Casey v. Kevin on U.S. v. Google + Walter Isaacson on Two Years With Elon Musk (2024)

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So Casey, I want to start this week’s show with an apology.

Oh, I love the sound of that.

So last week on the show, you said the word schadenfreude, but you pronounced it schadenfreid, and I made fun of you which was not nice because you don’t speak German and maybe they didn’t offer it at your high school. And instead of mocking you for that, I realized belatedly that I should have been trying to help you.

You truly could have been trying to help me.

So this week, I actually taught you German.

You taught me German? Because I don’t remember that, actually.

Well, I didn’t do it in your presence. I did it with the help of AI. But let’s see the clip.

(LAUGHING) Oh, no.

It sounds like I just declared war on Austria.

[LAUGHS]: So Casey, you want to describe what you just saw?

I saw a fairly convincing video of myself sitting in my old home office talking into the camera as if podcasting and appearing to speak German, a language that I don’t know.

Well, you do now —

I do now, apparently.

— because there’s this app. It’s called Heygen, and it’s brand new. Basically, you take a video and you upload it. It translates whatever audio is on the video into another language, and then it actually clones your voice and makes your lips move in the video to match the new voice.

So I took an old clip from an old recording. I threw it into Heygen, and I made you speak German.

That is amazing. Heygen is actually how we get our editor’s attention on the podcast here. Hi, Jen.

By the way, I wasn’t done with German because it turns out that you also speak Hindi now.

Oh, my gosh.

Does this mean the end of Duolingo as a company?

I don’t know yet. What do you think?

What do I need Duolingo for? I’m just going to start deepfaking myself. [THEME MUSIC]

I’m Kevin Roose. I’m a tech columnist at The New York Times.

I’m Casey Newton from “Platformer,” and you’re listening to “Hard Fork.” This week, it’s Google versus the government, inside the antitrust trial that could shake up big tech. And then, Walter Isaacson joins us to discuss his new biography of area businessman Elon Musk.

I’ve heard of that guy.

[LAUGHS]:

[THEME MUSIC]

Casey, we have to start today by talking about what I think is probably the biggest tech news story of the week, which is the giant antitrust trial between Google and the US government.

Yeah, we haven’t seen something like this for a long time.

Yeah, so my colleagues at the New York Times called this, quote, “the most consequential trial over tech power in the modern internet era.” And antitrust is something we’ve talked about on the show periodically. This week it is actually coming to a head in Google’s case because the trial challenging the company’s search dominance began on Tuesday. The case was brought by the Department of Justice along with 38 states and territories.

That’s right. And the question that the court is trying to answer is, can Google pay to get itself distributed on places that are not Google? Can it pay to be the default search engine on iOS? Can it pay to be the default search engine on Mozilla’s Firefox browser?

Prosecutors say that Google has spent at least $10 billion across all platforms ensuring that Google is the default search. But I think it could be way more than that. The exact amount that Google pays Apple is a closely held trade secret. But a few years ago, analysts estimated that they could be paying at least $18 billion by 2022.

Yeah, so this is an issue because the Department of Justice alleges that Google is a monopoly, which is not in and of itself illegal — you can be a monopoly. That’s not a problem under our antitrust law — but that it is also extended that monopoly in illegal and anti-competitive ways through these default deals and also through the bundling of Google Apps and services with Android phones.

So if you get a new Android phone, it’s going to come pre-loaded with Google as the default search engine. It’s also going to come with a bunch of other Google Apps installed on the phone. That’s part of the agreement that Google has with the makers of Android phones. In order to use their operating system, you have to pre-install a bunch of their apps and make Google the default search engine.

Right.

So this is what the Department of Justice is saying, that Google has this monopoly that it has illegally extended through these distribution deals. What is Google saying in response?

What Google is saying is that it is not illegal to advertise yourself. Google loves to make the comparison to the grocery store. And in a grocery store, Kraft might pay extra to put its macaroni and cheese at the end cap so that you see it and you’re more likely to buy it than another macaroni and cheese. At the end of the day, if you want another macaroni and cheese, you just go to the macaroni and cheese aisle, and you pull it off the shelf. That’s what Google is saying is happening here.

Hey, you don’t like Google on iOS? Guess what? You can change it. You don’t like it on Android? You can change it. You don’t like it on the web? You can change it. So what Google is saying is it’s just very easy to switch, and there is no real harm to the consumer here.

Right. They love to say this phrase competition, “Competition is only a click away.”

They love to say that.

So the trial started on Tuesday. And in the first day, we saw the DOJ lay out its case. Google’s lawyers laid out their case, what you just described about the grocery store and competition is only a click away. They also listed a bunch of other competitors that they feel they have, not just search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo or Yahoo but also things like Wayfair, Amazon, Tripadvisor, Grubhub, and Yelp, these companies that you wouldn’t think of as traditional competitors to search engines but that Google and its lawyers say actually means that they do have a bunch of competition.

Yeah, although when I try to find my own stories on Grubhub, it never comes up with anything. So it’s pretty disappointing there.

So Casey, what do you think the stakes of this trial are?

Well, actually, here’s what’s interesting about the stakes of the trial. Unlike a criminal trial where if I accuse you of murder, if I’m able to convict you, I can put you in prison for a long time. If Google gets convicted of breaking the law here, then there’s just another phase where they try to come up with, well, what would the penalty be?

So there are some obvious things that you could imagine. If Google has been extending its monopoly illegally through these agreements, presumably the judge will say, you have to stop creating these agreements. There are other people who believe that the judge might say, based on this illegal monopoly that you have developed in search, we’re going to break up the entire company.

Now, I think to believe that is going to happen here, you have to be on the sort of drugs you can normally only get at Burning Man. I do not think that that’s where we’re going with this. But I do think that, at a minimum, we could see the sort of thing you see in Europe, which is when you get a new Android phone and you boot it up for the first time, there’s a little pop up that says, which of these search engines do you want to use?

Right. So this is a pretty major moment in the tech world because this case is the first major antitrust case against a tech company since the Microsoft case in the ‘90s So I think one possible outcome of this case is that it just shifts the balance of power in the tech industry, maybe giving Google a few fewer options when it comes to how it’s going to preserve its position in the search industry and maybe giving rivals a little bit of a chance to catch up.

So Casey, what do you think of this case?

So I don’t think this case is really all that strong for some of the reasons that we’ve already talked about. It is not difficult to change the default search engine on your phone, and I don’t have a full understanding of why it should be illegal to strike a deal with another company to promote your product.

So my main feeling in reading through this case is, if we as a country decided that we think Google should be smaller and more limited in the way that it can grow and expand its influence, which I think is probably a good idea, I just wish we would do that by passing a law rather than try to apply these older antitrust statutes to a fairly novel situation on the internet.

Yeah. I disagree, actually. I think this is actually a pretty good case for the following reasons. One, it’s easy-ish to understand. It’s not involving some huge complicated scheme for how the ad market works or something like that. It’s pretty simple. Can Google pay for these deals or not?

Number two, Google has already lost this kind of case in several places around the world, including the EU and India where courts and regulators have ruled that they can’t do this kind of bundling deal. But the biggest reason is that I don’t think actually Google believes its own argument here.

Google is arguing in court, its lawyers are arguing that these sort of defaults, they don’t really mean that much. Consumers can and do choose different options all the time. But if these default deals don’t matter, why would Google spend billions of dollars a year on them?

This is not a minor expense for them. I’ve been thinking about this story that my colleague Nico Grant wrote earlier this year after the relaunch of Bing with all of this AI stuff inside of it. Nico reported that Samsung was considering going with Bing over Google as the default on its phones.

Now, this didn’t actually turn out to happen. But just the idea that Samsung might change its defaults to Bing caused chaos inside Google because they had not had to compete for Samsung’s business in many years.

Google wasn’t saying, oh, it’s OK if they go with Bing as the default because competition is only a click away, and people can very easily change back to Google. They know that defaults win, and that’s why they’re willing to spend so much to preserve these deals.

Sure, I do think that last argument you made is the strongest one, that it is clear that these agreements have value, and that’s why Google wants them. It’s just not clear to me that it is illegal to strike these kind of deals.

One question you could ask yourself is, well, what if these deals were illegal? What if Apple just got to flip a coin to decide, or it just picked the search engine that it thought was best? How would that meaningfully affect the landscape of search engines in the world?

I’m just not sure we would see another one. One argument you hear sometimes is, well, if Apple wasn’t going to get $18 billion from Google to be the default iOS, maybe Apple would go out and build its own search engine, and then there would be more competition in the market. And I’m curious about that world. But then I use Siri on my watch, and I think, thank god Apple is not trying to build a search engine.

But I actually think that what’s been happening with AI over the past year is a really interesting way to look at this case. Obviously, this case is not about AI. It was brought before ChatGPT launched. It’s not going to deal in much detail with things like Bard and Bing and OpenAI.

But I do think that what we’ve seen in the past year is that another search engine did try to compete with Google. Microsoft spent all this money and time trying to build a better search engine. And I think a lot of people, including me, when Bing came out thought, OK, maybe this is actually the thing that’s going to meaningfully take away market share from Google. And it’s still early days, but so far we aren’t seeing that happen.

Well, because you ruined it by trying to get that AI to flirt with you. And so that’s on you, Roose.

Well, I disagree with the premise there. But I think what we’ve seen is that Bing maybe did build something that Google didn’t have. It did have a competitive leg up in the market because it had all this AI stuff. And yet, it still hasn’t been able to meaningfully cut into Google’s market share. Now, you could say, well, that’s because Google is still better in all these other ways. But it’s also because Google is the default. Google is literally the default search engine on many of the most popular browsers. And so if you are Bing, you not only have to overcome Google’s dominance by building a better search engine, you also have to then go around and compete for all these default deals.

By the way, I hate this grocery store analogy. Can I tell you why?

Why?

Because if you’re in the grocery store, and you see a brand of macaroni and cheese at eye level or on an end cap somewhere, maybe you are slightly more likely to pick that one. But it wouldn’t be that hard for you to pick another one. But this is more like if co*ke was on the shelf at the grocery store because co*ke had paid the grocery store a bunch of money. And you could get Pepsi, but you had to drive to a different store 10 minutes away.

Drive to a different store?! We’re talking about three taps in the Settings menu.

“And by the way, if you want to use our shopping carts or our self-checkout machines, they only really work with co*ke. And so if you want Pepsi, you’re actually going to have to stand in line and get checked out by a person. And also, you’re going to have to carry it around the store too.”

You’re unhinged. Let me tell you something. I’m really glad you brought up the Bing example because I am somebody who has been frustrated with the quality of Google search, overall. I think in many categories, it is noticeably worse than it used to be. And I have been dreaming of the day when some real competition would come along and put a shiver down this company’s spine, and it actually arrived in the form of ChatGPT, and Google has had to hustle.

But then let’s talk about Bing, which was the second chapter of that story which you just brought up. In order to use these new features, back when we were first writing about them, you had to download a developer version of the Microsoft Edge browser. You had to sign in with your special Microsoft account, and then you could use it.

But that was just for early testers.

Let me finish my story. So I went through all of these steps, and, Kevin, I was happy too because I was getting a glimpse of the future. I was going to get to use this next generation search engine, and I was going to see what happened.

And then over a couple of months, I used it, and I used it less, and I used it less. And you know what the reason is? It wasn’t because it wasn’t the default on my phone or in my browser of choice, it was because it just wasn’t that good.

And this is the point that I think a lot of people just do not want to get into when we talk about competition in Search, which is that you have to be 10 times better than the thing that you are replacing in order to get a grip on people’s attention. And when it comes to Google, for all of its flaws, it is still hard to make something that is 10 times better than it.

I agree with you that you need to be 10 times better, but I don’t think that’s the natural state of things. I think if you built a search engine that was percent better than Google, market share should shift to you.

And the reason that we’ve not seen it shift to Bing even though they had all this stuff that Google didn’t have at first is not just because people’s instinct kicks in, and they’re just automatically used to going to Google to look for stuff, it’s also because it’s the default everywhere. And if it weren’t the default everywhere, maybe people would be more inclined to make a different choice.

Now, as you point out, we have seen in places like the EU that when you give people a choice of which search engine do you want to be your default, a lot of them pick Google. And maybe this kind of choice will actually not move the needle on how much of the search market Google has.

But I do think that giving people a choice matters. I think these deals are tipping the scale of what is fair. And I think that they shouldn’t be allowed to do them.

So this is your proposed solution. It’s just Google should not be allowed to strike deals with anybody to become the default.

I think that would be a good step. I think what it would mean is that you buy a new iPhone, you go to set up Safari, and it says, which of these search engines do you want to use as your default? Do you want Google? Do you want Bing? Do you want DuckDuckGo? Or do you want no search engine to be your default? Do you just want to go to a search engine yourself?

Well, listen, I think that even in the case where the judge agrees with everything that you’ve said, and we move to a penalty phase where they have to decide what they’re going to do about it, we might still end up with a system that recreates the status quo in a different form, which is why I wish we had just passed new antitrust laws in this country so that we could just write down what is OK and what is not OK and can move on from there.

Yeah, well, as they say, you go to war with the antitrust laws, you have not the antitrust laws you want.

So Casey, let’s talk about remedies here because, as you’ve said, this is not a case where it’s clear what happens if the DOJ actually wins. It could be anything from a very minor change to the way that search engine defaults are presented on a browser or a mobile phone, or it could be a more sweeping change that requires Google to do other things to appease the courts. So what do you think the remedies are likely to be in this case if the DOJ even wins?

I think the remedy is going to be an annoying pop up on your phone. I think it is going to be GDPR 2.0, and it’s just going to be something that you flick away the second that you see it. And a bunch of lawyers can pat themselves on their back for striking a blow for competition, and Google will continue to have 90-plus percent market share across the world.

I think that’s possible. I also think it’s possible that there’s some strategy at the DOJ for the remedies they want that goes far beyond that. I don’t think we’re going to see Google broken up or Alphabet broken up or any real major systemic threat to Google’s business.

I do think it will be more along the lines of what’s happened in the EU and India. But I also think it’s possible that the judge just says, you know what? We’re going to go for something broader here because just changing these default deals isn’t enough.

Yeah, well, after the DOJ wins here and zero new meaningful search engines are created, I’d love to visit this conversation with you again.

I’ll take the other side of that bet. Let’s check in.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When we come back, the trials of Elon Musk. Ooh.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Kevin, let’s interview Walter Isaacson, author of the new book “Elon Musk.”

Yes. This is a new book that came out this week. It has been very hotly anticipated and very widely covered.

Would you say it’s the talk of the town?

I would say it’s the talk of the town. So Walter Isaacson, of course, is the legendary biographer and historian. He’s the former editor of “Time,” and he has written biographies of lots of important inventors and technologists, including Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs. And for the past two years, he has been following around Elon Musk.

Yeah, and we knew this was happening because Elon Musk announced it on Twitter. And we have heard stories dribbling out here and there after Elon took over Twitter. We knew that Walter was in a lot of those rooms. And so we’ve been waiting very anxiously to get our hands on the book so we can understand what Isaacson saw in those situations.

Yeah. It’s a really interesting book. It really delivers on the promise of new reporting anecdotes, stories from inside Twitter after Elon Musk took it over. And I just found it very interesting to read. So I’m very excited to sit down with Walter Isaacson to discuss what it has been like to be immersed in Elon Musk’s world for the past two years.

And what he’s doing to recover.

[LAUGHS]:

[MUSIC PLAYING] Walter Isaacson, welcome to “Hard Fork.”

Hey, great to be with you.

So Walter, you’ve written books on some of the greatest inventors in history, Einstein, da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna who helped discover CRISPR. I’m probably forgetting a few in there.

You could have written a biography of any person, basically, on this planet, living or dead. Why did you decide to write a book on Elon Musk. And follow-up question, how has your blood pressure changed as a result of that decision?

And to answer the second question first, I think I’m going to have to go on those little pills that reduce your blood pressure.

When I first started this a couple of years ago, he was a guy who had been able to make Tesla into by far the most valuable car company ever. He had led us into the era of electric vehicles. He had launched rockets that could land upright and be reused. He was the only entity that could get American astronauts into orbit from the US. And I thought, wow, this is a breathtaking technologist, and it’ll be interesting to see the secrets of his creativity.

Well, about a year into it, he was secretly buying shares of Twitter. So I guess that made it into a far wilder ride. He just let me be by his side week after week. And he goes through so many mood swings. He’s so mercurial — and I’m pretty much a quieter guy — that, yeah, my blood pressure — sometimes I’d have to take a long deep breath.

I’m really curious about the routine that you developed with him. So you live in New Orleans. He’s in San Francisco or Texas working on his six or 10 jobs that he has. So would he just call you and say, hey, Walter come hang out with me this week, or were you calling him asking him where he was? What kind of routine did you guys develop?

I just would decide whenever I wanted to go out, which is usually a week or two each month. And I would text him and say, all right, I’m coming out Wednesday. Where are you going to be? And he would say, Austin. And I’d get to Austin, and that was pretty good.

You’d bring a few black t-shirts and a few changes of clothes and an overnight bag because you never knew where it was going to lead. After a day in Austin, he might say or just indicate, we’re going down to Boca Chica, the launch pad site for SpaceX at the tip of Texas. And we’re going out to San Francisco or Hawthorne, the Port of Los Angeles where SpaceX is. And I would just ride.

And I guess part of my way of operating is I just stayed in the corner. I stayed really quiet. I took notes. And as you all know, if you’ve ever dealt with him, he goes silent and dark at times. The first trick I learned was don’t fill the silences. Don’t try to say something when he’s processing. Just wait, and, eventually, he’ll start free associating, and you take notes.

So both Casey and I have been reporting on Elon Musk and his companies for many years. I feel like we —

I know, and you all have done an amazing job not only reporting on, it but getting people there to talk. I assume you know that unnerves him at times. It’s your ability to get everybody there to talk. But it certainly helped inform my book for which, thank you.

Thank you, Walter.

Yeah, weirdly when Casey texts him and says, I’m coming to visit you on Tuesday, the response is not “Come on down.”

I’m sure he calls his security.

Yeah, exactly. So I feel like we both have a pretty good mental model of Elon Musk from observing him publicly over the years. But then again, people can be different in private as we both know. And I’m curious what you were surprised by when you started spending a lot of time with Elon Musk. What seemed different from the public person?

The fact that there’s so many personalities, five or six very contrasting personalities. He can be very intensely focused on an engineering problem or even more so a factory assembly line issue where he will just try to figure out why it’s taking so long to make a valve.

And then there’s that giddy mode where he’s making stupid sophom*oric jokes and watching “Monty Python” skits. And then there’s sometimes an inspiring mode where he’s talking about getting humanity to Mars. But what surprised me and was unnerving was there’s a dark mode as Claire Boucher known as Grimes says, that demon mode, you can see it happening.

And so you never weren’t quite sure which Musk you were going to be with. And they would change rather rapidly. Steve Jobs was once called mercurial, and he looked it up, and he said, well it’s better than the opposite which is saturnine. Well, Musk takes mercurial up another order of magnitude.

Was he always that mercurial? Did those multiple different sides of his personality all emerge during his childhood? Did it come later? If it was childhood, was there a particular reason that you think that happened?

Yeah, it’s not new. It’s not like all of a sudden he’s become mercurial. Part of it comes from dad. And that’s the first rule of a biographer other than shut up and listen to your subject is it’s often all about dad. And his father has — his father is still around, very much a Jekyll and Hyde personality.

He could be great at engineering. He could talk wonderful tales. I’ve talked to him on the phone quite a bit. But he turns into Mr. Hyde, and he would berate Elon for an hour, sometimes an hour and a half after Elon got bullied and beaten up on the playground.

He would have to stand in front of his father, and his father would keep telling him how stupid he was. And so that mercurial personality is very much there in Errol Musk. And what Maye Musk, Elon’s mother — not surprisingly divorced from Errol — said, “The danger for Elon is that he becomes his father.”

Yeah. Was there one thing that you learned about the early years of his life while writing this book that made you think, aha, that is the skeleton key, that is the key to understanding who he has become as an adult, something that could serve as a throughline for what came later in his life?

Over and over again, there were the tales of childhood that were violent and harsh.

I remember once he got very dark and quiet, and I waited a minute or two. And then he started talking about this wilderness camp called Veld School. And when he was very young and scrawny and socially awkward, he got sent to this wilderness camp in South Africa.

And for a week, it was like “Survivor.” And the kids were encouraged to beat other kids up to take their food. And Musk got beaten up all the time, and he lost 10 pounds. And then he goes back to veld school, this wilderness camp, a few years later, and he’s grown a bit. He’s almost hit six feet. And he becomes very pugnacious.

He knows he’s going to get beaten up. But he punches kids really hard in the nose. He said, the lesson I learned is that if somebody is going to bully you, even if they’re going to beat you up, you just punch them as hard as you can in the nose, and that’ll make them think twice.

So that darkness, that combativeness, that pugnaciousness, that started then. And watching him tell those stories about his father, about being bitten by the dog, all these sort of things, [SIGHS]:: you realize what demons were jangling in his head.

One story from your book that really stuck out to me as potentially revealing about Elon Musk is this time as an adult when his brother Kimbal is offering to, I think it was, take him to an ayahuasca ceremony. And ayahuasca is a powerful psychedelic that makes you confront your inner turmoil and gives people access to their own feelings.

And he basically said, I don’t want to go there. The metaphor used was something about “there’s concrete there, and I don’t want to see what’s under the concrete.”

Layers of concrete he didn’t want to peel away.

So does he have good access to his own emotions? Is he in therapy? Does he strike you as someone who understands himself on a deep level?

He doesn’t have great access to his emotions. He’s not in therapy. He has mood swings and depression, and he’s talked to me, and it’s in the book about whether or not he might be bipolar. He certainly has prescription medications he uses, even if he wouldn’t do the ayahuasca ceremony.

Is he self aware? As with any question on Elon Musk, it’s like which Elon Musk? When he’s in demon mode, he’s not self-aware. And even after he comes out of demon mode, he won’t even remember it well. But there are times when he’s deeply reflective and almost amused by himself.

I’m curious what it’s like to run six 6 or 10 companies, whatever he’s up to now. Does he devote like a day of each week to a different company, or does he just free associate based on what is the most on fire? How does he approach that?

Yes. He tends to focus intensely in a serial fashion for an hour or two on something very specific. It might be walking the rocket assembly lines in Boca Chica, South Texas. It might be figuring out how you’re going to upload video and have playbacks on the platform now known as X.

And when he’s intensely focused on any of these things, everything else is filtered out. He’s lucky to have really good teams. Gwynne Shotwell can run the 98 of SpaceX each day that he’s not focused on. And Marc Juncosa, as you know, is an awesome engineer. He can do things. I’m waiting to see whether Linda Yaccarino can become a Gwynne Shotwell and do that as well.

But when he’s focused on any of these particular things, he just filters out everything around him. I’ll give you an example. There was the night that the Twitter board accepted his offer. They said, all right, you’re now going to own Twitter. I thought there’d be a big — this was —

Were you there with him, physically?

Yeah. And then — you all remember that night, pretty big news. Instead of celebrating, he goes from Austin to Boca Chica, Texas and is there for a meeting on the Raptor engines, which are a part of the Starship, and a methane leak. And everybody else in the room is thinking, hey, by the way, you just bought Twitter. Should we tell him — nobody mentioned it. He never mentioned it.

And then he went with Kimbal, his brother, to some honky tonk in a strip mall in Brownsville, Texas, and just sat there sipping a beer and listening to the music. So the intense focus, it’s not multitasking. I once said he multitasks well, and somebody corrected me because multitasking means you do four, five things at once. He does one thing at once, and then moves on to something else.

He’s a unitasker.

But a very intense one.

Yeah.

I should add, he’s doing all this while he has a large number of kids, which is — obviously, he can afford plenty of help. He’s not physically their primary caretaker at all times.

But we actually found out, thanks to your book, that he has one more child than we knew about, that Elon Musk and Grimes had a third child together, a son named Techno Mechanicus. I’m curious. How much did you see him interacting with his kids, and what did that tell you about him as a father or maybe a person?

Well, obviously, X, the three-year-old, is with him at all times. I remember being on a solar roof installation in Boca Chica, standing on top of the roof at about 10:00 PM one night. And there’s X, a little toddler down on the ground, playing with the cables and the moving equipment.

And that gets to your question, what is Musk like? Well, he just loves having his kid around. But he’s not overprotective. I’m thinking, I got to climb down this ladder and get the kid before he — he wants his kids to be risk takers. And they do spend time with him, but he’s not a hovering cuddly father.

Yeah, you write about his relationship with his estranged transgender daughter, Jenna. And I wonder if you had a chance to speak with her and get her insights into what it was like to be his child.

No, she’s moved and changed her last name and wants to have nothing to do with it. Christiana, her aunt, and others, in messages in the book, or anything she says were relayed.

Yeah. I’m curious about that too because that estrangement seems to have been a big source of pain for him.

Huge, huge, pain for him.

And actually maybe one of the keys to understanding why he’s become so hyper-political in recent years, and he’s very upset about pronouns and gender ideology — he’s always talking about this woke-mind virus that he thinks everyone is contracting. Do you think that estrangement was a turning point for him as far as his political beliefs are concerned?

Yes, I think it was one of many, but yes. I think about three years ago when the kid named after one of his favorite characters in the X-Men comics decided to transition and become Jenna, he got his head around that.

He even tweeted and said things like I’m fine with trans, whatever. But she became also an avowed Marxist and thought that all of his wealth made him bad. And that caused him to do a lot of things, including sell all of his houses. He has basically no house, except for this two-bedroom thing down in the south tip of Texas.

It also caused him to become inflamed about what he calls the woke-mind virus, that at the crossroads school of Los Angeles, this progressive school where she went to, she was indoctrinated, he thinks, with a very progressive mentality that was anti-wealth.

Now, there are many other things that cause in the past three years this shift towards a more populist politics is. He felt that Democratic Assemblymen in California up to Joe Biden, the president, were dissing him. He was upset about regulations, including the shutdowns for COVID.

So there were many things in the book. There’s a whole chapter or two in the book about the shift towards the right. But yeah I’d, agree with you. One of the main precipitating things was his daughter disavowing him.

I want to talk a little bit more about demon mode. What does it look like when he is in it? And what sorts of things tend to precipitate it?

I was walking with him once near the launch pad in South Texas, and it was 10:00 PM, Friday. And there were only two people working on the launch pad.

And there was a poor guy named Andy, and he was in charge of the launch pad. And just like Elon the child standing in front of his father for an hour being berated, Musk berated Andy and said, why aren’t more people working? And Andy was smart enough not to say, it’s Friday at 10:00 PM, and we don’t have any launch scheduled.

And Musk goes into demon mode, really chews Andy out, but also orders a surge. And that’s a theme in the book too. Whether it’s the solar roofs when he goes into demon mode, or whether it’s Twitter where he goes into Demon mode his first week there, or whether it’s at launch pad, he’ll order up a surge which means people are flying in from Cape Canaveral in Los Angeles, and they’re sleeping on sleeping bags on the airstream trailer — I used one of the airstream trailers there — and within a week, they have the rocket stacked.

So I could see demon mode coming on. I could see the anger there and the darkness. But as Grimes says, demon mode is really unattractive. But demon mode gets sh*t done.

And within a week, they had that rocket stacked. And he totally forgot. I said, why did you remount Andy so badly? He looked at me blankly. He didn’t remember being Mr. Hyde. And Andy said, yeah, it’s that way, and Andy actually got promoted slightly after that.

So demon mode is one explanation for some of Musk’s erratic or cruel behavior at times. Another theory that we hear a lot out here in Silicon Valley, including from people who have known Elon Musk over the years, has to do with drugs.

And there wasn’t a lot of drug content in your book, but the “Wall Street Journal” reported this year that Elon Musk has been using ketamine both for depression and recreationally at parties and then that might be fueling some of his behavior is a popular speculation, at least out here. Did you ever see Elon Musk doing drugs?

I never saw him do recreational drugs. And if so, I would have printed it. I know that he has prescription drugs, and ketamine is a prescription drug as well as a recreational one.

He said to me, and he said to others, he believes that ketamine is better than serotonin inhibitors or other prescription drugs at dealing with deep depression and that type of mood swings. So yes, I think he has different prescriptions and has tried many things to treat the demons dancing around in his head. But he’s not as much of a party animal as I think people think.

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When we come back, more with Walter Isaacson about Starlink, the Twitter acquisition, and Musk’s reaction to his book.

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One theme that we see over and over again looking at tech executives or anyone who has managed to amass a large amount of power in a short period of time is that they become deeply uncomfortable with that power. We saw this with Marc Zuckerberg and other folks who have run big social media platforms and eventually said, wait a minute, I don’t think I want all this power.

Elon Musk has become one of the most powerful people in the world, not just because of his wealth but because he controls Starlink satellites and private space travel and is, as you write in the book, a major part of geopolitical conflict now. I’m curious how you saw him grappling with that power and whether you think it’s something that he actually wants or that he’s trying to get rid of.

Well, he grapples with it. And yeah, there are moments when he’s the kid in the corner of the bookstore reading the superhero comics, and he imagines himself with his underpants on the outside saving the world. And there are times when he says, whoa, when I did Starlink, it was so people could chill and watch movies and play video games, not so that they can conduct a war.

So I’ve seen him go through those mood swings, and, of course, there’s the time when he called me. And I was back in New Orleans at my high school watching a football game. And the Ukrainians were doing a sneak attack using Starlink on Sevastopol, the Russian fleet.

I got something wrong because he told me that night, he said, and we’re not enabling it. We’re not enabling Starlink because I don’t want them to do a Pearl Harbor, to cause a World War III. And then I realized later that he had disabled it before. That it was geofenced.

Do you think he was telling you — so just to lay this out a little bit for people who haven’t been following it. So the discrepancy here is about what happened when Elon Musk was deciding what to do about an advance that the Ukrainian military was making on the Russian Navy stationed in Crimea.

Drone submarine attacks using Starlink.

So there are these drone submarines that rely on Starlink for their internet connectivity. And you write in the book that Musk told his engineers to turn that off within 100km of the Crimean Coast. Then, your excerpt goes online, and Elon Musk objects to this portrayal and says that there was never Starlink access in this area and that he had just declined to enable it. So which version of that is correct? And do you feel like he was telling you the truth the first time?

Well, no, I think that the first time he said, we’re not enabling it, we’re not allowing it to be used — and I interpreted that to mean it was a decision he made that night. In fact, as he said later, and I believe him, that was a policy that they had geofenced off the Crimea before that night. But the Ukrainians didn’t know it — I have all the text messages — and they’re appealing to allow it to happen.

So he just reaffirmed that policy and did not allow, did not enable Starlink to be used. So I shouldn’t have said he turned it off that night, that he reaffirmed the geofencing that made it not enabled that night.

Either way, it seems just remarkable and probably not good that the path of the war in Ukraine has to go through this sort of unelected industrialist who happens to have built some internet infrastructure.

Absolutely. That’s why the main conflict of this episode is not exactly when did the geofencing policy get enabled, it’s why does this person have this power to do all of this?

I asked him, have you talked to General Mark Milley? Have you talked to Jake Sullivan, the National security advisor? Because I’m thinking, hey, you shouldn’t have this much power maybe.

And he does talk to them, and they work out an arrangement where there’s now a military version of Starlink called Starshield, and he has sold it to the US military and intelligence services. And the US military gets to control how it’s used.

So I think even he felt, hey, a little bit too much in my hands. I should let the responsibility move to the officials in charge. And so I think there are now a lot of Starlink and Starshield satellites that he doesn’t directly control.

Yeah. A lot of the stories in your book, and I would say, in Elon Musk’s life, in general, have sort of a similar shape where he sets out to do something audacious, and people tell him he’s crazy, and then something flips on in his brain, and he goes demon mode, and he orders a surge and fixes it, and proves the haters wrong, and emerges victorious and wealthier, and all those things. Twitter, I want to talk about Twitter because Twitter is an example where that has not been the narrative, right? He took over this company. And since he took it over, it has lost at least half of its value. Its US advertising is down something like 60 percent, at least according to him.

I would think it’s fair to say it has not been a success. Has anything that has happened with Twitter over the past year made Elon Musk question his own beliefs about himself as an entrepreneur? And how did, I guess, watching him run Twitter complicate the story that you had set out to tell?

Well, I knew about the Twitter thing a year into the reporting, so it’s become all woven into the narrative. And when you look at him going into surge mode and doing things, he goes back to the first principles of physics.

Why can’t we make Cybertruck out of stainless steel and not have a chassis but have it be the exoskeleton? Why can’t we get the rocket engine down to this weight? He has a very good feel for the physics of first principles of engineering and manufacturing. But what he does not have a good feel for is human emotions, social interactions, and that’s why Twitter, in my mind, is not a really great purchase.

I always thought, man, that’s wacky. This is not his fingertip feel. And he said to me that Twitter is basically an engineering issue. How are we going to get videos up or whatever? And I think — I write in the book, no, it’s not. It’s mainly an advertising medium to get people’s eyeballs in a friendly environment so that they can socially interact.

And so he has created at Twitter something that technologically, I think, is actually done pretty well in advance. But he’s also made it an environment that is toxic enough that many advertisers don’t want brand advertising there. And that’s what he doesn’t have a good feel for.

Y’all have written about this extensively. And you just know that it’s not his strength, understanding how to make a sweet, cuddly, blue-checked friendly kitten environment that brand advertisers are going to want.

Yeah.

Elon seems to have decided in advance that almost everyone who works at Twitter before he took over was incompetent. Where did that belief come from?

Well, first of all, he felt that there were 10 times as many people as necessary. And I thought, well, that’s insane. But he may have — I don’t know. Y’all be the judge.

I do it in the book. I watched those first few weeks where they go through three rounds of firing. And he has the Musketeers, his young Tesla engineers and a couple of his cousins, going through every line of code and saying, wait, these people are just phoning it in, and they haven’t been able to get a good payment system, they haven’t been able to get a good video system. And so he really decided that they could do it with 15 percent of the engineers.

Now, that caused a degradation of the service. But somewhat surprisingly to me, it’s actually still up and running. Maybe you can do it with 15 percent of the engineers. He also had a reaction against the whole atmosphere there.

I remember that first time he really explored Twitter headquarters, a day or two before closing the deal. And they were talking to him about how we value psychological safety. And it looked like one of these places that had places where people could rest in yoga mats, and it was all there to make people feel comfortable.

Well, he doesn’t love psychological safety. No, we want hardcore intensity. And so it was a clash of cultures that y’all have seen in Silicon Valley between the hardcore intensity types and the “let’s have artisanal coffees at the coffee bar” types. And those are two different types of companies. I’ve never seen a culture switch happen as fast as happened at Twitter.

You write in the book that what he wanted his employees to feel was actually a certain psychological danger. And I thought that was really astute. That actually is the best way to understand how he runs his companies. It’s that he just wants people to be scared most of the time.

Yeah, because he was scared most of the time as a kid. He believes that psychological danger, that feeling unsafe, is the motivation to being intense and hardcore and all in. And whether it’s Grimes or his second wife, Tallulah, says he just cannot stand it when he’s supposed to be savoring things and smelling the flowers.

When things are going well, he conjures up a storm. One of his girlfriends said to me, he associates drama and storm with childhood love. And I’m not sure I’d go that psychologically deep, but I do quote her.

Walter, I want to ask you a question about the experience of reporting on Elon Musk and writing about him. You write in the book about one journalist who stood up to Elon Musk, my former colleague at the “New York Times,” Bari Weiss, who was one of the hand-picked reporters who Elon Musk brought in after his Twitter acquisition to dig through the company’s dirty laundry or what they saw as the dirty laundry and report these Twitter files and blow up the previous administration.

And she participated in that at first, but she eventually came to see him as a hypocrite because he was promoting himself as a free-speech absolutist while also banning journalists from Twitter. And she called him out, even though she knew that doing so would jeopardize her access to the Twitter files and to Elon himself.

I’m sure that you saw things in the course of reporting this book that struck you as hypocritical or unethical or just bad. But your book is very fair, and I would say, generous to Elon Musk. Were you scared of losing your access if you called him out the way that Bari Weiss did? Or is there something about the role of the biographer that is just different?

Well, I think he is hypocritical. And the whole Bari Weiss story and the hypocrisy of banning those journalists, that’s all in the book. And it’s all not a pretty tale at all. So I think that was pretty bad.

Now, I find the whole Bari Weiss story — and it’s in the book, interesting — there’s an amazing night in December where he flies down to my hometown of New Orleans to meet with Macron, but he’s also unleashing the first round of Twitter files with Matt Taibbi. And Bari is sitting at home with Nellie feeling jealous like, I wish I had this. And boom!

He starts texting her, and she flies up that night. And that night, they all meet. Elon is wandering through the halls with Bari Weiss, pulling out the staywoke t-shirts, and getting mad.

So there’s a wild ride when you’re with Elon. But I don’t think I pulled the punches, including in that whole tale you’re talking about it with Bari Weiss. And when he reads it, who knows? He may cut me off too. But that’s the price of doing business.

Has he said anything to you in the past few days? How is he feeling about the book?

He did tweet jokingly with a little smile, Walter told me not to read it, which I’m sure, I guess, I must have said at some point. Don’t read it. Because you’re right. I have to keep in mind at all times who it’s for, and it’s for the reader. So no, I’ve not — other than that occasional posting on X, I don’t know whether he’s read the book or not.

I think maybe for my final question, I’m just curious of the degree to which you think that his current life and lifestyle are sustainable. At the very end of the book, he starts yet another company, this one about AI, big subject. It could take up all of his time if he let it.

But instead, he has all these other things that he has to do. As you think through what you think is coming for him in the next five years, do you just see him on a steady path of building new companies and trying to achieve all these goals he set out for himself? Or at some point, does he start to run out of fuel and have to give something up?

Sometimes he shoots off rockets, and they explode, and he leaves a lot of debris in the wake, and that’s the way I end the book, which is there are going to be some explosions. And as you have written about quite a bit, what used to be known as Twitter is not a beautiful sight. It’s got debris that’s strewn in its wake.

And yeah, I was somewhat stunned after the Starship launch attempt, which did pretty well but then blew up, a bit of a metaphor for what’s happening. And then he calls me and says, you’ve got to come to Austin, one more round, because we can’t do this by phone. And he’s starting an AI company, and he’s figuring out real-world AI, using, not only Optimus the robot, but the billion frames of video from Tesla cameras and how he’s going to do it.

And I’m like, wait, you’re starting yet another company? This rocket will never get to orbit. But I’ve watched this movie over and over again, and I know — I know there’s going to be a couple of bad explosions. There’s going to be burning rubble that comes down into the swamps. But at least he’s taking risks, and you really don’t get rockets to orbit unless you take risks. And as Steve Jobs said, the people are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

So we have, as a society, lost a little bit of that risk taking. We’ve got more referees nowadays than we have risk takers, more regulators and lawyers than we have innovators and doers. And I think sometimes he goes to the other extreme. But I think if we’re ever going to be a very innovative society again, we got to push both ends of that. And that means there will be some rubble that happened.

Walter, my last question. At the end of the book, you write that all heroes have flaws and that the good parts of Elon Musk, his inventiveness, his drive, his pursuit of worthy and ambitious projects, that those good parts might not exist were it not for the bad parts.

Is that your bottom-line takeaway on him after this experience? That even though he has all these flaws, and he can be capricious and cruel, that it’s sort of worth it because we get electric cars and rockets and satellite internet and all these other things out of that deal?

No. I don’t think that getting rockets and electric cars justifies really bad behavior. But I do let the reader decide because these strands, the dark strands in Musk are interwoven into the fabric. And if you pull out one of those strands, maybe you don’t get the whole fabric, which as he says, even the best are molded out of faults.

So yes, those faults are interwoven in the tapestry of Musk. But I hope people who read the book will say, all right, I’m going to try some of these audacious epic goals, but I’m not going to be as much of an asshole as I pursue it. And yes, I think it’s possible to get great things done but temper some of your impulsive instincts.

Well, I’m always telling Kevin to do just that. So I hope he listens to you and he starts treating us better.

I’m not saying Kevin can do it, but I’m saying, though, people like you and me, Casey, you know?

No, I’m too far gone.

We have that we have that empathy gene.

We do.

We want people who are sitting across from us to like us.

I think you’ve convinced me never to write a biography of a living person. I think if I do one, it’s going to be like someone who died because they can’t complain.

Well, I’ll tell you, after this one, I’m not even sure Aristotle is far back enough.

Yeah, you’re going to be writing a book about Otzi the Iceman.

Exactly, exactly. No, I think maybe one of the ancient Greeks, especially ones that had no children or wives or anything like that.

No Twitter accounts, yeah, no one with a Twitter account. Well, Walter, thank you so much, and congratulations on a really interesting book. We really appreciate you joining us.

Thanks, Walter.

Thank y’all so much. [MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, Kevin. So real quick, I need your help on something. “The Verge” is putting together a list of the best tweets of all time, and I told them that none of yours would really qualify.

[LAUGHS]: Rude.

But I did want to pick out a few. And so I just wanted to read you a couple of very old tweets, and you just tell me if you think that this is an all-time or not.

Great tweets from me or tweets from other people?

These are other people’s tweets. Again, I looked at all of your tweets. Nothing qualified.

I was getting worried because I did tweet some stuff in 2011 that I would be mortified to see make a reappearance.

All right. So thumbs up, thumbs down, is this an all-timer or not? OK. This is from November 2012, @shockproofbeats. “I’d love to get in touch with Emilio Estevez. Does anyone have his emailio addresstevez?”

[LAUGHS]: That’s pretty good. I like that.

That’s a perfect piece of writing to me, all-timer. OK, Boring As Heck, May 2015, “Mysterious old lady flips tarot card revealing a dude who looks exactly like me flying a hot air balloon into power lines. Me, is that good?”

And finally, this is from Crypto Tara in July 2013. “It says here you got fired from Olive Garden because you kept saying ‘Pasta la vista, baby’ to people. Why would you put that on a resume?”

Those are good.

All-timers!

I love those.

Me too.

“Hard Fork” is produced by Rachel Cohn and Davis Lande. We’re edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today’s show was engineered by Chris Wood, original music by Dan Powell, Elisheba Ittoop, Marion Lozano, and Sophia Lanman. Special thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, Nell Gallogly, Kate LoPresti, and Jeffrey Miranda.

You can email us, as always, at hardfork@nytimes.com.

Let us know which of us think Walter should write a biography about.

Oh, I hope it’s you. I want to dig up your skeletons.

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