What it's like to write the biographies of Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried

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Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 9 November 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

Today's episode is a little different. NPR's David Folkenflik sits down with two writers – Walter Isaacson and Michael Lewis – to ask about their experiences writing biographies of Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried, respectively, and what it means to watch the person you're profiling become a villain in the public eye in real time. They discuss the process of getting close – or keeping their distance – from their sources for Elon Musk and Going Infinite, and confront the criticisms of how they do or don't address the wrongdoings of Musk and Bankman-Fried in their books.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. There are these two big biographies I'm seeing
0:05.8	everywhere at bookstores these days. One is Walter Isaacson's book on Elon Musk, just titled Elon Musk,
0:12.2	and the other is Michael Lewis's book on Sam Bankman-Fried called Going Infinite. Now, the two subjects have a lot in
0:18.7	common. They are big personalities who talked their way
0:21.8	into certain positions in the tech world. But both Isaacson and Lewis have a lot in common,
0:27.9	too. They've both written widely acclaimed books, tackling big topics, and they get really
0:32.9	close with their subjects. And lately, they've both been criticized for maybe getting too cozy with
0:39.7	their subjects, going maybe, you know, a little easy. And here's David Fulkenflex sat down with the two of them
0:44.8	a few weeks ago, back when Sam Bankman-Fried's trial first began, and asked them, how close is too
0:51.0	close? This message comes from Wise, the app for using money around the globe.
0:56.7	When you manage your money with Wise, you'll always get the mid-market exchange rate with no
1:01.8	hidden fees. Join millions of customers and visit Wise.com. T's and C's apply.
1:08.3	Walter Isaacson, your book is on Elon Musk, the force behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and
1:13.5	now X, what we all used to call Twitter. How did you convince Musk to give you so much access for this book?
1:20.2	It was a bit of a surprise because I talked to him by phone and I said, I don't want to do a book
1:27.0	based on five or ten or fifteen interviews. I don't want to do a book based on five or ten or fifteen
1:29.8	interviews. I don't want to do a conventional book like that. I want to be by your side for
1:34.8	two years and every meeting that I want to be in. Nothing excluded and he went, oh, okay.
1:41.9	And then I said, but here's the other part of the deal i don't want you
1:45.1	have any control over it and i'm not going to let you read it before it's published and he went oh okay
1:49.8	and i was kind of stunned and then a few minutes later somebody said why are you doing musk i said how do you
1:55.6	know he said well he just tweeted out walter's writing my biography and so that's how I got on the roller coaster somewhat
	...

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