You know that scene in Godfather 3? It's probably the only one anyone remembers. Michael

Corleone is old, he's puttering around his kitchen in a cart again, complaining that

the mobster life just won't let him go.

Admittedly, not a great movie. But anyway, that is how I think about Elon Musk and reporter

Ashley Vance, who wrote a pretty exhaustive book about him in 2015.

Yeah, the book was from start to finish. I was probably about three years and that was

living and breathing a lot of real Elon Musk in a universe for lack of a better term.

Ashley got sick of talking about Musk. He was burned out.

Elon and I also had a really tense go of it after my book came out which made wanting

to write about him not that attractive of a proposition.

I just thought I was writing a book about an interesting person and some interesting

companies. I didn't expect it to be this almost inseparable part of my life forever after

that.

But the problem is once you have written the big Elon Musk biography, people like me want

to call you up and ask you questions. What was your first impression of him?

There were no handlers and when I would ask him a question, he just answered it so openly

and thoughtfully and kind of differently than the on-message billionaires and CEOs that

I was used to interview. He does have a slightly, I don't know, awkward, the right way.

He's not always like the easiest conversationalist especially at the beginning of a chat so

there was a little bit of that going on. But I was immediately struck like, oh this guy's

you might not agree with what he's going to say but he's actually saying what's on his

mind.

...