[indiscernible] it was only a little over a year. david: it took him a while. he gradually, the first person he -- i think he did get rid of was francis perkins. and he actually said, i don't want a won in my cabinet. he didn't say that to her -- a woman in my cabinet. he didn't say that. he didn't say that to her. he did, i'm sorry. >> on that note we're going to wrap up this session. thank you very much, david. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2025] >> weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's story and on sundays, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books d authors. funding for c-span2 comes from these television companies and more. including midco.

>> where are you going? or maybe a better question is, how far do you want to go? and how fast do you want to get there? now we're getting somewhere. so let's go. let's go faster. let's go further. let's go beyond. >> midco, along with these television companies, support c-span2 as a public service. >> book tv continues now. television for serious readers. now about our featured >> now about our featured attraction, walter isakson. i'd be surprised if you haven't already seen him on tv. brad: in the past few days or read a bit about his new book.

because, well, he's been everywhere. and for good reason. the release of another biography by walter isakson has been -- isaacson has been an event in itself. he's staked out a well-earned reputation as a preeminent biographer of geniuses and whether he's writing about brilliant people from long ago like leonardody vinci, benjamin frankly and albert einstein, or more contemporary innovative figures of our age, like steve jorks or henry kissinger, you can bet the result will be a fascinating, revealing, comprehensive and vividly told book. walter's take on elon musk is certainly all that. and 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 musk as a technological trailblazer, a leader in the fields of electric vehicles and private space exploration. then came musk's empus pulsative -- impulsive purchase of twitter and providing ukraine with satellite communication links during the war with russia and the questions and controversies about musk only grew. all of which has enhanced the timeliness and importance of walter's in depth portrait of musk and of the demons that drive him. now predictably walter himself has come in for some criticism about what he decided to put in the book or leave out or 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 in offering personal opinions about the person that he's writing about. public appearances so far, walter has certainly not shied away from addressing such matters and i'm sure he won't this evening. but i also know that if you read musk's biography, which i encourage all of you to do, if you haven't already, you'll find it presents a full account not only of musk's influential and consequential achievements, but also his dark, muir curial and offensive sides. then you can make your own judgments about musk which is what walter has intended. the conversation with walter this evening will be michael duffy, opinions editor at large at "the washington post" where he's been for nearly five years. before that he spent several decades with "time" magazine in

various positions as correspondent and editor. so, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming walter isaacson and mike duffy. [applause] >> you want to hand me the mic? >> do you want to start? >> hi, michael came all the way from missoula. >> well, some events matter. this is one so welcome and thank you for coming and thank you, walter for coming. we're here to talk about the new elon musk book by walter. >> holder mike. >> i will get used to it. i've read this book. i love it. i don't know, i didn't know very much about elon musk when i started reading it. now, i feel like i know a great deal. it's hard for me to imagine going forward without having

read it now that i've read it. so i recommend it. walter, talk to us first about your arrangement with musk, how it happened, how you found out that it happened, and whether your relationship with him about writing the book changed over the course of writing it. >> you know, i always like doing people who are pushing the edge of innovation and for elon musk, he was bringing us into the era of electric vehicles and he was bringing us into the era of space travel again. space adventure. i thought, well, that's really cool. and we had a mutual friend and put us together on the phone and we talked about an hour and a half and i said, look, i'd love to do this, but not based on interviews. i want to be by your side. i want to spend weeks on end, you know, just living in the airstream trailer down in boca chica, texas, near his launch and or walking the factory lines

with him. he said, fine, you can be with me all the time. nothing is off limits really. and then i said, the other thing is no control over the book. you don't even, i'm not even going to send it to you first. i don't even know if he's read it now. and he said fine. i said, ok, well, that's pretty amazing. because he controls things and i went back with cathy, we were visiting somebody and we went to the main house because we were house guests in a little cottage. and after a while i said, my god, you're doing. i said, what do you mean? he said, well, he just tweeted out and it was like in the middle of the conversation, he tweeted out. i was going to do it. so i said, well, i guess i'm on for the ride. >> and did that relationship stay the same and that, that arrangement stay the same? the book? >> he has never asked to see the book. he never pushed, pressured, anything. and he just didn't, i thought it would be the heisenberg principle, by observing him it would change him. but all of his mercurial moods,

his, you know, inspirational things, his dark things, they all were in full and he never seemed to notice me. i mean, i would just always be by his side. he never tried to spin or do anything. sometimes we'd sit in the conference room after meetings and there'd be a break and sit there for 15, 20 minutes, half of it in silence. and then he would start talking in a monotone, telling me about his childhood and telling me about other things. >> the biographies you written before, franklin, einstein, kissinger, jobs. did any of them prepare you for this subject? >> steve jobs is a little bit like that. somebody really strong willed and had a reality distortion field as does musk. somebody -- >> meaning? >> meaning that he drove people to do things that they were sure were impossible and he drove them crazy. but then they eventually were able to do it. and he had a strong will with

steve jobs, he had been taught by his guru in india to just stare without blinking and say, don't be afraid you can do it. so even early on, when he and steve wozniak are trying to do the original apple 2, woz says i can't code it, you know, by the weekend, he said we have to code it fast. we've got to get back to the apple farm where we working. hence the name of the company. woz said, he stared without blinking and said, don't be afraid you can do it. i got so freaked out. i did it over and over again. even to the end with a guy named -- a guy who runs corning glass. jobs wanted a really beautiful piece of glass for the iphone he was thinking of and described it. and wendell weekes said maybe we used to do a formula for gorilla

glass, and jobs said, i want this much by october. and weeks said, well, there's no way we've not started it. and weeks said to me, he just stared at me without blinking and said, don't be afraid you can do it anyway. that's the reality distortion field. take elon musk one order of magnitude up. he just was always pushing people, driving them crazy, but driving them to do things they didn't think they could do. >> and he has the stare too. >> he definitely has the stare, but he's mercurial much more than steve jobs was. and he can be really cold elon musk and he can be nasty at times and he could also be giddy and funny and inspiring. but the weirdness is he would shift moods almost on a dime and you could see it. i remember once walking at the launch pad down in south texas where they're doing the biggest movable object ever made by humans, which is starship. and it was a particular late friday night. and there are a couple of people working on the pad.

and all of a sudden i see his face, his girlfriend, claire boucher known as grimes says, you can just see it come right across his face and suddenly he got into what she calls demon mode and just started berating andy krebs who was working that site saying, where is everybody? you know, we need to have, you know, dozens of people working 24 hours a day. and he said it's a friday night. we don't have any launches scheduled and he just got so mad. he just, and then he said i want a surge. and by the next day there were 200 people flying in from cape canaveral, los angeles. and for a week they worked around the clock to stop the -- stock the rocket even though they didn't need to. but he wanted that fierce urgency. >> ok. the next question is a statement. his father. >> yikes. >> discuss. >> when elon was young, he was scrawny. he was socially awkward and he

got beaten up all the time, especially, they would send him off to these wilderness camps and they have, the kids would eat him up for the food. he lost weight. finally, he said i learned to punch people in the nose, which you still see today. and even though they beat me up, at least i had punched them in the nose and they'd think twice, and once he got pushed down the steps of his school, this is not like sidwell, this school, this is in pretoria, south africa and they push him down the steps, concrete steps and pummel his face and he's in the hospital for four or five days. his brother, kimball, says you couldn't recognize him. when he gets home, he has to stand in front of his father for an hour and a half. and his father just berates him and tells him he's stupid. he's weak, he'll never mount -- amount to anything and takes the side of the kid who beat him up. so those scars from childhood are dancing in his head still, he goes really silent when the subject of his father comes up

and then eventually starts talking in a monotone about the pain he still feels. >> and if his worst relationship is with his father, he has this very unusually close relationship with kimball. the brother you just mentioned. >> he has a very close relationship with kimball who says i'm the one who got the empathy gene in the family. and it's true. i mean, and this is somewhat complex to talk about. but out of this book, one of the things that surprised me is that because musk doesn't have that what you'd call incoming receptors for human emotions or outgoing. he doesn't have the antenna, he calls himself asperger's, which, you know, is a broad name. but it makes him so he doesn't have a good -- he's a callous person who can be very intense with you, but has that lack of receptors of emotion. whereas kimball is the opposite.

kimball is always hugging and things and so they're almost joined at the hip although they fight really badly. and when they first started their first company together, they once fought on the floor until kimball had his ear button -- bitten off almost and had to go get stitches. and everybody else is kind of appalled. and they said, don't worry, they're brothers, they just do that. at one point, a sad part in the book after 2018, kimball, which is the worst year of elon musk's life. he goes into almost production. hell, we've talked about in a tailspin. he even talks to people about whether he is bipolar, all of the problems, he talks about, you may have. and kimball sells all of his stuff, gives up his business, takes all of his money out of his bank account to keep tesla afloat. and then afterwards, he says, ok, i need money for my restaurant business and at first, elon won't do it. he says it's not gonna work and kimball doesn't speak to him for six months and finally says i

didn't want to lose my brother. so we started speaking again and eventually elon helped london, -- >> he reconciled, but he only gave him five of the 10 million. >> i'm glad you read the book. i haven't read it yet. >> so much easier. >> so the first several 100 pages of this book are about his childhood and then walter turns to spacex and tesla. so we'll take these in order because they're just too much fun. musk starts building rockets. how come? >> you know, he had made a lot of money on his first two companies and he said, i don't like to try to enjoy my money. i put my chips back on the table. i want to do something big. he's driving on the long island expressway with a friend and he says, man, we went to the moon 50 years ago, let's say, and now where are we going to go next? when will we go to mars? and he looks on the website of nasa, there's no plans even to go back to the moon. and he's appalled. he said, you know, we're a

nation, the u.s., because he had immigrated here of people who took risks to get here. you know, whether they came on the mayflower or they came across the rio grande river. these are people who are risk takers and we've lost the ability to take risks. so he decides he's going to do a mission to mars. now, there are many reasons. one is this incredibly elevated reason of somebody i think who read too much sci-fi comic books as a lonely child in the corner of the bookstore, which is that if we're not a multi planetary species, eventually something will happen and the light of human consciousness will be lost. and we don't know if there's any other consciousness in the universe, we have to do it. and i used to think that was like the type of pep talks you give to teams or the podcast or something. he would in tone it over and over again the importance of being a spacefaring species. and i came to believe he was earnest and he believed it.

he also thought adventure, that we have to have adventure back. and he said there's nothing grander than traveling to other planets. and he was able to build, at first he is going to try to buy a rocket from russia or something. and it's a really funny couple of scenes in the book where he goes to russia and they're spitting on him and stuff. and on the way back, he goes to first principles, which is how much does the material in a rocket cost? how much does the fuel cost? and we can get it 90% cheaper if we can do it this way. and he decides to build his own rockets and they start -- eventually, he has three of them blow up, his first attempt. but eventually he has now sent more mass into orbit than every other country and every other company combined. >> so if saving human consciousness was the rationale behind spacex, what's the reason for tesla? >> he had three great goals

coming out of that corner of the bookstore which was not as well lit as politics and prose and it was sort of dark thing and he would read the sci-fi sections. he had three great missions in life that he, especially in college, he focuses on. one is making us a space faring civilization. two is sustainable energy, basically, batteries, solar roofs, power packs and of course, electric vehicles. at this point, in the early 2000's, ford's general motors, , everybody's gotten out of the electric vehicle, they're crushing the chevy volt because they want to just get rid of it. and he's saying, no, we've got to do it. and the third one which we can get to later is he reads isaac asimov's robot series and he says we have to have safe artificial intelligence. otherwise our robots will turn upon us. these are not the things i worried about in college and growing up in new orleans, not causing my palms to sweat. >> ok, so the book is among

other things, something of an industrial engineering handbook. and you think, oh, that sounds really dull. it's anything but. one example so he re engineers , how we build rockets, but more significantly he re-is how we build cars. >> in america we got out of the habit of manufacturing our own stuff. we outsourced it all over and, you can see what it's done to our politics. when he first was creating tesla with martin and others, mark, the original roadster had the batteries made in japan. they were being shipped to thailand to some former barbecue pit factory to make them into battery packs. eventually shipped to england where they were put in lotus chassis and the panels came from france. they were shipped back to the u.s. anyway, it was a mess. and he said, if you don't manufacture what you design, you can't innovate. your designers have to be right next to the assembly line.

and so he spends more time walking the factory floor and figuring out the assembly line. and so he brings it all in house and at that point, i think 70% of the intellectual property of car companies had been outsourced and now he's got it. so it's a car most made in america, most made in his own factories. >> the emotional high point of this engineering handbook, which is really one of my favorite parts of the book, comes when he is, musk is up against it and he makes a promise wittingly or unwittingly to produce five th -- 5000 cars a week. how does he do it? >> well, there's an enormous number of short sellers in 2018. this is what i said was the hell period. he had people betting against tesla's stock and the only way he was going to survive, he felt , he did the calculation. you had to get to 5000 cars a week.

the short sellers had drones flying over the factory counting what the two assembly lines could do. they had inside information. they were going nuts. it's the most shorted stock in history and they figured out , correctly, that those two assembly lines could not do 5000 cars a week. and it would take a year to build another factory. and he's a military history addict. and he remembers in world war two that they used to build 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 he says within a week, i want a tent that would be three times the size of this room and we're going to build a third assembly line. and of course, this is not exactly legal. i mean, he's always breaking rules and regulations, but there was a small thing in the law in california, you could put up a temporary tent to do auto repair. it was like for a muffler shop.

he said they can find us later. -- fine us later. they build this huge tent. they don't even have an ability to do an assembly line, but they take an old conveyor belt and put it on a slope and they're able to hit 5000 cars a week and tesla becomes the most valuable car company in the world. >> and the slope is because the conveyor belt wouldn't otherwise work. >> right. it's how they move, move the cars down. and it was when he just lived on the factory floor that whole time and really, really went bonkers. i mean, there is a phrase kimball uses and some of his friends use, which is called open-loop warning. which means you're not getting feedback, you're like an unguided missile and to hear -- >> you can't hear criticism. >> you can't hear nothing. so they would do an open loop warning and this is what he really, and people think he's bad now on twitter and other things. this is when he tweets that some

british cave diver is a pedophile. this is when he says i'm taking tesla private and the saudis are going to give me enough money and funding is secured. all these things are ongoing lawsuits, you know, and it was hell year for him. >> i have to say that as a reader, i felt like there were 25 hell years. >> at the beginning of 2019, he forces them to do an autonomous vehicle that will drive on its own because he thinks that's going to be the next big thing. >> let's talk a little bit about his unusual personalities. this is a book that is replete with tales of recklessness, um, personal recklessness, professional recklessness. where does that come from? in your view? >> you use the phrase his personalities, which is good because it's plural. and like his father who was a llndyde character would go into dark mode and almost not remember when he came back to

being, you know, suite dr. jekyll musk goes to quick personality changes and it's, uh he even talked about multiple personalities. you can call it a disorder, but it is who he is. and there'll be times when he is just laughing like crazy and showing mine t python's silly walks and then figuring out how to translate those silly walks into the robot so it is engineered the right way. and then he'll 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 darkness hits. >> i was amazed how many times he played fact if you don't do , this today, we're never, we'll never get to mars. >> we will never be a multi-planetary species if you don't work all night. and, uh, you know, i go to so many people, andy krebs, the guy

he reamed out on the launchpad down in south texas. lucas hughes who didn't quite know the cost of every material of a component and some of them leave. some stay. and a couple milan kovic, a wonderful guy, you know, they leave and then, goes to a much gentler place and then comes back and said i had a choice between being burned out or bored and i decided to be burned out on a mission with elon . >> the jekyll and hyde thing, you can't read this without concluding that his mind was as you noted, shaped by science fiction novels and lots and lots of gaming. >> video gaming, people haven't talked about that enough. he is a total addict to things like polyopia. he stayed up all night when elon -- eldon rain, is there anyone young enough to know what eldon ring is? cool. so eldon ring comes out, he has gone to hawaii with natasha

bassett, australian actor. but then he has to meet grimes in vancouver. i mean, it's in the middle of the most emotional turmoil and eldon ring comes out and he stays up all night playing elton ring till 5 30. and then right after that, he sends out a message, i made an offer. and that was when he announced he was going to go hostile on twitter. so video games, he learns a lot from polyopia including as kimball said, empathy is not your friend. now, you and i don't believe that, but it's like empathy can hurt you. >> allies aren't worth keeping. >> exactly. >> some weird pathology he picked up. >> he didn't pick up one of the key lessons of poly topia, which i call front minimization, which is you don't have to fight everybody at once. >> of course there's a name for

that. even more personally he told you that he was a fool for love. what did he mean? >> you know, he associates love his brother says, and so does amber, amber heard, for those of you who remember johnny depp trial is a person who is somewhat dramatic and they went out for about a year and they broke up right in 2018, right? right when his father errol was having a child with errol's person he raised as a stepdaughter. so this is an emotional turmoil to break up with amber. his father, fathering a child with somebody he thought was his stepsister, and the production hell. but almost everybody he is married and gone out with. is there for the drama. justine his first wife, they just would fight. they'd go to bookstores. i keep giving politics and prose a out but this was kepler's and palo alto and they get in huge fights.

and i think it was amber who said to me, you know, he's a fool for love and he associates drama with love. if things are calm and the only really calm relationship he had was with this wonderful person tallulah riley. who he married twice. she was just a calming influence and he would say, you know, and kimball would say it would have been great because, but instead use including grimes, is a really great fun, good person. she can be dramatic. >> as much as he wants to populate other planets. he's done a pretty good job of populating this one. >> yeah. he actually, i mean, but it's a weird thing. i mean, no, everything is mission driven and you think, ok, that's wacky. then you think? ok, it's wacky and it's earnest, which is, he believes the declining birth rate is going to be harm to human consciousness.

how many of us wake up in the morning worrying about that? but he truly, and 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 this too much. but for the ivf treatment of friends and relatives because he wants everybody to have children. >> talk to us a little bit about his shift, being a obama supporter to a, to a trump backer. was that just mere convenience? >> no, the political shift in the past two years is obviously , it has been pretty sharp. now, as i say, there are many elons. there are time when he will be talking in the afternoon and he will say we need a party of the center. we need more moderates. we should support independence in this country, but late at night he's pushing those buttons, not so much conservative, but what you would

all sort of the populist right. the viewpoint that we see in europe, we see here. it starts about three years ago. first of all, with covid and covid lockdowns and the restrictions and he believed that the lockdowns were too onerous so he pushed back on that. secondly, he got attacked by a lot of democrats and from california assembly women to uh elizabeth warren. and at one point, then he had because of some stock options, that he exercised, elizabeth warren said he's a billionaire avoiding taxes and he had paid more taxes than anybody in history had ever paid to any government. partly because he had exercised the stock options and he just bristles as if he's on the playground and wants to punch people in the nose. and then thirdly, and 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 xavier. and about at age 16, she transitions to being jenna and starts texting people in the , family. hey, i'm transitioning. i'm now a girl, i'm named jenna. but don't tell my dad. whoa. yeah. ok. he gets his head around that and everybody in the family says, ok, 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 to make sure that she has as she puts it in the filing, nothing whatsoever to do with him ever again. this causes him such pain and he

has to lash out a bit. and he believes that at crossroads where he went to school or some of you may know in los angeles that the woke mind virus and the progressiveness there made her hate capitalism and hate her father. and so all these things are jangling together and the fact that he loves twitter, he's addicted to twitter. he's doing really dumb tweets late at night about cave divers and he has this money in his pocket because he exercised the option. and he said what product do i like? i like twitter. and so he starts buying it. cathy and i talked about it. i give cathy some of the credit and a couple of other people close to him, which is whenever he went dark, it brought him back to the playground, the playground where he was beaten up and now he had the chance to own the world's playground. >> he moves faster than my questions do. it's great. i was, it was at this point i was gonna say, and that brings us to twitter. >> i'm looking at that.

>> you're reading my question. so things are going well for him in at his, at his life at this time, all the companies are firing literally on all cylinders. everything is kind of -- >> no cylinders. these are electric, they're firing on all engines. raptor engines, electric motors, -- >> editor to the end. and yet he makes this jump. what is the temptation here for him? why is twitter such a -- >> one of the things about that moment you talked about, it was when i was hanging around with him, following him himself and he had just become time's person of the year. he had become the richest person on the planet. tesla made a one million cars that year. it had become the most valuable car company after this hell production thing, he had launched that previous six months, 33 rockets into orbit and landed them upright so he could reuse the rockets. something that still, no company, not nasa, not boeing,

not anybody, or country or russia or china can do. and i said, man, you know, and i'm thinking this is great for the book. it's ending on a high. and he says i was not made for the calm. i sail into the storm. i've got to put my chips back on the table. and every single person close to him, says the times he is most uncomfortable when he's just unnerved is when everything is going well. and the times that he is most energized is when all hell is breaking loose on all sorts of fronts. and tallulah wednesday, i would go at night, he would stay up when things were going really bad and the stress and i'd have to hold his head as he vomited and he would channel phrases that his father had 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, he can't leave well enough alone. >> and yet the events of that

. our -- that period are, this is a difficult difficult portion of the book to read in part because you realize he cannot engineer a platform that is made of human emotion and opinion. >> he is such a good material science engineer. he can look at the valve of a raptor engine and say it shouldn't be in canel. we should do it in this or stainless steel for the cyber truck. he does not have a fingertip feel for human emotions. as i said, he doesn't have those antennae, doesn't have those receptors. and so i'm asking him, what are you thinking? and he said, well, twitter, they have not improved the product. you can't do video, you can't do payments platform and it's an engineering problem and i'm thinking, as i write in the book, it's not an engineering product. it's an advertising medium that gathers people with human emotions. the other reason he wanted to buy twitter is when he had done

his second company, x.com, it was a huge success, it a company that allowed you to do payments to other people and form a social network to do it. and it gets morphed into paypal and then they get rid of him, even though elves the founder of one of the companies. and they change the name from x.com to paypal and they just make it a payment system. which we all use, but it's not the everything app. and he told me when i was asking him about why are you doing twitter, it's my chance to show and to use twitter as the booster rocket to do what we should have done 20 years ago with x.com. michael: at this point are you almost -- let's say pick a time in 2022, november, december -- walter: march. michael: he's peaked in a lot of ways. what appears to be peaking. yet you're now covering a really different story. walter: so in april is when giga factory opens, meaning the big factory in texas. he's there at giga factory.

it's the largest factory in the world making tesla. 100 other great things have happened. starship has finally been stacked. and that april is when he's been buying twitter stock and he decides to go rogue. they want him on the board and we're standing -- we're sitting on the mezzanine watching the factory about to be opened and suddenly kimbel is saying to him, his friends ken and antonio, why are you doing twitter? and he's deciding that he needs control of twitter. even though this whole factory is going up. and that night we went to a place in austin. his son, griffin, is there. another of his sons, a delightful kid named sacksen who is you a -- saxon who is autistic. but very wise.

his mother, may, is there. grimes is there. and they're all saying, don't buy twitter. why would you want this? and he's even asking his kids and it's, oh, dad, with he don't use twitter -- we don't use twitter. sackson things -- saxon thinks it's really stupid. the only person there who likes twitter is may, his mother. which should have been a demograph signal -- demographic signal. [laughter] that's when from there is when he flays to hawaii, as i said, to larry's house and then vancouver and this guy suddenly is on this rush. and i tried to write the book from that point on. when you read the book you say, man, it's kind of long. it's really short and in bursts. like three or four-page chapters because how do i capture the freneticness of april through the present, launching the rockets, taking over twitter, whatever, where every day he's doing five or six things.

when the twitter board accepts his offer, which he made an offer, he goes down to this tiny spit of a town in south texas and decides that night that they're going to figure out why there's a methane leak and for two hours everybody in the room is like, you just bought twitter, this is like the biggest deal or they've just accepted your offer. everybody in the world is talking about this. and all he does is focus on the methane leak. michael: were you there? walter: i was there for the trip down there, yes, yes. i was not there in vancouver. michael: talk to us about the ukraine story. what is the lesson of that and what is the lesson for the united states? walter: the lesson is that when russia invades ukraine, ukraine has the command and control, they have to communicate with their troops. the russians are able to hack the commercial satellite, they're able to hack all the military, all satellites go down.

except starlink, which is elon musk. so that night -- providing internet, but also communications between the troops. and they would have been crushed and so the vice minister is sending him text messages saying, we're going to get -- we need starlink. and his comic book superhero instincts almost kick in. all night for three or four night, all the text messages, he's sending hundreds and then thousands of free starlink dishes and services which basically, as fedorov says, the vice minister, saves ukraine. they would have been done. then what happens is a few months later, i'd been with him for a week and i'm at my old high school football game in the whreechers because it's -- in the bleachers because it's arch manning's game and he's about to go to the university of texas. so we all go. and the phone keeps ringing. it's elon. and he says they're going to use

-- they're using starlink to launch a sneak attack on the russian fleet in crimea. michael: and your first question is -- walter: i go, ok. he says, it's going to cause world war iii. he said, i know russian doctrine. they will retaliate with nuclear weapons. he says, we're not going to allow it. we're not going to allow it. and i wrote that he turned it off that night later. i had to correct it which is it had been geo fenced and they were asking him to turn it on and they didn't know it was turned off. they were using it to launch this attack and so secretly it had been geo fenced and you saw all the mentales that night, not only in crimea, but in the -- he's also deciding to provide it but turn it off so they can't do offensive things. fed rosk is saying, it's not offensive, my family lives in that village. it's this high-pitched night in

which he ends up not allowing starlink to be used for this sneak attack and the subs wash ashore. this causes, of course, when my book comes out, this -- how could he not enable it? why didn't he let them do it? and i do say, you know, at one point, you have talked to general mark milley? you have talked to jake sullivan? the national security advisor? and i'm saying it really partly as a question, but as we sometimes joke, it's a bit secratic, like, why do you have this much power? and he says, yes, he's been talking to them. and he finally -- it resolves itself rather well, i think. which is he ends up deciding to give up and to sell control of a certain number of starlink satellites and services and even make a military version of it called star shield that he's now

selling outright to the u.s. government and its intelligence agencies. so u.s. officials get to decide how the starlink is enabled to be used by the ukrainians. michael: starlink and twitter, the question is obvious, is it good for this much power to be in the hands of one person? walter: no, no, it's not. and that's why i think it's good he finally says, we're going to give up this power. i must say, the only time -- and i don't know the exact sequence of when did mark milley know when it was enabled not? because the only times he would kick me out of the room and the only questions he wouldn't answer is when it was classified information, he was having a classified conversation and i would have to go. so that's still to be determined, that thing. but there's a larger question, should he have so much power? no, probably not. but there should be somebody else who can get american

communications satellites into orbit. do you know our main u.s. intelligence satellites, boeing can't get them up, nasa can't get them up to higher earth orbit. only super heavy falcon rockets can. likewise, he's the only person who is making starlink work and when they tried to do like coast-to-coast charging, e.v. charging networks, it didn't really work and now general motors and ford, he's opened up his own charging networks instead of the sort of public ones. michael: i'll ask one more and then take questions from the audience. as the book went on, i got the sense you were growing more and more impatient with him. or at least his lack of self-control. did i imagine that? walter: i found it really difficult and i try to convey it in the book in very vivid terms, you know, i don't preach. i don't say here's what you think. i'm going to leave it to you to figure out what to think. but by the end he's doing

amazing things. he's getting starship launched. he's starting an artificial intelligence company. he's doing full self-driving through machine learning with billions of frank but he's also somewhat unhinged and uncontrolled and saying things. especially posting things on x or twitter. and it's something that is so impulsive and so immature in a way, one of his friends, antonio, said, we were traveling and he was -- i just had to kind of stop him from doing these tweets and i took his phone and put it in the hotel safe and punched in a code and then left -- then at 3:00 in the morning, musk calls hotel security to get his phone out. [laughter] so i am -- i mean, i try not to be too judgmental, i've been criticized for not being too judge mental, but you can read this book and you're going to see, boom, boom, boom. all these things that happened

and you can make your judgment but clearly the unhinged postings i think are self--- and when i ask him he says, a.i., if i have one regret, it's i keep shooting my self in the foot. i should buy kevlar boots because i keep shooting myself and stabbing myself. and the follow-up is like, well, why do you keep doing it? but he says, this is who i am. and this is the larger theme of the book. i'm sorry to do that. which is, would a musk that's controlled, would a musk with an impulse control button, would a musk that you could say, ok, temper this, would a tempered musk be as successful as a musk unbound? and we have that here in washington. you can call it the richard holbrook phenomenon, whatever it may be, people who are really strong and driven and drive people nuts, can you pull out

the dark strands and say, would a musk unbound still be getting the rockets into orbit? and the answer is no, you don't have to be a jerk or a-hole or whatever, but you have look that it's a every individual, light and dark, as a tightly woven fabric and by understanding them, that doesn't mean you sympathize, it doesn't mean you excuse, but it's really helpful to understand these people. michael: one of the questions is do you think he's a force for good in the end and does he believe in democracy as something worth fighting for? walter: yes, he talks about democracy a lot he's a force for good in many ways. we have to remember that the entire electric vehicle movement ground to a halt in the early 2000's. nobody was going that way. more than any other person on this planet, he's done, if you care about climate, if you care about the environment, to make

solar, power packed batteries and then teslas, he has now made five million teslas. in the last six months he's done a million. this is by an order of magnitude more than all other american car companies that are not going. so he's a force for good to getting us into the age where we're not going to be doing a mine and burn fuels for our cars. secondly, he's a force for good of being able to get us into space again. we hadn't gone -- we hadn't sent astronauts into orbit since the space shuttle 12 years ago was decommissioned. that's a force for good. then you get to the democracy question. no. i don't think he's handling twitter well. i think all social media, facebook, twitter, x, whatever, undermines democracy. i mean, can, it can be a really good force for good. but at the moment it doesn't. he's opened the apper tour to more friend speech which you can

argue, a.i., more free speech, he believes is good for democracy. but amplifying hate speech which sometimes happens on twitter or amplifying misinformation, that's a big danger to democracy. i'm sorry, i'm going on too long. michael: that's ok. how would you describe the basic, most important difference between jobs and musk? walter: i think each deserves a separate biography because they're three great innovators of our time that bring us into a new age. there are more. gates and bezos. but it's jobs who brought us into the era of friendly computers and smartphones and a thousand songs in our pocket and everything else. there's jennifer dowdna of the code breaker, my last book, that figured out with her team and her colleagues how to make a tool that will edit our genes. which means you can design your babies. that's a big deal. and thirdly, musk is somebody up there changing the way we live.

jobs and musk both had an absolute passion. i think jobs had a more spiritual feel for both beauty and the design of products and a definite deep spiritual feel for connecting with human emotions. he says, we know how to make people's hearts sing. i don't think elon has that feel for human emotionless. michael: who would you like to write a big biography next, what female? walter: i'd say we're off the record except i see c-span here. [laughter] michael: it's a kind of for instance question. walter: i'm telling you something i'm chewing on but don't tell priscilla, our mutual editor. secret safe with you? there's one person, the real temperaturation of science -- transformation of science at the beginning of the 20th century, that hasn't gotten her due. and she's the person who figured out that basically chemistry and

if isics are the same -- and physics are the same. it's all about electrons going around an atom. it's all about radiation. and what is radiation, the all about figuring out the periodic chart and how do you feel it in for that reason? and nobody has written a scientific, authoritative body of marie curie and she also has an awesome personal life. friends of sign stein. her husband -- einstein. her husband, pierre khouri, helps her -- curie, helps her in the lab but makes sure she wins the nobel prize. she won two, one in chemistry, one in physics. he gets weakened by radiation and killed by a street car and she starts having an affair with one of his students so when she wins a second nobel prize, it's a huge scandal. they tell her not to come to accept. she goes and accepts. and she says, she doesn't say this to the nobel -- if i had been a man, you wouldn't have said that. michael: let's go right to the

screen play. don't bother with the book. [laughter] walter: a.i. or i may write about, you know, somebody else. michael: what has writing this book taught you as a historian? walter: it's given me this greater appreciation for the shakespeare line at the end of measure for measure which is even the best are molded out of faults. and in our day and age of snap judgments and cable shows and people on talk radio, everybody's either hero or a villain. but shakespeare teaches us that we are a tapestry, as i've used the metaphor, many thread. elon musk is the litmus test which is so many people either totally revere him or can't stand him. or somebody out there was

telling me, i have a tesla and i love my tesla, but i'm embarrassed because it's elon musk's. 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 admire, but have to understand that people are more complex. it's not the cartoon heroes and villains that our cable tv age has turned people into. michael: walter isaacson, ladies and gentlemen. please join me in thanking him for coming. [applause] walter: that went fast.

>> south dakota governor kristi noem was confirmed by the senate as president trump's -- >> in south dakota i think for a democrat to be elected and even for republicans, you need to be a little bipartisan and work together. south dakota's very populist. people think it's very conservative and it's really not. my last race when i ran for governor 3 1/2 years ago, i only won by three points and it was against a guy who was a bernie sanders supporter. it's very much a state that can go back and forth and tom was being -- was the majority leader, very influential. i cared about farm bills. i cared about tax reform. and was somebody who didn't complain about things. i tried to show up and be a part

of the solution and i think he appreciated that. he had a leadership camp every year that he would host for new leaders in the state, that he thought had potential to serve and he did invite me to that one year. and i went. it was in the black hills for a weekend and he brought in speakers and we spent time together talking about policy and what it's like to run for office. it was interesting to me because i never once considered becoming a democrat. i think maybe he probably hoped i would. but, boy, for years after that, even when i ran for congress, i had a lot of republicans who questioned if i was truly a republican just because i had attended that leadership camp that tom daschle had hosted. it was surprised by how they felt like that tainted my krep credentials to even be a republican, that i would go and spend time with democrats. announcer: and the full program is available to watch online at booktv.org.