificial intelligence that's aligned with our values and our will as humans. Interesting. How is he able to juggle all these different projects? Because he really is a hands-on person, isn't he?

Yes, he's very much of a serial monotasker with a fanatic focus. Not a multitasker. Nah, I once called him a multitasker, and I got corrected because he doesn't do 10 things at once. He does one thing at a time, undistracted and with an intense focus. For example, when the Twitter board decided to accept his offer that night, he flew down to the south tip of Texas to be in a conference room to deal with Starship. And everybody in the engineers in that room, they're all like, you know, this guy just bought Twitter. The whole world's talking about it.

He doesn't mention it. He's focused on a methane leak in the Raptor engine for Starship. And for more than an hour, they deal with the materials of the valve and how it could be fixed. And he doesn't get distracted then by something like Twitter. And in a given day, I'd be flying around with him or going to different meetings. He will focus for an hour or two on how should self-driving cars make a left-hand turn when there's a bike lane. Then he would focus on the anode and cathode for the new battery that Tesla would have to do. And 99% of what Tesla and SpaceX and Norrelink and X-A-I and Twitter would be doing would be run by some other people.

But he said it's like Napoleon. If you get on the battlefield and you're focusing on one thing, the troops see you focus. They see you down in the details and the rest will take care of itself. And he believes himself, as you point out in the book, that he should be down there with the troops, how everything happens so he can keep an eye on it. You mentioned how as an engineer, he believes you have to be on the site. You can't do this remotely. You know, once at around midnight was down in, where his only home, down in Texas, and he's making people install a solar roof and seeing if they can do it in one day. And he's up there. He climbs up the ladder to the peak of this roof.

I got to follow them up there. It's like balancing on this roof. And the supervisor, who's down on the ground, is saying, here's why we do it. He said to the supervisor, have you ever actually nailed a tile in? Have you ever installed a roof? And the supervisor says, no, I'm a designer. You know, I supervise. He said, no, if you've never actually gotten on the roof and done it yourself,

you don't know what the blank you're talking about. And he fires the dude. But that's Musk. He's there on the roof doing that. And then, you know, later in the day, he'll be insisting that the designers of, say, the new Tesla have their desk on the assembly line. So they see what happens each step of the way for something they've designed. So he believes innovation comes from that iterative process of really being hands-on. You describe engineering at SpaceX and his dislikes of specifications or requirements from outside.

that they should be recommendations and not rules. Is that a common theme that outside rules don't necessarily apply? He has an algorithm that has five steps. And step one is question every rule and regulation. Somebody will say, he'll say, who made that regulation? I want to know the name of the person and what that person knows. He says, the only rules and regulations you have to follow are the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation. That's very interesting. Were you surprised at the amount of access he gave you and the transparency of letting you watch his decision making in real time and inviting you along, as you say, when he's going to make a big, big decision?

I was totally blown away by it. And even when he's like reaming people out or with his girlfriend or whatever it may be, he was just open and transparent. And you and your listeners would know of the Heisenberg problem, which is if I'm observing this, particle? Am I affecting its, you know, position, momentum, whatever it may be? And it never seemed to. I receded into the background and he hardly would notice me. But even on the night when he's plotting with his bankers to do a surprise close of the Twitter deal so he can deny the old Twitter leadership, their severance packet, I'm sitting there in the room and the lawyers are looking at me,

the bankers are looking at me, like, why is this? Why is this? Why is this? guy in this room. But must just gives a little nods that it's okay. And so you read about it in the book. You read about him deciding to make the $25,000 cheap car for Tesla, which hadn't been public, or starting XAI. He said nothing's off limits. You know, one of the things that people probably know him most for is Tesla and the car. And one of the most controversial parts of that car is full self-driving. or the ability of the car to actually drive itself, which it can't do yet. Why has he so focused on this mission of full self-driving? It's one of those things where he focuses intensely on the future,

and he keeps trying to force it to get there sometimes faster than it can. Every year from 2016 on, he says, we're going to have full self-driving within a year, and it always recedes. He's doing something phenomenally interesting now, and once again, I got to be in the secret meeting where that's decided, which is, even now, if you have full self-drive on a Tesla, it's done by algorithm. In other words, there's hundreds of thousands of lines of C++ coding that the engineers do that say things like if you see a red light, stop, and if there's a double yellow line, don't cross it. If you're making a left turn this way and there's a crosswalk, do this. And now he's doing it the way chat GPT does large language model predictive.

intelligence. And instead of making it rules-based, he's feeding billions of frames from Tesla car cameras into the supercomputers, Nvidia and now Dojo. And they're processing the visual data to do human imitation so that instead of doing it based on rules, it's done based on what millions of human drivers have done in such a situation. And that will be full service, full self driving 12, FSD 12, and it will be an AI version of it, basically an end-to-end neural network. And so that's still not ready yet. It's still going to take quite a while, but he's still hoping he'll have it done in a year. So you're trying to find the people who drive best and imitate what they're doing.

They're feeding in all the drivers, but he says he also has, as I've seen, a bunch of people, I think, some in Buffalo, New York, who are watching all the driver's videos and rating them, just like you would an Uber driver and say, this one's five-star, this one's two-star. So it not only drives like an average human, it will learn to drive like the best human drivers. You know, this is like come full circle. For me is that when I was in college studying industrial engineering, back in the day, they would ask us to go on to a floor where they make widgets. And as an industrial engineer, you're trying to find somebody who does it the best, can make 10 widgets an hour instead of only nine.

And so you go see that person and you want everybody else to imitate how that person makes a widget. This is exactly the same thing. No, human imitation is the way our neural networks work in our brain. I mean, you may be taught by your parents the rules for eating spaghetti and put your fork this way, but 99% of it is watching people eat spaghetti or speak language. And that's what his new, what he calls real world artificial intelligence is aiming to do, whether it be robots or self-driving cars. Is it because he's willing to take a chance on something new

where big companies hardly ever take chances on new things? He says big companies and governments and even societies like ours used to be risk takers, But now they got more regulators and risk takers, more referees than doers, and more people in the legal department and the finance department saying, no, no, that wouldn't be safe, stopping that. And he says, and sometimes I think he goes too far, he says, we got to be like America used to be. We have to build our own factory. We have to see what works. And we have to take risks. Well, you know, people who take risks have to be ready for failure, too. How does he deal with that? He blew up, you talked to him way back then, the first three Falcon rockets, blow up. By the way, Starship, last April, got three minutes into space, totally amazing. And then it blew up. I think that you've got to be able to learn from failures. And if you're a Boeing or a NASA, you just do not launch unless every single person is signed off on every single rest, which means Boeing hasn't been able to get a rocket with Ashton.

astronauts to the space station. This is Science Friday from WNNNIC Studios. You mentioned looking to the future and we talked about Mars. Do you think he will actually be able to get there? Yeah, we will get to Mars as a species, of course. And Starship, his rocket, I think someday we'll get there. He would hope it would be in 10 years. I would suspect that's Elon time and you double it at least.

I suspect, I mean, we've already gotten the rover to Mars, but I suspect that Starship will be making missions to Mars and perhaps even, you know, missions with humans to Mars 20 or so years from now. And you've got to keep your eye on that horizon. I mean, he does a meeting almost every week called Mars Colonizer, who is like, what are we going to wear when we get to Mars? How are we going to govern ourselves? And I have to pinch myself and say, these are real grownups, talking about what we're going to wear when we're living on Mars. But looking into the future like that kind of inspires you to get over the hump each day. And Walter, I bet you get asked this question all the time. But as an interviewer, I've got to ask it also.

Given all the controversy he stirs, do you think Elon is a good person overall? You know, there are moments when he's inspiring. and good. But as I always say about Musk, it's not as if there's only one person or personality you're dealing with. You're seeing a guy who can go through a lot of moods and personalities. Overall, he has single-handedly done more than any other individual to get us into the era of electric vehicles and to connect them to solar roofs and power walls. Likewise, he's single-handedly got us back into the era of space exploration and even make. making rockets that can land and be reused, which is the holy grail.

He's also, I think, moving us into the era of self-driving cars. All of these are huge advances for humanity. But I also look metaphorically at the rockets he's launched and the rubble he's left in his wake, the human costs, the way he can be callous and even cruel to people. And I say, does that make it worth it? Does that justify it? And I say, well, I wouldn't want to be that way. But then again, I say, but I'm never going to be the one who shoots a rocket that gets to Mars.

You've told us dramatically what Musk is doing. What's your next act? What are you working on, should we expect to see? You know, I love being back in my hometown of New Orleans, teaching the next generation of students here at Tulane. I teach the digital revolution and innovation. I also always am looking for a science person who might be the next inspiration. I've been looking recently at, I think, one of the people who's truly brought us into the 20th century science, who understood that chemistry was physics, and then she wins a Nobel Prize in both fields,

first woman to do so and first only to win in two sciences. And I think Marie Curie and the things that she had to push up against, to me, are totally fascinating. All right, so we'll look forward to that. Have me back on, please. Absolutely. You can come back on any time you'd like Walter. Walter Isaac's an author of the book, Elon Musk. It's a terrific read. Sit down.

It's like 90 little chunks in there that you can read pretty quickly and enjoy it for all it's worth. Walter is Professor of History at Tulane University. Thank you, Walter, for taking time to be with us today and for your work. Thank you, Ira. And that's it for today. Lots of folks help put this program together, including... Felissa Mayors, Danielle Johnson.

Beth Rami. Nehima Ahmed. Next time, a decades-long saga that resulted in the finding that a common ingredient in cold and allergy medicines doesn't really work. Thanks for listening. As they say, please like, comment, and subscribe on your favorite podcast platforms. I'm Charles Bergquist. We'll see you soon on Science Friday.