Introducing: On Musk with Walter Isaacson
America's Crime Lab
iHeartPodcasts and Kaleidoscope
4.8 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2023
⏱️ 3 minutes
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Summary
What is it like to shadow Elon Musk for two years? To sit courtside as he builds a rocket? Or tears apart an engineer? Or couch surfs at the homes of billionaires? And how on earth do you make sense of it all? Walter Isaacson is the biographer of giants: DaVinci, Franklin, Doudna, Jobs...and now Musk, former enfante terrible, rocket launcher, electric car innovator, and Twitter—er, X—disruptor, to put it gently. In this four part series, author Evan Ratliff (Mastermind, Longform Podcast) sits down with Isaacson to draw out the behind-the-scenes stories of this epic biography, and what the writer has learned as an outsider inside Silicon Valley.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I've got levels on you. All right, we're ready. Yeah. |
| 0:04.6 | Yeah. |
| 0:05.6 | Five weeks ago, I sat down with biographer Walter Isakson to try and unpack his new 600-page |
| 0:11.6 | biography of Elon Musk. Already some stories had jumped off the page. |
| 0:16.7 | That night he was deciding whether or not to allow Starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimea. |
| 0:24.0 | When Isakson set out to write this biography, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure. |
| 0:29.0 | Mus turns to his security guard, said, you got a pocket knife, and he takes off the floorboard himself. |
| 0:35.2 | He just prides it open. |
| 0:36.9 | What he got was a subject who was also volatile, increasingly so in chaos and conspiracy. |
| 0:43.0 | I mean I'm thinking it's idiotic to buy Twitter because he doesn't have a |
| 0:46.7 | fingertip feel for social emotional networks. |
| 0:50.1 | And so Isaacson did what he done with Steve Jobs and tried to capture it all through stories. |
| 0:57.0 | And I said, I want to be by your side at all times. |
| 1:00.0 | And I want for two years to have nothing off limits in a very low monotone he goes okay |
| 1:06.4 | It allowed him to see up close for better and worse how Musk operates |
| 1:11.4 | Musk is probably the richest couch surfer ever. |
| 1:14.0 | So he would stay with Larry Page and they'd stay up all night |
| 1:18.0 | and Musk would talk about how we have to be careful of AI. |
| 1:22.0 | And believe it or not, these fights... how we have to be careful of AI. |
| 1:22.8 | And believe it or not, these fights |
| 1:25.5 | cause them to quit speaking to each other. |
| 1:28.0 | He'd see some calm on a factory line or at a launch pad |
... |
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