Attraction Walter Isaacson. I would be surprised if you have not already seen him on tv in the past few days or read a bit about his new book because while, he has been everywhere. And for good reason. The release of another biography by Walter Isaacson has become an event in itself. Heat staked out a well earned reputation as a preeminent biographer and genius and whether he is writing about brilliant people from long ago like leonardo da vinci, Benjamin Franklin or Albert Einstein or contemporary innovative figures of our age steve jobs or jennifer or Henry Kissinger you can bet the results will be at fascinating revealing comprehensive and vividly told book. Walters take on elon musk is certainly all of that. The story turned out to be even more than walter bargained for when he set out a couple of years ago to do the biography. Back then walter thought hed be writing mainly about the technological trailblazer a leader in the field of electric vehicles and private space exploration. Then came musks impulsive purchase of twitter and his central role in providing you create with satellite communication during the war with russia. The questions and controversy about musk onlygr grew. All ofss which has enhanced the timelinessth and the importancef walters indepth portrait of musk and of the demons that drive him. Walter himself is coming for somebo criticism about what he decided to put in the book or leave out shipyard the extent to which he refrains from judging musk. Legitimate questions have been raised about both the risks and advantages of access journalism and about how far a biographer should go and offering personal opinions about the person he is writing about. Public appearances so far walter certainly has not shied away from addressing such matters. I am sure he wont this evening. But i also know if you read eight musk biography which i encourage all of you to do if you have not already, you will find he presents a full account of not only musks influential achievements but also his dark material and offensive sides. Then you can make your own judgment aboutwh musk which is what walter has intended. The conversation with walter this evening will be Michael DuffeyOpinions Editor at large of the Washington Post where he has been for nearly five years. Before that he spent several decades with Time Magazine and various positions as correspondent andnd editor. Ladies and gentlemen please help me in welcoming. [applause] [applause] youre welcome for a quick thank you for coming. Thank you walter for coming. We are here to talk about the new elon musk book by walter. I will get used to it. I read this book, i love it. I did not know very much about elon musk when i started reading it and now i feel like i know a great deal. For me too imagine Going Forward without having read it now that i have read it. So i recommend it. Walter, talk to us first about your arrangement with musk. How it happened, how you found out it happened. [laughter] and why that your relationship with him about writing the book change over the course of writing it. I always like doing people pushing the edge of innovation. For elon musk he was bringing us into the era of the electric vehicles for use bring us into the era of space travel again. Space adventure. We had a mutual friend and put us together on the phone we talked about an hour and a half. I said look i would love to do this but not based on interviews. I want to beat by your side pretty when you spent weeks on end living in the airstream trailer down in texas and of the launchpad, a walk in the factory lines he said fine he can be with me all of the time. Nothing is offlimits really. And the other thing is no control over the book. Im not in going to send it to you first i dont know if hes read it now. He said fine, okay thats pretty amazing. [laughter] because he is controlling. I went back with kathy we were visiting somebody went to the main house we are houseguests in a little cottage. After a while i said he just tweeted out it was like in the middle of the conversation he tweeted out i was going to do it. So i said i guess im in for the ride. [laughter] did that relationship . That hes never asked to see the book he never pushed, pressured, anything. I thought i would be subject with heisenberg principle by observing him it would change him. But all of his material mood, his inspirational things, and he never seem to notice me. I would just always be biased. He never tried to spin or do anything. Sometimes he would sit in the Conference Room after meetings and there would be a break and would sit there for 15 or 20 minutes. Half of it in silence and then he would Start Talking in that monotone telling me about his childhood. Telling me about other things. . Did any of them prepare you for this . Well, you subject steve jobs and a little bit like that, somebody really strong willed, had a reality distortion field, as does mask somebody that just meaning that he drove people to do things that they were sure were impossible and he drove them that he was sure were impossible, and he drove them crazy so they were eventually able to do it and he had a strong role to steve jobs hee hd been taught by his guru in indy go to just stare without blinking an essay dont be afraid. You can do it. Early on when they tried to do the original apple, he said i cant code it by the weekend. Finally he said to me he would stand withoutt blinking. I got so freaked out i did it. Over and over again even to the end with a guy who runs corning glass he wanted a beautiful piece of glass for the phone he was thinking of and described it and he said maybe we used to do a formula for gorilla glass. Hear said to me he just stared without blinking and said dont be afraid. Thats the reality take elon musk one order of magnitude up. He was always pushing people driving them crazy about driving them to do things they didnt he is material with steve jobs. He could be giddy and funny and inspiring but the weirdness is he would shift foods almost on a diane and you could see it i remember once walking at the launchpad in south texas where they are doing the biggest obstacle that is starship and it was a particularly good friday night and a couple of people working on the pad. She just started berating saying where is everybody. We need to dozens of people working. The next day there were 200 people flying in from cape canaveral, los angeles and for a week they worked around the clock to start the rocket even though they didnt need to. When he was young he was scrawny, socially awkward and got beaten up all the time especially they were to send him off to these wilderness camps and the kids would beat him up. Finally he said i learned to punch people in the nose which you still see today. This is in south africa and they pushed him down the concrete step and pummel his face and he is in the hospital for four or five days and he says you couldnt recognize him. When he gets home he stands in front of his father for an hour and a half and his father just berates him and tells him hes stupid and weak and takes the side of the kid who beat him up so those scars from a childhood are dancing in his head still. He goes silent and then eventually starts talking about the pain he still feels. He has a very close relationship anna says im the one who got the empathy gene in the family, and its true. Its somewhat complex to talk about but out of the things that surprised me is that because he doesnt have that what you call incoming receptors or outgoing, doesnt have the end hannah, he calls himself as burgers but it makes him a callous person who can be very intense with you and how is the lack of receptors. They fight really badly and when they first started their First Company together they fell on the floor until he had his ear bitten off almost in hand to get stitches. They say dont worry, they are brothers they just do that. At one point, a part in the bok after 2018, the worst year of elon musks life, he goes into almost production hell we talked about in a tailspin. Heve p even talks to people bull about whether he is bipolar, all the people he talks about. He sells all this stuff and gives of hisf business and takes all the money out of his bank account to keep tesla afloat and afterwards says i need money for my Restaurant Business and at first he wont do it, says its not going to work. He doesnt speak to him for six months and finally says i didnt want to lose my brother zoe started speaking again and eventually helped. But only gave five of the 10 million. Im glad you read the book. I havent read it yet. [laughter] its easysy interviewing someone the first several hundred pages of the book and then walter turns to and tesla so we take these in order. They are too much fun. He starts building rockets. How come . He made a lot of money on the first two companies and said ii dont like to try to enjoy my money. I put my chips back on the table. I want to do something. Hes driving on the long island expressway with a friend and us as we went to the moon 50 years ago and now where are we going to go next . He looks on the website and theres no plans even to go back to the moon and hes appalled. Whether they came on the mayflower or the rio grande river. The many reasons one is this incredibly elevated reason of somebody i think that had too much scifi comic books as i a lonely child in a corner of the bookstore, which is if we are not a multiplanetary species, eventually something will happen and the light of human consciousness will be lost and we dont know ifes theres any other consciousness in the universe. I used to thinkk that was the type of peptalk you would give teens where the podcast or something but over and over the importance of being the species and he believed it and thought he said theres nothing grander than traveling to another planet. He was able to build at first he was going to try to buy a rocket from russia or something and its a couple funny scenes in the book he goes and they are spitting on him and on the way back he goes to the first principle which is how much is the material and the rocket, how much does the fuel cost and we can get it 90 cheaper if we can do it this way. He decides to build his own individually three of them blow up. But eventually hes now send more into orbit than every other company combined. Was the rationale beyond space x . He had three goals coming out of the corner of w the bookstore which wasnt as well read as politics and prose and it was sort of dark he had three Great Missions in life especially in college he focused on. One is a spacefaring organization. Two,o, Sustainable Energy basically batteries, solar roofs and electric vehicles. At this point, ford, General Motors, everybodys gotten out. They are crushing because they want to just get rid of it and hes saying no, weve got to get it. Then he reads the robot series ande a says we have to have safe Artificial Intelligence otherwise the robots will turn up on us. These are note the things i worried about in college growing up in new orleans. The book is among other things something of an Industrial Engineering handbook. You think that sounds really dull. Its anything but. An example is he re engineers how we bring rockets but he perhaps re engineers how we build cars. In america we got out of the habit of manufacturing our ownst stuff. We outsource it all over and you can see what is done to the politics. When he first was creating, the original that had the batteries made in japan and being shipped to thailand. Shipped to england and the panels came from france. The designers have to be right next to the Assembly Line is so he spends more time walking the factory floor. So he at that. 70 of the property had beenan outsourced d now hes got it so its a car most made in america in the factories. The emotional high point of the engineering handbook is one of myn favorite parts and comes when hes up against it and has, makes the problem wittingly or unwittinglye to produce 5,000 cars a week. How does he do it . There is an enormous number of shortsellers is what i said. People betting against the stock and the only way he was going to survive, he felt you had to get to 5,000 cars a week. The shortsellers had drones flying over the factory counting the twoha Assembly Lines. They had inside information. They were going nuts. They figured out correctly that those Assembly Lines could not do 5,000 cars a weekend it would take a year to build another factory. He is a military history addict and remembers in world war ii they use to beveled fighter jets in the parking lots in Southern California because they had to do it so fast. So he looks at the parking lot and says within a week, that would be three times the size of this room, a tanned we are going to buildld a third Assembly Line and of course this isnt exactly legal. Hes always breaking rules and regulations but there was a small thing in the law in california you could put up a temporary tend to do auto repair. They build this huge tent and they dont have an ability to do it on the subway line but they take an old Conveyor Belt and put it on the slope and they are able to hit 5,000 cars a week and tesla becomes the most valuable in theel world because the Conveyor Belt wouldnt otherwise work. Its how they move the cars down. And its when he just lived on the factory floor and really went bonkers. Theres a phraseis he uses and some of his friends use that is called open loop warning which means you are like an unguided missile. Thisis is when he tweets about a diver is a pedophile and he says im taking tesla private and they are going to give enough money. All of these are ongoing lawsuits. It was this hell year for him. As a reader i felt like 25 year sometimes. Still in the beginning of 2019 he forces them to do an Autonomous Vehicle that will drive on its owns because he thinks that is going to be the next big thing. Lets talk about the unusual personalities. This is a book that is replete with tales of recklessness, personal recklessness, professional recklessness. Where does that come from . You use the phrase his personalities, which is good because it is plural and like his father that is a jekyll and hyde character and would go into dark mode, we must not remember when he came back to being doctor jekyll. He has personality changes and its he even talks about multiple personalities, you can call it a disorder, but he is who he is and there will be times when he is just laughing like crazy and showing monty pythonto us gifts and figuring t how to translate them so that its engineered the right way and then you will be very inspirational that if we dont work all night, humanity wont get to mars. But then he goes to mr. Hyde and the doctors. Ed if you dont do this today we will never be a multiplanetary species if you dont work all night o. On the launchpad capsca off texas, he didnt quite know the cost of the material of the component. Some of them leave, some stay. They leave and then go to a gentler place and then come back and its a choice between being burned down or board and decided to be burned down on a missions with elon musk. You cant read this without concluding as you noted that its shaped by the Science Fiction models and gaming. Video gaming. He is a total addict and stayed up all night. Is anyone old enough to know what eldon ring is . So, he has gone to hawaii with natosha t but then he is in the middle of the most emotional turmoil. He comes out and stays up playing it until 5 30 and after that he sends out a message. I made an offer and that is when he announced that he was going to go hostile on twitter. Video games he learns a lot including empathy is not your friend. He did not pick up one of the key lessonsim i call minimizatin which is you dont have to fight everybody at once. Even more he told you that he was a fool for love. He associates love and sodas amber, for those of you that remember the donnie depth trial that was somewhat dramatic. They went out for about a year right in his father was having a child with the person he raised as a stepdaughter. So his father fathering a child with somebody he thought was his stepsister and almost everybody is there for the drama. Justine, his first wife, they would fight and go to bookstores. I keep getting politics and prose a shout out but they would get into these huge fights and i think amber said to me hes a fool for love and he associates drama withm love. If things are calm, and the only calm relationship he had was with a wonderful person, tallulah, he married twice, but she was just a calming influence and he would say it would have been great because, but instead including grimes, a great, fun person, she can be dramatic. As much as he wants to populate other planets hes done a good job populating this one. [laughter]an yeah. But everything is mission driven. Do you think okay, thats wacky. Then you think okay its wacky and its ernest. He believes the declining birthrate is going to be harm to humanus consciousness. How many of us wake up in the morning this is why he feels hes always telling his friends youve got to have more children. He pays, i wont get into too much, but for the ivf treatment of friends and relatives because he wants everybody to have children. Talk about the shift from, i find myself calling him elon, im sure that is a bad habit. An obama supporter to a trump backer. The political shift in the past two years is obviously pretty sharp. As i say, there are many belongs. Soce there are many times talkig in the afternoon he will say we need a party in the center. We need more moderates. We should support independent us in this country but late at night hes pushing the buttons not so much conservative, but what you would call sort of the populist right viewpoint that we see in europe and here. It starts about three years ago. First of all with covid and covid lock down restrictions. He o believed that they were too onerous so he pushed back on that. A second, he got attacked by a lot of democrats and from the Assembly Women to Elizabeth Warren. At one point, because of s