LinkedIn presents.

I'm Rufus Griskym, and this is the next big idea.

Today, Walter Isaacson spent the last two years

shadowing Elon Musk.

What did he learn?

In the summer of 2021, Walter Isaacson, the former time magazine editor and CNN CEO,

turned legendary biographer, who's written books about Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin,

Einstein, and DaVinci, was in the Hamptons when he got a call from Elon Musk.

At the time, Musk seemed to many people like a hero.

That year, he proved Tesla's skeptics wrong and shipped nearly a million vehicles.

As a result, Tesla's market cap soared past a trillion dollars, exceeding that of the next

nine largest auto companies combined.

It was also the year his other company, SpaceX, landed its 100th rocket standing up,

locked in an exclusive contract with NASA to put astronauts on the moon,

and launched mega constellations of Starlink communications satellites,

exploiting their near monopoly on launching payloads into space.

To cap it all off, Time Magazine named Musk its person of the year.

Oh, and he became the richest person in the world that year, passing Jeff Bezos.

On the phone, the two men discussed the prospect of Isaacson writing a biography of Musk.

Isaacson said he had two conditions.

One, I don't want to do it based on interviews.

I just want to spend two years at every meeting, nothing off limits, watch you all the time,

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