Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk, his method for writing books | Books

Name a brilliant innovator who lived between the Middle Ages and the present, and Walter Isaacson has probably written a book about that innovator.
He’s penned bestselling biographies of Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, among others. A New Orleans native, he graduated from Isidore Newman School and Harvard University, then attended the University of Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.
A former editor of Time magazine, Isaacson served briefly as CEO of CNN and spent 15 years leading the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
He’s now a professor at Tulane University. He co-chairs the New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane from Thursday through Saturday, March 14-16.
The following interview with Isaacson, 71, lightly edited for space and clarity, is from a recent episode of “Let’s Talk with Keith Spera” on WLAE-TV.
Microsoft co-founder, philanthropist and writer Bill Gates, right, chats with author Walter Isaacson at the 2023 New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University on Thursday, March 9, 2023.
Do you credit your time as a young reporter at The Times-Picayune with launching your career?
Absolutely. For better or worse, I had no intention of being a journalist or writer. I was just hanging around in New Orleans. I had worked for T. Smith and Son stevedoring in the summer, which was a hot and grueling job.
My friend and I lived in an unairconditioned apartment on Pleasant Street, which was misnamed at the time. No air-conditioning, and working on the derrick barges off the Napoleon Avenue wharf.
I got an internship at The Times-Picayune | The States-Item. The office was air-conditioned and had really good coffee in the cafeteria. That’s what set me on the course.
You probably know more about Elon Musk than anyone outside his inner circle.
I actually think I know more about Elon Musk than he knows about himself. He’s not the most self-aware individual.
Knowing what you know, would you accept a ride on one of his rockets?
I don’t have a particular desire to be sent up into outer space. I asked him, “Do you want to go to Mars?” He said, “I want to die on Mars, just not on impact.”
When I decided to write the “Elon Musk” book, he was only doing SpaceX and Tesla. Then he decided to buy Twitter and do so many other things. It was more of an interesting, complex, layered adventure than I expected it to be.
The cover of “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson. (Provided photo)
What was the most unfair criticism of your Musk book?
I felt the criticism, to the extent there was criticism, was generally fair. One criticism, which I’ll cop a plea to, was I wasn’t all that judgmental.
People said, “You should have come down on him like a ton of bricks for doing bad things.” Hey, I’m old-fashioned. I was at the Picayune 40 years ago. You went out, report the story, try to get all the facts right, you make it a narrative and then you let the reader decide.
I let the reader make judgments instead of me preaching. I’m more of a storyteller than a preacher.
And things are so fluid … Musk can wake up one day and do something terrible or amazing.
I had a particular advantage — I got to get really up close. He let me spend two years (with him), morning, noon and night, any meeting, nothing off-limits. I’m lucky. I’ve written a few books before, so I can afford to fly off to Brownsville and Boca Chica, Texas, and spend time with him.
I didn’t want to squander that opportunity to be the eyes and ears of the reader. If you read the book, there’s good, there’s bad, there’s really ugly. I don’t sugarcoat it. I don’t varnish it. Everything is exactly as I saw it.
How did you wade through all the material you collected?
One simple secret which is not mine — you see it in the Bible — is keep it chronological. The Bible has the best lead sentence ever: “In the beginning …”
Jon Batiste and Suleika Jaouad pose with Walter Isaacson during the red carpet for the premiere of the Jon Batiste documentary “American Symphony,” at the Orpheum Theater in New Orleans, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023. (Photo by Sophia Germer, The Times-Picayune)
The other thing that flows from that is, be a storyteller. If I’m going to talk about why Elon Musk can get into such a dark mood and fire 85% of the people at Twitter, or do something amazing, like get rockets into orbit docking with the space station and put up satellites to recreate the internet … instead of trying to analyze the whole thing, in each paragraph I’m going to start in my mind with the phrase, “Let me tell you a story.” I put the stories I’ve seen in chronological order and the book’s a narrative.
We’re from New Orleans — you learn to do that all the time. Me and Michael Lewis talk about it a lot. We both went to Newman. You’re trained, even at the lunch table, to say, “Let me tell you a story.”
You don’t do the grunt work of transcribing interviews, do you?
Especially with the Elon Musk interviews, I couldn’t really trust anybody else to transcribe them. There’s all sorts of information that I thought would be dangerous if it were floating around.
Sometimes I’ll say to my wife, Cathy, “Can you help me with this one?” But I also think that if I do my own legwork, do my own research and even do my own transcribing, then I’m much more up close and personal with the story.
Walter Isaacson introduces bestselling author John Grisham as The New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University opens on Thursday, March 10, 2022.
There are certain things I just don’t do that much of. I don’t watch TV that much, which is why I was never very good at running CNN. I love music and I like sports some. But we don’t spend a lot of time going out to movies or watching TV.
If you love something, it’s easy to find time. And I love storytelling and reporting.
Is your writing clean in the first draft?
Early on I was an adopter of computers, because the notion of being able to cut and paste and revise rather than retype pages. Even at Time magazine, I was one of the first users of computers, because I revise and revise and revise.
I finally learned a trick that came from Leonardo da Vinci. Instead of trying to do the Mona Lisa all at once, it was layer after layer, brush stroke after brush stroke, revision after revision.
So one of my secrets is I just write a very rough chapter, then revise and revise. After 15 revisions, I’ll read it out loud and say, “OK, maybe just a few more brushstrokes.”
The New Orleans Book Festival, which you and Cheryl Landrieu co-chair, featured such speakers as John Grisham and Bill Gates in its first two years. What was the festival’s original goal?
Microsoft co-founder, philanthropist and writer Bill Gates, right, chats with author Walter Isaacson, beneath a video screen of their chat at the 2023 New Orleans Book Festival at Tulane University on Thursday, March 9, 2023.
When Cheryl Landrieu was first lady of New Orleans, she did a children’s book festival at City Park, and I think she missed it. I had come from the Aspen Institute, where we created the Aspen Ideas Festival, which was a great success. People were hungry to get together and discuss ideas.
When I write books, I go on the circuit: the Miami Book Festival, the Texas Book Festival, Chicago. Why don’t we have one? New Orleans is a city of festivals, but we didn’t have a huge book festival.
Between Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, here’s an opening in the cultural calendar. We wanted to make it free and open to the public. We don’t want it to be elitist. You don’t have to get tickets; you just show up. We have big tents and big music and big food and big authors.
This year’s lineup includes Ken Burns, David Brooks, Liz Cheney, Douglas Brinkley, Donna Brazile, Richard Ford — and also Big Freedia and Irma Thomas.
It’s a book festival — 80% of what happens is about books. But we also want to make it a New Orleans festival, so there’s always a big crawfish boil and lots of music.
Irma Thomas is going to close Saturday. When I was really young, I went to the first Jazz festivals. I remember Irma Thomas doing the finale. That’s going to bring us back to our roots.
The Book Festival catchphrase is “Mardi Gras for the Mind.”
We could also say “Jazz Fest for the Mind.” One of the models was Jazz Fest, because at any given moment, it’s four or five venues going on.
At Tulane, you’re a professor of American history and values. What does that mean?
I do two classes I particularly like. One is called “The Digital Revolution: From Ada to Zuckerberg.” It starts with Ada Lovelace in the 1830s coming up with the concept of a general-purpose computer and ends with Mark Zuckerberg doing social media.
President Joe Biden presents the 2021 National Humanities Medal to Walter Isaacson at White House in Washington, Tuesday, March 21, 2023. March 21, 2023. The awarding of the 2021 medals was delayed to 2023 because of the pandemic. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
I make the students teach about things since Facebook, like what do you make of TikTok? This year we’re doing artificial intelligence and chatbots and how they change everything.
To me, connecting technology to our values is one of the most important things we’re going to have to do in this century. I wrote about it in “The Code Breaker,” the book about Jennifer Doudna and gene editing. When we learn to gene edit, how are we going to process that morally?
Social media, we didn’t process very well. We unleashed Facebook and Twitter on the world without figuring how they connect to our values. AI, we’re going to have the same problem.
Connecting the humanities, the arts and culture to technology, engineering and science — that’s what we have to do to make sure we’re taking ourselves into the 21st century with a human understanding of our new tools and technology.
In 2023, you received the National Humanities medal from President Joe Biden at the White House.
I actually misstepped, I was so flummoxed. I was supposed to go off this way and went off the wrong direction.
Do you have your next book lined up?
I tried to do a book on Louis Armstrong. I studied everything about him. I knew everything about Louis Armstrong except for who he was.
I couldn’t figure out if he was happy. Why was he waving the white handkerchief with the smile? What was behind the mask and the smile? Did he like White people? I put that book aside.
I’m probably going to do Marie Curie. I think the combination of physics and chemistry at the beginning of the 20th century set us on a road. She was also a great woman pioneer. It also means I go to Paris.
And she’s not around to criticize you.
Every now and then after I write about a living person, my wife and I say, “OK, it’s time to go into the way-back machine and do somebody that’s been gone for a hundred years.”
“Let’s Talk with Keith Spera,” a partnership between WLAE-TV and The Times-Picayune | NOLA.com, airs on WLAE-TV on Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 9:30 p.m.
WWNO 89.9 FM broadcasts “Let’s Talk” on Mondays at 12:30 p.m. and Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m. Episodes are also available on WLAE’s YouTube page.
Email Keith Spera at kspera@theadvocate.com.
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