Nobody avoids getting scarred. The question is how you deal with it

Walter Isaacson does not offer a how-to guide. He offers someone you can walk alongside. You can watch Einstein grow up Jewish in Germany, Jennifer Doudna feel like an outsider in a Polynesian village in Hawaii, Leonardo wander from Vinci to Florence, or Elon Musk come of age in violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father. One picture from the new Musk book sits at the center of this conversation. Musk and his brother Kimbal get off a train after an anti-apartheid concert. A man is lying there with a knife sticking out of his head. They step into the pool of blood, and it is sticky on the soles of their shoes.

That scene, Isaacson tells Lex Fridman, causes scars that last the rest of your life. The question is not how you avoid getting scarred. It is how you deal with it. Fridman introduces Isaacson as one of the great living biographers — Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Doudna, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and now Musk — and says they have already talked for hours off the microphone. He hopes the Musk book, whatever short-term controversy it draws, will someday send young people with hard childhoods toward the hardest problems in the world.

Fridman opens with the question that will run under the next two hours. What is the role of a difficult childhood in the lives of great minds: a requirement, a catalyst, or a coincidence? It is not a requirement, Isaacson says. Some people with happy childhoods do quite well. It is certainly true, though, that a lot of really driven people are driven because they are harnessing the demons of childhood. He cites a line from Barack Obama's memoirs: every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of his father. For Musk, both are true.

Elon and Kimbal told Isaacson what happened after the playground beating. Musk was pushed down concrete steps and had his face pummeled so badly that Kimbal said he could not really recognize him. He was in the hospital for almost a week. When he came home, he had to stand in front of his father, Errol Musk, who berated him for more than an hour, called him stupid, and took the side of the boy who had beaten him. Fridman calls it one of the more traumatic events of Musk's life. Isaacson agrees.

There was also Veld School, a paramilitary camp that young South African boys were sent to. Musk was scrawny, bad at picking up social and emotional cues, and has talked about being Asperger's; a camp like that traumatized him. The second time he went, he had shot up to almost six feet and learned a little judo. He realized that if he was getting beaten, it might hurt, but he would punch the other person in the nose as hard as possible. That instinct to always punch back, Isaacson says, has been ingrained in him ever since.

Isaacson spent a lot of time talking to Errol, who no longer has Elon's email and sometimes writes to the biographer instead. Errol had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality: a gifted engineering mind who knew how to build a wilderness camp in South Africa with mica so it would not conduct heat, and a man who went into dark periods of pure psychological abuse. Maye Musk, who divorced him early, told Isaacson the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father. Musk knows it. He talks about the demons, about Diablo dancing in his head. Grimes has said she can tell a minute or two in advance when demon mode is about to happen. Then he snaps out of it and shows you a Monty Python skit on his phone.

The line that stayed with Fridman came from Talulah Riley, Musk's second wife, married twice. Deep inside the man, she told Isaacson, is a man-child still standing in front of his father. For him, love and family are tangled up with those psychological torments. In 2008, when Tesla was going bankrupt, he would get so stressed he would vomit, then channel phrases his father had used on him. Kimbal calls him a drama addict. Coming out of that childhood, Isaacson sees many facets, almost many personalities: engineering mode, silly mode, charismatic mode, visionary mode, and the demon in dark mode.

Isaacson makes the comparison personal. He was blessed, and perhaps a little cursed, with the greatest father he could imagine, an electrical engineer in New Orleans, always kind. Perhaps that is why he is not quite as driven or as crazed, and does not have to prove things. He gets to write about Musk, Einstein, Jobs, and Leonardo, who was torn by demons and not even legitimized by his father. People lucky enough to have gentle childhoods grow up with fewer demons, he says, but also fewer drives. They end up being Boswell, not Dr. Johnson. They end up the observer, not the doer. He has never shot off a rocket that might get to Mars, never moved the world into electric vehicles, never stayed up all night on a factory floor. If he sees something risky, he calculates the upside and the downside. That is another reason people like Musk get stuff done, and people like Isaacson write about them.

Fridman asks what advice he would give people with difficult childhoods. Isaacson says all of us have demons, even those who grew up in a magical part of New Orleans. Rule one in life is harness your demons: know that you are ambitious or not, lazy or not. Leonardo knew he was a procrastinator. It is useful to know what is eating at you, and to know what you are good at. Isaacson says he is a little more like Kimbal than Elon, over-endowed with the empathy gene. That was fine when he ran Time magazine, a group of about 150 people on the editorial floors whom he knew and had a jolly time with. At CNN he was not a good manager, because he cared too much that people not get annoyed at him.

Musk said the same thing about Jon McNeil, then president of Tesla. McNeil told Isaacson that Musk would fire people and be really rough, with no empathy for the humans in front of him. Musk's reply was that McNeil could not fire people: he cared more about pleasing the people in front of him than pleasing the enterprise. Being over-endowed with a desire to please can make you a less tough manager. It does not mean the trait is useless. John Adams's worst criticism of Benjamin Franklin was that he was "insinuating," always trying to get people to like him. That turned out to be the superpower that unlocked the Constitutional Convention and the Treaty of Paris. After three years of running CNN, Isaacson admitted he was not cut to be an executive in high-intensity situations. Musk is cut for them so completely that when things get less intense — enough cars, rockets landing — he thinks of something else so he can surge again. Addiction to intensity is his superpower, Isaacson says, and it is a lot greater than the superpower of being a good observer.

Fridman pushes back a little. It is not only an addiction to risk and drama. There is always a bigger mission sitting on top of it, an empathy toward people in the big picture. Isaacson agrees, and sharpens the point. It is empathy toward humanity more than toward the three or four humans sitting in the conference room, and that is a big deal. You see it in Bill Gates, in Larry Summers, in Musk: great goals of humanity, and at times cluelessness or callousness about the emotions of the people in front of them.

Musk, Isaacson says, is driven by mission more than anyone he has ever watched, and the missions are cosmic. One is to make humans a space-faring, multi-planetary species and get to Mars. The second is to bring the world into sustainable energy: electric vehicles, solar roofs, battery packs. The third is to make sure artificial intelligence is safe and aligned with human values. Isaacson used to stand to the side at SpaceX while Musk told people that if they made this particular decision they would never get to Mars in their lifetime, then lectured on why human consciousness needed to get there. The first nineteen times, Isaacson thought it was a pep talk. On about the twentieth, he believed it. The man is actually driven by this. The anger at a minor engineering choice is not theater. It is impatience that the big mission will not be accomplished.

Musk once joked that he loved comic books as a kid. All the people in them are trying to save the world, but they are wearing their underpants on the outside and look ridiculous. Then he paused. "But they are trying to save the world." Isaacson thinks Musk has an epic sense of the role he will play, and like the comic-book characters it is sometimes ridiculous and sometimes true. That is also why Isaacson writes biography. Doudna grew up feeling out of place and was told by a school counselor that girls do not do science; her father dropped James Watson's *The Double Helix* on her bed, and she realized the counselor was wrong. Leonardo was illegitimate, gay, left-handed, distracted. Fridman says it is painful to read and also inspiring: if you walk side by side with those demons and do not let the pain break you, you can do great things. Isaacson thanks him for making the purpose of biography more epic than he had thought. The question, again, is not how you avoid getting scarred. It is how you deal with it.

Einstein, too, did not have a standard trajectory of success. He was Jewish in Germany as that got harder, slow to talk, a visual thinker always daydreaming. He ran away from German rote education and applied to the Zurich Polytech, the second-best school in Zurich, and was rejected. Isaacson tried and failed to find the name of the admissions counselor. Einstein did not finish in the top half of his class. Graduate school would not accept his dissertation, so he could not get a teaching job. He tried about fourteen high schools. In 1905 he was a third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office — third class because without a doctorate he could not be second or first.

Sitting on that stool, with a day job, he wrote three papers that transformed science, plus an addendum. Once you have quantum theory and relativity and Maxwell's equations and the speed of light, you get the most famous equation in physics: E equals MC squared. It was a pretty good year. In 1906 he was still a third-class patent clerk. In 1907, still. It took until 1909 before people realized that relativity might be correct and might upend Newtonian physics. Being misunderstood and unappreciated was not a short interlude. It was years.

How was it possible? Partly because he was a visual thinker, and partly because the patent office was better than being the acolyte of a professor who wanted him to follow the rules. Switzerland had just gone on standard time zones, and the Swiss care whether the hour strikes in Basel at the same instant as in Bern, so the office was full of devices to synchronize distant clocks with a light signal. Einstein visualized what it would look like to ride alongside a light beam. If you caught up with it, it should look stationary, but Maxwell's equations do not allow that. He said it made his palms sweat. Then he made the leap: if you are traveling very fast, what looks synchronized to you is different from what looks synchronized to someone going the other way. The speed of light is constant. Time is relative depending on your state of motion. That kind of out-of-the-box leap made 1905 his miracle year. Isaacson puts Musk in the same family of mind: after General Motors and Ford gave up on electric vehicles, to say I know the path to change the trajectory of the world; after a drunken lunch in Russia where they poked fun at him and spat, to sit on the Delta flight home and calculate how much metal and fuel a rocket would really cost. Steve Jobs's friends called the same thing a reality distortion field. It drove people crazy. It also drove them to do things they did not think they could do.

Fridman asks whether Musk, Jobs, Einstein, and Leonardo think in parallel ways. Isaacson thinks they were all visual thinkers, perhaps from slight childhood handicaps: Leonardo left-handed and a little dyslexic; Einstein with echolalia, repeating things, slow to talk. Walking factory lines with Musk, Isaacson watches him look at the heat shield under a Raptor engine on a Starship booster and ask why it has to be that way, whether they could trim it or get rid of a part. In 2018, when Tesla was in a life-or-death push for five thousand cars a week, Musk stared at machines bolting something to the chassis, summoned Lars Moravy, and asked why there were six bolts. The engineers explained crash tests and pressure. Musk said if you visualize it, the force goes this way and that way, and four bolts would do. They tested it. He was right. Isaacson says he could give five hundred of those. On any given day Musk is visualizing the physics of an engineering or manufacturing problem.

The mundane-sounding part is the special part. Musk cares not only about the design of the product but about visualizing the manufacturing of it, the machine that makes the machine. That, Isaacson argues, is what America failed to do for forty years by outsourcing so much manufacturing. You cannot be a good innovator if you do not know how to make the stuff you are designing. That is why Musk puts designers' desks right next to the assembly lines, so they have to watch the drawing become a physical object. End-to-end control is the same instinct. Jobs's iPhone is a Kyoto zen garden: hardware that only works with Apple software, and for a while an iTunes store that only worked with Apple, carefully curated and a thing of beauty.

When Musk first arrived at Tesla he was executive chairman and the person funding it, not yet CEO, and they were outsourcing everything. Batteries in Japan, a battery pack assembled at a barbecue shop in Thailand, then shipped to a Lotus factory in England to be dropped into a Lotus Elise chassis. It was a nightmare. He went to the other extreme: a factory in Fremont from Toyota, software in-house, painting in-house, batteries made in-house. That control is part of his personality, Isaacson says, and it is also what allows Tesla to keep innovating. Fridman offers Autopilot as the same story at larger scale: from Mobileye to an in-house system, then getting rid of sensors that are not rich in data, then arguing that vision only can do it. Getting rid of radar was huge. Everybody was against it, and they are still fighting it a bit, still trying a next-generation form of radar.

It gets back to first principles. Humans drive with only visual input. They do not have radar, lidar, or sonar, so there is no law of physics that says vision-only self-driving cannot work. That became an article of faith, and Musk has been far too optimistic on the deadlines. Why not use lidar as a crutch, the way you use a telescope to look at stars? Because you cannot do millions of cars that way at scale, and you cannot depend on maps like Google Maps or the car will never drive from New Orleans to Slidell on a hot day. Full self-driving used to be hundreds of thousands of lines of rules: if you see a red light, stop; if there is a bike lane, do this. FSD 12 is supposed to be AI and machine learning only, trained on about a billion frames a week from Tesla drivers, and only the best humans, the five-star drivers, the Uber drivers, as Musk puts it. ChatGPT does not answer "who were the five best popes" by looking up a list. It has ingested billions of pieces of writing. This will be real-world AI, done by ingesting video.

Fridman offers a picture of how these people build. They walk into a dark room with a confident sketch of where the wall is, step on a Lego, fill with pain, and adjust. Good ideas get discovered on the way. To him, Autopilot stopped being about the car years ago, around the Software 2.0 work with Andrej Karpathy, and started being about Optimus, the robot: embodied systems that understand the world. A hundred years from now the car may be remembered as a nice vehicle. The stack that lets machines see will be the thing. Tesla keeps discovering what it is — car company, AI company, robotics company, energy company — by pushing forward with a vision and stumbling into the next room.

Isaacson says three things are required. You have to be adventurous, because nobody enters a dark room without a flashlight and a map unless they take risks. You need iterative brain cycles, a feedback loop that can process information and make it work. And you have to realize you will blow things up. The first three Falcon rockets blew up. Starship flew three and a half minutes, then blew up the first time. Boeing and NASA, he says, have become unwilling to enter that room without knowing exactly where the exit is and the lighted path to it. The people who created America, whether they came on the Mayflower or as refugees from the Nazis, took a lot of risk to get here. Now we have more referees than risk-takers, more lawyers and regulators saying you cannot do that, it is too risky, than people willing to innovate. You need both. The ratio is wrong.

Fifty or a hundred years from now, Isaacson bets, what Musk will be most remembered for besides space travel is real-world AI. Not just Optimus, but Optimus and the self-driving car, which are pretty much the same thing, using GPU clusters or Dojo chips to process real-world data. Large language models are fine, especially if you want to chitchat with a chatbot. The holy grail is artificial general intelligence, and the tough part of that is real-world AI, where he thinks Optimus and full self-driving are far ahead. Fridman objects, gently, to "chitchat": people have fallen in love over words and gone to war over words. Isaacson's answer is short. The wisdom is in mathematics.

The silliness is not a side quest. Isaacson treats it as a release valve, like Polytopia and Elden Ring. Musk has an explosive sense of humor, and the weird part is the abrupt transition. In a conference room, demon mode, dark words, "your resignation will be accepted if you die," and then something pops and he pulls up a Monty Python skit, the Ministry of Silly Walks, and starts laughing. It is as if he has different modes: engineering, dark, an emulation of human, and a silly and giddy one. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Isaacson suspects, was read once too often. Douglas Adams writes that if anyone ever discovers the secret of the universe it will be replaced by a more complex one, and then that this has already happened. That humor, Isaacson thinks, helped pull Musk out of the darkest periods.

Isaacson opened the Musk book with two quotes. On Saturday Night Live, Musk said he reinvented electric cars and is sending people to Mars: did you also think he was going to be a chill, normal dude? Jobs's line sits next to it: the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. First stipulate that Musk is crazy at times, Isaacson says, then find out, through stories, where the craziness works. Between an aborted countdown and the first Starship launch he flew to Miami, met Linda Yaccarino for the first time at an ad-sales conference, made her CEO, and flew back for the launch. You want to take away the phone so he does not tweet at 3 a.m. You want to tell him to quit being so crazy. Then Shakespeare, at the end of *Measure for Measure*: even the best are molded out of faults. Isaacson does not know that you can pull that strand out of the fabric and have the fabric remain whole.

The harder word is cruelty. At the start of the Jobs reporting, Steve Wozniak asked whether Jobs had to be so mean, so rough, so drama-addicted. Near the end, at an iPad launch, with Jobs emaciated from illness, Isaacson asked Woz for the answer. If I had been running Apple, Woz said, I would have been nicer to everybody, everybody would have gotten stock options, we would have been like a family. He paused, smiled, and said that if he had been running Apple, he did not think they would have done the Macintosh or the iPhone. Jobs told Isaacson the same thing Musk later did: people like you love wearing velvet gloves, you like people to like you, you sugarcoat. Jobs said he was a working-class kid who did not have that luxury. If something sucks, he had to say it sucked, or he would have a team of B players. Isaacson admits that when he ran CNN, the place needed to be reshaped and certain things blown up, and he did not do it. So he writes about the people who can.

"That is the stupidest thing I have ever heard" is a sentence Isaacson has heard from Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs — Jobs even said it about a smoothie at Whole Foods. Errol Musk used it too, making Elon stand in front of him: that is the stupidest thing, you are the stupidest person, you will never amount to anything. Jon McNeil asked whether you have to be that way. Probably not, Isaacson says. A lot of successful people are much kinder. Sometimes, though, you need to be more brutally honest than the people who win Boss of the Year trophies. The A-player idea also sends a signal to the people who are all in. That is what happened when Musk walked into Twitter.

The day before the takeover, Musk had his young cousins Andrew and James, plus people from the Autopilot team, going over lines of code. He sat with a laptop on the second floor looking at what Twitter engineers had written, and they decided they were going to fire 85 percent of them because they had to be all in. Psychological safety, mental-health days, working remotely: that was the old religion. Someone, Isaacson thinks one of the cousins or Ross Nordeen, suggested they not simply fire everyone, but ask: do you want to be all in? Hardcore, in person, as much as it takes, check the box by midnight, or this is not for you. Isaacson was more hardcore in his twenties than in his fifties. Different stages, different camps, and it does not even have to be a whole company; it can be a team. The problem was that Twitter sat at one extreme, with yoga studios and the mantra that people should never feel psychologically threatened. Musk unleashed a bitter laugh every time he heard the word. He likes the words hardcore and intensity, and a fierce sense of urgency as an operating principle. Changing the name and killing the birds followed the same instinct. Sweet little chirpy birds tweeting, he thought, is not hardcore.

At the beginning of 2022 Musk was riding high: a million Tesla vehicles, Falcon 9 boosters landing, richest person on Earth, Time's person of the year. He did not want to savor it. He had sold his houses. He started secretly buying Twitter shares in January, February, March. On the mezzanine of the Austin Gigafactory, with Luke Nosek and Ken Howery and later Griffin and Maye at dinner, the question was why he would want to own Twitter. Almost nobody in the room used it. Maye did. It looked as if he would take a board seat, sign a standstill, and stop at about 10 percent. Then he went to Larry Ellison's house in Hawaii, skipped the vacation, and started firing off texts, including that Twitter needed a fire-breathing dragon. Parag Agrawal, he thought, was not going to take it to a new level. In Vancouver, Grimes met him, they stayed up all night on Elden Ring, and at 5:30 he sent the offer.

Between late April and October the deal was rocky. People ask Isaacson whether Musk wanted out. Which Elon, at what time of day? Mornings he would say the Delaware court was going to force him, talk to lawyers, meet investment bankers in Austin who offered ways to get out, stay in, or cut the price. Other times he would text that this would be great, the accelerant to do X.com the way they had thought about it twenty years earlier. Only in early October, as Optimus was being unveiled in California, did the lawyers tell him he was probably not going to win the case. By then he had made his peace, and was sometimes happy. They hatched a flash close after the markets shut, so he could send a letter firing Parag and others "for cause" and try to save about $200 million. It was the money, and also a jujitsu move: they misled me about the numbers, I got forced, I am going to get something back.

Then it got manic. Three rounds to get the staff down to 15 percent. On Christmas Eve, after a meeting insisted they could not kill the Sacramento server farm because of redundancy, he said no it is not, turned the plane around on the way to Austin, landed, and pulled the servers himself. Kimbal had wanted to skip the acquisition and start a new network on the blockchain; they concluded the chain was not fast enough for a billion tweets a day, and Sam Bankman-Fried's offers came with the same condition. In retrospect Isaacson thinks a new company might have been cleaner, without the baggage. Building hundreds of millions of real users from scratch is brutally hard, as Mastodon, Bluesky, and even Threads have shown. The Autopilot team graded a year of Twitter code. A group Isaacson nicknamed the Musketeers went through hundreds of internal Slack messages; anyone who had posted that that jerk Elon Musk was going to take over went on the list. They did not look at private messages. Still more than Isaacson or most people would have done. At every step almost everyone said that is enough, this will destroy things. There was some degradation. Not as much as half the services he uses. Musk's algorithm, after questioning every requirement, is delete, delete, delete, and a corollary: if you do not add back 20 percent of what you deleted, you did not delete enough because you were too timid. Did he overdo it? Probably by 20 percent, which is the formula, and they were probably hiring people back.

Fridman asks how much of Musk's and Jobs's success is hiring and managing great teams. Isaacson once asked Jobs what the best product he ever created was, expecting the Macintosh or the iPhone. Jobs said those products are hard; the best thing he ever created was the team that made them, from Jony Ive to Tim Cook, Eddie Cue, and Phil Schiller. Musk is a magnet for talent — Gwynne Shotwell, Linda Yaccarino, Mark Juncosa at SpaceX, Drew Baglino, Lars Moravy, Tom Zhu at Tesla — though he is not a collaborator in the Benjamin Franklin sense. Franklin's founders, Isaacson says, are the best team ever created: Jefferson and Madison for brains, the Adamses for passion, Washington for rectitude, and Franklin to make them compromise. Read the Constitution, then read *Abbey Road*. Both good. Different league.

The method can be concrete. When the Raptor engine looked like a spaghetti bush and would be hard to manufacture, Musk got rid of the people in charge and spent months in skip-level meetings, sitting with the people one level below his direct reports, drilling them with questions, watching who emerged. In those Covid-masked rooms a young engineer with dreadlocks, Jacob McKenzie, answered in a monotone and did not get rattled. After midnight Musk called: you still around? Jake was still at work. Musk put him in charge of the team building Raptor. They now build at least one a week. He gets it wrong, too. Brian Dow had surged the Nevada battery factory, got promoted into solar roof, sweated through night installs on peaked roofs in Boca Chica while Musk asked why a single leg needed four screws, and a couple of months later was fired. People who stay, Isaacson thinks, have self-knowledge. Tim Zaman burned out on Autopilot, got bored at the next company, called Tesla, and came back. He had learned he would rather be burned out than bored. The three hiring filters are excellence, trustworthiness, and drive. At Twitter, trustworthiness meant loyalty, and Isaacson says Musk thought half the people were disloyal; he was wrong, it was about two-thirds. At SpaceX, loyalty is not the question. Excellence is a given. The question is whether you will move to a spit of a town called Boca Chica and go all in.

Time management is where Musk is in a league of his own. Jobs had to run Pixar and Apple for a while. Musk, every couple of hours, switches from how to implant a Neuralink chip and how fast the surgical robot can move, to a Raptor heat shield, to imitation learning for full self-driving. The night the Twitter board accepted his offer, news around the world, he went to Boca Chica and fixated on a valve in a Raptor engine with a methane leak. The engineers in the room, Isaacson assumes, were thinking: this guy just bought Twitter, should we say something? Then he and Kimbal sat in a roadside joint in Brownsville and listened to music, almost nobody noticing. Isaacson once called him a great multitasker and was corrected. He is a serial tasker. Intense focus for an hour, a palate cleanser of Polytopia or a round of tweets, then the next task. When he is on Starlink and the CIA, he is not also worrying about the $25,000 car.

Fridman hears a lesson: there are a lot of minutes in the day, no excuse not to get a lot done, if you can hold extreme focus and urgency. Isaacson thinks the fierce urgency is real, and sometimes ginned up. A Friday night at 10 p.m. on the Boca Chica pad, only a few people working, launch eight months away, and Musk orders a surge: two hundred people here by tomorrow, or we will never get to Mars. Switching, Fridman says, is how you keep the intensity, because most of us cannot hold it on one task forever. Leonardo could not focus at all, which is why he has more unfinished paintings than finished ones, and that wandering helped him see patterns in nature. Musk is the opposite: every few months a new surge, a hundred solar roofs, a Starship dome by dawn. It is inspiring. Isaacson also wants to appreciate people who can be good and still savor the success, the moment, the quiet. Musk's big failing is that he cannot savor the moment or the success. That is the flip side of hardcore intensity.

In *The Innovators*, Isaacson asked whether individuals or groups turn the tides of history. Henry Kissinger, on the shuttle missions for Middle East peace, the subject of Isaacson's first book, told him that as a Harvard professor he thought history was determined by great forces and groups of people. Up close, he saw what a difference an individual could make. He meant Sadat and Golda Meir, and probably himself. Biographers have a dirty secret, Isaacson says: they know they distort history a bit by making the narrative too driven by one person. Sometimes it is driven by one person. Musk is a case like that. Sometimes, as with Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, Andy Grove, then Wozniak and Jobs finding the microchip in a store and deciding to build Apple, there are flows of forces and people who build on each other.

He errs a little toward what a Jobs, a Musk, an Einstein can do, and he also tries to ask the historical question: if they had not been around, would the groups have done it anyway? Special relativity: even after the 1905 paper, it was four years before people truly got that it was not only how you observe time that is relative, it is time itself. On general relativity a decade later, Isaacson is not sure we would have it yet. The iPhone, a thousand songs and email and the internet and a phone in your pocket, so beautiful you cannot live without it: a lot of people from Panasonic to Motorola did not get that, and it may have been a while. Electric vehicles are clearer. GM and Ford, smart people, crushed the Bolt, and he means that literally; they smashed them because they had decided to discontinue the car. Twelve years earlier the space shuttle was about to be grounded and nobody was sending up rockets. Some readers will say Tesla was Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. They helped create the shell of a company and deserve to be called co-founders. The person who actually gets the world to a million electric vehicles a year is Musk. Five years from now, Isaacson says, a gasoline car will look quaint. Ninety percent of that is Elon Musk.

Fridman asks when and how Musk will retire from the schedule he is on. Isaacson thinks he would hate to retire. He cannot live without the pressure, the drama, the all-in feeling. He has never looked at Ellison's beach house and said maybe I should spend time there. He says he learned early that vacations will kill you: he goes on one and they oust him from PayPal; he goes to Africa and gets malaria. The projects are hundred-year projects, and one of the weird things is watching him think incredibly long term. Early on, Isaacson sat through two-hour Mars Colonizer meetings about what the governance structure would be, what people would wear, how the robots would work, whether there would be democracy. They were still trying to build rocket ships. In a tense moment before a launch, Musk will start asking about an engine years away, or whether they have materials on order. Robotaxi has been a passion since 2016; there are still no cars without steering wheels taking over the highways. He is always looking way into the future. That, Isaacson says, is one reason you write these books: so a young woman told not to do science can read *The Code Breaker* and say I can be that, and so someone who was about to become a regulator might decide to be the person who, as Jobs put it, pushes the human race.

Fridman asks for the process, the full of it. Step one, Isaacson says, is to figure out how the mind works. What caused Einstein to make the leap, or Musk to say stainless steel while looking at a carbon-fiber rocket? Smart people are a dime a dozen and do not usually amount to much. You have to be creative, imaginative, to think different, as Jobs would say. A mentor told him two types of people come out of this work, preachers or storytellers. He tries to be a storyteller. Whenever he needs to convey a thought, six magic words should be on a card pinned above the desk: "Let me tell you a story." How does Musk find talent? Tell the story of Jake McKenzie. The Bible does it. Best opening sentence ever: in the beginning, then stories. Second, keep it chronological. A person in the fortieth year has grown from the thirty-ninth and the thirty-eighth. Alice Mayhew, his editor at Simon & Schuster, who among other things midwifed *All the President's Men*, would put a mark in the margin that meant all things in good time. If it is good enough for the Bible, it is good enough for you. The academy once disdained both the great-person theory and imposing a narrative. Doris Kearns, later Goodwin, was denied tenure for writing *Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream* through one person. That opened biography to non-academics: David McCullough, Robert Caro, then Jon Meacham and Isaacson. Storytelling is how we form our views of the world.

The Musk book is based more on observation than almost any of his others, more than a hundred hours, five feet away, even while Musk played Polytopia or seethed. He is not sure any biographer since Boswell on Dr. Johnson has had that kind of access. He tries to get out of the way of the story. Interviews still matter. He spoke with 140, maybe 150 people, all listed in the back, all on the record; he does not put anonymous quotes in the book, even if it takes two or three calls to get someone to go on the record. First day as a New Orleans reporter he covered a murder, phoned it in from a payphone, and the city editor asked if he had talked to the family. Go knock on the door. An hour later they were still talking, bringing out yearbooks. Lesson one: people want to talk if you are willing to listen. From David Broder and Tim Russert in New Hampshire he learned door-knocking without a leading question: I am trying to figure out this election, what do you think, then stay silent. With Musk there is a third secret. He will go silent for a minute, two, four. Do not fill it. You can outlast him. You can never go wrong by staying silent if there is nothing you have to say. Genuine curiosity is the rest. People can tell whether you asked because you want the answer or because you are playing gotcha. Franklin's essay on conversation said the same: sincere questions, then listen, and if someone has even the germ of an idea, give them credit. Franklin started a fire company in Philadelphia by taking a question to the Leather Apron Club: why don't we have it, what would it take, what would be good?

On objectivity, Isaacson wants to be honest, which he thinks is akin to being objective. He keeps in mind who he is writing for. He is not writing for Musk. He has not sent him the book and does not think Musk has read it yet. He has one reader, the open-minded one. If a story will piss off the subject or make the subject happy, that is a minor consideration. Will the reader understand the person better because the story is in the book? Fridman, a romantic, asks how important love is to these lives. Sometimes people who affect the course of humanity have better relationships with humanity than with the humans sitting around them. Mileva, Einstein's first wife, was a sounding board and helped with the mathematics of special relativity; he did not treat her well, and made her sign a letter that she would not interrupt him. When she wanted a divorce he could not afford it, still a patent clerk, so he offered a deal: one of these days one of the 1905 papers is going to win the Nobel Prize, and if we divorce I will give you the money. She consulted other scientists and took the bet. In 1919 he won; she got all the money and bought three apartment buildings in Zurich. Elsa, the second wife, was more a partnership of convenience than a romantic love. Sometimes what people need is a partner who will handle the stuff they will not. Isaacson's books, he says, are not great inspiring guides to personal relationships. He writes at night, not after a hearty breakfast, from a chronological outline that would run a hundred pages, then clusters scenes so a decision like Starship or the Texas factory can live in one chapter. Whenever he pauses, he tells a story. He does not need a transition sentence that announces the point. He starts, "One day in January in the factory in Texas."

Advice for young people begins with Plato, or Socrates: the unexamined life is not worth living. You do not have to figure out the big meaning of it all. You have to figure out why you are doing what you are doing, with a self-awareness Isaacson did not have enough of when he was young. The examination is hourly: why am I about to say that, what is my true motive, should I be careful what I wish for. In his salad days at Time he chased the next level, caught the brass ring, became top editor, then CNN, and learned he was not great at running complex organizations. He would rather be managed than manage. He is not afraid of death and does not think about it a lot, but he tells the Jobs story: the fact that we are going to die gives you focus and meaning. Musk has said he can think of nothing worse than the Silicon Valley search for living forever. We know from Sisyphus how bad it is to be condemned to eternal life. In ancient Greece someone walked behind the king and said *memento mori*. The lucky thing about being a biographer is that you know the legacy is a shelf of interesting people, and maybe a seventeen-year-old biology student who decides to become the next biochemist. What Isaacson thinks more about is going home. After Katrina he was vice-chair of the New Orleans recovery authority and realized everything he has comes from that beautiful, troubled city. He is never going to solve challenges at the grand global level, but he can teach at Tulane, sit on the city planning commission that worries about short-term rentals, and immerse himself in a community, because lonely people are lonely when they belong to nothing. He cites T.S. Eliot in *Four Quartets*, and wants the source on the record: we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to return to the place where we started and know it for the first time. If this were a Shakespeare play, he says, you would call it Act Five. You go back to where you came from, and you try to make sure somebody else can have a magical trajectory starting in New Orleans.