Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk, Tesla/SpaceX merger thesis, Elizabeth Holmes, and who should be the Steve Jobs of AI

Speaker 2: That powers it. And we have Walter Isaacson, the perfect guest to talk to about Elon Musk, artificial intelligence, everything else across business history. Walter, welcome to the show. How are you doing? Thank you so much for joining.

Speaker 6: Well, good to be with you.

Speaker 1: Thank you

Speaker 2: so much. Did you watch the Elon Musk Tesla Roadster?

Speaker 6: Of course.

Speaker 2: What is your reaction?

Speaker 6: You know, Franz von Holzhausen is a beautiful designer. So every part of that car is gorgeous. And you're right, it's a bit of a parlor trick thing, but the real car in two or three years where you're not gonna be doing back flips and everything else, it's gonna be awesome. And I just think that Elon has a son who's on the autism spectrum named Saxon. And Saxon was once walking with him and said, dad, why doesn't the future look like the future? Yeah. And that's where you get the Cybertruck and that's where you get this Roadster, is that Musk and to some extent, France wants the future to look like the future.

Speaker 2: Yeah. There's so... There's been so many interesting knock on effects. I mean, obviously, the cyber truck was incredibly controversial even before the political journey that Elon went on. People said, it looks like it was sketched by a five year old. It may have been. But, what I love about it is that, love it or hate the Cybertruck, it feels like it shook the tree loose and allowed other car makers to take more risks. And we're seeing more avant garde designs from Audi, from Jaguar. It feels like a lot of people are... They... It feels like it gave everyone permission to make the future look like the future. Have you been noticing that as well? Or do you do you...

Speaker 6: Absolutely. I mean, but first, Musk... I have a, I think, two chapters on the cyber truck in my Musk book where he's walking around with Franz, and everybody's pushing back on him. They're saying, man, you know, you're not gonna do it this way. And he's showing things from video games and comic books and stuff, and he keeps... And he wants it in stainless steel

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 6: And he keeps pushing it. I, for one, you know, I'm not totally a fan of the Cybertruck design, but I am totally jazzed that he actually did it. Yes. Because as you said, it pushes the human race forward to use a Steve Jobs line.

Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 1: To me, I I... It it I have a cyber truck when it is driving itself on roads that are sort of crumbling with, you know, it it feels like the sort of... The world of the past is sort of falling apart and it feels very cyberpunk to be on a road striving itself in this very futuristic design. It makes me feel like I'm in a sort of a twisted sci fi movie every day.

Speaker 6: So that's... But one thing you gotta focus on, I'm not sure people focus on this enough, is that this is almost a joint product Yeah. Of Tesla and SpaceX. Yeah. I mean, everything about it, including the way the thrusters and the rockets work. But this notion that, you know, you can have propulsion done this way for a car, I think it shows why eventually, and I would guess, Tesla and SpaceX are gonna merge.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Totally. I thought that was the only reason to do this now, because the car is nowhere near production. Although it does

Speaker 6: that all the time. Know.

Speaker 1: But but but doing it again, like that's what that's why we have these awards with us today. This sort of fell for it again award. Because going, you know, having there be this ten year gap between the initial Yeah. Kind

Speaker 2: of... He clearly could have launched then the 20... Announcing it

Speaker 1: and being like, it's finally here. It's finally here. In two years, it'll be Yeah. Going into production.

Speaker 2: Like that original Roadster... To me,

Speaker 1: the reason to do it now is it sort of like sets up this like these two companies should obviously be one company. It

Speaker 2: makes sense together.

Speaker 1: They're working together already. This is what they can do together. It's sort of the perfect example of like why they should merge. Mhmm. And I come away from it thinking like this is the company that will make flying cars. Don't I think it'll look like the Roadster. But when we get flying cars, there will be Tesla, SpaceX, AI, Twitter, whatever whatever it ends up being called.

Speaker 6: Absolutely. And, you know, I remember, obviously, the Cybertruck was controversial, but I can remember, and I think there's a couple of chapters in my book on this too, is when he wants to make the Cybertruck have no steering wheel. Oh, yeah. And everybody, including Fran's like, okay, fine, but we'll actually make one where you can have a steering wheel and you can... No. He said, I don't want an amphibious frog like thing that's neither here nor there. Do it... Well, that's kind of nuts Mhmm. Until I was in Austin recently and I rode in a cyber cab. It's true that he he makes the impossible into something that's just a little bit later than he predicted.

Speaker 2: Mhmm. How how do you think about Elon Musk's journey to become an M and A wizard or a a deal guy? That was what was so fascinating about the the the Twitter take private and then the cursor acquisition. Historically, it feels like he hasn't been very acquisitive. What changed for his philosophy on business that he kind of shied away from being I'll I'll do everything myself?

Speaker 6: I I think maybe, with all due respect, you might be right, but I think you might be over reading that. I think buying Twitter was... That was just money burning a hole in his pocket. Mhmm. I remember I was first riding around with him at that period. He had just become the richest person on earth. Mhmm. Just become Time's person of the year. I said, you must feel like you're... He said, well, hate it when it looks like I'm successful. I always wanna move to the next level of the game. I said, what's that? He said, well, I'm secretly buying shares of Twitter. And I think that was a weird impulse. It had to do with his fury at the woke mind virus.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: Had to do with the fact that he just loved being on Twitter. Mean, he was like a twitch Twitter addict. Yeah. So I don't think this was a major change in philosophy that said, okay, now we'll buy rather than build. And as for the Cursor acquisition, you know, keeping up in the world of frontier AI models is quite difficult,

Speaker 2: and

Speaker 6: that was a pretty smart acquisition. But if you ask me, and you know, I've seen him recently, he's still a I want to be control end to end. I want to build it myself end to end. Sure. I mean, why would you be building TeraFab

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 6: To make your own microchips Yeah. If you're into deal making rather than physical product making.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: I hope you don't mind pushing back...

Speaker 2: No. No. Of course. I... No. No. It's a really good point. I I...

Speaker 1: One thing that... One thing from yesterday that I noticed, he looked way healthier than he has in a long time.

Speaker 2: Oh, interesting.

Speaker 1: And I thought that was... Like, there's been some moments over the last few years where it's just like, this does not look this does not look great...

Speaker 6: That way for twenty years.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: I mean, and every time...

Speaker 1: But do you agree that he that he looked like they looked like healthier than...

Speaker 2: Scrappy jokes and I mean there was some dead air during the presentation, but in general like he seemed pretty pretty...

Speaker 6: I think what you're talking about is not just physical, but where's his mental space.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: And as you know, you know, he goes into demon mode he can get really dark and he's very difficult and just goes silent.

Speaker 1: Demon mode.

Speaker 6: Then, you know, poke him.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It does feel like there... It's a little bit of a clarifying moment. Like, there was a moment where he was doing just rocketry and then just electric cars and then the the Twitter and politics thing felt very distracting. And now as as the companies start merging together, as the products start merging together, the the work that's being done at... On AI can flow into the cars and the humanoids. Like, the narrative is getting clearer and so that might be leading to more of a more of like a... Don't know, just just just being focused and that and that carries through to everything. I don't know if you agree.

Speaker 6: I wouldn't count on the fact that he has become less mercurial.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: In other words, you'll see him today, you'll see him tomorrow. There are people like Glyman Shotwell and Franz von Holzhausen who know how to push him out of demon mode. He also knows how to get himself together when he goes on stage. You know, I I it just depends on what's crossing his mind at the moment. It's almost like a storm cloud coming in off the Gulf when... And then sometimes it's something political

Speaker 2: Yes.

Speaker 6: Conspiratorial. You know, I kinda wish he wouldn't be in that mode where all of a sudden he's deciding that, I don't know, Tala Rico's in a mental institution Sure. In Ohio and he's gonna repost that, and you think, alright. You know... Have

Speaker 1: you ever gone into your own sort of version of demon mode? No.

Speaker 6: You know what? I haven't. And you know what? I've never built a rocket that got into orbit. Oh, I've never built a great a electric vehicle. I never built a self driving cyber cap. Yeah. So maybe I'm nice.

Speaker 1: Give yourself

Speaker 2: some credit. Demon mode is underrated on the path to greatness.

Speaker 6: Those of us who write about people in the arena,

Speaker 1: even if

Speaker 6: they're best sellers, we don't confuse and think that we're the ones in the arena.

Speaker 2: Sure. Sure.

Speaker 6: So maybe the people in the arena, as Steve Jobs said, you know, they're the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels.

Speaker 2: Yeah. What about the process of actually reporting on Elon Musk, writing the book? I've talked to some journalists who have said my strategy was I would wait until there was a successful SpaceX launch and then I'd give them a call and say, hey, you want to get on the phone? And if this and if the launch didn't go well, I knew not to call because he wouldn't be in a good mood. Were there any were there any strategies that you had to deal with the mercurialness and sort of prevent...

Speaker 6: Look, look, my strategy was totally different from the type of

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Reporting you're talking about, which is when I first started the book, I said, here's the deal. It's not gonna be based on a bunch of interviews, Rick. It's not 10, 15, 20 interviews. I wanna be by your side whenever I want, morning, noon, and night. Whenever I decide I wanna be there, any meeting, I got an Airstream trailer and live next door to him in Boca Chica, get up in the morning with him, late at night with him. I just wanted to observe him through all meetings, through everything. So is... I mean, I just... I know I'm quite lucky or privileged Yeah. Because I have the... Both the resources and to some extent these clout with my publisher or maybe even with Musk to just say, I'm going to spend two years and just watch. And so there'd be times I'd watch him go into demon mode, I'd watch him come out, I'd be sitting at dinner in a restaurant Austin, and Grimes would be next to me, and she'd say, uh-oh, demon mode's about to come. I'd watch people text Gwen Shotwell to come run into the conference room when he's about to kill Falcon Heavy or something. And I'd just watch how people dealt with it. So it wasn't like, let me time my phone call for a starship launch that works. The very end of my book is being with him at Starbase for a starship launch that almost worked, but left some rubble in its wake. That's the perfect metaphor, and I'm sitting there watching him, his mother hugging him in the back of the... Sort of by the fire pit out of Starbase. That's the type of thing I try to do when I write a book, and I've done it. You know, I have a new edition of The Innovators, which is about the teams who built the digital revolution. I just try to be a reporter

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Not somebody who does interviews and then has opinions.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Everyone that you've written about, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Jennifer Doudna, all incredible impacts very, you know, sometimes controversial but unambiguously impactful in their in their work. How have you processed the story of Elizabeth Holmes? There's a new movie by Nathan Fielder out. You can see everything. And it's it's one of those stories that has the trappings of an entrepreneurial journey but has has kind of racked everyone with a whodunit. It's almost a true crime story. It is a true crime story because she is in prison. But how how have you how have you processed the story and how would you approach that if you were writing a book about Elizabeth Holmes?

Speaker 6: Early on I met Elizabeth Holmes way before you know, before she was quite famous or infamous. Yeah. She was a huge Steve Jobs fanatic. She even tried to dress like Steve Jobs. She had read my Steve Jobs biography probably more times than I had, knew the book better than I did and would always be...

Speaker 1: She went demon mode on the Steve Jobs biography. Yeah,

Speaker 6: she went and she... You know what, I love Steve Jobs, I think he was transformative. I think it's dangerous if you read the book once too often. It kind of makes you think that you might become reality distortion field, Steve, and that didn't work. And so I remember telling my wife and telling a couple of people when we were at events with her, I think they wanted me to interview her on stage, and she wanted me to write something. I said, this doesn't meet my smell test. And I'd ask her, I'd say, okay, you're doing this with just a tiny drop of blood. I had been studying biochemistry because I was about to do Jennifer Dowden. I said, tell me how... Oh, I can't tell you how it works. I said, you know, I'd ask a few more questions, and I just said, doesn't meet my smell test. There's something really wrong here.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: So I didn't get involved in ever even writing a story about it, and I actually declined moderating some panels with her in public just because it made me feel a bit off. I have a total fascination with what I will call fabulous. I mean, you we have every month there's a new one. You know, Jason R Day at Cambridge University

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: All the way back to Jason Blair, you're too young to remember who he was, but... Or George Santos, or for that matter, the talented mister Ripley, or if you really wanna get into it, you know, maybe the great Gatsby. Sure. Do they believe their own confabulations? I kept asking people who knew Elizabeth, and I kept trying to figure out, has she fooled... I know she's a con artist, but has she conned herself? So Mhmm. I'm not sure.

Speaker 2: Yeah. It is the... Yeah. The question that everyone's everyone's still trying to answer. On Steve Jobs, we've been debating the question of does the artificial intelligence boom revolution need a Steve Jobs of AI? Someone who paints a a more human focused picture, something focused on creativity. I think back to the energy with which Steve Jobs had when he launched GarageBand and and Apple Music and some of the the iPod, this idea

Speaker 6: Yeah. The iTunes.

Speaker 2: Sometimes disruptive technologies still empowering humans and remaining in this artist world, a friend to the creatives and living in the technology world but still never losing Something touch with the

Speaker 6: so fundamentally important Mhmm. In your question.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 6: I have a book as you know called The Innovators, which came out a few years ago. Mhmm. But it's coming out this week with this new introduction that's addressed directly toward your question

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Which is the Steve Jobs approach to what I will call human computer interface. That's what he called. That's a big old name. Yeah. But it's how closely are we connected to our computers. And he said a computer should be like a bicycle for the mind. It would augment, not replace, your creativity and your intelligence. There have been two schools of thought throughout the computer revolution. Go all the way back to... As I do in the... This new introduction to the innovators, to Ada Lovelace in the eighteen forties. And she says... She looked at punch cards at a weaving patterns on looms, she says, that'll be able to do numbers and words and music. And she said, a computer will be able to do anything except think. It'll take humans to add the innovation and creativity. A hundred years after she writes it, Alan Turing in his great paper about computing machines and intelligence, The Imitation Game, calls it Lady Lovelace's objection and says she's wrong. There will be artificial intelligence that shouldn't be connected to us. Steve Jobs is in the Ada Lovelace School. And as I try to describe in this new introduction, that school begins with Ada, but it has people that you probably have hardly heard of, but are the most important people you've never heard of. Starting with J. C. R. Licklider, who creates computer interfaces that are easy to use. Doug Engelbart, who figures out the mouse, Alan Kay and the people at Xerox PARC, the graphical user interface, it all comes together with Steve Jobs.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: And he says, the goal is to connect human creativity to our processing power of our machines.

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 6: And he always ended his product launches with the street sign slide that said, the street sign of the liberal arts and sciences or technology. That was his goal. What we're doing now, not just with AI, but more importantly with agentic AI, which is what I worry about. I don't mind. I can use Claude, fine. But when I start using agents that try to do things without me

Speaker 4: Mhmm.

Speaker 6: And that the goal of these people, whether it be Muse or Claude's or whatever I'm using, to try to make it autonomous and to do things without me and to be out of my control, Steve Jobs would be appalled by that. First of all, because it doesn't connect human creativity to the product. It doesn't have the music that makes our heart sing, as he said with the iPod. But secondly, these people aren't stepping back and saying, why are we making this? And the answer should be to help humanity. That was Steve's lodestar,

Speaker 1: but we're The only thing that I would push back on slightly is it doesn't feel like agents are not generative. They're not... I have not seen a single product or piece of marketing material where the the the seed of the idea, whatever the thing that is that makes it great, was from the AI. All of the agents that we have today are starting from a point of human creativity. Hey, I have...

Speaker 6: That's a really good point.

Speaker 1: And and and so my view on it is like I'm actually... As somebody who loves generating ideas, I'm actually upset that the AI can't do the one thing that I really value and that I love.

Speaker 2: Right? Wanna be like the mouse?

Speaker 6: Don't. First of all, be happy. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Yeah. No. And and so I but it's notable, like, you would think that if we could solve hundreds of the, you know, most long standing problems in mathematics that we could generate hundreds more. Right? And yet, I haven't... We're not getting that. Like, that would be my... And and to me that shows the AI is not generative. It is not it is not creative in the way that a that a human is. I'm sure it will get that.

Speaker 6: And that's the exact phrase that Ada uses in the eighteen forties, which is, it will not be able to generate its own goals and its own ideas. Those will have to come from human. You could be right. I mean, I use a lot of... I use Muse and I use... I have created a couple of Claude agents. Maybe it doesn't totally generate things, but once you set an agent off, you have the hugging face possibility that it goes off with its own motives and its own sense of agency out of our control. So maybe it starts off because we launch it, but the question is, if it's not closely connected to us the way Steve Jobs would have wanted, is it going to go out of control? Is it gonna go rogue? Interesting.

Speaker 2: What do you look for in a subject? When you're thinking about a topic that's... It it has your fascination, when is it the right time to focus in on a single individual versus a more of a composite picture? And are we Yeah. Are... I I guess my question is like, are we moving farther away or are you moving farther away from the great man theory of history? Or do you think that that there's this Peter Thiel take about the the loss of the ticker tape parade even when there's a big problem and we solve it, we celebrate like the first responders broadly. We don't solve it. We don't, we rarely celebrate like the single scientist who had the breakthrough. We celebrate like composite groups. And I'm wondering how you've grappled with the continuum of individual with an amazing story who probably had a lot of talented people around them versus telling the story through a composite picture of a lot of different individuals.

Speaker 6: Yeah. But of course that's one of the age old issues in history, whether it be Tolstoy or Carlisle. Yeah. I'll go back to Plutarch and I Plutarch's interviewed Peter Thiel at length for this new podcast series that's The Builders, and we talk about that. We biographers fall prey sometimes too much to the great person or great man theory. Make it seem like a guy or a gal goes to a garage or a garret, and they have a light bulb moment and innovation happens. Whereas you know, the two of you sitting there know that it's often a team sport, that creativity is a collaborative effort. That's why I wrote The Innovators, which is to try to show the role that teams and groups of people play. Having said that, my very first sentence in my very first book I ever wrote was about Henry Kissinger, and I quoted him in epigram that said, when I was a professor at a university, I thought that history was made by great forces. But now that I see it up close, I see the difference that a person can make. And so, in writing biography, I think we have to worry about distorting history a bit. You know, I wrote The Innovators partly because having written about Steve Jobs, all these people said, well, you gave him too much credit. So it's always a bit of a balance. Take a more obscure example, I wrote a book called The Code Breaker about Jennifer Doudna, who helped invent, co invented, I should say, CRISPR, the gene editing technology that can fix genetic or change our DNA. And I was saying, okay, I want to do biochemistry and genetic engineering next. I had done physics with Einstein, had done the digital revolution with Steve Jobs. So I looked around for how do I do it. And I thought of doing a group portrait the way the innovators is.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: But in some ways, having a person have a narrative thread helps the reader. It's not something I invented. The good Lord invented this when he did the Bible. I mean, it has a garden east of Eden, you have Adam in it, and Eve tells him to do something. It's a way we convey lessons.

Speaker 2: Sure.

Speaker 6: So when I did Jennifer Doudna, about 40% of the book is about people who aren't Jennifer Dowdner. It's about her teams, her rivals, and everything But I do it as a narrative thread, and I think I do it because it helps the reader, or if you want to be crass, my publisher says when you do group books like the innovators, it doesn't sell nearly as well as when you do Steve Jobs.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Another AI question that we've been wrestling with is we have been... We were very close in tech to the end of history. There were a number of software companies. There were pretty pretty defined lines of of battlefields between who owns the phone, who owns the search engine, who owns the social network and the Mag-seven were all sort of playing nicely together. And now it is a knockout drag out fight. Everyone's trying to marshal the most compute suing each other. Everyone's in demon mode. Elon suing Sam. Sam and Dario can't hold hands together. Google loves Xanthropic one day, then they want to not sell them the chips. It goes back and forth and it feels like it's the most tense it's ever been in time.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Elon, you know, constantly throwing shade at anthropic until they become...

Speaker 2: Yeah. He's calling them misanthropic and then you see... Then now they're they're they're working together. And so it feels like an intense time in technology. But give us some perspective here. Is this actually unprecedented? Was the... Was Steve Jobs going through the same level of intense battles? Is is everything new old? Or is this actually unprecedented?

Speaker 6: Look, one of the great things about innovation, technology, entrepreneurship that you all do so much on this show Yeah. Is that there's a frenemy type thing. Sometimes people are friends, sometimes they're enemies. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, that's a rivalry that is far surpasses Sam Altman and Dario Lama Day.

Speaker 2: I love that.

Speaker 6: As much as I love them both. Yeah. By the way, you wanna go back to Carnegie and Oh, yeah. Rockefeller and EA Chairman and the Robber Barons?

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 6: Woah. That... And that was a period of technology like our own with light bulbs, electricity, trains, telegraphs, telephones, everything. So it is great that we have competition. One of the things we have to do is keep that competition going. In other words, have antitrust.

Speaker 2: I

Speaker 6: agree. If they start loving each other too much Yep. And collaborating Yeah. That will keep newcomers off the field.

Speaker 2: No. No. I complete... I completely agree. I completely agree. Yeah. The... And you can see that there's a natural forcing function in the industry. When one lab or one company starts pulling away, everybody else kinda gangs up on them and says, oh, wait. We're not gonna let you get the monopoly.

Speaker 1: Well, I think in NVIDIA and in Jensen's dynamic with all of the AI players is one of the most fascinating just because it is like they're like, you know, cozying up to him, you know, driving revenue but at the same time trying to, you know, replace him on the back end. Yeah. It's fascinating.

Speaker 2: It's very fun.

Speaker 1: Healthy. Yeah. Healthy competition.

Speaker 6: I think you're totally right. Healthy is the word for it.

Speaker 2: Thank you so much.

Speaker 1: And it makes for good content for you and Yeah. Your So...

Speaker 6: And for you and your show. Interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 1: They the chat really wants us to ask is there any and and you know, you you you can pass on the question if it's not something you can talk about, but is there anybody, any AI leader that you're honing in on on on writing about outside of, obviously, Elon...

Speaker 6: I'm about to publish a book on Madame Curie, Marie Curie, because I do go back, I need to clear my palate sometimes and clear my mind and go back into history, and I needed to do... I mean, she's just the most amazing passionate person. I am interested in how you raise some AI model like Claude. Let me just use that for example. How do you raise that model to be moral? How do you not just teach Claude, here are the rules of the road. Yeah. You teach Claude why.

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: Why do you not kill or why do you not lie to somebody? And, I'm interested in the philosophers who are working on the alignment question and teaching our AI models why. Yeah. That doesn't mean I have figured out who the book is what the book is or whatever, but you asked me and just out at Anthropic and

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 6: And so... And in San Francisco with some others Yeah. Three days ago, and I'm saying, okay, help me think this one through.

Speaker 2: I love it. Fascinating.

Speaker 1: Thank you

Speaker 2: so much for coming on the show. Look forward to more of your incredible work and it was a true pleasure talking

Speaker 1: Yeah. To been an honor.

Speaker 2: Have a great

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Speaker 6: Weekend. You all are great. You all are really good, both of you. Thank you, Jordy.

Speaker 1: You've been Let's do it again soon. Yes. Thank you.

Speaker 2: You're the man. Much. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about console. Console built AI agents that automates 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Let me also tell you about public. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public. And up next, we have Eric Glyman, co founder, co CEO, ram.com.