In this podcast, Motley Fool host Ricky Mulvey caught up with Walter Isaacson to talk about the force that is Elon Musk.
They also discuss:
- The importance of the letter X.
- How to craft a "cocktail of a fanatical risk taker."
- Musk's latest endeavor into "real-world artificial intelligence."
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool's free podcasts, check out our podcast center. To get started investing, check out our quick-start guide to investing in stocks. A full transcript follows the video.
This video was recorded on Oct. 7, 2023.
Walter Isaacson: He does need that existential crisis, that manic intensity that we're all doomed unless we do this. However, there was some truth to it, most shorted stock in the history of the world, and there are a lot of people betting it was going to go under. It drives him to be living in the factory floor saying, we've got to get to 5,000 a week and firing anybody, or going into demon mode with anybody. He says, there's just no way. We only have two assembly lines. It's going to get to 3,000 maybe 3,500.
Mary Long: I'm Mary Long, and that's Walter Isaacson. He's a professor of history at Tulane University and a best-selling biographer of Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna and Benjamin Franklin. His new book is Elon Musk. That's what Isaacson and Ricky Mulvey talk about on today's show to get a portrait of the Earth moving force behind Tesla and SpaceX. They also talk about Elon's new artificial intelligence company and his love for risk, including a story about a blindfolded knife thrower at a birthday party.
Ricky Mulvey: You sat in on a lot of the wild conversations that Elon Musk had, it's SpaceX, Tesla, and sometimes there's very pressing issues with getting a rocket off the ground, sometimes there's an issue with maybe a car assembly line. But there's also room for these discussions about the future of humanity, like what's the governance plan on the future colony of Mars. What will people wear there? Can you give us some color of what's going on in those discussions, and at least maybe the rough draft of the future plan for the government of Mars.
Walter Isaacson: You know, when he talks about making humans a space-faring species and colonizing other planets, he talks about human consciousness and how it's the only consciousness we know of in the universe, and so we have to get to other planets, and I thought that was probably at first just the pontification you would do for a pep talk to your team for a podcast. But he would say it over and over again and it's as if he really had internalized this as a mission of his life. No matter what was happening with Tesla on a given day, or the rockets or any pressing problems he had, he loved one meeting and that was called Mars Colonizer. He never skipped that meeting. They would sit there and talk about, what would you wear on Mars? Who are the robots going to work for? What would be the governance structure of Mars? For a while, I'm just taking notes, and finally, I'm pinching myself and saying, wait a minute, these are grown ups and they're sitting there talking about what we're going to wear when we colonize Mars. But it was typical of Musk, which is he kept his eyes on a distant horizon every now and then just to keep himself motivated.
Ricky Mulvey: What would you wear on Mars?
Walter Isaacson: He designed space suits, and by the way, Boeing and NASA, they were unable to create great space suits for even the walks that they would do from the shuttle. He's even now making space suits that they might use. The real question for him was how to make sure the robots are under the control of the humans and not vice versa. Because this is a guy, as a kid who read all those Isaac Asimov robot stories about the rules of robotics, and that's another of his missions was have guard rails and safety for artificial intelligence.
Ricky Mulvey: It seems that you could almost judge Elon Musk's mood, whether or not he's in a demon mode based on almost what he's referencing, is he talking about a Monty Python skit, is he talking about the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy with regard to AI, or is it closer, maybe to Asimov, and then on the extreme other end of the spectrum, the matrix controlling, possibly the simulation that we're living in right now?
Walter Isaacson: He was such a lonely kid, no friends as a kid, socially awkward. He talks about having a pretty bad case of Aspergers. He would sit in the corner of his local library and read science fiction, as you said, Hitchhiker's Guide or the Matrix or the Foundation Series, E&K Banks, many others. He really developed a sense of himself as almost a epic superhero, but also Captain Underpants. As you mentioned, his moods would shift, and when I was around him on a given day, they'd shift suddenly and he would be giddy at one point, then he would be quoting Hitchhiker's Guide. Then he would be an engineering mode and totally focused on say why a methane leak was happening in a valve of a raptor engine, and then there was, of course, this dark mode that his girlfriend Grimes calls demon mode. It was almost like Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Something would set him off. I could usually tell what it was going to be and you'd see the dark cloud across his face. He never raised his voice, but he'd become coldly angry and dark at times. When people say did you like Musk, I said, well, there are a lot of Elon Musk I liked or respected, but I also felt at times when he lapsed into this dark mood, he was a different person.
Ricky Mulvey: You said that you could predict what would set him off. What were these predictions you were making? How did you know?
Walter Isaacson: Well, I remember once being at a restaurant in Austin, Texas with Grimes, his girlfriend, and a few other people. Somebody said something about how what Musk was doing was impossible and he should get over it. Grimes leaned over and said demon mode, and she could see the darkness about to happen, and I could always see it. It was usually when somebody wasn't hardcore all in and had a manic intensity in pursuing the mission, even late on a Friday night at the launch pad for Starship down in South Texas. I remember it was about 10:00 PM on a Friday. He was walking around and only two people were working on the launch pad. They didn't have a launch schedule for months, and suddenly he's looking at Andy Krebs, who was in charge of that launch pad, and asking why more people weren't working, that we'd never get to Mars unless they had intensity. At first, they were saying, well, there's no need to, we don't have anything scheduled, and I could see demon mode kick in. For about an hour, he was ordering up a surge so that by the next day, more than 100 people had to come in from Cape Canaveral and Los Angeles to get that launch pad to become a beehive of activity.
Ricky Mulvey: It seems like a lot of the executives, people who have worked with Musk for a long time, have their own strategies of dealing with this demon mode. One person who may be familiar with that is SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell. What is the rough draft, if you had to write the survival guide of working closely with Elon Musk, what are some of those lessons from those who spent a lot of time with him?
Walter Isaacson: Gwynne Shotwell is a great example. She's been there more than 20 years, been president of SpaceX. I've seen it where he, one day, for example, decided that in order to push Starship development, this biggest rocket ever made, that he's still trying to develop, he just did a test flight earlier this year. In order to push it faster, they're going to have to cancel Falcon Heavy, which is the only rocket that can get military satellites into high Earth orbit. NASA depends on the defense intelligence agent, and he just said, we'll never get to Mars if we just keep relying on that crutch. I'm canceling it. They're all texting Gwynne, and she comes into the conference room, and so it's just giving him, in a very engineering style, all facts and figures and saying we can discuss this over the next week, but let me give you the information and we'll work up more information for what will happen if we'll do it. He's like an engineer. He absorbs that information and reversed himself.
Ricky Mulvey: One of the things you've discussed is his ability to visualize engineering information, perhaps better than maybe anyone else I've ever heard about, and that has to be critical to his ability to launch Starships and make electric cars.
Walter Isaacson: Some of the great thinkers that I've written about have been very visual thinkers. Albert Einstein was slow in learning how to talk as a child. They called him der Depperte, the dope one because he couldn't really articulate things. He said, because he was slow in learning to read, he learned to visualize. Likewise with Musk, he has a intuitive feel for the underlying physics of material properties. At one point he says, we're going to quit using carbon composites for this rocket, we're going to do it out of stainless steel. This is Starship, the biggest rocket ever. They're trying to talk to him, say, it's not going to be strong enough, it's going to be too heavy. He starts explaining, let's try it because at certain temperatures as a strength of stainless steel, that means you can keep it pretty thin, and he was going even over the details of the millimeters of the nose cone and where the pressure points would be. Over the next few weeks, they try it out. If you go down to Boca Chica, Texas, you'll see it like the cybertruck is all stainless steel.
Ricky Mulvey: You've also talked about how some of the greatness and the darkness are all interrelated with many of your subjects including Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. With Musk, there's the all in personality you've described. I'm wondering if it's been hard for you in this biography to stay in the role of the observer sometimes thinking about Elon Musk, especially maybe texting you about how he's having trouble sleeping, drinking so much Red Bull, taking Ambien, telling you that he's burning the candle at both ends with a flame thrower. In this case, and I'm sure you had that with Steve Jobs as well, where he's essentially refusing cancer treatment to try these diets. How hard is that task to stay in the role as the documenter, the observer when you see the geniuses probably hurting themselves.
Walter Isaacson: Ricky, that's a really good question. You also have to be careful of the Heisenberg problem, which is by observing a particle, you're going to affect its motion and my role is to be the observer. With Musk, it was particularly a difficult and strong question because I had told him I didn't want to do this book based on five or 10 or 15 interviews. I wanted to be bias side at all moments of the day for weeks on end, for two years. I could see him going through these various phases and I had to wall off a bit that I was not supposed to be his pal, I was not supposed to advise him, and occasionally I'd ask him questions. I'd say, have you talked to General Mark Milley about that question he was posing or have you considered this, or why is an increase in the huge array of speech better for democracy, can you explain to me why you think that's true? Most of the time I was doing it by asking him questions. I'm trying to be very open with the reader when I'm in a scene that might affect the scene. I'm not one of those type of writers who wants to say, me, me, me. But I have to be honest when I'm in a scene that these are the things I said and these were the responses.
Ricky Mulvey: Then now with the book coming out, I don't know if this is happening, tell me I'm wrong, but I would imagine a lot of people are trying to get through to Elon Musk through you. Elon Musk's further, has continued to send you things. I know there's been issues. I think Grimes is now suing Musk to see their kids. Grimes even saying that the first time she saw the half siblings of her children were in your book. How's that experience been for you?
Walter Isaacson: Well, it is true that two types of people who contact me people in the family are very close to Musk. I feel I owe them some discussions because everybody was very open to me, whether it was Grimes or Shivon Zilis, the other woman you mentioned, or his father who very dark and high, but spent a lot of time talking to me. Of course the things that I slough off is maybe 20 times a day. People say I have to get to Elon Musk because I've invented a way to have a perpetual motion rocket ship or something and that I just have a standard reply which is I'm not an agent for Elon Musk. I finished the book. That's it?
Ricky Mulvey: I guess going away from the process of writing, I want to get back to the businesses and the personality. One thing I didn't realize and it is apparent throughout the way he names his kids, the way he names his company is the letter X and just how important that letter is to Elon Musk. Walter, you are a man of letters, but I would doubt you have that type of preference for exactly one letter. Why is this letter so darn important to Elon Musk?
Walter Isaacson: Even as a kid, whether it be the X Man comics or the mathematical concept of the unknown, the mystery, that you have to hunt for in an algebra problem. For example, it made him love X. It sounded as if it was risk taking, as if it's hardcore, there's an adventuresome quality to it. Throughout his life, whether it was his eldest surviving child was named after his favorite comic book character in the X Man comics, Xavier or his first company was called X.com which morphed into PayPal but he fought to keep the name X, and you see it over and over again with SpaceX or turning Twitter now into X. Thinking he feels little tweets with blue birds and little blue check barks that are anointed to members of the elite is bullshit and he needs a hardcore, somewhat more mysterious type of thing. Then X AI. Of course, his three-year-old kid who's with him at all times has a name that sounds like a auto generated druid password, but he calls him X.
Ricky Mulvey: A lot of the arguments when Musk started with the founders of PayPal where he was pushing for X. His arguments, were seems to be getting the same ones now, like X.com sounds a little seedy, people don't know what it is. But he pushed through it similar to what he's pushing through now. Maybe Twitter really is the culmination of that dream in the '90s of what X.com could be.
Walter Isaacson: You got it right, Ricky. Nobody else seems to have captured that but it's part of the narrative which is feeling burned that Peter Thiel and others ousted him from the company that he had called X.com 20 some ideal years ago and then they named it PayPal. He thought PayPal was a sweet little name, like a friendly person who helps you get paid and of course, it does have a more friendly feel to it just as little bluebirds and Twitter has a sweet and friendly feel. But nobody uses the phrase sweet and friendly to describe Elon Musk. He's hardcore. He's all in. He's a risk taker, for better or for worse. When he was first buying up stock in Twitter, and we were at the Gigafactory in Texas even before it opened and he told me he was going to go try to control Twitter he said it will be the booster rocket, the accelerant to make a payment system connected to a social network, connected to a place where things like the Motley Fool podcast can be posted and make money. People can do content and make money. He said, "This will fulfill my dream of the original X.com".
Ricky Mulvey: He told you that it could be the largest financial institution in the world, I guess it would be through that connection in the process of that will remain to be seen as he also has focuses on artificial intelligence. In the story of Twitter as well and now X.com there's a rule that I would say you set up in the beginning parts of the book which is that Musk has this incredible ability to be a serial mono-tasker. He can go from company to company and completely focus what he's doing on the problem at hand. Do you think Twitter broke that? Towards the end of the book you talk about this Tesla robo taxi design meeting where he's complaining about the workers of Twitter and how they're not performing up to his standards. It seems like that would be completely unheard of just a few years earlier for Elon Musk.
Walter Isaacson: Yes. But he's still, and you put it so well, a serial mono-tasker or more than a multitask. Meaning, for example, on the night that the Twitter board decides to accept his offer and he's going to become the owner of Twitter, the whole world is talking about it. He goes down to the Starbase where the star ship is going to launch in Boca Chica and they're in the conference room and nobody talks about Twitter, even though it's the biggest story. They're worried about a methane leak in one of the raptor engines. You see him just intensely focus on that, so he still does that. He complained that Twitter is a distraction, People said, was he glad he bought Twitter or did he really want to go through with it? He's mercurial. There were mornings where he was all giddy about, I'm going to take over Twitter, we're going to do what we meant to do with X.com and there were afternoons when he was deeply dark and yelling at his lawyers and say, get me out of this deal, the Court's trying to force me to go through with it. I think now that he's found Linda Yaccarino, I hope because I don't think his highest and best use of his time is running a social network. I hope he'll focus more on artificial intelligence as he told me he would and focus more on Starship and getting it to orbit.
Ricky Mulvey: That's part of it where there's always been this slight connection that X.com Twitter has some, I understand the humanitarian reason for its existence, but it doesn't have that existential reasoning that a lot of his companies do. Reading your book, Walter, and one of the things he wanted to do was own the theme park and I came back to this thought of just wouldn't it be better if he just owned an actual theme park.
Walter Isaacson: Right. Or even started, as his brother Kimbal suggested, start your own payments platform social media because Twitter was a sweet little playground. People like me, in the mainstream media, we got to chat with each other and we were anointed with blue check marks and it was a casual. It was toxic too, in many places. But it was still the playground for mainstream media and he just did not like that or want to keep that.
Ricky Mulvey: I'm looking at my time and I know I have to focus on Tesla a bit. One of the things written about Tesla, and I think this is foundational to the business, "Musk focus on the importance of the mission rather than the potential of the business". For a lot of short term stock traders, that might not be the best course of outcome, but a lot of long term investors have benefited well from that mentality. How does that drive Tesla's model? What do you think would have changed at Tesla if that were reversed? If the potential of the business was more important than the importance of the mission.
Walter Isaacson: Now, if he were driven mainly by money, you won't start a rocket company and you wouldn't start an electric vehicle company. He always has a mission in mind and then back fills with a business plans as to take SpaceX first his mission is getting to Mars and then he realizes I can launch communication satellite. In fact, I'm the only person who can send up rockets, land them upright, and reuse them so I will launch my own Internet in low earth or it was Starlink. Now, you ask about Tesla. He decided by doing high end vehicles like the Roadster, he could fund a factory because he thought it was ridiculous that America was outsourcing its manufacturing and that would make it so we didn't have a feel for innovation if we just design things and let it be manufactured somewhere else. He spent more time focusing on not just the product, but what he called the machine that makes the machine, the assembly line. Each station on the assembly line. By in-sourcing everything, is not the best short-term business model. If you're going to go for short-term profit, obviously your labor costs are better if you're having it manufactured in other places. But he said, we have to look at the longer term. It was a period in which, I think more than 70 percent of the intellectual property that automakers produce in America, they were sending offshore to get produced. He more and more decided to in source it. But it did finally mean that he has the two most productive factories around in Fremont, California, in Austin, Texas. Now he turned out already this year, a million Teslas and he's worth more than the next eight or nine car companies combined. One of the things I said in on a meeting, it wasn't public, but I put it in the book, he's now building the new assembly line that's going to create not just robot taxis, but a pretty cheap $25,000 car. Something to go up against a Corolla. Because he's willing to price it cheaply, but then make up for it with huge manufacturing, that will take Tesla to the next level, along with autopilot when he finally gets full self driving done.
Ricky Mulvey: But the $25,000 car was not something he was initially excited about. This is something where he actually did seem to change his mind.
Walter Isaacson: That's an interesting question. Just like we talked about Gwynne Shotwell changing his mind over and over again, he tells Drew Baglino and Franz von Holthausen and Lars Moravy and the people running Tesla, the next car, we have to force the future. We have to make it with no steering wheel, so we go bankrupt if we haven't conquered autopilot. They're like, but you've been crazy every year you say autopilot, full self driver is only a year away. Finally, I'm at a meeting and it's very secretive, and they keep presenting him facts about how we can make a robot taxi, one with no steering wheel on a particular type of assembly line platform. But also that assembly line can make this global inexpensive car. He finally green lights it. You just have to be one of those smart people who knows not only how to be all in and hardcore but how to handle Elon Musk.
Ricky Mulvey: Musk is someone who needs an existential threat though, and the success you've talked about with Tesla would make it harder for him to find one there. One of the questions I had reading though about the short sellers, when the short sellers guessed that Musk was not going to be able to hit the production targets that Tesla was putting out and they're sending drones over the factory. I know how Musk feels about these short sellers, but were they really an existential threat to the existence of Tesla or is this how his mind needs to work to get to that manic intensity?
Walter Isaacson: You're smart. Because he does need that existential crisis, that manic intensity, that we're all doomed unless we do this. However, there was some truth to it, most shorted stock in the history of the world. There are a lot of people betting it was going to go under. It drives him to be living in the factory floor saying, we got to get to 5,000 a week and firing anybody, or going into demon mode with anybody. Who says there's just no way, we only have two assembly lines. It's going to get to 3,000 maybe 3,500. Then he would say, if that's the case, we're doomed and he had read World War I and II military history. He knew that some of the military contractors started during the war making their planes in the parking lot. He says, I get it, why don't we just put a big tent in the parking lot here and create another assembly line. He didn't have any real permit. There was some loophole that says if you're an auto repair shop, you can't put up a tent, but that was like for muffler shops. Within three weeks they build this huge tent and created another assembly line. At the end of, I think it was June in 2018, the 5,000 car rolls up and a company that's on the verge of bankruptcy starts shooting up and of course becomes more valuable in the next nine car companies combined.
Ricky Mulvey: The other thing that Musk learned in building out these assembly plants is that occasionally automation is a mistake. I wouldn't have guessed that before reading your book. Maybe it's because of the optimist robot and the way this man lives in the future. But what did Musk find to be a mistake in the level of automation that he had at these Tesla factories.
Walter Isaacson: Especially in 2017, 2018 when he's faced with these existential crisis, he would walk the factory floor tump, sometimes till three in the morning and it was called walk to the red because wherever there was a hold up, there was a red light flashing. It might be putting a piece of felt under the battery or it might be trying to put the window seals in, and there were robots trying to do all these things. Finally he said, well, how long would it take it for just a person put in these seals or whatever? He realized that sometimes things are easier done by human hands than by a robot. They go into a frenzy, which is an amazing scene in the book. It'll be a great scene in a movie some day where they're taking spray can paint and just putting X's, his favorite letter, on some of these robots and ripping them out and throwing them out into the parking lot. He comes up with an algorithm. People who care about innovation ought to read at least the algorithm parts, because it's five steps on how to make something so amazing and produce it. Step 1 is to question every requirement and rule. If somebody says, we need this because the safety team or the legal team says something, he says, let's both question it. Then Step 2 is delete it, but only till you get to Step 5. After you've gone through the other four steps, do you get the step called automate. He loves automation in the new assembly line for the robot taxi and $25,000 car, they'll be highly automated, but you only automate once you've gone through the other steps of the algorithm.
Ricky Mulvey: My favorite part is that you need a name for the person who made the rule. I'm sure you got to hear some of the phone calls when Musk discovers the name of the person who was on the other side of that rule.
Walter Isaacson: This book is very, I think, admiring of some of his engineering skills but less so, in fact, he can be at times, and it's almost a cautionary tale, but yeah, including on that 2018 thing, there are a couple of people where he says, OK, who did this and they call some poor guy and he's finally standing there, and they've never met Musk and you see it in the book. Musk just rips him apart and fires him.
Ricky Mulvey: With that serial happiness, I think one of the things you said is his inability to enjoy the moment. It's almost like with that his incredible wealth, there was a time where he was the richest person on the planet. I think you would have been around him and he seemed miserable. Is that it?
Walter Isaacson: [inaudible] a storm. He always said, I calm water doesn't suit me. I don't want to go on a vacation. I don't want to have yachts or anything else. He doesn't even own any real houses, just this two bedroom place in South Texas. He says that he's addicted to drama and I think his second wife, Talulah Riley put it well, said he almost because he had such a brutal childhood that he associates drama with parental love, even though he didn't get much parental love from his father and Kimbal, his brother, says, if you want to know the theme, he's a drama addict. When he becomes the richest person on the planet, just when I'm starting to write the book into 2021, beginning of 2022, he's also a person of the year at time. In the financial times, suddenly Tesla is now churning out cars and making a profit. I said, well, you must be pretty satisfied now. He said, no, I'm like a video game addict. If I'm asked for a level of the game, I have to put all my chips back in, I have to push everything back in, go all in, and move to the next level of the game. That's when he started buying Twitter.
Ricky Mulvey: I want to get to that. It seems like some of his behavior too, there's this clause and now you can't make fun of me. I paid the largest tax bill in what was it in the history of the United States. Now you can't make fun of me. I have a kid who hates me for being a billionaire, so now you can't make fun of me because I just sold all of my real estate. That never seems to work out for him. Of course, people are going to continue to make fun of him.
Walter Isaacson: Yeah. He's drawn as many haters as he has fans, and that's one of the problems, especially of writing a book, is that we're not very good at holding two thoughts in our mind. That the the guy could be amazing and also a villain or not a villain. Amazing and unhinged and bad at times and all at the same time. But you're right, there are certain things that just get him angry. When he lost really contact with his daughter Jenna, who had transitioned from being, as I said, named after a character in the X-Men comics. It wasn't the transitioning he got his head around but the problem for him was that she had become so anti capitalist. In her ideology hated rich people that she wouldn't speak to him or use his last name and that's when he sells his houses, that's when he decides he's not going to indulge in any luxuries. It's funny because I would think criticism wouldn't mean much to him. But there are certain things that just set him off.
Ricky Mulvey: You said it earlier, I don't think it would be fair. I don't think there's a single fair characterization for him. But there has been villainous and awful behavior, I think specifically of Yoel Roth, who run trusts and safety. Then I would describe it as a pettiness where he's going to, it's page 248 of this guy's research paper to imply that Yoel Roth is a pedophile and when taken into context, that's not the point the guy's making. In fact, he has to later sell his house, go on the road because he's getting death threats from this mob of people obsessed with Elon Musk who believe this guy is an awful criminal.
Walter Isaacson: Yeah and I tell that story perhaps at length in the book because Yoel Roth is an interesting person who got along well with Musk in the beginning even though he was very much of a liberal or progressive. When he was running trust and safety, Musk really respected him and they worked together for a few weeks until Yoel just couldn't stand it anymore because Musk is making impetuous decisions, putting Donald Trump back on the platform, putting various people back on, or just doing things without going through understanding it, the pronouns and trans issues and all these things. Even after Yoel quits, Musk is OK with him and then Musk turn dark on him after Yoel said a few things. And you're right somebody else had gone through a dissertation, I guess Yoel had written in college and found something in it where he's talking about gay matchmaking sites and how to make sure underage people could use them properly or something. Musk retweeted and said, oh, it seems like he wants underage people to be on porn sites or whatever. It was not just cruel because that shows an intentionality that's almost not there. It was a callousness, a amorality on Musk's part to just go after somebody like that. I want the book to make you amazed at how he got Tesla. How he got more satellites into orbit than all other companies and countries combined but also appalled at how he can do things that seem so callous and amoral, especially when it comes to Twitter. As I say, it's not either people think, oh, you're too tough on him or you're too nice to him or whatever, it's like a Shakespeare play. Shakespeare at the end of measure for measure says, has one of the characters say, the best are molded out of their faults. You have to understand the contradictions in this person, and that's why I tell it as a narrative, a lot of fast paced scenes instead of me trying to preach at you. But it's also why I didn't sugarcoat that Yoel Roth's story.
Ricky Mulvey: Yeah and honestly, Walter, I think it's been a little bit of an unfair criticism levied at your work. Your job is not to make moral judgments, it's to be more of a landscape photographer and allow the reader to walk alongside these great, complex and [inaudible] .
Walter Isaacson: But I understand the criticism. It's very useful to have people in this world who make very strong moral judgments. I think I do put moral judgments including in the Yoel Roth's section. I mean, it's clear what the moral judgment of that is, or the moral judgment of some of his Paul Pelosi like tweets. But I feel I'm supposed to tell the story and I think in this day and age, we do have people who are so much better at rendering snap judgments in a high moral screaming fashion, then we have people who are going to say let me go out and report and tell you the story and let you sort out some of the complexity here.
Ricky Mulvey: I want to ask you a few questions about simulation theory. This seems to drive Elon Musk a lot. The idea that maybe we're in a bit of a computer program, this is maybe the result of some of the reading of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The simple question, does it matter to Musk if we live in a simulation?
Walter Isaacson: [laughs] I think a lot of what Musk believes is a mix of almost youthful philosophy and humor and he is addicted to video games. Whenever late at night things are going wild, he will pull out Polytopia for example, or sometimes the Elden Ring. He likes to think how funny it would be if we were all just avatars in some great simulation. Of course, in Hitchhiker's Guide, I can't quote it exactly, but it says there's a theory that if anybody discovers the secret of the universe, the universe will disappear and be replaced by an even more complex universe, and then the next line is, there's another theory that this has already happened. I think that appeals to both Musk's humor and his sense that you should treat life almost like a video game and just be all in at all times.
Ricky Mulvey: All of this leads into this cocktail of a fanatical risk taker and one of the things I appreciated about your book is it's not just the business. I mean, also the scene where he's basically, he has a blindfolded knife thrower aiming at a balloon below his groin and then you think, OK, maybe the fight that was set up with Mark Zuckerberg is pale in comparison.
Walter Isaacson: Well, he believes that we were a great nation of risk takers, whether we came here on the Mayflower or across the Rio Grande. He believes we've lost that talent to be risk takers. That we've got more referees than risk takers, or more regulators than people who will innovate. But he also, as Peter Thiel says in the book, most entrepreneurs know how to take risk. Peter Thiel says, Musk is addicted to risk. When in doubt he will take wild risk. There is no reason in this world why, at a birthday party that somebody is throwing for you, you would put a pink balloon in your crotch, right below your crotch, and have a blind knife throw, try to punch a balloon. I asked about it, he said, well, at worst happened, I'd lose one testicle and I'd still have the other. But that's an addiction to risk that comes from the childhood, comes from his parents and grandparents. It's one of the many themes in the book. Which means that he blows up rockets at time. He blows up sweetness of Twitter at times. He leaves rubble in his wake. But unlike Boeing, he get rockets into orbit. Unlike General Motors and Ford, he can build a fleet of electric vehicles.
Ricky Mulvey: The last question I want to ask is about AI. He has a new company called x.AI. A lot of this seems to be driven from a conversation that he had with Google co-founder, Larry Page, where Musk is talking about the dangers of AI. Larry Page essentially accuses him of being what is a speciesist. Which is that if these computers can think and feel, don't they matter as much as we are. Your book describes times where Elon Musk has stretched stories, thinking in retrospect, forgetting what people say. Has anyone followed up with Larry Page about this to dive into his thoughts about what it means?
Walter Isaacson: Larry doesn't talk about it much because he used to be one of Elon's best friends. Elon Musk is the world's richest couch surfer. He didn't have a house in Silicon Valley, so he would stay at Larry Page's house. They spend nights and nights talking about the risk of artificial intelligence turning rogue on us and leaving humans behind. The Asimov issue, and as you said, Larry Page thought that was nuts and like no, and by the way, if we could get computers that could have consciousness, why isn't that just as good as human consciousness. Musk says, yeah, I'm a speciesist. I actually believe in the human species. I think it's a cool species. I'm more in favor of it. I talked to even one of those arguments was at a birthday party. Reid Hoffman is there, many other people are there, Sam Altman, of course. These conversations happen over the years, including with Demis Hassabis, who is the founder of DeepMind and he's trying to throw himself in front of the train when Demis is selling DeepMind to Larry Page.
Musk is gathering people to try to stop that. This isn't just one conversation. This is about two years of him opposing Larry Page on this notion of we need more Guardrails on AI and now he's still that way. He believes that Sam Altman took OpenAI, which Musk had co-founded with Sam Altman from being a non profit, open source thing to now being a closed source in which it has a for profit arm that has sold a large percentage to Microsoft. It's Elon Musk's worth nightmare in terms of AI. At least that Microsoft and Google without Guardrails are going to create AI. In some ways, one of the culminations of the book, besides a first launch of Starship, is Musk deciding that he has to get into AI himself rather than having trusted OpenAI and other things. Near the end of the book, there's a whole scene. It's where we meet Shivon Zilis', their children for the first time. I'd spent a week or so with Musk and was just back here in New Orleans, rested, recuperating, and maybe starting to write. He said, no, you got to come back. It's something we can't talk about on the phone. We sat in the backyard of Shivon's house in Austin by the swimming pool with their two twins sitting on their lap.
He said, I'm going to have to start an AI company x.AI. The interesting thing is it's not just about doing a chatbot. It's not just about large language model, generative predictive transformer based language intelligence. Chat bots like ChatGPT. He feels that the Holy Grail is real world artificial intelligence. Real-world artificial intelligence that doesn't just process language and search the billion documents on the internet. You can ask what are the five best pops or something, but something that can process video data like the 8 billion frames a week from Tesla cars and the cameras in a Tesla car all being processed, not just by video GPUs, but by Dojo. This chip that he's doing that maximizes the ability to do video and oral things and for that matter, Twitter feeds. Eventually, he wants to create cars that can drive themselves and robots that can walk around a factory floor or walk around burning man or walk around your house and have planning and have intentionality and be able to do things.
That is going to be his next big thing is real world AI. I'll leave with this, which is having watched Sam Altman and Google and all doing machine learning based on processing of millions and millions of documents and words and everything else, and being able to predict things, he makes a pivot at the end of the book from the full self-driving technology he has been using, which is a rules based algorithm where FSD 11, for example, has hundreds of thousands of lines of code coded by real engineers and humans that have simple things like when you see a red light stop or when you see a double yellow line, don't cross it. When you see a bike lane and you're taking a left turn, here's what to do. They show him that instead of doing a rules based algorithm, you could do what ChatGPT does with language and do it with navigating the real world. Which is to look how millions and millions of drivers handle different situations. The machine learns what to do based on human imitation. It is almost like chatGPT for self driving. At the very end of the book, we see him getting into a car with the team at autopilot saying, OK, here's our new way of doing it, which is a machine learning, human imitation, AI way of directing the car and telling predictive text, but predictive of hit the brake, turn the wheel, do these things. There's always something new on the horizon from Musk, as you said Ricky. He's always wanting to go all in. He's always wanting to put his chips back on the table. That's what he's doing now with having been wrong for the past 8,9 years about when autopilot was actually going to be a success. Pushing as hard as possible in the next two years to have artificial intelligence teach our cars how to drive themselves.
Ricky Mulvey: Walter Isaacson, thank you so much for your contribution to our collective understanding of humanity. Thank you for your wonderful book and thank you for spending some time with us, us listeners.
Walter Isaacson: Let me say one thing. You read the whole book. You asked the best questions I've ever been asked in the interviews so far. Thank you.
Ricky Mulvey: It's an honor. Thank you, Walter.
Walter Isaacson: My pleasure.
Mary Long: As always, people in the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about and the motley fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy, or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. Today was a bit longer than our typical episode, so we'll be off tomorrow. But if you like long-form conversations about tech, check out Motley Fool lives This Week in Tech. It's hosted by Tim Beyers and Tim White and it is on every Friday at 10:00 AM Eastern at live.fool.com where you can also catch replays. I'm Mary Long, we'll be back on Monday. See you then Fools.
