2023-09-22
31 分钟This is in conversation from Apple News.
I'm Shemitah Basu.
Today, what drives Elon Musk?
Walter Isaacson has spent the past two years shadowing the richest man in the world.
He has zigzagged from the factory floor at Tesla to the desert for SpaceX rocket test launches, to weekly meetings about a future city on Mars, all to write his latest book, a biography of Elon Musk.
Isaacson had two rules when he took on this project.
I said, if I do this book, I don't want to do it just based on a few interviews.
I want to be by your side for two years.
I just want to see you in operation the way no biographer has ever been as up close or intimate to anybody else.
And rule number two was you don't.
Get to read the book in advance.
You have no control over it.
I was somewhat surprised when he said, sure, let's go.
The book called Elon Musk is out now.
If you're listening in the Apple News app, stick around after the episode to hear an excerpt.
It falls in line with Isaacson's biographies of other innovators, people like Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Jennifer Doudna, who pioneered CRISPR genetic editing technology.
I was eager to talk to Walter Isaacson about what he learned about Elon, having spent so much time examining his personal, personal and professional life up close and what to make of his influence, his reach, his power.
I started by asking Walter how he would describe Elon Musk.
Well, I think that Musk is one of the most important innovators of our time, but he's also absolutely crazy, infuriatingly crazy half the time.
And so what I tried to do in this book is show the roots of the demons that are dancing around in his head, but also show how he turned some of those demons into drives.