If Books Could Kill - Elon Musk

00:00:00.000 This is like not a bit.

00:00:01.240 I like genuinely don't have a singer.

00:00:03.360 The only thing I could come up with is be straight, do grimes.

00:00:07.780 That's really offensive to straight people, I feel like.

00:00:10.380 By the way, the Beverage Center has maintained some element of meme status.

00:00:16.200 It's escaped containment.

00:00:17.100 I have people posting it at me. 0.99

00:00:20.740 I'm like, shit. 0.99

00:00:22.420 Just photos of Beverage Centers. 0.99

00:00:24.640 Well, I think that they're trying to make the accurate point that I am a bougie young man.

00:00:29.400 Well, yeah.

00:00:29.680 I also don't know how many people realize how bougie I can be.

00:00:32.960 Yeah, that's also, they don't know about your sweaters or your watches.

00:00:35.400 They don't know about the sweaters.

00:00:37.220 They don't know that I'm the light jacket king of New Jersey. 0.99

00:00:39.720 And you have a podcast with a gay man who only shops at Goodwill. 0.97

00:00:43.100 I feel like we're doing like gender is a social construct.

00:00:46.140 We're combating stereotypes so effectively.

00:00:48.960 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

00:00:50.160 I have one.

00:00:50.620 I haven't.

00:00:50.860 Okay.

00:00:51.020 I finally came up with a zinger, Peter.

00:00:52.800 Michael.

00:00:53.640 Peter.

00:00:54.260 What do you know about Elon Musk?

00:00:55.940 All I know is that I'm happy to finally have a reason to get a bumper sticker that says

00:00:59.940 I made this podcast after Elon went crazy.

00:01:15.400 This is Walter Isaacson's 2023 biography of Elon Musk.

00:01:23.560 Do you know anything about Walter Isaacson?

00:01:24.900 He did the Steve Jobs book, right?

00:01:26.900 Yeah.

00:01:27.100 He is a journalist, spent many years at Time Magazine, became the CEO and chairman of CNN

00:01:34.080 in 2001 for a bit.

00:01:36.140 Oh, I didn't know that.

00:01:36.800 He bopped around after that.

00:01:38.140 But what he's really known for is like these great men biographies.

00:01:43.260 He wrote one of Kissinger in 1992.

00:01:45.760 He did Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs.

00:01:49.320 And so this is his latest foray into the great man biography.

00:01:53.800 this massive biography of Elon Musk.

00:01:57.920 A big book about a very small man.

00:01:59.580 I imagine that you've heard of this book.

00:02:01.520 Yeah, I thought it was like kind of too fawning of an account,

00:02:04.700 kind of like the Michael Lewis, Sam Bankman-Fried book.

00:02:07.640 I wouldn't say that Isaacson is fawning.

00:02:10.660 He correctly identifies the vast majority of Elon Musk's issues.

00:02:17.400 He doesn't seem to weigh them that heavily against like the good aspects of Elon Musk as he sees them.

00:02:23.120 But what are those? I'm so ready to hear what the good aspects of Elon Musk are.

00:02:27.860 How dare you? He's the richest man in the world.

00:02:30.360 I'm also so proud of myself for being early on the Elon Musk hate train.

00:02:35.480 I was also early Elon Musk hater, although I don't know if I just got lucky on that.

00:02:40.720 What was it? What did it for you?

00:02:42.260 I just don't like how he is. You know, I just don't like the way that he carries himself in the world.

00:02:47.200 Seems weird. Undefeated.

00:02:48.300 Other issues with Isaacson's portrayal, Musk himself is obviously an unreliable narrator, not just in terms of, like, what happened and when, but also his motivations.

00:02:59.760 And Isaacson seems to both know this and not fully process it.

00:03:05.520 He will say, you know, he will point out that Elon has been misleading in certain ways, but he doesn't act like Elon is lying to him consistently.

00:03:14.340 And at various points, he just sort of tells Elon's story, right?

00:03:17.920 He interviewed many, many people for this, but he also spent a huge amount of time with

00:03:21.900 Elon.

00:03:22.600 A lot of the stories you're hearing are just sort of Elon side of things.

00:03:26.000 I feel like we see this with like powerful people all the time where there's like, yeah,

00:03:28.900 he lies.

00:03:29.860 But anyway, here's a thing that he said that we're going to take credulously for no particular

00:03:33.220 reason. 0.99

00:03:33.680 The big thesis here is that Elon is sort of a weirdo asshole, but also he couldn't have 0.99

00:03:41.080 accomplished everything that he's accomplished if he wasn't. 1.00

00:03:44.500 Oh.

00:03:44.740 I'm actually going to send you the final lines of the entire book.

00:03:49.180 So Isaacson says,

00:03:50.380 But would a restrained Musk accomplish as much as a Musk unbound?

00:03:54.460 Is being unfiltered and untethered integral to who he is?

00:03:58.240 Could you get the rockets to orbit or the transition to electric vehicles

00:04:01.500 without accepting all aspects of him, hinged and unhinged?

00:04:05.240 Sometimes great innovators are risk-seeking man-children who resist potty training.

00:04:09.640 They can be reckless, cringeworthy, sometimes even toxic.

00:04:12.400 They can also be crazy. Crazy enough to think they can change the world. 0.98

00:04:17.080 Yeah, this reads like a defense of him. 0.98

00:04:18.860 Crazy enough to think they can change the world. Are you in 10th grade? Please calm down with this.

00:04:24.780 This is like a very common theory of great men, right? That their excesses are necessary to achieve these incredible things.

00:04:31.900 And I think that we are meant to believe that the trade-off is worth it, right?

00:04:36.060 That it's worth tolerating someone like Elon because we get electric cars and space travel.

00:04:42.700 Right.

00:04:42.800 I think that's a coherent thesis.

00:04:44.980 I don't agree with it, but it's coherent.

00:04:47.100 Right.

00:04:47.440 Yeah.

00:04:47.620 But if you want to make that case, you have to reckon with what that tradeoff really is.

00:04:55.480 And I think this is the real big problem with Isaacson's book is that he is not very willing

00:05:02.500 to engage with what those tradeoffs are.

00:05:05.020 He very quickly references them and then skips over them.

00:05:08.840 And I think that leaves this book feeling sort of incomplete.

00:05:12.460 I think you also have to reckon with all of the things that he promised and didn't pan out as well.

00:05:16.260 And we will. And we will.

00:05:17.680 I mean you specifically. You have to reckon with me, Peter.

00:05:21.000 You in the next four hours.

00:05:22.700 Let's dive in to the prologue here.

00:05:26.380 Send you something else.

00:05:28.340 When he was 12, he was taken by bus to a wilderness survival camp known as a Veldschool.

00:05:33.500 It was a paramilitary Lord of the Flies, he recalls.

00:05:36.680 The kids were each given small rations of food and water,

00:05:39.200 and they were allowed, indeed encouraged, to fight over them.

00:05:42.240 Bullying was considered a virtue, his younger brother Kimball says.

00:05:45.440 The big kids quickly learned to punch the little ones in the face and take their stuff.

00:05:49.300 Elon, who was small and emotionally awkward, got beaten up twice.

00:05:52.580 He would end up losing 10 pounds.

00:05:54.380 Near the end of the first week, the boys were divided into two groups and told to attack each other.

00:05:58.900 It was so insane, mind-blowing, Musk recalls.

00:06:01.340 Every few years, one of the kids would die.

00:06:04.160 The counselors would recount such stories as warnings. 1.00

00:06:06.720 Don't be stupid like that dumb fuck who died last year, they would say. 1.00

00:06:09.840 Don't be the weak, dumb fuck. 1.00

00:06:11.880 Jesus, did he grow up in like the 1500s? 1.00

00:06:14.240 So right off the bat, you're being met with a story that just seems like it has to be bullshit. 0.99

00:06:20.200 Right. 0.98

00:06:20.700 Like, let's put our thinking caps on here.

00:06:22.960 There was a camp in South Africa where the children of well-off families frequently died.

00:06:28.800 Because this is probably just an urban legend that like the kids told each other that Elon has sort of changed in the retelling over the years.

00:06:34.460 Eve Fairbanks, who wrote a piece about the portions of the book that pertain to South Africa, she says that Veld School was a wilderness camp that most white South African children attended under apartheid.

00:06:46.340 She interviewed South Africans to see if anyone had a recollection similar to Elon's.

00:06:51.980 She said, nobody with whom I spoke remembered hearing about deaths at Veld School.

00:06:56.280 Feld School was all about discipline designed to prepare boys to join the military and, quote, fighting was discouraged.

00:07:03.180 There are other suspect stories here.

00:07:06.120 Isaacson says that as a teenager in the 80s, Musk and his brother Kimball were going to an anti-apartheid concert and, quote, had to wade through a pool of blood next to a dead person with a knife still sticking out of his brain.

00:07:17.640 Oh, my God.

00:07:18.620 Fairbanks spoke to a journalist who covered Johannesburg in the 80s.

00:07:22.680 They said that this was almost certainly a fabrication.

00:07:25.260 Because it would be enough of a news story that you'd be able to find evidence of it.

00:07:28.600 It's like a really big deal.

00:07:29.680 Presumably.

00:07:30.160 I mean, you know, there was a lot of violence in apartheid South Africa, but there are some

00:07:36.220 weird things here.

00:07:36.960 Like, it's notable that there were no official anti-apartheid concerts in South Africa due

00:07:41.760 to the government censorship.

00:07:43.360 Right.

00:07:43.540 This was not a free society.

00:07:45.000 Right.

00:07:45.160 In 1985, there was the concert in the park, which wasn't openly political, but was like

00:07:50.940 a big concert that had a protest vibe because it wasn't segregated. It was also famously peaceful.

00:07:57.700 Elon would have been 13. It doesn't quite line up. In general, though, Isaacson seems to want

00:08:03.380 to convey that Elon's childhood in South Africa was like very brutal and dangerous. He does it

00:08:09.360 without ever really examining how much of this might have happened or not happened. And he doesn't

00:08:14.480 dive into like the racialized elements of this, which is fucking crazy when you're talking about 0.98

00:08:19.280 apartheid South Africa. Here's a passage about why Musk's maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, 0.92

00:08:26.400 moved to South Africa. From the Netherlands? What were they originally? He was in Canada.

00:08:32.320 Oh, okay. With his quirky conservative populist views, Haldeman came to believe that the Canadian

00:08:37.700 government was usurping too much control over the lives of individuals and that the country had gone

00:08:42.500 soft. So in 1950, he decided to move to South Africa, which was still ruled by a white apartheid

00:08:48.260 regime okay so they so he's like a make canada great again guy in this day and age when someone

00:08:53.760 says quirky conservative populist views right and the year is 1950 and he left to go to south africa 0.96

00:09:00.460 alarm bells should be blaring in your fucking head when right when you read something like this right 0.97

00:09:05.640 his grandfather was living in canada in the 40s he was an avowed anti-communist who appeared to 0.99

00:09:11.460 be a nazi sympathizer he was active in the technocrat political movement until he resigned

00:09:17.460 his position in the organization he was in after they expressed support for the Soviet Union following

00:09:23.480 the German invasion. He then joins the Social Credit Party of Canada, where he defends their

00:09:28.620 party newspaper's decision to publish the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Oh, my God. We actually know

00:09:33.880 a good amount about his beliefs because he self-published like a mini book booklet in 1960.

00:09:39.420 According to reporting by The Atlantic from a couple of years ago, he moved to South Africa

00:09:43.960 because, quote, he believed that apartheid South Africa was destined to lead white Christian

00:09:49.300 civilization in its fight against the international conspiracy of Jewish bankers and the hordes of

00:09:54.980 colored people they controlled. That sounds out of context, Peter. I don't know if we can conclude

00:09:58.800 anything from that. Let's just say that it's quirky and move on. He also ignores the timing

00:10:03.860 of the move. He says that they moved when South Africa, quote, was still ruled by a white apartheid

00:10:09.240 regime but the atlantic piece pointed out that in july 1950 south africa instituted arguably its

00:10:15.540 foundational apartheid laws one requiring people to register their race and the other segregating

00:10:21.780 urban housing by race the family moved one month later holy shit so to say that they were like

00:10:27.980 moving to south africa which was still ruled by an apartheid regime it's like no right this guy 0.82

00:10:33.300 who we know is a weird racist moves there right on the ground floor it is notable that these

00:10:39.160 are the politics that he came to eventually. So it is important context for like the kinds

00:10:44.340 of conversations that they were presumably having at the dinner table as a kid.

00:10:47.060 I feel like it's important context regardless. Isaacson does not see Elon's upbringing in this

00:10:54.480 extremely reactionary place by this extremely reactionary family as like a meaningful part

00:11:01.440 of his story. And also it's clear that Elon has this narrative about himself that he overcame

00:11:06.240 bullying and this really rough upbringing. But it also sounds like a lot of the bullying

00:11:10.620 doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny. I'll say this. Regardless of what is or is not true

00:11:15.720 about his experience of South Africa, what is true almost certainly is that he was subjected

00:11:20.880 to pretty brutal abuse at the hands of his father, Errol Musk. Errol would brutally berate

00:11:26.660 Elon on a regular basis. There's a story where Elon is beaten so severely by bullies at school

00:11:31.740 that he's hospitalized. And here's what Errol says about it. After the school fight, Errol

00:11:37.580 sided with the kid who pummeled Elon's face. The boy had just lost his father to suicide and Elon

00:11:42.980 had called him stupid, Errol says. Elon had this tendency to call people stupid. How could I 1.00

00:11:47.720 possibly blame that child? Oh, this is fucked. Right. So he's basically, my kid deserved it 1.00

00:11:52.100 to get like kicked on the stairs or whatever. Although it is fucked up to do that to a kid 0.99

00:11:55.860 whose father just died. Here's the thing. We have two competing unreliable narrators here in Elon 0.99

00:12:00.840 and Errol both of whom are known bullshitters right so it's hard to say but it seems like both

00:12:06.880 parties agree on like a basic story here that he was beaten so severely that he was hospitalized

00:12:13.420 he returns home from the hospital and Errol berates Elon for an hour Isaacson says that both

00:12:20.760 Elon and Kimball Musk who no longer speak to their father say that his claim that Elon provoked the

00:12:26.500 attack is unhinged and that the perpetrator ended up being sent to juvenile prison for it.

00:12:32.160 They say that their father is a volatile, fabulist, regularly spinning tales that are

00:12:36.860 larded with fantasies, sometimes calculated, at other times delusional.

00:12:41.220 This also sounds like Elon now.

00:12:42.500 So who does that sound like?

00:12:43.940 You don't want to do too much armchair psychology here, but a volatile and delusional fabulist. 0.92

00:12:50.200 With racist views. 0.96

00:12:51.640 Right.

00:12:51.840 Right. One way or another, it is pretty clear that Elon is molded by the abuse that he endured

00:12:57.600 at the hands of his father. Different people in his life frame it in different ways, but all of

00:13:01.980 them say that this has left him with like limited empathy and that he goes to dark places mentally.

00:13:07.820 His second wife, Tallulah Riley, said that he would wake up thrashing and recount abusive

00:13:13.620 things that his father said to him. She said, quote, he's retained a childlike, almost stunted

00:13:18.960 side inside the man he's still there as a child a child standing in front of his dad both of his

00:13:25.180 ex-wives said that elon would say abusive things to them that had been said to him by his father

00:13:31.880 i hate that you're like drumming up emotions in me of like feeling bad for this person it'll fade

00:13:35.800 over time it would be such a sad human story if he wasn't like one of the most powerful people 0.80

00:13:40.040 in the world and like inflicting this garbage on other people if he was just a guy you'd be like

00:13:44.020 yeah sad somebody like this is just never gonna have like a stopping point right because he's 0.97

00:13:48.520 like he's trying to fill some fucking hole within himself that just can't be filled a quote from a 0.75

00:13:53.080 friend he was not hardwired to have empathy and this is a big part of theory of musk uh that he 0.98

00:14:01.320 just has like limited empathy and it's very interesting how little this basic observation

00:14:07.640 seems to factor into his analysis of elon's claims about wanting to better humanity right 0.92

00:14:14.700 All of Elon's big projects, going into space, electric cars, Hyperloop, all that shit.

00:14:21.620 Elon tells a story where he is trying to like get humanity to this very important next stage, 0.55

00:14:29.360 right, that we need to get to.

00:14:30.800 And it's all for the betterment of humanity.

00:14:33.120 And yet Isaacson admits that Musk is not an empathetic guy.

00:14:37.840 So like, what does that tell you about his claim that he's just trying to help out the

00:14:42.040 human race?

00:14:42.680 Because what you're actually looking at is a pattern of, like, selfish behavior, but 0.95

00:14:46.600 somehow you're kind of, like, believing his narrative that it's, like, it's all for the

00:14:49.740 greater good.

00:14:50.460 I'll lighten the mood a little bit.

00:14:51.940 Here we go.

00:14:52.740 A little more.

00:14:53.500 The science fiction book that most influenced his wonder years was Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's

00:14:57.340 Guide to the Galaxy.

00:14:58.440 The jaunty and wry tale helped shape Musk's philosophy and added a dollop of droll humor

00:15:03.240 to his serious mean.

00:15:04.840 The Hitchhiker's Guide, he says, helped me out of my existential depression, and I soon

00:15:09.040 realized it was amazingly funny in all sorts of subtle ways.

00:15:12.680 Elon Musk trying to figure out The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is my favorite B-plot

00:15:19.680 in the Isaacson biography.

00:15:21.580 Have you ever read it?

00:15:22.800 No.

00:15:23.180 He's like, I soon realized it was amazingly funny in all sorts of subtle ways.

00:15:27.540 The Hitchhiker's Guide, I haven't read it in like 30 years, but it's like a comedy.

00:15:31.880 It's like overtly, it's satirical.

00:15:34.880 All right, keep going.

00:15:36.260 He says, the denizens of the galaxy are trying to figure out the answer to the ultimate

00:15:40.180 question of life, the universe, and everything.

00:15:42.120 They build a supercomputer that after 7 million years spouts out the answer, 42.

00:15:47.320 When that provokes a befuddled howl, the computer replies, that quite definitely is the answer.

00:15:52.360 I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you've never actually known what

00:15:55.860 the question is.

00:15:56.780 That lesson stuck with Musk.

00:15:58.500 I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are

00:16:02.560 better able to ask the questions about the answer, which is the universe. 0.98

00:16:06.520 Oh, that's dumb. 0.98

00:16:07.700 What is he saying? 1.00

00:16:09.100 What is he talking about here?

00:16:10.500 So The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is like a sci-fi satire of capitalism.

00:16:16.300 Like the entire thing is predicated around the demolition of the Earth to build an interstellar superhighway.

00:16:22.720 The whole 42 thing, the idea that the answer to everything is 42, it's meant to be an absurdity.

00:16:29.500 This really simple number is the answer to this grand question.

00:16:33.360 Douglas Adams has said, I just thought of like what would be kind of the silliest number, right? 0.99

00:16:38.800 Anyway, so now we have this guy choosing presidents for us because he's too stupid to understand like a book that is widely read by children. 0.99

00:16:47.960 I was 12 years old when I read this. 0.99

00:16:50.240 Nobody show Elon Musk Starship Troopers.

00:16:52.480 It's like RoboCop.

00:16:54.520 Anyway, he's into computers and programming at a young age.

00:16:58.000 He programmed a rudimentary video game at the age of 12.

00:17:01.120 At the age of 17, he leaves South Africa on his own for Canada.

00:17:07.760 Did you send you something?

00:17:08.340 A myth has grown that Musk, because his father was on and off successful, arrived in North America in 1989 with a lot of money, perhaps pockets filled with emeralds.

00:17:17.200 Errol at times encouraged that perception.

00:17:19.360 But in fact, what Errol got from the Zambian emerald mine had become worthless years earlier.

00:17:23.960 When Elon left South Africa, his father gave him $2,000 in traveler's checks, and his mother provided him with another $2,000 by cashing out a stock account she had opened with the money she won in a beauty contest as a teenager.

00:17:34.660 Otherwise, what he mainly had with him when he arrived in Montreal was a list of his mother's

00:17:38.800 relatives he had never met.

00:17:40.400 There is a sort of storyline around Elon that you'll see floating around that he comes from

00:17:44.800 real wealth.

00:17:45.920 That does not appear to be true.

00:17:47.300 All right.

00:17:47.500 The emerald mine thing that people always talk about is like kind of an urban legend

00:17:51.060 because like it didn't actually produce that much money, right?

00:17:53.140 Yeah.

00:17:53.660 I mean, it existed.

00:17:55.440 And Elon at times has entirely denied the emerald mine thing.

00:18:00.120 Right.

00:18:00.360 A couple of years ago, he tweeted, quote, the fake emerald mine thing is so annoying.

00:18:03.940 Like, where exactly is this thing?

00:18:06.020 Right.

00:18:06.160 But in an interview in 2014, he said, quote, my father had a share in an emerald mine in

00:18:11.160 Zambia.

00:18:11.740 So the fact that he denies parts of it, I think, has sort of fed the story that he actually

00:18:19.040 did come with a bunch of money.

00:18:20.920 Right.

00:18:21.180 Errol gave an interview to The Sun where he claimed that he sent Elon to the States with

00:18:26.000 plenty of money.

00:18:27.160 He also said that this was his idea, which Elon denies. 0.90

00:18:30.560 It's hard to know what's up because both of these guys are serial liars.

00:18:34.580 But it's pretty safe to say that Elon wasn't particularly wealthy when he arrived in Canada.

00:18:40.240 And he's not like the heir to an emerald mine in the way that people sometimes throw that around.

00:18:43.900 I mean, he definitely grew up fine, but he wasn't like one of Trump's kids or something.

00:18:48.280 So the thing about Errol is that he had some money, but he was up and down.

00:18:53.240 He was not consistently successful in business. 0.85

00:18:55.940 He was also like a degenerate gambler.

00:18:57.980 right there's an anecdote about a time when he thought he could beat roulette and i think it was

00:19:04.760 kimble came down to the kitchen and he's got like a model roulette wheel and he's trying and he's

00:19:11.580 and he tells him like i'm seeing how microwave microwave waves affect what isn't that like the

00:19:17.940 least beatable game at a casino unless you get the microwave waves flowing in the right direction

00:19:23.620 Unless you're cheating.

00:19:24.600 Yeah.

00:19:24.940 Elon does well on the SATs, but nothing insane.

00:19:28.520 730 math, 670 verbal.

00:19:30.840 That's a 1,400, folks.

00:19:32.060 Better than I got.

00:19:33.180 I did better, baby.

00:19:34.160 Wait, you got better than that?

00:19:35.260 Really? 1.00

00:19:35.540 Yeah, I'm like smart as shit, dude. 1.00

00:19:36.800 Oh, now you host a podcast? 0.99

00:19:38.120 And now you live in New Jersey and host a podcast?

00:19:39.800 My life is a series of like downward trajectories and then a standardized test.

00:19:44.560 On the left, a lot of people are like, we need to like abolish standardized testing.

00:19:47.460 I'm like, please no.

00:19:48.260 You leave children like me behind.

00:19:50.040 Right.

00:19:50.320 The smart yet lazy kids. 0.70

00:19:51.760 Yeah.

00:19:51.940 If you tell me you must perform consistently over the span of three years, it will never

00:19:56.900 happen.

00:19:57.440 But if you tell me you've got a test Saturday, I am on it.

00:20:00.940 This is such a good dynamic for the podcast because I was very hardworking, but also kind 0.98

00:20:04.980 of dumb.

00:20:05.920 Is this why we work so well? 1.00

00:20:07.780 Yeah.

00:20:08.360 So he goes to Queens College, Canada.

00:20:11.620 He likes gaming.

00:20:13.240 He tries to network with important people, him and his brother Kimball, does a summer

00:20:17.760 internship at Scotiabank.

00:20:19.780 And then in 1992, he transfers to Penn, double majors in physics and business.

00:20:26.260 Isn't that your alma mater?

00:20:27.220 Didn't you go to Penn?

00:20:27.760 I went to Penn for law school.

00:20:29.040 Yes.

00:20:29.360 Oh, okay.

00:20:30.160 Isaacson says, quote, he had conceived by then a life vision that he would repeat like a mantra.

00:20:36.720 I thought about the things that will truly affect humanity, Musk says.

00:20:40.620 I came up with three, the internet, sustainable energy, and space travel.

00:20:45.660 Whatever.

00:20:45.980 You read this and you're like, this feels a little convenient, right?

00:20:49.040 That like in the 1990s, Elon identified these three things that happen to be the three things

00:20:54.200 that he works on now as like the most important things in the world.

00:20:57.780 I found an interview that Musk did with GQ in 2008 where he told the same story, except

00:21:04.320 in that interview, he said they were space travel, electric cars, and solar power.

00:21:08.740 So no mention of the internet.

00:21:10.740 It seems like he's just sort of telling variations of this story depending on what he's working

00:21:14.220 on, right?

00:21:14.940 This is like us doing our like worst takes of the year episode and just the three most

00:21:18.000 recent articles that were published. Right. I came up with three, space travel, electric cars,

00:21:23.740 and not enough racism. Right. And I've decided to fix all of them. Elon and Kimball's brother

00:21:29.480 head to Silicon Valley at this point to try to materialize an idea that they have to basically

00:21:35.180 put the yellow pages online. They put a directory of businesses online with maps that provide

00:21:41.440 directions to them. The company is called Zip2. I'm going to send you a bit. It says,

00:21:46.580 From the very beginning of his career, Musk was a demanding manager,

00:21:50.340 contemptuous of the concept of work-life balance.

00:21:53.140 At Zip2 and every subsequent company, he drove himself relentlessly all day

00:21:57.280 and through much of the night without vacations, and he expected others to do the same.

00:22:01.220 His only indulgence was allowing breaks for intense video game binges.

00:22:05.120 The Zip2 team won second place in a national quake competition.

00:22:08.800 They would have come in first, he says, but one of them crashed his computer by pushing it too hard.

00:22:13.960 This also sounds fake, but the part about him being a terrible manager seems true.

00:22:17.880 So the part about him being a demanding manager is the substantive portion here.

00:22:21.900 But I do want to talk about him being good at Quake for a second.

00:22:24.820 Elon has elsewhere claimed that he was one of the best Quake players in the world at the time.

00:22:30.200 Quake was, you know, one of the first first person shooters.

00:22:32.500 Yeah, I was a big Quake head.

00:22:33.660 That was like the grandson of Doom, basically, in like Wolfenstein 3D.

00:22:37.620 The consensus best player in this era was a dude who went by the online handle Thresh.

00:22:44.480 And he has basically said Elon was one of the early players who played a lot, but that he, quote, wasn't very good.

00:22:53.520 Brutal.

00:22:55.100 The competition story is basically unverified.

00:22:58.140 The idea that their team won second place in a national Quake competition.

00:23:02.520 It's sort of hard to believe that someone crashed a computer and that's why they lost.

00:23:06.100 My computer's never played Quake before.

00:23:08.060 E-gaming was not a thing in the 90s.

00:23:10.040 And so there weren't really national competitions the way there are now.

00:23:12.880 Right.

00:23:13.040 But yeah, this is just another thing where I think Isaacson's like, wow, yeah.

00:23:16.340 And he has like zero interest in whether or not this is actually true.

00:23:19.340 Because he's actually missing like what should be a big thread of the biography that like 0.99

00:23:22.920 this is a guy who cannot tell the fucking truth and lies about the weirdest things. 0.98

00:23:27.280 Yeah, exactly. 0.99

00:23:27.600 You could just say like I was really into Quake at the time and I was pretty good.

00:23:30.560 Right.

00:23:30.740 I was one of the best in the world. 1.00

00:23:31.860 Like you don't have to say that shit. 1.00

00:23:33.080 Yeah, no one cares. 1.00

00:23:33.960 I know it feels like I'm nitpicking, right? 0.84

00:23:35.500 Because I'm sort of skipping past the fact that he's like an awful manager who hates

00:23:39.220 work-life balance and talking about how he's lying about Quake.

00:23:42.300 But yeah, this is what I think Isaacson is missing, that there's this like B-plot that

00:23:47.240 is always happening that Isaacson isn't even aware of.

00:23:50.380 Right.

00:23:50.640 Where Elon is just constantly throwing in little lies.

00:23:54.400 He like needs something from this.

00:23:55.980 Like it's fulfilling some sort of weird emotional need and it deserves some like exploration.

00:24:00.020 Yeah.

00:24:00.220 We've seen this more recently too with newer video games.

00:24:03.720 but he has to believe that if he were to do something, he would be one of the best in the

00:24:07.800 world at it. Oh, it's so, God, it's such loser energy. It really is. I like video games, 0.94

00:24:13.400 but also it's so pathetic to have this be your thing that you have to lie about. 0.96

00:24:18.180 Exactly. I would say as the world's ninth best ball ex-pit player, I don't have to lie and say 0.81

00:24:22.920 that I'm the second best. I'm happy with my standing. So the Zip2 business gets bought out,

00:24:28.160 big buyout and it leaves elon with 22 million dollars and he becomes a worse person

00:24:35.260 every dollar just makes him like one percent shittier his next venture in 1999 is x.com

00:24:42.760 not the one today but the original isn't like a paypal payments something something yep yep i'm

00:24:48.880 gonna send it to you send this to you do not click the link it automatically created a link

00:24:53.540 to x.com. Oh yeah, of course. That will bring you to a hardcore pornography site, formerly known as

00:24:58.300 Twitter. Okay. His concept for x.com was grant. It would be a one-stop everything store for all

00:25:03.720 financial needs, banking, digital purchases, checking, credit cards, investments, and loans.

00:25:08.680 Transactions would be handled instantly with no waiting for payments to clear. His insight was

00:25:13.000 that money is simply an entry into a database, and he wanted to devise a way that all transactions

00:25:17.220 were securely recorded in real time. If you fix all the reasons why a consumer would take money

00:25:21.720 out of the system, he says, then it will be the place where all the money is. And that would make

00:25:25.960 it a multi-trillion dollar company. Honestly, I kind of wish this existed. Well, yeah. I mean,

00:25:30.740 but that's the thing is sometimes he will say something that's actually insightful about

00:25:34.440 business and he does. Like he's not a total dipshit. But then sometimes he'll say shit like 0.99

00:25:39.960 this where it's just like, well, yeah, but you have to actually do this, right? Like transactions 0.95

00:25:45.480 will be handled instantly. What does that mean? How, right? If you fix all the reasons why a

00:25:51.660 consumer would take money out of the system then it will be the place where all the money is it's

00:25:56.800 like yeah you're i guess that's an idea right if there was a place and no one ever took their money

00:26:02.160 out yeah well eventually all the money would be in there right it's like elon you are the smartest

00:26:07.180 man in the world this is also such a pattern for him because with the hyperloop he was like well

00:26:11.920 it's basically the same infrastructure as a high-speed rail but you just need to take out

00:26:15.680 all of the parts that cost a lot of money magically saying it would be cheaper to do it cheaper yes

00:26:20.440 He, after taxes, he has $16 million from the sale of Zip2.

00:26:24.880 He invests $12 million of it into X.com.

00:26:28.840 Oh, wow.

00:26:29.240 This is a very important Elon thing.

00:26:31.040 As rich as he is, he doesn't seem to care about his own personal wealth in and of itself.

00:26:37.340 He was very willing to just keep risking all of it on the next venture over and over and

00:26:42.900 over again.

00:26:43.480 This next anecdote we've actually discussed before in the context of the Sam Bankman Freed

00:26:50.800 episode, but it is so funny that I'm going to share it again.

00:26:56.480 And also, I think it's relevant to this episode because it's in this book.

00:26:59.800 I hope it's polycule related.

00:27:01.900 Some people were playing a high stakes game of Texas Hold'em.

00:27:05.080 Although Musk was not a card player, he pulled up to the table.

00:27:08.160 There were all these nerds and sharpsters who were good at memorizing cards and calculating

00:27:11.700 odds, Levchin says.

00:27:13.360 Elon just proceeded to go all in on every hand and lose.

00:27:16.720 Then he would buy more chips and double down.

00:27:19.120 Eventually, after losing many hands, he went all in and won.

00:27:22.520 Then he said, right, fine, I'm done.

00:27:25.220 It would be a theme in his life.

00:27:26.980 Avoid taking chips off the table.

00:27:28.820 Keep risking them.

00:27:30.300 This is just the story of someone losing over and over again at Texas Hold'em.

00:27:34.340 For people who aren't card players, what they're describing is a situation where you put in,

00:27:40.120 say a hundred dollars and you lose it like four times consecutively and then the fifth time you

00:27:47.340 win what does that mean it means you're down like 300 bucks it's such an interesting part of the

00:27:54.920 book because it does feel like a microcosm of what isaacson is bad at it's like he doesn't know

00:28:01.180 quite enough about this to know that elon just sucks at poker and that all this anecdote is 0.98

00:28:07.880 right is the tale of a dipshit who doesn't understand poker he's like a rich sucker 0.98

00:28:12.500 story basically right yeah exactly um but isaacson is like he loves risk like that's all he takes 0.77

00:28:18.380 from it because he just doesn't he he doesn't really know what he's looking at here because

00:28:21.840 the story is also about somebody who just refuses to change their strategy given like new conditions

00:28:26.940 like it's clear that wasn't working and he just kept doing the same thing i have seen people do

00:28:31.640 this and the only thing they have in common generally is that they're action junkies that

00:28:36.860 they just want to keep gambling. They have a gambling addiction. All right, I am going to

00:28:40.940 send you a bit. One of Musk's management tactics, then as later, was to set an insane deadline and

00:28:46.360 drive colleagues to meet it. He did that in the fall of 1999 by announcing, in what one engineer

00:28:51.160 called a dick move, that X.com would launch to the public on Thanksgiving weekend. In the weeks

00:28:56.320 leading up to that, Musk prowled the office each day, including Thanksgiving, in a nervous and

00:29:01.080 nervous-making frenzy and slept under his desk most nights. One of the engineers who went home

00:29:05.600 at 2 a.m. Thanksgiving morning, got a call from Musk at 11 a.m. asking him to come back in

00:29:10.500 because another engineer had worked all night and was not running on full thrusters anymore.

00:29:14.960 Such behavior produced drama and resentments, but also success. When the product went live

00:29:19.500 that weekend, all the employees were marched to a nearby ATM where Musk inserted an X.com debit

00:29:25.260 card. Cash word out and the team celebrated. This is very important in the process. Something

00:29:31.000 that consistently comes up is that elon seems to only be able to really get things done himself

00:29:37.260 when there's like a crisis right an imminent deadline or something else high stakes and so

00:29:42.800 when there isn't one he will create one yeah if you read this story isaac seems like it produced

00:29:49.000 results but what results yeah they launched this product thanksgiving weekend and so was that better

00:29:55.880 than launching it a week later it also seems like he's someone who because he does this like i'm

00:30:00.800 willing to work. Yeah, exactly. He expects other people to do it. But he is he's the owner of the

00:30:05.160 company. So if the company does well, he makes millions and millions of dollars. The framing

00:30:09.600 that this is success is like capitalism brain rot. Yeah. Like the question is whether this was

00:30:15.340 necessary to achieve their goals and whether those goals made sense and also whether these people

00:30:21.280 were adequately rewarded for their sacrifices. Right. Right. This is like one of Isaacson's

00:30:26.360 big errors. He really seems to believe that this sort of cruelty is like a necessary component

00:30:33.120 for great men building great things. The only person I will let get away with this behavior

00:30:37.560 is James Cameron. I'm canceling everybody else. Well, yeah, because he went down to the Titanic.

00:30:43.880 Yeah. I mean, that's real results. So after a bit, X.com merges with the company that would

00:30:50.960 shortly become paypal and musk becomes ceo of the resulting company this is the beginning of what's

00:30:58.840 now referred to as like the paypal mafia the group of early paypal employees and founders many of

00:31:04.880 whom went on to much silicon valley success uh peter thiel david sacks right i'm now gonna share

00:31:11.800 with you a story that has no purpose other than being fucking hilarious which video game is he

00:31:17.620 lying about now so this is a story about peter teal getting into elon musk's mclaren which is 0.75

00:31:23.720 sort of the fancy car he bought himself after his zip 2 sale so what can this car do teal asked

00:31:29.520 watch this musk replied pulling into the fast lane and flooring the accelerator the rear axle

00:31:34.720 broke and the car spun around hit an embankment and flew in the air like a flying saucer parts

00:31:39.560 of the body shredded watch this and then immediately crashed both of them are fine

00:31:46.640 i am now going to send you a famous drill tweet yeah i was just about to say this yeah just just 0.77

00:31:53.620 read the drill tweet here so long suckers i rev up my motorcycle and create a huge cloud of smoke 0.61

00:31:59.560 when the cloud dissipates i'm lying completely dead on the pavement yes 0.70

00:32:03.040 i immediately thought of this tweet oh my god watch this watch this watch this and just 0.86

00:32:10.320 immediately crashes the car is so fucking good that's also kind of a metaphor for what he did 0.91

00:32:15.240 buying Twitter and stuff. He's like, watch this. Exactly. Runs it into the ground. It's not just 0.98

00:32:20.140 a dunk. That's actually an important metaphor. All right. I sent you another thing. Musk insisted

00:32:24.740 that the company's name should be X.com with PayPal as merely one of its subsidiary brands.

00:32:30.000 He even tried to rebrand the payment system X PayPal. There was a lot of pushback. PayPal had

00:32:36.440 become a trusted brand name, like a good pal who's helping you to get paid. Focus groups showed that

00:32:40.920 the name X.com, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about

00:32:45.780 in polite company. But Musk was unwavering and remains so to this day. If you want to just be a

00:32:51.280 niche payment system, PayPal is better, he said. But if you want to take over the world's financial

00:32:55.640 system, then X is the better name. It sounds like a porn site. Dude, it's not good. His belief that 0.97

00:33:02.480 X is like a cool name is so funny. It's classic Elon. The things that he thinks are cool are

00:33:08.480 are generally speaking things that like a 12 year old thinks is cool also x paypal sounds like

00:33:13.200 he used to be my friend like my ex pal i can't even talk this is just common sense when you when

00:33:18.460 you hear x.com it's like what what is that yeah he's like oh if you want to take over the world's

00:33:23.360 financial system then x is the better name no it's not dude do you know where he got this from 0.98

00:33:27.020 because didn't he like name one of his kids x as well yeah he just likes like sci-fi shit and 0.75

00:33:32.520 his brain is trapped in childhood to some degree i mean that's that's all there is to it later on 0.93

00:33:38.240 Thiel and the other PayPal mafia guys secretly commission a study that shows that the PayPal

00:33:44.620 brand is more valuable.

00:33:46.480 And then they show it to Musk and he gets mad and he retaliates by stripping the brand

00:33:50.360 from the website.

00:33:51.420 Really?

00:33:52.080 God.

00:33:52.640 Isaacson says, during the merger, Musk kept insisting that X.com had close to twice as

00:33:57.880 many users as PayPal.

00:33:59.980 And Levchin, who's one of the PayPal guys, would check with its engineers and get the

00:34:04.380 real number.

00:34:05.340 Elon didn't just exaggerate.

00:34:06.880 He made it up, Levchin says.

00:34:08.400 No way.

00:34:09.180 It was what his father would have done.

00:34:10.980 That's Isaacson.

00:34:12.020 Levchin also says, Elon will say crazy stuff, but every once in a while, he'll surprise

00:34:16.680 you by knowing way more than you do about your own specialty.

00:34:19.720 I think a huge part of the way he motivates people are these displays of sharpness, which 0.96

00:34:23.960 people don't expect from him because they mistake him for a bullshitter or goofball.

00:34:28.100 I've never heard him say anything that shows any expertise.

00:34:31.240 Maybe not, but I actually think this is really important to understand because Elon is a

00:34:35.640 serial bullshitter right but he is in some ways very smart and capable he's a very fast learner 0.94

00:34:41.420 and he will hyper fixate on shit and focus on understanding it until he does and the result 0.98

00:34:48.340 is that he will often have a very detailed knowledge about certain projects and certain 0.99

00:34:52.340 aspects of his companies and the bullshitter and the guy who knows a lot of rocket science

00:34:59.940 are the same guy right because he has the same amount of confidence whether he's lying or telling

00:35:04.040 the truth. I actually think that almost like the magic of his appeal, right? Like when I look at

00:35:09.960 the widespread appeal of Elon Musk circa 2015 or whatever, I'm a little bit baffled. But I think

00:35:17.200 what's happening is a lot of people view his bullshitting and his like big dreams and the

00:35:23.680 things that he's capable of as like part of like a mosaic, right? And I think that's how Isaacson

00:35:28.440 views him too. It feels to me from the outside that the ratio of knowledge to bullshit has also 0.96

00:35:34.880 shifted over time. His ego has reached a different place. Right. Right. So Musk was too difficult to 0.98

00:35:40.760 deal with as CEO. And so they coup him out in 2000 per Isaacson. And this seems true. He doesn't

00:35:48.320 really hold a grudge about this. He seems to accept that he was sort of outmaneuvered. That

00:35:51.760 is actually interesting. But he becomes very interested in control of his companies in future

00:35:56.820 projects because is he still friends with sax and teal and stuff yeah he maintains ties with them

00:36:01.040 in 2002 paypal is acquired by ebay and musk of course still has shares and that leaves him very

00:36:08.700 rich something in the ballpark of 250 million okay and so at this point he's sort of adrift

00:36:14.100 he has a bunch of cash and grand ambitions he claims that he realizes that nasa has no plans

00:36:21.600 to go to mars and that kind of shocks him he does some early research and then he founds spacex in

00:36:28.380 2002 god and he starts hiring competent engineers people are so obsessed with mars for like no 0.97

00:36:34.040 fucking reason i just don't get like there's no reason to do it other than like dick measuring 0.81

00:36:39.400 no it's uh the next step in human civilization obviously the next planet to go to the key is to 0.99

00:36:44.940 start ruining this one as quickly as possible he's actually doing an incredible pr move of making

00:36:49.520 himself so prominent on earth that the planet itself becomes intolerable and that we're like

00:36:56.700 just send me to mars it is very funny that all these guys like we have we have a habitable planet

00:37:00.820 and they don't seem to care about like the fact that we're destroying it they're really excited

00:37:04.220 about this like there's like radioactive dust ball that's fucking six months on a spaceship away

00:37:10.520 this is from isaacson spacex's goal he said in an early presentation was to launch its first rocket

00:37:15.820 by September 2003 and send an unmanned mission to Mars by 2010.

00:37:21.840 Thus continued the tradition he had established at PayPal, setting unrealistic timelines that

00:37:26.260 transformed his wild notions from being completely insane to merely very late.

00:37:30.400 And also he gets a bunch of headlines about these goals that he sets, which makes him

00:37:33.320 seem like a visionary, but he never actually delivers on anything.

00:37:35.620 He is laser focused on keeping down costs early on.

00:37:39.200 Isaacson says his focus on cost, as well as his natural controlling instincts, led him

00:37:43.580 to want to manufacture as many components as possible in-house rather than buy them from

00:37:47.900 suppliers, which was then the standard practice in the rocket and car industries. At one point,

00:37:53.560 SpaceX needed a valve, Mueller recalls, and the supplier said it would cost $250,000.

00:37:59.360 Musk declared that insane and told Mueller they should make it themselves. They were able to do

00:38:04.060 so in months at a fraction of the cost. Right. So you do see him producing some like genuine

00:38:08.520 results here. This is something that Elon is very good at. He seems to have a good instinct

00:38:13.560 for where costs can be drastically cut. And I think a real key component of Elon's business

00:38:20.940 success is it just leads to a lot of vertical integration. Vertical integration is where you

00:38:26.720 consolidate your supply chain in your own company, right? So instead of buying parts from a supplier,

00:38:32.720 you make them yourself. Which is what NASA used to do before it started outsourcing everything to

00:38:37.280 suppliers. And that is one of the things that caused the Challenger explosion.

00:38:40.480 What was happening to them is that first they would find cheaper sources for their parts, but then those suppliers would catch on and jack up prices.

00:38:47.620 So Elon's like, let's just start building this stuff ourselves, right?

00:38:50.700 Right.

00:38:50.920 The downsides of vertical integration, it requires a bunch of upfront costs, right?

00:38:55.860 But you can keep costs and hassles down later.

00:38:59.620 Right.

00:38:59.780 Once again, Elon fosters a culture where everyone is subjected to brutal deadlines.

00:39:06.300 Send you this.

00:39:07.440 Musk insisted on setting unrealistic deadlines even when they weren't necessary, such as

00:39:11.920 when he ordered test stands to be erected in weeks for rocket engines that had not yet

00:39:16.120 been built.

00:39:17.180 A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle, he repeatedly declared.

00:39:21.220 The sense of urgency was good for its own sake.

00:39:23.480 It made his engineers engage in first principles thinking.

00:39:26.400 But as Mueller points out, it was also corrosive.

00:39:28.800 If you set an aggressive schedule that people think they might be able to make, they will

00:39:32.080 try to put out extra effort. 0.86

00:39:33.400 But if you give them a schedule that's physically impossible, engineers aren't stupid. 0.89

00:39:36.960 You've demoralized them. 0.69

00:39:38.480 It's Elon's biggest weakness.

00:39:40.140 Isaacson says this is similar to what Steve Jobs did.

00:39:42.820 And he says, although the practice demoralized people, they ended up accomplishing things

00:39:47.240 that other companies couldn't.

00:39:48.760 This like ideology is so weird because you could also say they make their workers work

00:39:53.240 12 hour shifts, seven days a week.

00:39:54.900 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:39:56.060 It would work in some industries to employ children, but there's reasons we don't do

00:39:59.720 that.

00:40:00.020 Like we wouldn't lionize somebody who just like based their company on essentially illegal

00:40:04.100 behavior or certainly immoral behavior.

00:40:06.440 Yeah. There's also like he sort of imagines that there's like a magic to this. Right. But it's not magical. They're getting together some really talented people like Elon hires top engineers. And then he just is like fucking do this in three days. And yes, sometimes they accomplish a lot. Right. I don't really understand what Isaacson thinks the magic is. And I went into this willing to engage with the idea that Elon has some like real genuine talent. Right.

00:40:34.960 I think that there are too many people who are Elon haters in the Elon hater space, people 0.99

00:40:40.680 who imagine that he's like just a total bumbling fool. 0.98

00:40:45.660 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:40:46.260 And I just think that's obviously not true, right?

00:40:48.100 Like there is something here.

00:40:49.440 There are things that he's genuinely good at.

00:40:51.800 Some of what he's good at is just abusing his employees, right?

00:40:55.780 Right.

00:40:55.980 He also, like I said, is like has a really good instinct for where costs can be cut.

00:41:00.760 He will look at certain designs and think like, we don't need that.

00:41:04.520 Right.

00:41:04.700 There are real strengths here, but I don't know why Isaacson insists on believing that just like

00:41:11.720 cracking the whip on your employees is like a talent or like there's like a mystical quality

00:41:16.380 to it almost. I mean, he did get to Mars in 2010. That's true. This did pay off. You can't deny.

00:41:21.180 The fact that I'm recording this from Mars does undermine. So over the course of the next few

00:41:26.900 years, SpaceX gets production going and they get a factory. They're able to secure some smaller

00:41:32.500 government contracts to launch satellites part of how they do that is with like some elon showmanship

00:41:38.740 they built a rocket prototype and literally bring it to dc and it gets the attention of some nasa

00:41:44.540 folks they get a 278 million dollar contract to attempt to put some shit into orbit okay but they

00:41:52.920 burn through that and by 2008 spacex is essentially out of money uh they've attempted to send a rocket

00:41:59.340 into orbit three times. They have failed. Elon reaches out to the PayPal guys for some investment

00:42:05.020 to keep them afloat, which he gets. Their fourth launch is successful. That ends up securing them

00:42:11.160 a big contract with NASA. Musk is well connected within the first Obama administration, especially

00:42:18.960 with Lori Garver, who is deputy administrator at NASA. In 2010, Obama makes a publicity visit to

00:42:26.840 the SpaceX launch pad. And then that summer, they land the biggest ever commercial space deal,

00:42:33.360 almost half a billion dollars to send up satellites for a communications company.

00:42:37.320 Oh, I thought you were going to say that this is when they sent Katy Perry to space,

00:42:40.420 which is going to be the crescendo of this episode.

00:42:42.280 Now that is Bezos, I believe.

00:42:44.800 Oh, that makes me feel like a plastic bag.

00:42:46.500 This is really the early stages of a media honeymoon that lasts until about 2018.

00:42:53.400 between the rise of spacex and tesla elon is able to portray himself as like this mogul

00:43:00.420 slash innovator who is invested in advancing the cause of humanity he's gonna get us off of fossil

00:43:06.740 fuels with tesla and he's gonna get us to mars with spacex he has cameos in iron man 2 on the

00:43:13.580 simpsons in rick and morty yeah i'm gonna i guess i'll send you this here is a sampling

00:43:18.120 of headlines and news coverage from this era gq 2015 how elon musk plans on reinventing the world

00:43:26.660 and mars rolling stone 2017 elon musk the architect of tomorrow inside the inventor's

00:43:33.060 world-changing plans to inhabit outer space revolutionize high-speed transportation reinvent

00:43:38.500 cars and hopefully find love along the way that one did come true well he found 12 unwanted babies

00:43:46.240 The Guardian, 2018, Elon Musk, the real-life Iron Man.

00:43:50.480 A December 2008 profile of him from GQ said that Elon was endeavoring to give the human

00:43:55.700 race its biggest upgrade since the advent of consciousness.

00:43:59.200 Ooh, that one's really bad.

00:44:00.720 The advent of consciousness?

00:44:03.120 Since we were like fish?

00:44:04.740 Step one, consciousness.

00:44:06.360 Step two, cars without gas.

00:44:08.860 What are you talking about?

00:44:09.720 Like, we've already gone to space.

00:44:11.120 Right.

00:44:11.260 Like we already went to the moon, which for the record is more than SpaceX has done at

00:44:16.020 the time of recording. 0.99

00:44:17.840 Elon likes to speak in like dramatic terms like this, that the way he speaks about shit 0.92

00:44:23.140 is often both like really dramatic and also really nerdy, which makes me think that he 0.98

00:44:28.060 said that.

00:44:28.620 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:44:29.240 I don't know.

00:44:29.960 I remember when I was living in Berlin, I had like a German tutor, like a guy that I

00:44:34.220 would go speak German with who was like a big Elon Musk stan.

00:44:37.060 And so all we would do is argue in German about Elon Musk.

00:44:40.240 And like all he would ever present was like things Elon Musk was going to do.

00:44:45.260 Yeah, yeah.

00:44:45.500 It was like the Hyperloop is going to be amazing.

00:44:47.580 Soon everybody will have an electric car.

00:44:48.940 And I was like, this is all things that he has not done.

00:44:51.280 It's things that he's promised.

00:44:52.960 But like other people promise outlandish stuff too and don't get media coverage like this.

00:44:57.000 There was a really good Esquire piece in 2012 that focuses on Musk's relationship with NASA

00:45:02.800 and like his desire to get to Mars, but seems to understand his personality a little bit

00:45:09.340 more than most people did at this time. They are basically talking about his willingness to take

00:45:15.840 on risks and dangers in the context of trying to get people to Mars. And so they say this.

00:45:21.660 It says, but you should know something about him. In 20 years, he plans to ask you to sell

00:45:25.820 everything you own and to give him the $500,000 he figures will be the price of a trip to Mars.

00:45:30.980 Whether such a price is impossible or laughable is immaterial. He will ask you to leave everything

00:45:35.220 you own and everything you know. He will ask you to start a colony on a planet that exists

00:45:39.280 as a red star in the night sky. He doesn't want you to come back, but he doesn't want

00:45:43.620 you to die either. For a long time, he thought you would have to risk death to accomplish

00:45:47.180 his dream, but now he's decided he doesn't want you to. You don't have to die for Elon

00:45:51.780 Musk. For you to be willing is more than enough.

00:45:54.760 In this piece, they sort of put together, like, well, are you going to be able to safely

00:45:59.440 get people to Mars?

00:46:00.840 Yeah.

00:46:01.040 And initially, Elon had been kind of realistic about this where he's like, obviously, this sort of space travel is very dangerous.

00:46:07.760 People might die, right?

00:46:09.280 And then he sort of like realizes that like from a PR perspective, maybe you need to walk that back a little bit.

00:46:13.820 Right.

00:46:13.960 And so that's what they're talking about here.

00:46:15.520 Like these plans all sound nice.

00:46:17.920 But at the end of the day, what he's actually talking about is you pay a huge sum of money and then he sends you off to Mars where you will end your life.

00:46:28.760 Just say he loved Big Brother.

00:46:30.580 This is taking forever. 0.98

00:46:31.780 It's also like not clear what anyone is supposed to fucking do on Mars. 0.98

00:46:34.900 Mars is just a giant desert. 0.97

00:46:37.060 Obviously, if you like look at a camera shot of Mars from like a rover, you're like, wow, beautiful.

00:46:42.020 By year two, you're going to be like.

00:46:43.820 By hour two.

00:46:45.160 I mean, there's literally nothing there.

00:46:46.600 There's nothing to do.

00:46:47.500 It's not like you can like go hiking or something.

00:46:49.680 You can play board games.

00:46:51.880 Yeah.

00:46:52.580 You can do anything that you can do like in Seattle in the winter when you're stuck inside.

00:46:56.900 But like you are stuck inside.

00:46:58.620 And also it takes six months to get there.

00:47:00.580 I cannot get over this detail.

00:47:02.240 I'm going to skip over a lot of the much more recent SpaceX stuff, mostly because this story

00:47:07.340 gets really boring.

00:47:09.120 It's no longer like a startup.

00:47:11.240 And so Isaacson is just sort of like telling you stories of business.

00:47:14.620 And it's just like, who could possibly care?

00:47:17.000 Does he have a sense of whether the company is like, I don't know, still promising or

00:47:20.180 has it kind of stalled out?

00:47:21.160 I mean, it hasn't stalled out in the business sense because the United States government

00:47:25.080 has moved over huge portions of their space program to the private sector, right?

00:47:30.660 And SpaceX is the most prominent company.

00:47:32.880 But the rest of the story here is kind of the same thing over and over again, like a

00:47:36.140 problem emerges and Elon enters crisis mode to fix it.

00:47:40.060 And that's it.

00:47:40.800 In broad strokes, SpaceX continues to work closely with NASA.

00:47:44.140 They put a civilian crew into orbit in 2021, the first private company to do so.

00:47:49.940 The last big event that Isaacson witnesses is the failed launch of the Starship, which

00:47:54.700 is the latest SpaceX rocket in April 2023. And so the story just sort of trails off.

00:48:00.960 There is a story that is very important. I need you to read it. It's from a book called

00:48:05.460 Liftoff by Eric Berger. Liftoff, Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days that Launched SpaceX.

00:48:11.620 I'm going to send you a quick excerpt here.

00:48:13.960 Eventually, Musk realized that Pop-Tarts were best enjoyed toasted. So he opened a package

00:48:18.840 and put two of them into the toaster. Only Musk made the rookie mistake of inserting the pastries

00:48:23.440 horizontally rather than vertically. When they popped back up, he had to stick his fingers into

00:48:28.340 the toaster to grab his breakfast. This was a problem. And at about six in the morning,

00:48:32.640 Musk proceeded to scream at full volume, fuck, it burns. Fuck, it burns. 1.00

00:48:40.480 Rich guy encounters eating. Dude. You just put your fingers in the fucking toaster, dude? 1.00

00:48:45.360 It's like Bart getting shocked and getting increasingly angry and going back for it. 1.00

00:48:50.940 Oh, God, it's so beautiful.

00:48:52.920 This is the person who's like in charge of like 80% of the government right now.

00:48:56.480 Grab a fork, Elon.

00:48:57.520 Just like dig around. 0.74

00:48:58.980 That's SpaceX.

00:48:59.960 Let's talk about Tesla.

00:49:01.440 We're going to rewind.

00:49:02.360 In the mid-aughts, just a couple of years after getting SpaceX up and running,

00:49:07.300 Elon starts aiming to meet people in the electric car space.

00:49:11.240 He meets some guys with prototypes.

00:49:14.040 Eventually, he meets two guys who had a company called Tesla.

00:49:17.880 martin eberhard is the guy who created the tesla corporation he had seen an existing prototype of

00:49:26.620 an electric car and he invested in it but he basically decided that the guys involved were

00:49:31.720 not serious about building and selling cars so he brings in a friend mark tarpening they hatch a

00:49:37.900 broad plan to develop an electric roadster and they create tesla in 2003 they do not have any

00:49:45.080 money, but someone hooks them up with Elon and they get going. I am going to send you a bit here.

00:49:51.440 Both Eberhard and Musk considered themselves to be the main founder of Tesla. In Eberhard's mind,

00:49:56.240 he had come up with the idea, enlisted his friend Tarpening, registered a company,

00:49:59.860 chosen a name, and gone out and found funders. Elon called himself the chief architect and all

00:50:04.020 kinds of things, but he wasn't, Eberhard says. He was just a board member and investor. But in

00:50:08.600 Musk's mind, he was the one who put Eberhard together with CTO J.B. Straubel and provided

00:50:13.840 the funding needed to start the company. When I met Eberhard and Wright and Tarpening, they had no

00:50:18.280 intellectual property, no employees, nothing. All they had was a shell corporation. It's a pretty

00:50:23.140 commonly held belief that Elon took over Tesla after its founding and then like started calling

00:50:29.280 himself a founder. I actually think that's sort of a myth or at least like a half truth. These guys,

00:50:35.260 they had a preexisting idea, but Elon got in so early. He was involved from the early planning

00:50:41.860 stages in everything from design to tech.

00:50:44.780 So it wasn't like there was a factory and like they were making products.

00:50:47.580 It was like, it was literally just an idea.

00:50:49.000 He's right when they said they didn't have IP.

00:50:50.940 They didn't even have a patent, right?

00:50:52.320 Let alone like a prototype.

00:50:54.080 Right.

00:50:54.200 It's safe to say that he did not literally found the company in the sense that like the

00:50:58.400 corporate entity was established before he got involved, but that's literally all there

00:51:03.420 was.

00:51:03.780 Also, it sounds like he's really involved in the company from then on.

00:51:06.760 So it's not like he just gave them money and was like, call me in five years when you

00:51:09.220 have a car.

00:51:10.060 He's super involved.

00:51:10.820 I think that he probably pissed off Eberhard with how involved he was, but he's involved nonetheless.

00:51:16.480 Long-time point of sensitivity for Elon.

00:51:18.320 He got into disputes, legal disputes, about being called an investor early on.

00:51:23.400 Eberhard is ousted a couple years later after much tension.

00:51:28.640 Isaacson described them as very similar, like hard-headed engineer types.

00:51:32.880 Eberhard sued him for libel in 2008, which ended in a mutual non-disparagement agreement

00:51:39.180 that Musk violates constantly to this day.

00:51:41.760 It's so weird that he hates this Eberhard guy, but he doesn't hate Teal and the other

00:51:44.840 guys that pushed him out of his company.

00:51:46.020 You'll see.

00:51:46.500 You'll see.

00:51:47.020 Just read this bit.

00:51:48.140 Eberhard, after being ousted, launched a little website called Tesla Founders Blog, where

00:51:52.940 he vented his frustrations about Musk and accused the company of trying to root out

00:51:56.880 and destroy any of its heart that might still be beating.

00:51:59.640 Board members asked him to tone it down, which didn't work, and then Tesla's lawyer threatened

00:52:04.000 to withdraw his stock options, which did.

00:52:06.580 There are certain people who occupy a demon's corner of Musk's headspace.

00:52:10.160 They trigger him, turn him dark, and rouse a cold anger.

00:52:13.300 His father is number one, but somewhat oddly, Martin Eberhard, who is hardly a household

00:52:17.420 name, is second.

00:52:18.660 Getting involved with Eberhard was the worst mistake I ever made in my career, Musk says. 0.98

00:52:23.260 That's how I talk about getting involved with a bougie guy in New Jersey, a bougie lawyer. 1.00

00:52:27.520 I was in New York City at the time when we went into business, when we permanently intertwined 1.00

00:52:32.100 our fates.

00:52:33.100 You had no IP.

00:52:34.260 You had nothing.

00:52:35.040 I had tons of shitloads of IP, dude.

00:52:37.160 I'm swimming in IP. 0.89

00:52:38.780 I think it's very clear that Eberhard, A, talked a bunch of shit early on, and B, wants 0.97

00:52:46.660 to undermine the image of Elon as a founder of Tesla. 0.98

00:52:50.540 And they're sort of both arguing over it.

00:52:52.060 Yeah.

00:52:52.340 The argument over like who's the founder is sort of beside the point, right?

00:52:55.800 Like they both have a real claim to that word, whatever it might mean.

00:52:59.400 But yeah, it just seems like it's two egomaniacs who hate each other. 0.95

00:53:03.200 This is an everyone sucks here situation, to put it in Reddit.

00:53:06.180 And again, very similar to SpaceX, what really sets Tesla apart is the extent to which he pursues vertical integration.

00:53:13.400 Isaacson says one of the most important decisions that Elon Musk made about Tesla was that it should make its own key components rather than piecing together a car with hundreds of components from independent suppliers.

00:53:23.200 That's also why it was hella expensive probably too, yeah.

00:53:25.260 Yeah, getting off the ground, right? This not only allows for control of costs and control of

00:53:31.120 supply chain logistics, but also it prevents their competitors from easily replicating what

00:53:36.260 they're doing. If you're Ford, you can't just call up Tesla's suppliers and be like,

00:53:40.640 we'll have what they're having, right? Because Tesla is the supplier, right?

00:53:43.840 So the first car that they produce is called the Roadster. It launches in 2007. It's a

00:53:49.860 two-door sports car and it's meant to be everything that a two-door sports car traditionally is,

00:53:56.680 just electric. The idea is that you put out this expensive sports car and it's sort of like proof

00:54:02.220 of concept. Like your sort of dream car could be electric. So you get some publicity, you sell a

00:54:08.340 few of these, and then you have the cash to produce a more affordable version, which you can

00:54:12.680 sell to the mass market. And also I wonder, I do think Elon was important to this because he was

00:54:18.020 cool like he was seen as cool and electric cars at the time were like hippies and kind of like a

00:54:23.040 joke like a punchline and that was very intentional like they were like this needs to be cool in a way

00:54:28.500 that electric cars have not been but also he had a knack for certain types of pr they got like uh

00:54:35.580 celebrities on their wait list okay george clooney was on the wait list right schwarzenegger was the

00:54:39.660 governor of california at the time which is where the factory was he's at the prototype unveiling

00:54:44.080 So this puts them on the map. They only sell like 2,500 of these, but the point wasn't to sell a

00:54:48.740 ton. In 2012, they launched the Model S, which was their attempt at a fully electric family sedan.

00:54:58.760 It's more affordable than the Roadster. It's still expensive. Base cost is like 57 grand,

00:55:03.780 but the Model S gets some great reviews. It sells very well. And so now they're sort of a household

00:55:10.400 name yeah brief interlude the factories where they like make all their shit uh elon calls them 0.69

00:55:16.640 giga factories okay and the worst part about reading this book is like he's obviously into 0.95

00:55:22.820 this nerd shit and thinks it's cool the like giant arms that the spacex rockets sit in he calls that 0.87

00:55:31.120 contraption mechazilla okay and like you're just sort of forced to deal with this as the book goes 0.99

00:55:37.060 where isaacson is like mechazilla and like you can tell that like isaacson kind of thinks it's

00:55:43.360 charming or something yeah it's like so embarrassing and cringy oh but he had to cut

00:55:47.720 like 300 lord of the rings references yeah like oh you call your conference room tom bombadil

00:55:52.280 wow this is this is actually like an interesting blind spot for isaacson uh that i think is

00:55:58.640 material and i'm not just trying to dunk he doesn't understand that elon is cringe i think

00:56:05.900 He sort of takes for granted that Elon is kind of like funny and cool in a way, that

00:56:10.340 he has this appeal that he doesn't.

00:56:12.540 Right.

00:56:12.700 Here's a really good example I'm going to send you.

00:56:15.120 His humor has many levels.

00:56:16.400 The lowest is his puerile affection for poop emojis, fart sounds programmed into the Tesla,

00:56:22.120 and other discharges of bathroom humor.

00:56:24.400 Say the voice command, open butthole, to the console in a Tesla, and it opens the electric 0.95

00:56:29.420 charging port at the rear of the vehicle.

00:56:31.340 He also has a mordant ironic strand of humor demonstrated by a poster on the wall of his cubicle at SpaceX.

00:56:37.800 It shows a twinkling dark blue sky with a shooting star.

00:56:40.740 When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true, it reads.

00:56:44.500 Unless it's really a meteor hurtling to the earth which will destroy all life, then you're pretty much hosed, no matter what you wish for, unless it's death by meteorite.

00:56:54.420 Oh god, I'm like in an Airbnb by the airport.

00:56:57.140 Like, Isaacson is like, yeah, he's got these poop jokes, but then he has this unbelievably hilarious, ironic sense of humor.

00:57:04.720 It's like, no, these are just different types of cringe-ass, try-hard humor, dude.

00:57:09.140 He has two kinds of family circus cartoons that he recites. 0.77

00:57:12.800 Jesus Christ. 0.99

00:57:13.660 It's very important to understanding Elon Musk that he is a cringe-ass dork. 0.99

00:57:18.900 Right. 0.99

00:57:19.160 But Isaacson is not young or hip enough to understand it.

00:57:22.580 And also a lot of his joking seems to be very approval-seeking.

00:57:25.740 It's sort of simpy. 0.89

00:57:26.780 it's pathetic dude yeah and i think it's even like changed our perspectives on other billionaires 0.98

00:57:32.360 like now i look at bezos and he's like obviously on like light steroids and like shaving his head 0.97

00:57:38.600 and stuff and i'm like oh are you doing this for me jeff yeah yeah you want me to think you're cool

00:57:43.420 or mark zuckerberg going on joe rogan right like zuckerberg with a big gold chain i'm like

00:57:48.660 you want me to like you just tell me elon has almost like fostered like brought about this

00:57:55.320 era. Of like the cringe billionaire, yeah. Yeah. Let's talk about one of the big Elon promises,

00:58:02.960 self-driving vehicles. God. He starts pushing this in the mid-2010s. I'm going to send this to you.

00:58:11.280 As with his other mission-driven obsessions, including travel to Mars, he made what would

00:58:15.440 turn out to be absurd predictions about timing. On his October 2016 call with reporters, he

00:58:20.080 declared that by the end of the following year, a Tesla would be able to drive from Los Angeles to

00:58:24.560 New York without the need of a single touch on the wheel. When you want your car to return,

00:58:29.520 cap summon on your phone, he said. It will eventually find you even if you are on the

00:58:34.060 other side of the country. I look forward to getting fucking rear-ended by one of these. 0.99

00:58:38.300 We are building towards a future where a lot of people are going to die. And like your last 0.99

00:58:42.980 thought is going to be, Elon Musk killed me. Yeah. This sucks so bad, dude. There's one

00:58:47.820 incident that isaacson does not discuss in 2016 tesla released a video of a car driving ostensibly

00:58:55.680 by itself the video has text reading quote the person in the driver's seat is only there for

00:59:02.700 legal reasons he is not doing anything the car is driving itself musk tweeted the video saying

00:59:09.040 there was quote no human input at all but the car was following a predetermined route

00:59:15.940 that they established by doing a 3D map of the area, which is not something the Tesla

00:59:21.640 software is inherently capable of. And during recording, it crashed once, which they edited

00:59:27.100 out. This was initially reported in the New York Times in 2021. And then it was confirmed when

00:59:33.400 testimony from a 2018 deposition of the director of autonomy was leaked. Again, the actual story,

00:59:42.840 the biography here is like, this is someone who's willing to lie to boost the stock price and like

00:59:47.860 get positive PR. No, this story is that this is what's necessary to make the magic happen.

00:59:53.960 Sent you a little bit more. Almost every year, Musk would make another prediction that full

00:59:57.520 self-driving was just a year or two away. When will someone be able to buy one of your cars and

01:00:02.080 literally just take their hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they've

01:00:05.840 arrived? Chris Anderson asked him at a TED Talk in May 2017. That's about two years, Musk replied.

01:00:10.820 In an interview with Kara Swisher at the Code Conference at the end of 2018, he said Tesla

01:00:15.340 was on track to do it next year.

01:00:17.440 In early 2019, he doubled down.

01:00:19.460 I think we'll be feature complete, full self-driving this year, he declared on a podcast with ARK

01:00:24.040 Invest.

01:00:24.740 I would say I'm certain of that.

01:00:26.380 That's not a question mark.

01:00:27.540 That is not a question mark. 1.00

01:00:28.800 Yeah, Jesus fucking Christ. 0.99

01:00:30.300 Isaacson says, as Musk pursued his autonomous vehicle ideas, he stubbornly and repeatedly 0.99

01:00:34.500 exaggerated the autopilot capability of Tesla cars.

01:00:38.040 That was dangerous.

01:00:38.800 It led some drivers to think they could ride in a Tesla without paying much attention.

01:00:43.140 Of course.

01:00:43.560 There have been wrongful death lawsuits and so forth from this.

01:00:47.480 Isaacson does not dive into it, which is part and parcel with my primary critique here,

01:00:53.240 which is if your whole book is predicated on the idea, the whole thesis is that there's

01:00:59.680 a trade-off. 1.00

01:01:00.660 Yes, he's a total freak and an asshole, but it produces these results. 1.00

01:01:05.380 right then like you actually need to talk about the details of that trade-off right you actually 1.00

01:01:10.900 need to talk about the wrongful death lawsuits his statements arguably have like gotten people

01:01:14.860 killed right you see a press conference with him you're like oh it's safe for me to play on my 0.97

01:01:18.140 phone while i'm on the freeway and then you fucking kill somebody i mean look tesla has 0.98

01:01:21.440 paid out money to people because of these lawsuits right yeah the fact that elon musk has not been 0.98

01:01:25.820 held personally responsible as most mostly just an artifact of our criminal laws and our quirky

01:01:30.600 right-wing legislators. Is quirky the right word? I say quirky. In 2019, Musk hosts an autonomy day

01:01:38.020 where the goal is to provide a demonstration of a partially self-driving car. They're able to get

01:01:43.120 the car to do like a short predetermined route. And then he says once again, that full autonomy

01:01:48.200 is about a year away, after which he says Tesla will unleash a fleet of 1 million robo taxis for

01:01:54.180 public use. I think this is a good place to talk about his history of broken promises and his sort

01:01:58.820 of general willingness to bullshit the public. Isaacson, you can tell by the excerpts, is aware

01:02:04.800 of this, but he sort of sugarcoats it, right? Right. He says about the autonomy stuff,

01:02:09.400 Musk mixed, as he often did, vision and hype. Even in his own head, he blurred the line between

01:02:14.760 what he believed and what he wanted to believe. Yeah, vision and hype are both just ways of

01:02:18.360 saying bullshit. He blurred bullshit and bullshit. This makes it seem like almost like it's not 1.00

01:02:22.240 conscious or like it's not done to deceive. Like, oh, he's just a dreamer. He's just dreaming.

01:02:27.800 But I think it's beyond that. 0.86

01:02:28.720 He knows he's bullshitting.

01:02:30.060 He said in 2018 that they were going to play small rocket thrusters around a new Roadster

01:02:35.980 model and that it could potentially fly.

01:02:38.940 He said that the...

01:02:39.740 Do you remember when he said the Cybertruck might be able to double as a boat?

01:02:42.660 Yeah.

01:02:44.200 Briefly.

01:02:44.740 Yeah.

01:02:45.040 To act briefly as a boat.

01:02:46.380 Yeah.

01:02:46.620 He also...

01:02:47.020 Like he bullshits about the Mars timeline, of course.

01:02:49.320 In 2011, he said we'd have a man on Mars within a decade as a best case.

01:02:54.080 15 to 20 as a worst case.

01:02:55.800 Right.

01:02:55.920 In 2022, he tweeted that he hoped to have men on Mars in 2029.

01:03:01.540 Just this year, he said there'd be an unmanned mission to Mars in 2026, which if I pause

01:03:08.260 long enough while speaking, will be right now.

01:03:11.720 Also, didn't he famously say the COVID pandemic would be over in April of 2020, like in March

01:03:16.660 of 2020?

01:03:17.180 But yeah, no, like there's a lot of evidence that Elon knowingly lies to the public with

01:03:21.280 frequency.

01:03:22.000 And I think you have to reckon with that.

01:03:23.920 And he does it for financial gain, too.

01:03:25.620 like this pumps up his stock price it's not like he's doing this out of like the goodness of his 0.99

01:03:28.740 heart right like even if it is unconscious he's making money on these fucking lies like to wrap 0.96

01:03:33.200 up the sort of car portion of this i think most people are aware that tesla's had a rough couple 0.98

01:03:37.360 years we will talk about elon's political shit in part two but obviously he has alienated what 0.55

01:03:45.260 was once his primary target demographic of like environmentalist libs yeah that has resulted in 0.97

01:03:50.740 pretty notable sales declines and on top of that if you want to get a little more businessy

01:03:56.840 competition has gotten a lot more robust that has put pressure on tesla's margins which were once

01:04:02.580 its strong point then you have the complete flop of the cyber truck launched a couple years ago 0.99

01:04:07.860 just the ugliest piece of shit in history it has sold something like 50 000 in the entire country 0.99

01:04:13.360 there's no other physical object that screams i am an asshole like a cyber truck there's no t-shirt 1.00

01:04:20.100 you can wear there's no other thing you can buy it's like i'm a huge dick there was a cyber truck 0.99

01:04:24.720 in our local like target parking lot and i saw like multiple people laughing and taking pictures

01:04:30.120 there's no other car where people will just demonstrate visible disgust that's what i do

01:04:35.140 when i see them i try to make sure they see me being like bro despite these struggles tesla's

01:04:41.460 stock price has remained high the company is worth one and a half trillion dollars and that

01:04:46.960 is mostly because Elon continues to weave various tales for investors. One of them is autonomous

01:04:54.420 driving and the prospect of robo taxis. But the other is humanoid robots.

01:05:00.740 Oh, that's a Tesla thing? I thought that was like a separate company.

01:05:02.940 This is under Tesla. So there's a chapter in this book called Optimus is Born. We haven't

01:05:08.020 talked about the format of this book, but it's sort of semi-chronological where he's

01:05:12.740 going approximately chronologically, but also bouncing back and forth between the companies.

01:05:16.960 Like this podcast will.

01:05:18.300 Yeah.

01:05:18.840 But he bounces back and forth so much that there are 90 chapters.

01:05:22.440 So each one is just like a few pages.

01:05:23.860 It's a nightmare, dude.

01:05:25.480 Isaacson covers the beginnings of this initiative, this humanoid robot initiative, when he talks

01:05:32.720 about Tesla's AI day in 2021.

01:05:36.560 The big announcement is this humanoid robot named Optimus.

01:05:40.720 Even as a kind of a cringe name.

01:05:42.620 As you might expect, they did not have a working prototype at the time.

01:05:46.840 Instead, they dressed an actress up like the robot, and she danced around on stage.

01:05:51.840 Really? 0.99

01:05:52.860 Yep.

01:05:53.380 Again, the chapter is called Optimus is Born, but the robot does not exist.

01:05:59.520 Does he say why I would want a humanoid robot?

01:06:02.660 Yes.

01:06:02.760 What is the purpose?

01:06:03.760 Yes, you will see.

01:06:05.020 Musk gave one directive.

01:06:06.940 It was to be a humanoid robot.

01:06:08.440 In other words, it was supposed to look like a person rather than the mechanical contraption

01:06:12.800 with wheels or four legs like boston dynamics and others were making okay if we're able to produce

01:06:18.360 a general purpose robot that could observe you and learn how to do a task that would supercharge

01:06:24.060 the economy to a degree that's insane he said would it though this is a must quote humanoid

01:06:30.780 robots will uncork the economy to quasi infinite levels the well-known concept of quasi infinity

01:06:38.020 folks also isn't this just like he wants a personal assistant that just seems like a weird

01:06:41.460 rich guy thing at no point in the book does the phrase robot butler appear but it's robot butlers

01:06:47.000 there's no other way around it right musk says this means a future of abundance a future where

01:06:51.720 there is no poverty we can afford to have a universal basic income wouldn't a robot do the

01:06:56.920 opposite you're listening to jesus christ himself speak okay show some respect it really is a

01:07:02.680 fundamental transformation of civilization recently he said there will be billions of them all his

01:07:08.560 His entire role in public life now is making poverty worse. 0.99

01:07:11.480 He's, like, cutting fucking food stamps. 1.00

01:07:13.300 So whenever these guys are like, we can solve poverty, we'll solve poverty now, bitch. 1.00

01:07:16.240 Just because he cut USAID and killed 10 million people doesn't mean that his dream of robot butlers that do surgery is not real, Michael. 0.99

01:07:24.580 This is, again, the vision thing.

01:07:25.680 He's promising a vision like, I'm about to become a good person.

01:07:28.500 Once my mass murder spree is over, you'll all see how nice I am.

01:07:31.560 What would you even do with a robot butler?

01:07:32.860 I would like, I would have it like chopped sweet potatoes for me, but then it would just 0.99

01:07:36.360 sit idle in the corner like my fucking robot vacuum does now. 0.98

01:07:39.100 I would become one of the problematic consumers in WALL-E, just like my robot just bringing 0.99

01:07:46.780 me soda and chips all day.

01:07:49.960 And I'm just like playing video games.

01:07:51.320 Because like what problem does it even solve?

01:07:52.880 Yeah, you have to like get up from the couch every once in a while, like fizz some water

01:07:55.860 and then sit back down.

01:07:56.880 But like, is that a major thing, like a major issue in society? 0.98

01:08:00.380 I mean, look, obviously, if there were, like, real humanoid robots that could do shit, it would be very useful. 0.94

01:08:07.280 Professional stuff, I guess. 0.93

01:08:08.360 Not for, like, personal.

01:08:09.320 Well, I would make it clean my house all the time.

01:08:11.160 That would actually be kind of nice.

01:08:12.120 And then I would use that free time to think of ideas.

01:08:17.360 So, you know, big picture, as concern about the core business of Tesla is rising, he very loudly pivots to this big new thing that's going to change the world, right?

01:08:28.120 It's like it's hard not to see through this where like car sales are down and he's like car sales don't matter.

01:08:32.620 Right.

01:08:32.800 Robot butlers for everybody. 0.99

01:08:33.980 And also gets a bunch of earned media from it too.

01:08:35.880 Yeah.

01:08:36.040 Elon has been interested in AI for a while and Optimus is sort of an offshoot of this.

01:08:40.500 He helped found OpenAI back in 2014 with Sam Altman, although they've been at odds in recent years.

01:08:46.700 He resigned from the board in 2018.

01:08:49.020 Isaacson says that Elon helped found OpenAI because of, quote,

01:08:52.960 the possibility that someone might create intentionally or inadvertently AI that could

01:08:59.300 be harmful to humans. Yeah, I'm really worried about the next pandemic. That's why I'm creating

01:09:02.740 super aids in my laboratory. Elon says that this is all based on a conversation he has with Larry

01:09:08.100 Page at Google, who is working on AI. And he decides that Larry Page is not sufficiently

01:09:14.940 concerned about the prospect of AI turning on humanity or damaging humanity or whatever.

01:09:20.960 And based on the conversation he relays, it actually does sound like Larry Page is a

01:09:24.940 psychopath who says like, well, who cares if computers take over?

01:09:27.940 It's just the next stage in evolution.

01:09:29.600 Oh, man.

01:09:30.140 Jesus Christ.

01:09:31.080 Like that.

01:09:31.580 Let my robot butler live my life for me.

01:09:33.420 So when the optimist idea comes about, Isaacson says this about it.

01:09:38.900 An ultimate expression of safe AI, especially for someone who imbibed sci-fi as a kid, would

01:09:44.480 be creating a humanoid robot, one that could process visual inputs and learn to perform

01:09:49.180 tasks without violating Asimov's law that a robot shall not harm humanity or any human.

01:09:54.360 While OpenAI and Google were focusing on creating text-based chatbots, Musk decided to focus

01:09:59.380 on artificial intelligence systems that operated in the physical world, such as robots and

01:10:04.180 cars.

01:10:04.760 Why would AI in the form of a physical robot be safer than, like, a chatbot? 0.86

01:10:10.780 It seems significantly worse, because then he can, like, slap you in the face.

01:10:13.380 Like, how is this safer than a chatbot? 1.00

01:10:15.520 This is just a chatbot that can physically kick your ass. 1.00

01:10:18.440 Right. 1.00

01:10:18.620 Like, even in Ex Machina, the robot stabs him.

01:10:23.700 It's tidying your house by pushing you out the window. 0.85

01:10:25.680 Like, you're actually detritus.

01:10:27.160 The robot decides that you are dirty and then you're in a fight for your life. 0.90

01:10:30.460 Or those insane, like, cases where chatbots have sort of encouraged people to kill themselves.

01:10:35.380 This could be, like, tying the noose.

01:10:36.840 He's like, oh, I'm interested in a safe AI.

01:10:39.640 And what's safer than a robot?

01:10:41.240 And Isaacson is like, yeah, what's safer than a robot?

01:10:43.800 And just writes it down.

01:10:44.740 Like, a lot of things, dude.

01:10:46.140 A lot of things are safer than a robot.

01:10:47.360 But I think Isaacson buys the pitch that at his core, Elon does in fact simply want to

01:10:55.360 help save humanity from these perceived threats.

01:10:58.900 But I think that gets it wrong.

01:11:00.800 There's a great quote from Sam Altman in a New Yorker interview where he said, Elon

01:11:05.820 desperately wants the world to be saved, but only if he can be the one to save it.

01:11:09.580 Right.

01:11:09.780 That's like with all these guys.

01:11:10.860 It's all an ego thing.

01:11:11.680 That's the Mars thing. 0.99

01:11:12.420 There's no fucking reason to go to Mars. 0.98

01:11:13.760 But it's just like he wants to be able to say, I sent people to Mars. 0.99

01:11:16.740 And yeah, I think that's right.

01:11:18.220 Like Elon isn't interested in saving people.

01:11:20.420 He's interested in being the savior.

01:11:22.700 Right.

01:11:22.840 And that's why whenever he does something, he couches it in those terms.

01:11:26.400 He's founding SpaceX to give us access to Mars and save civilization.

01:11:30.320 He's founding Tesla to save us from fossil fuel dependency.

01:11:34.420 He's founding open AI to save us from being destroyed by AI.

01:11:37.560 He's buying Twitter to save free speech.

01:11:39.700 Right.

01:11:39.860 Everything gets pitched in these terms.

01:11:42.200 And I think Isaacson just sort of buys it. 0.99

01:11:44.600 He just sort of buys it, even though in my mind, it's just obvious bullshit. 0.98

01:11:47.520 When clearly I think it's a story he's telling himself, right? 1.00

01:11:49.580 Because nobody wants to think that they're a piece of shit. 1.00

01:11:51.280 But there's no reason for a journalist to look at this and just like repeat it. 1.00

01:11:55.380 Here is a quote about these robots from the latest Tesla earnings call.

01:12:01.080 My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is,

01:12:05.400 if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?

01:12:09.820 If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army?

01:12:15.340 Not control, but a strong influence.

01:12:17.620 I don't feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.

01:12:21.460 Not disconcerting at all that he's talking about controlling a robot army.

01:12:26.300 And so I think you see this stuff and it's kind of obvious that his concern isn't saving humanity.

01:12:32.580 It's power.

01:12:33.600 It's having leverage over humanity.

01:12:36.460 Think about how wrong Isaacson is getting this, right?

01:12:39.100 He believes in Elon's grand aims. 0.99

01:12:42.360 His whole thesis is like, yeah, he's a damaged asshole, but he's doing these incredible things. 0.99

01:12:46.660 And now Elon is openly like, I want control of this robot army. 0.97

01:12:51.120 So Elon has some smaller projects in the pre-2020-ish era, and we're going to go over

01:12:57.780 them quickly.

01:12:59.300 I think the way that Isaacson covers them is indicative because they both get covered

01:13:04.100 very briefly in a chapter or two.

01:13:06.560 The first is Neuralink.

01:13:07.920 Right.

01:13:08.080 This is Musk's company dedicated to creating a computer brain interface, which would be achieved by an implant in the brain.

01:13:16.900 Which previously could only be achieved by getting a vaccine of which person putting a microchip inside of you.

01:13:21.500 So Musk unveils an early version of the device that he has in mind in 2020.

01:13:27.400 It's implanted into a pig and you could watch a computer pick up her brain signals.

01:13:33.000 musk said i could have a neural link right now and you wouldn't know maybe i do in fairness if

01:13:39.700 elon musk said he was being controlled by a pig this entire time i would believe him right what

01:13:44.380 is the actual purpose of this thing in my brain so they teach they teach monkeys to play pong with

01:13:51.100 their brains so there's one purpose right there so write that down michael i can teach a monkey

01:13:55.300 video games okay isaacson barely spends time on this and he skips the fact that the testing on

01:14:00.780 monkeys was an awful dystopian nightmare. This stuff came out after the book was ready for

01:14:07.160 publication, I think. So I don't know how much blame Isaacson deserves here, but it was reported

01:14:11.600 that a bunch of monkeys died. Musk said online that the deaths were not the result of the implant

01:14:16.820 and that they purposefully chose subjects close to death for ethical reasons. Both of those things

01:14:22.780 are untrue. Several monkeys were euthanized after complications from the implant. Wired talked to an

01:14:28.780 employee about the close to death comment and the employee said it was ridiculous if not a complete

01:14:33.660 fabrication the monkeys needed a year of training before they could get the implants so they could 0.86

01:14:38.940 not have been chosen if they were close to death those monkeys were no angels again you know isaacson 0.94

01:14:44.000 talks about musk's dishonesty as if he's just sort of like always bloviating making these big

01:14:50.140 promises and he's like well it's not entirely dishonest right uh he just says unrealistic

01:14:55.340 things, but he believes them to some degree. But he doesn't really explore things like this that

01:15:00.800 are just flat out lies to the public. Also, even if this information was not available,

01:15:04.780 you should know that this guy has a pattern of over promising things and lying in these tests,

01:15:10.220 right? They lied in the prototype of self-driving cars. So if they're having this prototype of

01:15:14.600 monkeys playing pong, you should just assume that it's a fucking lie to get publicity. Like he does 0.99

01:15:18.720 this over and over again. Also, what if my robot butler learns to control me? Using the Neuralink.

01:15:24.300 Then I'm cleaning up after my robot butler.

01:15:26.720 Black Mirror episode, your robot is making you play Pong with your brain.

01:15:30.900 The other thing that Isaacson spends almost no time on is the Hyperloop.

01:15:35.660 The Hyperloop, of course, an idea Elon had for a tunnel where a car would descend into a sort of sled that would be shot through the tunnel using magnets.

01:15:45.620 Well, there were a couple of different ideas because there was also one where you would be in a pod and the pod would be going through and then eventually it became you're in the car.

01:15:52.200 He like watered it down like 50 times.

01:15:54.500 That's right.

01:15:55.020 Musk publishes a white paper about the idea in 2013, but nothing really comes of it.

01:16:00.740 It sort of devolves from there.

01:16:03.540 And you said it gets watered down.

01:16:04.880 I think that's putting it pretty lightly.

01:16:07.580 It devolves from there into a more mundane plan to build tunnels more efficiently.

01:16:12.900 Right.

01:16:13.160 And this is how The Boring Company comes about.

01:16:15.140 This is how Isaacson describes it.

01:16:17.500 on a trip to hong kong in late 2016 musk had a jammed day of meetings and as was often the case

01:16:25.360 needed some minutes of downtime when he could recharge check his phone and just stare blankly

01:16:29.880 he was doing that stare when john mcneil tesla's president of sales and marketing

01:16:33.720 came over to break him out of his trance did you ever notice that cities are built in 3d

01:16:38.240 but the roads are only built in 2d musk finally said mcneil looked puzzled you could build roads

01:16:44.240 in 3d by building tunnels under cities musk explained this is why i'm so skeptical of the

01:16:50.400 stories where people are like oh he had such technical proficiency because this is this is

01:16:54.640 like a child no but this is what's funny about musk is that like i do believe that the stories

01:16:59.700 of his technical proficiency at least some of them yeah but i believe that it has led him to

01:17:04.800 a place where he also occasionally rediscovers really basic simple things and thinks that he's

01:17:11.640 the first person to think of it it's like you didn't invent tunnels just now did you think

01:17:15.780 that you just invented tunnels right now we should do a dig underneath a city that's like really big

01:17:20.640 we should pick like a city like boston to try it out i don't know but what would you call the dig

01:17:26.240 maybe isaacson thinks that this anecdote speaks for itself but it is sort of weird to just glide

01:17:32.260 past musk acting like he's the first person to think of tunnels right like surely you have

01:17:37.500 something to say about this right and also where did the conversation go after that right because

01:17:41.120 You'd think this guy who's like a functioning adult would be like, ah.

01:17:43.980 You noticed, Elon, how you had a word to describe what you're thinking of.

01:17:47.840 And that word is tunnel.

01:17:48.700 That's because they exist already.

01:17:50.220 I immediately got a mental image.

01:17:51.860 How did that happen?

01:17:53.080 So when Musk is initially discussing the Hyperloop, he's discussing this really futuristic thing

01:18:00.380 that could span the length of California or the Northeast Corridor.

01:18:03.560 And then it turns into what he ends up calling future tunnels that would have sleds, but

01:18:08.500 move slower than he originally envisioned.

01:18:10.440 The only thing that is ever actually built is a 1.7-mile tunnel in Las Vegas.

01:18:17.400 There are no magnets.

01:18:18.960 It is a little tunnel with Teslas in it.

01:18:21.940 We're going to watch some news coverage.

01:18:24.240 Wait, are we?

01:18:25.660 Hell yeah, dude.

01:18:28.440 As you descend the escalator into the loop station, you see the Teslas waiting to whisk you into a tunnel 43 feet below ground.

01:18:37.300 Now, you might think, all right, it's like a subway.

01:18:39.360 but this is more like a highway underground and because it's las vegas this is also a thrill ride

01:18:47.060 the cars are going so slow it's crazy thrill ride park light and sound show they have to speed up

01:18:54.360 the footage to make it look like it's going fast across a sprawling convention center

01:18:58.100 it's a car driving in a tunnel it can be a 45 minute walk from one end to the other what the

01:19:05.380 loop gets you there in less than two minutes. Here's how it works. You enter the station and

01:19:10.180 call for a Tesla. The system operates like an Uber or a Lyft, where you have an app on your

01:19:15.460 phone. You say, I'm here. I want to go there. Car comes up, has an identifier on it that matches

01:19:20.740 with what is on the app on your phone. Passengers don't have to make multiple stops. It doesn't

01:19:24.520 just run on a set schedule? There are multiple exits. You go directly to your station of choice.

01:19:29.680 The convention center has three, but plans are in the works to build a loop system

01:19:34.280 citywide construction on this loop was completed in two years for a cost of less than 53 million

01:19:43.500 dollars including the stations it's designed to handle 4 400 people an hour with 62 cars 0.97

01:19:49.960 right now with drivers but soon they need drivers they go to a fucking straight line in a tunnel 0.84

01:19:58.060 likely won't stay in vegas any place that has congestion issues needs to move people and really 0.91

01:20:06.540 can't just keep expanding road why hasn't anybody thought of this before i want to look at a system

01:20:12.140 like this because it really makes a difference god this is just a little tunnel they're they're

01:20:18.540 flashing different colored lights in the tunnel and so when she's like it's part thrill ride all

01:20:24.860 all she's showing is cars moving through a tunnel at like 10 miles an hour with flashing colored

01:20:32.760 lights from one end of a convention center to the other end of a convention center and they're like

01:20:37.140 it only costs 50 million dollars yeah that's because it's just a mile of time what's also so

01:20:43.600 amazing to me is like why does the media run interference for this because like a much better 0.87

01:20:49.220 story is just like the city spent money on this thing that is dumb right but like she is basically

01:20:55.120 operating as an advertisement part thrill ride what are you talking about she's describing things

01:21:01.020 to you that you've seen a thousand times as if no one's ever seen them before in history it's a car 0.91

01:21:05.900 in a fucking tunnel going like a car in a tunnel but this one is underground and there are cars in 0.96

01:21:13.000 I just noticed that the cry-on is Tesla-powered loop tackles traffic. 1.00

01:21:18.140 It's from one end of a convention center to another end.

01:21:21.020 It's not tackling traffic.

01:21:22.580 Well, it's tackling.

01:21:23.400 I mean-

01:21:23.780 It's tackling foot traffic.

01:21:25.000 I want to talk about what I think is the biggest substantive omission from the book.

01:21:30.080 Substantive.

01:21:30.620 Which is Elon's treatment of workers.

01:21:34.360 I'm going to send you a bit.

01:21:35.220 The United Auto Workers had failed to unionize Tesla's Fremont plant,

01:21:38.740 Partly because of what the National Labor Relations Board deemed to be illegal anti-union actions by the company, and partly because its workers, as at the other new electric vehicle companies, Lucid and Rivian, got stock options, not usually part of union contracts.

01:21:52.260 This makes it seem as though the fact that these workers got stock options somehow prevents them from unionizing.

01:22:02.000 But that's not true.

01:22:03.160 If you're in a union, you don't automatically forfeit stock options.

01:22:06.940 And that could be part of the union contract that they're allowed.

01:22:09.660 It could be part of a union contract that they're forbidden.

01:22:12.000 Anything could be part of a union contract.

01:22:14.040 What actually happened was that during the union vote, Elon tweeted, quote,

01:22:19.700 nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union.

01:22:24.120 But why pay union dues and give up stock options for nothing?

01:22:28.360 Which the NLRB said was illegal because it sounded a lot like he was threatening to eliminate

01:22:34.020 their stock options if they unionized.

01:22:36.040 It really seems like Isaacson doesn't understand what happened here and that he doesn't bother to look into it at all.

01:22:42.760 Tesla was also said to have targeted union activists for termination, prohibited workers from talking about wages and working conditions, which is illegal.

01:22:51.400 Isaacson doesn't talk about any of it.

01:22:52.880 He also does not touch on the discrimination lawsuits that came out of Tesla factories in the late 2010s, which we've actually discussed before.

01:22:59.760 Egregious stuff, yeah.

01:23:00.820 Really egregious.

01:23:01.560 The California Civil Rights Department alleged that black employees in the Fremont, California Tesla factory were subjected to discriminatory treatment and pay and promotions.

01:23:10.340 There were allegations that supervisors use the N-word and other like all sorts of bigotry.

01:23:15.760 The EEOC, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, brought a similar case alleging extensive discrimination.

01:23:22.360 One man was awarded over $100 million initially based on the severity of the treatment.

01:23:26.800 There were several lawsuits filed in 2021 alleging rampant sexual harassment, no mention from Isaacson at all.

01:23:33.920 At one point, he mentions in passing that the injury rate at Tesla factories was about 30% higher than the rest of the industry, which is based on a report from like 2017 or so.

01:23:44.900 But he doesn't dig into it.

01:23:46.580 Why?

01:23:47.240 Right?

01:23:47.520 What's happening?

01:23:48.520 Is it still true?

01:23:50.180 Like, what do we know?

01:23:51.220 It's also, it's always telling who these authors speak to as sources, right?

01:23:55.380 It sounds like he's reached out to these other kind of CEO types that Musk worked with.

01:23:58.940 But why didn't you reach out to someone who worked there?

01:24:01.220 Why didn't you reach out to somebody at the UAW?

01:24:02.880 Like, you could have also reached out to people who were on the ground in these disputes and

01:24:06.000 could have talked about them. 0.99

01:24:06.980 I just don't think he's interested in this shit, which again, I think it's like a fatal 0.99

01:24:11.180 flaw in his book. 0.99

01:24:12.620 Because the thesis of the book is like, you have to break some eggs to make an omelet.

01:24:16.120 Right.

01:24:16.280 And so you're not going to look into the eggs all that much.

01:24:18.440 You're like, well, it's just another thing that he did.

01:24:19.980 Right.

01:24:20.140 But that's the thing.

01:24:20.760 It's like, how can your whole, and I know I'm repeating myself, but how can your whole

01:24:24.300 book be about the trade-off between the broken eggs and the omelet. And you're not even going

01:24:29.640 to glance at the eggs. Exactly. It's not like he made Terminator 2, something for which any number

01:24:34.360 of eggs is totally worth it. One of the best quotes in the book comes from an employee who

01:24:39.300 is berated by Elon after not knowing certain information. And Isaacson reveals that the

01:24:46.180 employee may have been distracted by the recent death of his infant daughter. Oh, wow. Elon

01:24:51.140 himself has lost a child. One of his babies died of SIDS when he was in his first marriage.

01:24:58.460 Isaacson talks to the employee about it. And the guy says, quote, Elon cares a lot about humanity,

01:25:04.100 but humanity in more of a very macro sense. I think it's such a good encapsulation of it.

01:25:09.980 Like Elon is not truly kind to anyone in his life. And yet here are all these people who buy

01:25:17.720 into his vision about wanting to better humanity, right? And maybe, maybe if you just took a step

01:25:22.940 back, and you looked at how he treats the people around him, right, you'd conclude that the

01:25:28.220 simplest explanation is that he doesn't actually care about humanity, right? And it speaks to like

01:25:34.060 the world that he envisions, because when are we going to suddenly manifest this utopian world

01:25:41.020 where workers shouldn't be treated like that, right? Does Elon Musk believe in a future where

01:25:45.880 one day we don't need to treat workers like that? No, he doesn't believe in that future.

01:25:50.940 It's something that Isaacson doesn't think about at all.

01:25:53.180 It's kind of like the full self-driving. It's always 10 years down the line. This

01:25:56.800 care for humanity is going to happen.

01:25:58.480 I have skipped one thing, which is the women in Musk's life.

01:26:02.720 Yeah, I was going to ask because we're at the part of the Wikipedia article where it

01:26:05.640 should be like personal life.

01:26:06.820 He's had four prominent relationships. His first wife, Justine, his second wife, Tallulah

01:26:13.400 riley and then he dated amber heard and grimes i forgot about amber heard jesus i don't think

01:26:19.160 that these relationships are particularly interesting in and of themselves in like the

01:26:24.840 context of the elon biography but i do think that isaacson fumbles them enough that we should

01:26:29.800 mention it yeah everyone in elon's life says justine was crazy and toxic just about everyone

01:26:36.100 says the same thing about amber heard yeah but then we are told outright that he's verbally

01:26:40.480 abusive in ways similar to his father, right? There's a bit where Elon nearly calls off the

01:26:44.980 wedding with Justine because she won't sign a last second prenup. His family and friends portray it

01:26:51.040 like, oh, he seeks out these toxic and chaotic women. And it's like, okay, maybe, but it sort

01:26:58.620 of feels like a subset of this mode of analysis where Musk himself has no agency when he's doing

01:27:03.140 shitty things like right when he's being verbally abusive to these women it's this like this the

01:27:10.120 output of his father's abuse but when they're being toxic towards him oh right these women

01:27:15.880 like uh his mother his mother says about his first wife that she had no redeeming qualities

01:27:20.180 like oh my god i'm sorry but at the end of the day i do not believe the story being told by elon musk

01:27:28.300 and his best friends and family you know what i mean because i don't think that they are reliable

01:27:32.720 narrator it is very funny to be like this narcissistic man child with temper issues 0.84

01:27:37.900 happens to have dated two women in a row who are just like crazy and toxic right right like yeah

01:27:44.460 weird how that happens as i have mentioned before elon's extended media honeymoon really comes to an

01:27:51.580 end in 2018 when a series of humiliating mishaps changes the course of his life and public image

01:27:58.520 forever all that and more on the next if books could kill oh yeah we're ending with a cliffhanger

01:28:04.680 yeah i thought i thought that would keep people in in tune in to find out all of the stuff you

01:28:09.520 know already that's right

If Books Could Kill - December 09, 2025

Elon Musk

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