Hi, I'm C. NBC producer Katie Kramer, today on Squack Pod.

The Elon Musk Book, finally on shelves.

The billionaire's biographer Walter

Isakson shares details from his two years at Musk's side.

He said, I just learned you punch people as hard as you can in the

nose if they're trying to beat you up. and that's a lesson he does every day.

What made Elon Musk who he is and what issues drive his genius and his hurdles?

Autism spectrum, as you know quite well, can be a wide variety of things.

But in his case, it's an awesome focus, an ability to just filter out everything when he's

on a problem, but also to filter out empathy and the feelings of emotions,

which is not great if you're running a social media network.

Isakson recounts run-ins with other billionaire innovators like Bill Gates.

At some point I get texts from Musk calling Gates

insane and using a word that begins with A and many other things.

He asks and answers, how did Musk get this much power and what's

really going on late at night at the office? There are times when he gets into a

dark late night ambient and red bull dark mode and he will shoot off

tweets, post on X at 3 in the morning and then realize he shouldn't have done some Paul Pelosi retweet.

All that, plus the other headlines that got us squawking today,

like the summer of strikes and the dream of AI.

I give you a trillion for it. Okay, You don't have a trillion? I don't have

apples. No. There you go. It's Tuesday, September 12th. Squawk Pond begins right now. Good morning everybody.

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