In early August 2021, Walter Isaacson was vacationing at a friend's house.

This eloquent, silver-haired best-selling biographer was appointed by Steve Jobs to write his biography. He's also a veteran in media, having served as the executive editor of Time magazine, chairman and CEO of CNN, and at one point was the chairman of the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors during Obama's tenure.

He specializes in writing about geniuses and leaders. "I'm very interested in people with creativity and unique thinking," he told CommonWealth Magazine over a video call in September.

During that vacation, he received a call. The caller was Elon Musk, the world's richest man.

Before this, Musk had been a fan of Isaacson's books, especially praising "Benjamin Franklin" and "Einstein". Isaacson suggested that he would write Musk’s biography, "but you're going to have no control over the book," he said. 

"Let’s do that," Musk said "Can I tell other people?" he asked.  

20 minutes later, when Isaacson stepped out of the guest room, he found out that Musk had already announced on Twitter: "If you're curious about Tesla, SpaceX & my general goings on, @WalterIsaacson is writing a biography." 

Two years later, Isaacson completed this biography, the only one exclusively authorized by Musk. What did he see? The Traditional Chinese version of Musk's biography is published by CommonWealth Magazine Co., Ltd. The following is an exclusive interview of Isaacson with CommonWealth Magazine:

CommonWealth: What's the main reason that motivated you to do Elon Musk in the first place?

Isaacson: I'm very interested in people who are innovators, people who are creative and think differently. And that's why I did Steve Jobs. And he helped bring us into the digital revolution with everything from phones to personal fun computers, music. The other great innovator of our time is Jennifer Doudna. I wrote about her because she's involved in finding tools that can edit our DNA. And then the third great innovator of the modern times is Elon Musk. And he's kind of crazy.

It was a wild ride being with him all this time. But as Steve Jobs once said, the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. When Musk said I could write a biography of him, I said, well, I need two conditions. One is I don't want to just do a bunch of interviews. I want to be by your side for two years. I want to be in every meeting. I want to be at dinner and lunch with you. I want to walk on the assembly lines with you. I want to watch you dealing with things. He said, fine. And he gave me unbelievable access.

There was never anything he said I couldn't watch and take notes. And then I said, and you're going to have no control over the book. He didn't even read it. He hasn't read it yet. So he has no control over it.

I think it is a very up close, personal and intimate book about the most interesting and influential private citizen in the world today.

Q: What's the most surprising thing you discovered during the two years by his side?

A: I discovered that there's not one Elon Musk. It's kind of weird. Like the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it's about a person who has big personality changes. And that's true of Elon Musk.

There are about five or six versions of Elon Musk and they change really fast when you're with them. Sometimes he's in engineering mode and he talks in a monotone and he focuses like a laser beam on an engineering problem or manufacturing problem. Sometimes he's silly. He's in a giddy mood. He makes stupid jokes like he's going to have a fight with Mark Zuckerberg and yanks people's chains. They all think, is he telling the truth? And he said, no, he's just joking. That's his juvenile sense of humor.

And then there's a very charismatic visionary, Musk, who says we have to get humans to other planets. We have to explore our galaxy. We have to have sustainable energy and batteries and electric cars.

We have to worry about artificial intelligence. And he's very visionary and he can attract people to work with him.

But there is another Elon Musk that surprised me and wasn't very pleasant. And that's what his girlfriend, Claire Boucher, the artist known as Grimes, calls “demon mode”. That's when suddenly he gets triggered. Somebody will say “that's against the rules”, “you can't do that” or “we're not going to be able to do what you ask”.

And you can watch and his face becomes almost unmoving and dark and his eyes get angry. He doesn't raise his voice. He never abuses anybody, but he just starts talking in deep, cold anger.

And maybe for an hour, he'll just tell people how bad they are at something and then he'll snap out of it. Suddenly in the middle of it, he'll start joking again. He'll make some Monty Python jokes. And then I asked him about it afterwards and he hardly remembers being in demon mode.

When people say, “what did you think of him” or “did you like him”? I said, well, it depends on which Musk I was with at any given time. But that's what surprised me the most.

Q: What's your favorite version of Musk? 

A: I think his humor is sometimes funny, but it's a bit silly, juvenile and immature. He likes making jokes about bodily functions and beating up Mark Zuckerberg. So it's sort of funny. But my favorite is when he gets deeply involved in engineering, usually about material science.

He'll say, why don't we make this rocket out of stainless steel? And the engineers will say, well, it'll be too heavy. We can't do that. And he'll explain why at certain temperatures and in certain ways, stainless steel will be better.

And they don't believe him, but they try it. And now Starship is being made out of stainless steel and it's working. I loved watching engineering mode because I didn't really focus on the fact that he was that intense of an engineer. I thought he just ran these companies. He had other people do the engineering. The odd thing is all of this echoes his father, who is a very difficult person. Elon doesn't speak to his father. His father's a pretty good engineer, and understands material science.

But his father also has these mood swings. And even when Elon was a child, suddenly his father would get dark and angry, and Elon would have to stand in front of him for an hour, for two hours. His father told him how useless and what an idiot he was.

A lot of times people are trying to deal with the demons of their childhood. And as Elon’s mother Maye Musk said to me, the big danger for Elon is that he becomes his father.

Q: How have you discussed China with Elon Musk? it seems like he likes to use his influence on geopolitics, in terms of either cross-strait tension or the Russia-Ukraine war.

A: We spend lots of time talking about China and about Taiwan.

He really believes, partly because he has a factory in China and he sells cars in China, that we need to have better relationships with China. If we have better relations with China, and that we avoid doing things that may provoke China into being more warlike and maybe threatening Taiwan, there'll be less of a threat to Taiwan. So he wants everybody to calm down. But of course he does depend on a lot of microchips from Taiwan.

I think it relates to his superhero idea. He's very powerful. He's the only person who can make these satellites that actually work and can't be hacked by Russia. He's the only person who can get American astronauts from the US to the space station.

So he has a grand sense of himself. I think he's calmed down a little bit. He did on the issue in Ukraine, where he was trying to decide how Starlink could be used and whether it could be used in Crimea.

And he had some peace plan, which didn't make much sense to me about Taiwan and China. But I think since then, he's decided to simply sell Starlink satellites to the US military and allow the military to figure out what to do with them. And he doesn't meddle in peace plans, I think sometimes he just gets larger than himself.

Q: Why do people need to understand Musk better now? 

A: I think it's important to understand what causes innovation, what causes creativity.

Taiwan is a place of enormous innovation and creativity, that’s why it has such a great economy. But it's important to know what makes innovation, what makes creativity. That's what I try to write about.

The United States, maybe Taiwan, too, is becoming a society where people don't question rules and regulations quite as much. We have more referees than we have innovators, people saying you can't do this, you can't do that. You got more lawyers saying that would be too dangerous. Don't try that.

So this book is supposed to show you that this guy can be really reckless. You can find him immature. You can think he's crazy. But you also need to understand why some of what he does is key for us being an innovative society.

Also, he's just unbelievably interesting. All personalities of him, even demon mode. Even if this were just a novel, without having a whole lot of understanding of the world's greatest innovations, it would be one of the most colorful characters you can imagine.

I got this opportunity to ride alongside him on this wild ride for two years. And I don't try to preach in this book, I don't try to say, here's what you have to think about it. I'm just telling you these wild stories. And then you get to figure out, wow, that guy's weird, or that guy's crazy, or that guy's a jerk, or that guy is amazing. I hope you figure out that all of those adjectives are true, and you might think that was the most interesting person I've read about in many years.

Q: You wrote a lot of books about great people, and you're also a historian. Many historians like to write about events or a particular period of time, but you choose to write about people. Do you believe people shape history?

A: That's a very good question. When I first wrote about Henry Kissinger, I discovered something he said when he was doing the missions in the Middle East. He said, when I was a professor, I used to think history was shaped by grand forces. But now that I see it up close, I see the differences personalities make, that people make. And that's always been a debate in history from the days of Toynbee to Tolstoy. You can have people debating, is it great forces or do individuals shape history? 

I worked at Time Magazine, and we always put a person on the cover when I was there. And it was because we wanted to tell the history of our time to the people who make it. And people said, well, that's personality journalism.

The person who founded the magazine said, we didn't invent that, the Bible did. That's the way we tell stories. That's the way we convey lessons through people. I find it more interesting to understand how a person works.

Now, in my book, I talk about the great forces shaping things, the outsourcing movement, the lack of manufacturing, the inability to do space travel, and partisan politics. These are all part of the story.

But I'm a journalist who has learned over the years that there are certain people, Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, that because of who they are, are not only interesting, but they actually influence the course of history.

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