ON MUSK Episode Two: Demons

I'm Walter Isaacson. Welcome to The Builders, my new series of interviews featuring the most consequential minds shaping our future. Our series starts with Elon Musk, but in anticipation, we're re-airing our critically acclaimed show On Musk in this feed. The show originally aired in December of 2023. It has four episodes of backstories, from the years I spent following Elon while writing his biography. Give it a listen, then stay tuned for The Builders. I think you'll like it.

So he's at Twitter the night before Christmas Eve, December 23rd. And they've got three server farms, and if they keep them going, it's going to be a few million dollars each year. And he says, let's get rid of the Sacramento one. And people have been working at Twitter a long time, engineers. He hasn't yet fired them. They say, no, you can't pull out those servers. It'll take six months to move those out of Sacramento. And there are rules and regulations. I know demon mode's about to strike. But they were trying to argue with him on it. And finally, he just... goes really angry and leaves. The next day, Christmas Eve, he's on his plane, flying from San Francisco to Austin, bringing these two cousins. And as they're flying over,

you know, Nevada, one of them says, why don't we just take those servers out ourselves? And Bust goes into giddy mode and turns the plane around, goes right to Sacramento. They get to the server, It's the afternoon of Christmas Eve, so nobody's really working. And it's a facility that has servers of other companies as well, so it's hard to get into. But being Musk, he just finds somebody and makes them let him in. And he says, we're going to take these servers out. And they said, we can't.

You need an electrician to open the floorboard and somebody to cut off the cables and somebody who can handle the dollies. Musk turns to his security guard and says, you got a pocket knife? And he takes off the floorboard himself. He just pries it open from a vent. Then he gets a pair of pliers. I think they had gotten at Home Depot. And he cuts the cable to the servers and waits. And nothing happens. It's fine.

So they start, in a frenzy, moving these servers out on racks, on dollies, into this rental truck. And it proves to everybody that, yes, you can do it. You said it was going to take six months. It took us six hours and we got a third of them moved. So he gets to prove people he's hardcore and he's intense.

And then he has Ron DeSantis announced for president. And there's no backup servers. There's no caching. So the service, Twitter, goes down for 20 minutes or more. And he says, well, I guess it was a mistake taking the service out. But like a lot of things, it's not clear yet. this was a total mistake or totally brilliant. And for me, it's a metaphor. He tends to take risks, and he tends to leave rubble in his wake.

When Walter Isaacson set out to write a biography of Elon Musk, he believed he was taking on a world-changing figure, certainly a visionary, maybe genius. At Tesla and SpaceX's Musk had attracted some of the most brilliant engineering minds of our time to his side. His relentless vision and exacting standards had driven those companies beyond what many people thought possible.

But Isaacson quickly came to see what everyone else close to Musk already knew. Working with him came with a cost. Musk's management style included utter derision for work-life balance, a belief that any camaraderie at work only weakened employees' judgments. a lack of empathy so pronounced that Musk might tear someone down in front of everyone just because things had gotten too calm for his comfort, and then instantly forget about it. He was also busy seemingly squandering his legacy by the day on Twitter. Then, of course, buying Twitter, swapping out his lofty ambitions of interplanetary colonization and combating climate change for blue-check policies and content moderation, all while getting wrapped up in a battle with what he called the, quote,

woke mind virus. I'm Evan Ratliff, and on this episode of On Musk with Walter Isaacson, we ride shotgun as Isaacson encounters the darker parts of Elon, the earthward pole that threatens to ground his highest aspirations. Episode two, Demons.

All right, we're ready.

Yeah.

All right.

There are moments in the book where he is just reaming out someone. It's sometimes hard to tell the ones where you're there and you're not because you have such comprehensive access to information that you can paint scenes that you didn't actually witness through these various eyes. Did you personally witness those things?

Absolutely. All the time. And I was stunned because I thought of the Heisenberg principle that if something's being observed, it's going to change its velocity or its position. And I thought by being in the room, he wasn't going to ream somebody out. And people were amazed, the people around him, that he was just as tough and as bad and as much of an asshole or as much of a genius when I was around, that it did not calm him down, did not keep him from going into demon mode.

Some of the targets on whom Musk trained his fury were people who'd gone the furthest for him, like one executive named Brian Dow, who'd been a hero of one of Musk's so-called surges. That's when Musk brings everybody into the office for days or weeks of insane hours to hit some target he's deemed crucial.

Back in 2017, when Musk went into total fury about the battery factory in Nevada and lived there for about three months saying, you've got to speed up this battery line. He brings in this guy, Brian Dow, who's a can-do person. Yes, boss, we can get rid of this machine. Yes, boss, we can do it. He was so eager to help. And then I was there sitting in Musk's little house when he calls up Brian Downs and says, I'm moving you to run the solar roof division. It's like, I can do it. I can do it, chief.

Now, the solar roof division was a Musk project that hadn't paid off so well. The basic idea was that instead of retrofitting solar panels on houses, they would make the roof tiles themselves into solar panels. Musk had invested in and then had Tesla buy a solar roof company started by his cousins. Not the cousins on the airplane, but the other cousins. There were some accusations of nepotism swirling around Musk, as you might imagine. Anyway, Musk is trying to turn Tesla into an electric energy everything company. Batteries, cars, solar roofs. But the solar roofs are not getting installed fast enough to scale the business. He's burned through three executives there already. In comes Brian Dow to Boca Chica,

where Isaacson is lurking nearby in his Airstream trailer.

And one day... Bus became driven by the fact that they had to install solar roofs faster. Just like the assembly line for the car or the rocket. He says, how can we speed up this step, this step, this step? And finally, he says, all right, we're going to do the roofs of my house and these other little tract homes down in the south tip of Texas. And Dow is up in, I think, Seattle or wherever he was based.

And it's his birthday. But Musk said, OK, I need you back down in Boca Chica. Things aren't going well. And he abandons his family, but he misses the connection in Houston, has to get a car and drive six hours, gets there late at night. It was another surge. The task?

To get the time it took to install one roof down from three or four days to just 24 hours. So Dow is leading his team of fellow designer engineers and roofers to meet the challenge.

And I remember one day, it must have been 105 in the shade, and there was no shade. And these roofers are working, and they have to get it done within 24 hours. Musk goes on over to this little subdivision by about 9 at night, and there's big industrial lighting and cables, and there's 12 people scrambling on the roof.

And he climbs this rickety ladder to the top of the roof. And I, of course, have to climb up with him, you know, standing on the peak of this roof, clinging on for dear life as these people are scurrying around. And as always, Elon has his little son, X, who was then about two years old. And he's just starting to toddle on the ground amid all the cables and the lights and the moving equipment. And I'm petrified for him.

I'm petrified for myself. And there's Elon standing at the peak of the roof saying, why do we need four fasteners for each of the roof tiles? Couldn't it be done with two? And they say, well, if a hurricane comes and he's like, okay, here would be the strength of the winds. Here's how much it would take. And he's looking at the wiring and how it works and trying to simplify it. And there's somebody there who's supervising.

and must get furious because he believes that every person working on a solar roof team should be on the roof installing it. And if you're not installing it with your own hands, you're not really going to understand what the problems are. And this guy is saying, well, you know, I've done many roofs. I've watched it. says, how many of you actually install with your own hands? Well, none.

I'm a designer. I knew that was going to be one of those triggers. And for about an hour, standing on that roof. On the roof. And then finally, we come down on the ladder, and we're standing next to the house, and it continues for another 30 minutes. He's reaming this guy out, and finally says to Brian Dow that he had to be fired. We came back. A couple days later, and there's another house they're doing. And then yet another house. And I remember once it was so hot that people were fainting. They were throwing up.

And yet they worked all day to install it within 24 hours. And finally, Musk is satisfied. But not until he fires Brian Dow, the guy in charge of the division, as well as many of the people who were helping do the roofs. And Brian talks to me afterwards and says, I tried so hard. I was so eager. He knew I would walk through walls with him. And yet he fired me. And that's the type of toughness that I don't find easy to stomach. It really, really turned me off when I was watching it. But I try to describe it. And also the fact that after he kept pushing me, he was able to get them to do a solar roof per day.

Even after that, by the way, solar roofs, still not scalable. After the vomiting and the passing out and the firing, it didn't really matter. The goal Musk had set of 24 hours to install the roof didn't move the needle, at least not by Silicon Valley standards. And Isaacson returns again and again to these episodes, trying to tease out what they mean for the people involved in them.

And as you'll see in the book, Not only did I report those, I think, in full fury of it all. I'm not sugarcoating. I also went back to the people who got totally reamed out. I'd go back a day later and sometimes six months later. Say, what did you learn? Like, why couldn't you take it? And there's a scene in the book of a Friday night at Starbase where he just reams out this wonderful southern guy, Andy Krabs, for not having enough people working. Just chews them up left, right, and center. And then like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a few weeks later, he doesn't even remember it. And he promotes Andy. But then it keeps happening. So Andy leaves. Recently, I was in Los Angeles and I'm signing books at

the LA Times book event. I see coming over for me. I say, that's Andy. I said, Andy, how are you doing? He says, I think I'm going to go back to SpaceX. I've had the choice of being burned out or being bored. I decided I'd rather be burned out. on such a mission.

That's amazing. Because the one that stuck with me was the guy who was thought to have caused one of the failed launches or crashes because he had like turned a nut on the rocket and that had disrupted something. And Musk actually publicly said it was him. And then he quit. And then Musk was sort of good riddance.

He wasn't that great of an engineer. And then you sort of end that section by saying it turned out It was not the turning of the nut. It wasn't him.

I know. I try to show both the fierce urgency of these things that Musk feels and that without this crazed urgency, you wouldn't have gotten Tesla lines working as well. But I also sometimes show where it was just awful the way he did these things. And it happens on the, Tesla assembly line where somebody who's totally innocent, you know, must then fires him. And that brings up the question that so many people ask in the book is, is it worthwhile? Do you make that trade-off? And by the end of the book, I kind of pretty clearly say, no, you don't really make that trade-off. That getting to Mars doesn't excuse being a total asshole. But I want the reader to see it in action.

And right after the break, Musk manages to create a truly unique level of Thanksgiving drama as we get into just what makes this guy tick. There's a personal aspect which I have experienced myself as a reporter because I tend to spend time around relatively unpleasant people and the stuff that I write about. But The moment that you have to experience him reaming someone out, him yelling, him being an asshole, you know, it's not all the time, but what kind of persona do you go into in that moment? I mean, this is not something I assume you would choose in your life to be around people who are behaving in this way.

Yeah, and there's some people who love conflict. They go to world wrestling, you know, matches and stuff, and I'm the opposite. I don't like seeing people fight and be really mean. So at those moments... I kind of shrink back a bit. I try to be a bit invisible. And then there were a lot of personal things that I had to figure out whether to put in the book, especially when it came to his complex relationship with women and the women who were the mother of his children.

Right before Thanksgiving of 2022, Claire Boucher, the performance artist known as Grime, is in the hospital with a surrogate who's having their child. But in the same hospital, Siobhan Zillis, who runs Neuralink, is having twins that are from Elon as a sperm donor. And they don't know that the other is actually in the same hospital, even though they know each other. They don't know they're both having kids of Elon's at the same time. This is complicated emotionally.

And Elon flies off right at Thanksgiving and says, I've got a crisis happening with one of the engines they were building. And I have to go focus on it. Now, it's like Thanksgiving Friday. You don't have to focus on it. But it was like rocket engines were simpler to him than human emotions. After the book is published, you can go on X or Twitter and see Grimes posting and Siobhan posting and how they're all mad about this scene in the book. But I felt that that was all key to understanding the turmoil. right around the time he's trying to get Starship launched, right around the time he's getting this new huge factory done in Austin, that he loves drama, that he lives for turmoil, and that the

personal side is in turmoil as well. And I kind of felt you had to know it all to understand what was swirling around him and inside him as he's doing all this.

For Isaacson, Musk's approach to life seemed rooted in his upbringing. What he describes in the beginning of the book as a violent childhood with an alternately neglectful and cruel father. At what point in your reporting did you sort of start to get those stories and understand that you were going to use those stories as a way into understanding sort of the psychology behind his work?

Elon Musk had never really talked about his childhood. or about the difficult relationship with his father. And there'd been profiles of him in Rolling Stone in which he says, there's something I just can't say. And so I knew there was a key there. And so I kept pushing on it, gently, month after month. Tell me about your dad.

Tell me about your childhood. Tell me about being beaten up. And he'd go silent, stony-faced. And I'd stay silent. I'd try to outlast him. Occasionally, he'd give me a little something. And then finally, on the 10th attempt at the conversation, we were flying somewhere, actually. And he said, tell me about your father. And tears came to his eyes. And then it started to tumble out. After that, I was able to get more and more. And of course, from his brother, Kimball, and from his father, who I talked to, and from his mother, who said, the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father. And so that's how that theme developed. But it wasn't something I could do in one, two, three, or four interviews. It was really

a year into the reporting that slowly that door began to open.

Well, I think that makes a big difference, to me at least, in how you read the book, in a way, knowing that. Because I think he has a difficult and in some ways horrible father. You start out with these scenes of violence and him being bullied in different ways. And it feels different to me to know that on day one, he didn't say to you, let me explain myself to you. The reason I'm a jerk is because I had this difficult upbringing. rather than that being something that you pulled out of him.

I sometimes think, and this will sound a bit arrogant, that I understand him better than he understands him. He'll tell me I've got emotions buried under concrete and I didn't blast through them. but I slowly, slowly bore through them and dug through them. And yes, it's a lot about the demons of childhood. It's also about being wired differently, which is complicated, meaning he says he has Asperger's, which isn't even used in the medical realm that much anymore.

He doesn't have very good input-output signals for human emotions. And that means he was socially awkward and beaten up as a kid all the time. And since the book came out, one of the things that surprises me is how many people come up to me. I'll say one of them, Andrew Yang, because he did it on his podcast.

But certain TV hosts will say, I have a kid with Asperger's. And what I have to do is I keep my arm around him at all times when we're on baseball games or out somewhere. And I say, look the person in the eye when he hands you the popcorn and do this. And then I realized that Musk's father, instead of putting his arm around him and helping him, said, you're stupid. You're a loser. You deserve to be beaten up.

And that doesn't excuse all of Musk's behavior. And sometimes we confuse explaining something with excusing it. I think it's important to explain it.

I want to note here that this is all pretty tricky territory. For one thing, Asperger's, as Walter notes, is an outdated diagnostic term for one form of autism spectrum disorder. But it's a term that some people still use to self-identify, including Musk. And ASD in general, and what people call Asperger's specifically, are both frequently misunderstood. Someone having trouble with social cues obviously does not mean they lack empathy. But challenges with social interactions can sometimes be confused for narcissism, and vice versa. Part of what I wanted to know from Isaacson was how he tried to navigate this territory when it came to Musk and his previous subject, Steve Jobs.

I was also struck by the contrast between the Jobs book and this book, because Jobs also, you describe, has the lack of empathy. That's something that comes up in the Jobs book a few times. But his ex-girlfriend identifies it as narcissistic personality disorder. And she says something like, I realized that telling him to be less self-centered was like telling a blind man to see.

And by the way, this is true of Tallulah Riley, the second wife of Elon Musk. And it's true of Grimes. It's like, no, sometimes you just can't tell Musk to be a different way because that is the way he's wired. Or you look at some of the great disruptors. I mean, Bill Gates, early days of Microsoft. No empathy. You know, Jeff Bezos could be that way.

And it is such a delicate issue because I feel like you're careful to say he says that he has Asperger's. And it's not your job, I believe, to challenge that. But in this case, it makes a difference whether he's right in terms of the explanation versus the excuse.

He has never been diagnosed. But his mother said, oh, yeah. He definitely has Asperger's and his brother, Campbell, says it. And one of the things that has happened since the Jobs book to now is we start using terms like neurodivergent as opposed to jerk or as opposed to trying to slap a broad label like Asperger's. Musk knows he goes into multiple personalities and almost forgets what he has done when he's dark, depressed. or when he's, as Grimes puts it, in demon mode, or when he gets back into just being engineering mode personality. There are times when he's friendly and joking, and times when he's inspirational, and times when he's laser focused like an engineer in a monotone with a specific problem. And he also has talked

to both me and the people around him about being bipolar. It would be useful with all of these semi-awarenesses if he would go to a doctor, get analyzed, get treatment. But as he says, these things are buried under layers of concrete and I don't want to blast through them.

So when you started connecting with the family and you end up talking to his father, and from a journalistic point of view, this seems like a very difficult character to be entangled with in terms of like his connection to the truth, but also his beliefs. How do you sort of manage that relationship?

Well, I'm still in contact with Errol Musk, who's not really in contact with Elon. Elon doesn't take his emails, doesn't speak to him. But Errol Musk is a really good engineer, has a real feel for the physical properties of everything from, you know, mica to steel. He's also somebody who has been successful at times, even once owned a Rolls Royce in South Africa and built a wilderness camp with his kids, and at times goes through this Dr.

Jekyll to Mr. Hyde transition and has lost a whole lot of money. He's a fabulist, which means he fabricates things. I mean, he makes himself the hero of some of his own adventures. On the other hand, he understands that his own son has many of these traits. And he'll say, when I ask him about taking this out of the person who beat up Elon, he'll say, well, Elon deserved that, or Elon was stupid. And he will say, I applied a very strict authoritarian attitude towards Elon, and he does that with other people as well. So in unraveling the mystery and the enigma inside of Musk, you start by peeling back the layers that come from his father, and you keep in mind his mother's admonition to be, which

is that the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father.

It's interesting that she says that because there's also this other side, which is he has a very supportive mother. So it's not just the father. And without becoming too much of an armchair psychologist, I guess, because he's got these, let's just say, unusual relationships with women over time, and he's got this supportive mother. What's the decision to sort of ground it more in the bad father than in the good mother?

Well, the mother is a wonderful character throughout the book, but both with May, the mother, and with Elon, they're attracted to dramatic relationships. And May will say of her son that he can't relax and smell the flowers. He's always attracted to the storm, to the drama. And May, who I really like, she hasn't been in life very good at relationships. She's attracted to people who cause problems.

And so, too, is it with Elon. You know, his first wife, a truly stormy relationship, but they thrived on fighting all the time. And he said, there's just something about the flame. I'm always attracted to the flame and drama in relationships. And I asked him why. And I asked Tallulah, his second wife, why. And Tallulah says, there he was growing up with his father and his father is mentally torturing him. And somehow you internalize storm and drama with your childhood nurturing. That's probably overthinking it. Because Kimball, his brother, he's much more stable in his relationships and in his ability to show empathy. Whereas Musk, he would see.

He'd see some calm on a factory line or at a launch pad, and he'd be unhappy. He'd say, I've got to stir things up.

Up next, Twitter, and whether Musk did ever turn his demon mode on Isaacson.

In April of 2022... when he's kicking around the idea of buying Twitter. He's starting to buy the stock, and he's going a bit dark on management, thinking maybe I'll make a hostile offer. It was a day he opened the Giga Texas factory. Amazing big event. And he goes out to dinner that weekend at a club called The Pershing, very quiet and private, in an upstairs room. And it's him, his autistic son, Saxon, his young three-year-old ex. Grimes comes in a little bit late. May Musk, she's at the dinner.

And it's myself and a couple of other people. I'm asking, why are you thinking of buying Twitter? And in my own mind, I'm thinking, that's a bad idea. But I'm just asking. And then everybody else is chiming in. Like, why do you really want it and what do you do with it? And at some point, he says to Griffin, one of his teenagers, do you use Twitter? He said, no, dad, none of my friends use Twitter. And May Musk, you know, his mother says, well, I use Twitter. I'm thinking, OK, this may be an indication of the demographic that they're heading towards. And everybody is trying to nudge him away from going down this path. Really hurting his reputation, but sucking up his time of trying to fix Twitter. And

all of this keeps coming out of the dinner. By the end of the dinner, I realize, okay, he's going to go there.

So now Isaacson has a subject on his hands who isn't just an innovator. a Silicon Valley darling with some libertarian-flecked politics. Now he's got someone gearing up to fight a war over free speech and right-wing censorship on Twitter, where he's about to try and manifest his original X.com everything platform vision.

When I first started working on the Elon Musk book, he was very well-known, but not quite as controversial. He wasn't quite as toxic or as canonized. Then the Twitter... deal happens, and that changes things. It really increases by at least two orders of magnitude how controversial he is and also how famous he is. So suddenly the narrative becomes much more of a roller coaster. So it's good for the book, but there were parts of it that I kind of wish, hey, he was a calmer personality.

But he says, I got to keep in mind that the mission is getting to Mars. It's not absolutely caring about the psychological pleasures and safeties of everybody. I can remember the time he walked into Twitter headquarters right before he had officially acquired it. And they're telling him what a nurturing place it is to work. And they're saying, you know, we've got quiet rooms and we have mental health days off and we have yoga studio so people can stay in balance. And then they say, and we really value psychological safety. And Musk sort of had that raspy laugh. And he says, psychological safety, that's our enemy.

That's an impediment. We have to have a fierce sense of urgency. We aren't aiming for psychological safety.

The other reason Musk gives for buying Twitter... one that he seems to get a lot of play for in some corners of the world, is that he's fighting against quote-unquote wokeness. Musk has his own term for it. When he talks about anti-woke mind virus, he uses that phrase. And that really touches on things that have become, you know, third rails in society in terms of how they're discussed.

I'm curious how you kind of engaged with that idea with him. I mean, he's someone who grew up in apartheid South Africa, so obviously, like, his views on race... And other societal issues are going to be colored by that. Like, what does he mean when he says something like that?

Well, the way I engage with it and you see it in the book is I question it. I say, why are you following this particular conspiracy? And I'll even talk about Occam's razor, which is the simplest explanation, maybe the best one. Instead of thinking there's a vast conspiracy of drug makers and COVID vaccines or people trying to lock down so they control government. or any of these things that he goes to, I'm not that way. I'm not conspiratorial. And I find that anti-political correctness and wokeness, it's a little hard for me to explain because my head's not there. You know, I think sometimes what we call being woke is being polite and sensitive to other people's feelings. And I'll ask him about that. I'll say, hey,

don't you understand? You've got a daughter who transitioned. Why do people care about pronouns. And he'll say things when he's in a more rational mood of, well, I don't mind people using pronouns, but it gouges my eyes out when I see it too much. I'm going, why? What's the problem? But it's when he's in his dark moods, this eats away at him. And I describe his political evolution from being an Obama supporter to being supporting Bobby Kennedy, then Ron DeSantis, people who are worried about wokeness or worried about conspiracy theories. And I never try to excuse it in the book. I don't excuse the rabbit hole, going down these rabbit holes of conspiracy. I do try to explain it from his childhood, from his father, whatever.

And then I'll tell a story about a particularly... horrible tweet he did, like, prosecute Fauci are my pronouns. I mean, just in a few words, is able to attack transgender pronouns and Anthony Fauci. And I talk about his father having said all these sort of things and him being in a hotbox room and Twitter, and he's going dark and giddy. And one of the people in the room starts joking about Fauci and pronouns. And until you read the book, I think critics can have a difficulty saying, is he explaining it or is he excusing it? But if you read that anecdote or that story, you're not going to say, Walter excused it. You're going to see the rawness that's there sometimes in Elon Musk.

Musk begins purging Twitter employees based on their relative, quote, hardcore-ness. When Twitter's finally down to a quarter of its previous size, he's created the ultimate test for his delete, delete, delete management algorithm.

And it's a hardcore, small cadre. And that cadre of people, you now see it at Twitter. He whittled down 80% of the staff, but it's a very hardcore cadre that will march through walls for him. And I think he tests people. He drives them mad, but also drives them to do things they didn't think they could do.

Did he ever turn his anger on you? Did you experience demon mode directed at you, as you describe it?

Everybody told me he was going to turn demon mode on me. The people who worked for him, plus Grimes and his former wives, they'd all say, it's going to happen to you. And if there's one small mystery, I can't quite figure out why it never did happen to me. Hmm. But I didn't fill the silences. When he went dark and he went silent, I would just sit there. When he would say something provocative, I'd just ask a question.

And I don't think I did anything that would have triggered that demon mode. But I must say, as I watched it get triggered by people around me, I always said, at some point, this is going to happen to me. where he tells me I'm stupid or whatever, like he did to some other people who worked with him. I didn't really want it to happen, but in the back of my mind, I knew if it did, it would be a pretty good passage in the book. And I waited, I waited, and I was pretty clear, having watched him after the first few months, I knew what brought on the storm. I knew the type of things. that would just set him off. And sometimes I'd see it happen.

I'd see it happen on an assembly line where some poor young worker, there's a scene in the book where Musk is saying, did you design this process here? And the young guy can't figure out what he's talking about. So what do you mean design it? And you could tell Musk was about to go ballistic. And he does.

And he fires the guy for no real reason. And I watched over and over again, Musk get triggered by people giving opinions not backed up by data, or not understanding what he was saying, or trying to make excuses.

Isaacson did find a few people who always seemed to dodge Musk's flamethrower. Mark Giancosa, the California surfer type who was a key SpaceX engineer, and Gwynne Shotwell, the president of SpaceX for the last 20 years.

I also watched people like Mark or Gwynne, and I learned how they did it, which wasn't Being a yes person, it was just slowly and methodically making factual arguments. And when Musk made a decision, say, fine, I get it. But then presenting them over and over again with more facts and saying, all right, we're going to try it that way. But here's what we learned when we tested it this morning. Because there are people who've been there almost 20 years at SpaceX or at Tesla who have never really been the object of his flamethrowing personality. But as...

A few people in the book said, Yoel Roth, who was in charge of moderation at Twitter. Twitter, yeah. Yoel told me over and over again those first few weeks how he had learned to deal with Musk, how it worked out fine. And he said, I know these type of people. He basically is saying, I know bosses that can turn into assholes all of a sudden. I've dealt with this before. And then finally, Yoel doesn't get fired.

He doesn't get reamed out. He finally says, It's just too much. I'm leaving. It's time for me to go.

It kind of highlights this aspect, I think, if you only hear about the incidents where Musk mistreats people, he's an asshole, he doesn't have any empathy. You kind of wonder, why would anyone work for him?

Over and over again, he would do things like force a surge to stack a rocket on a launch pad, even though there was no rush to do it, or force a surge to at one of the manufacturing plants. And people would go through hell for about a week to do it. And it was exhausting. And a few would fall by the wayside. And a couple would quit and then decided, I'd rather be burned out than bored.

And so he's able to get those 20% of the people in any workforce who are totally inspired by somebody always in battle And he gets a very lean team that's willing to put up with him being cold and angry for those amazing moments where they feel like they're changing the world.

In the next episode of On Musk, we turn our lens on Isaacson and his process, teasing out exactly how he wrote this behemoth biography, how he resists hot takes, even as he's surrounded by them. and how he sorted out what was going on with the supposed Musk family emerald mine.

I mean, it's just so brutal. They hate each other. He said, I'm just a middle-class kid trying to build a company, and when people do things that suck, I've got to tell them it sucks. And if I'm too collegial, we'll never get things done. Well, I thought that was going to be the end of all my access, that I had violated what he may have thought was just a private comment. But there were moments as the book was finishing— I'd get up in the morning and just turn on my phone. Is it still there? Was it like the rocket ship? Did it blow up?

On Musk with Walter Isaacson is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeart. This show is based on the writing and reporting of Walter Isaacson. It's hosted by me, Evan Ratliff. Produced by Lizzie Jacobs. Assistant production from Serena Chow. Mixing and sound design by Rick Kwan. Thomas Walsh did the engineering.

From iHeart Podcast, the executive producers are Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry. For Kaleidoscope, it was executive produced by Mangesh Hetikadur, with an assist from Oz Wolishan, Kostas Linos, and Kate Osborne. Special thanks to Bob Pittman, Conal Byrne, Will Pearson, Nikki Etor, Carrie Lieberman, Nathan Otoski, Ali Gavin, and the folks at WWNO who let us use their beautiful studio in New Orleans.

If you like stories about writers and their process, check out my other show, The Long Form Podcast. If you want a story about a different South African programmer who became one of the world's biggest criminals, you can check out my book, The Mastermind. And for more shows from Kaleidoscope, be sure to visit kaleidoscope.nyc. Thanks so much for listening.

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