much for spending time today talking about your amazing book and best of luck to you. speak to think you rob it was such a pleasure to be with you. ♪ weekends on cspan2 are an intellectual feast every saturday american history tv documents america's story and on sunday @booktv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. funding for cspan2 comes in these television companies and more including cox. his extremely rare. but friends don't have to be. when you are connected you are not alone. cox, along with these television companies support cspan2 as a public service. x now about her featured

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 he'd be writing mainly about the technological trailblazer a leader in the field of electric vehicles and private space exploration. then came musk's 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 in-depth 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 won't 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 musk's 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 duffey opinions 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] you're 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 off-limits really. and the other thing is no control over the book. i'm not in going to send it to you first i don't know if he's read it now. he said fine, okay that's 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 i'm in for the ride. [laughter] >> did that relationship? >> that he's 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 don't be afraid. you can do it. early on when they tried to do the original apple, he said i can't 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 don't be afraid. that's 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 didn't -- >> 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 didn't 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 couldn't 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 he's 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 i'm the one who got the empathy gene in the family, and it's true. it's somewhat complex to talk about but out of the things that surprised me is that because he doesn't have that what you call incoming receptors or outgoing, doesn't 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 don't worry, they are brothers they just do that. at one point,, a part in the bok after 2018, the worst year of elon musk's 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 won't do it, says it's not going to work. he doesn't speak to him for six months and finally says i didn't want to lose my brother zoe started speaking again and eventually helped. >> but only gave five of the 10 million. >> i'm glad you read the book. i haven't read it yet. [laughter] >> it's 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 don't like to try to enjoy my money. i put my chips back on the table. i want to do something. he's 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 there's no plans even to go back to the moon and he's 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 sci-fi comic books as i a lonely child in a corner of the bookstore, which is if we are not a multi-planetary species, eventually something will happen and the light of human consciousness will be lost and we don't know ifes there's 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 there's 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 it's 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 he's 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 wasn't 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, everybody's gotten out. they are crushing because they want to just get rid of it and he's saying no, we've 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. it's 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 he's got it so it's 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 he's 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 short-sellers 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 short-sellers 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 isn't exactly legal. he's 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 don't 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 wouldn't otherwise work. it's how they move the cars down. and it's when he just lived on the factory floor and really went bonkers. there's 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 i'm 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. >> let's 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 it's 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 it's engineered the right way and then you will be very inspirational that if we don't work all night, humanity won't get to mars. but then he goes to mr. hyde and the doctors.ed >> if you don't do this today we will never be a multi-planetary

species if you don't work all night o. >> on the launchpad capsca off texas, he didn't 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 it's a choice between being burned down or board and decided to be burned down on a missions with elon musk. >> you can't read this without concluding as you noted that it's 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 don't 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 he's 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 he's done a good job populating this one. [laughter]an

>> yeah. but everything is mission driven. do you think okay, that's wacky. then you think okay it's wacky and it's 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 he's always telling his friends you've got to have more children. he pays, i won't 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, i'm 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 he's 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 some options, elizabeth warren said he's a billionaire avoiding taxes and he'd paid more taxes than anybody in history ever paid to any government partly

because he exercised the stock and it is as if he's on the playground and wants to punch people in the nose and then the third in the most delicate part of it is his eldest surviving child, he had a child that died in infancy, was named after his favorite character in the x-men comics. at about age 15 she transitions and starts, texting with people in the family i'm transitioning, i am now a girl, i'm named jana but don't tell my dad. he gets his head around that. everybody inca the families is okay because he loves his children so much, but she becomes very left-wing economically and hates all rich people,, billionaires, goes to

court to change her name and makes sure she has as she puts it in the violin, nothing whatsoever to do with him ever again. this causes him such pain and he has tot lash out a bit, and he believes come at a crossroads where she went to school and some ofow you may know in los angeles, the woke mind virus and the progressiveness there made her hate capitalism and hate her father. so, all these things are jingling together, and the fact that he loves twitter, he's addicted to twitter and is doing dumb tweets at night about pedophile cave divers and he has this money in his pocket because he exercised the option. he said what product so he starts buying it. kathy and i talk about this and i give the credit and a couple other people close to him, which is whenever he went dark, it brought him back to the

playground where he was beaten up and now he had the chance to own the world's playground. >> if you move faster than my questions do. at this point things are going well in his life at this time. all the companies are fine. he makes this jump. whatat is the temptation for hi, whys is twitter -- >> one of the things at that moment you talked about, and when i was hanging around with him, and heth had just become te richest person on the planet. tesla made a million cars that year and had become the most valuable car company after this

production. he had launched the previous six months 33 rockets into orbit and landed them t upright he could reuse the rocket, something that is still no company, not nasa, not c boeing or anybody, country or russia or china can do. and i'm taking this. i fell into the storm. i've got to put my chips back on the table. and every single person close to him said u the times that he is most uncomfortable, when he's just unnerved is whener everythg ise going well. and the times that he is most energized is when all hell is breaking loose. i would have to hold his head and he would channel phrases his

father once said to him but then during the day he was energized back in the fight and so in that period, say early 2022 when things are going well you can't leave well enough alone. >> yet of the events of that period, this is a difficult portion of the book to read because you realize you cannot engineer a platform that has made a view and emotion and opinion. >> he can look at a raptor engine and say we should do it in this stainless steel. he doesn't have a fingertip feel for human emotions as i said. he doesn't have the receptors. and they would ask what are you thinking and he said well, twitter, they've not improved the product. you can't do video or payment platforms. i'm thinking as in the book it's not an engineering product.

it's an advertising medium that gathers people with human emotions and if it doesn't work and the other reason he went to buy twitter is when he had been his second company that allowed you to do payments indicates morphed into paypal and then they get rid of him. they changed the name to paypal and make it a payment system that we all use but it's not the everything app. when asked why are you doing twitter, it'se my chance to shw and use twitter as a booster rocket to do what we should have done 20 years ago. >> as you pick a time in 2022,

he's peaked in a lot of ways and you are now covering a different story. it's the largest factory in the world making tesla. a hundred other great things have happened. that april is when he's been buying twitter's stock and he decides to go rogue. we are sitting on the mezzanine watching the factory about to be opened. he is saying to him why are you doing twitter. he is deciding that he needs control of twitter. that nighthe we went to a place called the pershing in austin.

his son is there. his son who is autistic, but very wise. his mother is there, grimes, and they are d all saying don't buy twitter. why would you want this and even asking his kids and it's we don't use twitter. he thinks it's stupid and says why doesn'te? the future look le the future. the only person that likes twitter is his mother which should have been a demographic signal. he suddenly is on this rush and i t tried to write the book from that point on. when you read the book you think it's kind of long. it's's really short like three r

four page chapters. everyhe day he's doing five or x things. when the board acceptsma his offer, which he made an offer, he goes down to this tiny town in south texas and decides that night they are going to figure out why there is a leak and for two hours everybody in the room is like this is the biggest deal. they just accepted everybody in the world is talkingg about thi. when russia invades ukraine,

they have to communicate with the troops. they are able to hack all military, the satellites go down except starling. the communications between the troops and what has been crushed. we need to starling and his comic book superhero kicks in and all night he's sending hundredsds and thousands of diss and services with basically saves ukraine. then what happens is a few months later in the bleachers

because it is arch manning's game and he's about to go to the university of texas. he says they are using starling to launch an attackk on the russian fleet in crimea. >> the first question is. >> they would retaliate with nuclear weapons. he says we are not going to allow it. and i wrote that he turned off that night. they were using it to launch his attack. not only in crimea but also to

turn it off so they can't do all things of things. it's not offensive, my family lives in that village. it's a high-pitched night in which he ends up not allowing starling to be used for this sneak attack and of the subs wash ashore. this causes of course when my book comes out how could he not to enable it. why does he let them do it and have you talked to general mark meli and jake sullivan. partly it's a question but we joke it is a bit why do you have so much power and he says yes. it finally resolves itself rather well.

he ends up deciding to give up and sell control of a certain number of satellites into andservices and making the miliy version of it that he is now selling outright to the u.s. government and its intelligence agencies so u.s. officials get to decide how it is enabled to be used. is it good for this much power? >> no, it's not and that's why i think t it's good that he finaly says we are going to give up this power. i don't know the exact sequence did mark miller you know because the only time he would kick me out of the room and the only questions he would answer is when the classified information when he was having a classified conversation and i would have to

go. that is still to be determined. to get the communication satellites into orbit, do you know the main u.s. intelligence satellites boeing can't get them, nasa can't get them to high earth orbit. only super heavy falcon rockets can. when they tried to do coast to coast charging networks, it didn't really work and now general motors and ford he opened up his own networks instead of the sort of public ones. >> one more than a questions from the audience. as the book went on i got the sensean that you were growing me inpatient with him. the did i imagine that?

>> i found it difficult, and i try to convey it in the book in very vivid terms i don't preach, i'd say here's what you think. it's unhinged and controlled and posting things on twitter. it's something so impulsive and immature. one of his friends said we were traveling and he was, i just had to try to stop him from these. i took his phone and punched in the code and then at three in the morning he calls hotel

security to get his phone. i try not to be too judgmental. i can criticize without being too judgmental. you can see all these things that happen. but clearly the unhinged postings when i asked him yeah if i have one regret if i keep shooting myself in the foot.

would it be as successful and we have that here in washington you can call i it the richard holbrk phenomenon, whatever you will, peopledr that are strong and driven, can you pull up and say what we still be getting the rockets into orbit and the answer is you don't have to be a jerk, but you have to look at every individual light and dark as a tightly woven fabric and by understanding them it doesn't mean you sympathize or excuse, but it's helpful to understand thesens people. >> one of the questions do you think he's a force for good and does he believe democracy is something worth fighting for? >> yes,, he talks about democray a lot. he's's a force for good in many ways. we have to remember the entire electrico vehicle movement grod

to a halt. nobody is going that way. more than any other person on this planet, if you care about climate, if you care about the environment to make solar roofs, powerpack batteries and then test was, he has now made 5 million in the last six months he's done a million. this is by an order of magnitude more than all other american car companies. so he isod a force for good for getting us into the age where we are not going to be doing the burns. second, he's a force for good to get us into space again. then you get to the democracy

question. he can bedo a force for good. but he's opened up for more which you can argue he believes it is good for democracy but amplifying hate speech which sometimes happens on twitter or amplifying misinformation that is a big danger. >> how would you describe the basic most important? >> each deserves a separate vibe because the innovators it's those that brought us into the era. it figured out the team and the

colleagues to make a tool that will edit the genes that means you can design and third, he's somebody up there changing the way we live. they both had an absolute passion. i think that he had a more spiritual feel for both beauty and the design of product and a definite deepan spiritual feel r connecting with human emotions. he said we know how to make people's hearts sing. >> what would you like to write about t next? what female would you likee to write about?

>> is the secret is safe with you? one person in the transformation of science at the beginning of the century that hasn't gotten her do and she's a person who figured out that basically chemistry and physics are the same. it's all about electrons going around. it's all about radiation and what is radiation. it's about figuring out the periodic chart and filling it in for that reason. nobody has written a scientific biography and she also has an awesome personal life. friends of einstein. her husband helps her in the lab but makes sure she's the only person to win two nobels, one in chemistry and one in physics. he gets weakened by radiation and killed by a streetcar and she starts having them with one

of the students. it's a huge scandal. they tell him not to come to accept. she goes and accepts and says if i had been a man, you wouldn't have, done that. i may write about somebody else. >> what hasou writing this book taught you as a historian? >> it's given me a greater appreciation for the shakespeare line that is even the best are molded out of faults and in our dayge and age a snap judgment in cable shows and people on talk radio, everybody is eithert a hero or villain. shakespeare teaches us that we are a tapestry to use the

metaphor we are very bad at this day and age and elon musk as a litmus test which is so many people either totally revere him or can't stand him. somebody out there was telling me i have a tesla and i love my embarrassedm because it's elon musk. so, we have to be able to once again understand not only nuances, but that sometimes a darkness in somebody is something you can really decry but you have to understand, and maybe not admired have to understand that people are more complex. it's not the cartoon heroes and villains that are cable tv age has turned people into. >> ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking him for coming. [applause]e]

you think this is just a community center, no, it's more than that. >> comcast is partnering to create wi-fi enabled lift zones so students from low income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. >> comcast, along with these television companies supports c-span2 as a public service.

former european union ambassador discusses his experiences overseas representing the trump administration and his appearance of the witness for president trump's first impeachment. his book is the envoy. here is a portion of his talk. >> take away the whole impeachment period and that whole experience, just as an ambassador did it turn out to be as fantastic as you thought it might be when you were aspiring to be ambassador, and would you do it again? >> i would to do it again in a heartbeat and the reason i would do it again in a heartbeat it's like any job. once you have the learning curve that's gone by and you really understand whether you are doing brain surgery or you are fixing a car engine or you're an ambassador, once you understand the process, you can hit the

ground running. was it a credible job, it was the worst job and the best job. you had the highest highs and the lowest of lows because you had this feeling like driving a supertanker, the supertanker representing the united states of america. people are making all kinds of noise all the time of bell's we should do this and that and so on and so forth and everyone is giving speeches and thinking they are making policy think tanks and so on, but you know what, at the end of the day -- and i'm not saying this to be critical, it's just reality, they are all making noise. the supertanker just keeps going. as an ambassador, when you turn the wheel, the supertanker turns because you have the ability, you're not like the little kid on the right side of the car with a play steering wheel while daddy is driving and you are doing this and the car keeps going. you turn the wheel and the car